Iai no Shi (慰愛の詩) Review

A doujin game caught my eye last year: 慰愛の詩.

The one thing that drew me in: it’s a BL game told from a heroine’s first-person perspective…

And no, I’m not gay. I played it because it’s not just BL — there’s BG in there too.

Putting GL in a BL game sounds like a huge joke, but the joke actually happened, became real, and landed in front of me as a game.

It’s a doujin work, but unusually it has full voice acting. Unfortunately, there are no character sprites.

First, credit where it’s due: the voice acting is spot on, especially the heroine’s portrayal — deep and captivating. The two male leads I couldn’t care less about; they’re serviceable at best. But no sprites really hurts. Maybe they couldn’t find an artist. The backgrounds are just real photos run through Photoshop, so yeah, the budget was clearly tight.

Let’s get into the story.

The story is simple. As a kid, the heroine breaks a bone and meets Reiji in the hospital — he has a heart condition. They run into each other in the courtyard at midnight and hit it off.

Then Reiji suddenly has a heart attack, and another guy shows up: Isaji. He seems closer to Reiji than she is. He gets Reiji to emergency care in time, then blames the heroine for delaying treatment.

Time skip. The heroine is now school age.

Living alone in a rented place in a new city, she happens to run into the boy from her childhood… Reiji. Right at a university gate.

And he actually remembers her — remembers meeting her in that hospital room nine years ago.

They quickly pour their hearts out to each other, and since Reiji is just too handsome, she can’t hold back. She takes him home, and they immediately go at it like a house on fire.

After that she’s completely hooked on Reiji, and they screw nonstop in her apartment. Until another man shows up.

That man is Isaji — the one who saved Reiji and chewed her out when they were kids. She hates him, but he doesn’t seem to recognize her, or notice her relationship with Reiji, so she doesn’t care.

But soon something feels off. Reiji writes a poem that reads like a love poem, and when she reads it, she realizes it’s addressed to Isaji…

She discovers that Reiji and Isaji have a bond beyond friendship — all the way to love.

She keeps asking Reiji whether he loves her, and gets evasive non-answers. He only praises her beauty and charm, then immediately screws her senseless so she forgets herself. He never once says whether he loves her.

Eventually, under pressure, Reiji admits he does like Isaji — but he likes her too.

“The two loves are different.”

His reasoning is always so convincing that one look at his handsome face and she believes every word.

But soon enough she realizes she’s just a toy for him to screw. Reiji himself doesn’t even seem to know who he likes. He’s too composed, too free to do whatever he wants.

Furious, she decides to cut ties completely. While Reiji is asleep, exhausted after sex, she grabs a kitchen knife and goes to kill him.

But before the blade comes down, Reiji wakes up. Seeing her about to kill him, he doesn’t panic — he calmly delivers a confession. He says what he claims is his honest truth: he doesn’t know his own sexuality, but his love for her is real.

Ashamed of her ugly impulse, she bolts out the door and runs into the rainy night. The story ends there.

So, as you can see, different people will read this story very differently.

A straight guy like me will mostly see Reiji as a scumbag (which he is) — sweet talk, good looks, and he strings along both the heroine and his buddy, enjoying the best of both worlds.

But the dialogue is genuinely seductive. Reiji’s words are devastating to women, and if he were even more handsome, plenty of innocent girls wouldn’t stand a chance.

So the highlight here is the writing. It tells a story like a Korean or Japanese art film — the music and voice work both carry that art-film atmosphere.

It just doesn’t feel like a galgame, or even a visual novel.

Maybe this script should have been a short film instead of a game.

Honestly, this story was never suited to being a game in the first place…

Yeah. This is a “game” that hardly counts as one.