Tonari ni Kanojo no Iru Shiawase ~Curious Queen~ (となりに彼女のいる幸せ ～Curious Queen～) Review

So here’s the thing — playing this game was a complete mistake. I don’t even know when I downloaded it. I didn’t know what the premise was, who voiced the heroine, basically nothing about it. I just found it sitting on my hard drive while I was cleaning things up.

My guess is the developer name, Prekano, threw me off, since there’s a million games out there called “XX Kano” these days.

But through sheer coincidence, I ended up playing it anyway.

This is a “petite” title — very short, no choices, just pure romance. The story follows the protagonist reuniting years later with the girl who used to flick him in the forehead as a kid, and after they end up living together again, they get together.

The story is honestly pretty by-the-numbers. Not amazing, but not bad either. The one thing worth mentioning is that this heroine’s personality is genuinely hard for most otaku to swallow.

She’s way too domineering, and the protagonist is basically a total pushover in front of her. She completely steamrolls him — she barges into his room whenever she wants, hits him for no reason. Feels like a textbook “wild girlfriend.”

This kind of “girlfriend” feels weird in a Japanese galgame, or at least rare, so you’ll see Japanese players saying they “don’t really like this heroine.” Of course, this is still a galgame, so no matter how tough she acts, she inevitably ends up getting pushed down and fucked by the protagonist. And the H art is pretty average too — nothing special.

For a petite title, the only real highlight is probably the heroine’s personality, and honestly even that isn’t all that great. The people who’d like a heroine like this are probably M-types or a pretty niche crowd. Not that I’d know anything about that, since I’m not an M.

It was only after playing that I realized Tonari ni Kanojo no Iru Shiawase is actually a series — each entry is a single-route girlfriend charage. I’d accidentally played just one of them. Looking at the other heroines’ setups, they seem pretty likable. For otaku who just want sweet romance, spending two hours on one of these is actually a decent time.

I mean, a fat loser otaku like me can only comfort himself through games — unlike Miss Wang over there, who has a dove girl to keep her company.