Maitetsu Last Run (まいてつ Last Run) Review

Maitetsu came out back in early 2016, so it’s been almost five years now.

Hard to believe this game is already over 4 years old. Back then my reaction was “eh, it’s fine” — the production values looked pretty solid, but the story left me with a lot of conflicted feelings.

How do I put this… the game is set in a “fictional world,” but it uses a ton of homophones and pictographs to stand in for the real world. And on top of that, everything is bent toward steam train nostalgia.

So what’s this “nostalgia” about? I remember the game sets up a “new energy company” and makes it the villain — says the new energy company clearly has pollution problems, and it’s “evil” enough to want to abolish the current “steam trains.” In the end, the game’s story has the “steam trains” receiving protection from a local deity, proving they can still hold their own in the tourism department, and the town’s “new energy project” just gets shelved.

Honestly, I’m pretty confused. Replacing old energy sources with new ones is just the natural order of things, so how did it turn into such a tragic, grand issue? It even gets elevated to a political level somehow?

And you say new energy has water pollution problems — so steam locomotives have no air pollution or environmental pollution problems either?

And to really drive home how evil the “new energy” side is, the game throws in a hilariously goofy mayor route and a little-sister route, which try to stand up to the new-energy faction and make it sound like the entire town’s residents would rather pick the slower steam trains and reject new energy outright — I was laughing and crying at the same time.

It’s kind of like that “I’d rather have a blackout than tolerate a nuclear plant” mindset.

Still, the “Hachiroku” route in this game itself is pretty good. Personifying the locomotive and depicting the bond between the protagonist and his family’s ancestral train — that part’s genuinely nice. Anyway, as long as it doesn’t bring up that evil “new energy” stuff, this game’s fine.

On top of that, the game got plenty of praise from lolicons and railfans alike. Railway games are just that rare, and games with a legal loli are few and far between, so a rare sight like this was bound to find its backers.

But afterward, Maitetsu (まいてつ) seemed to get a lot of praise and then went down a bad path.

The developer behind the game had no plans to make a sequel — instead they started milking whatever value was left. So we watched Maitetsu turn into 爱上火车, get a Chinese localization, and land on Steam. It became an all-ages Pure Station, showed up on PS4 and Switch, got an anime adaptation, and then came this so-called “sequel,” Maitetsu Last Run!!.

Lose kept calling Maitetsu Last Run!! a “proper sequel,” and the thing is massive — two DVDs’ worth of data. There’s an After Story for the original heroines, a new train chapter, and even a “Zhongguo chapter.” As a Chinese player, there was no way I wasn’t hyped.

But after the game came out, I played it, and it didn’t bring me any surprises—what it brought me was nothing but… a feeling of total bewilderment.

First and foremost, there’s one problem:

“Is this really a ‘sequel’?”

First off, the game’s content is basically just the original work’s content. The so-called “sequel” only tacks a bit of After Story onto the end of the original. The final Grand Ending and the two added chapters have basically no “readability” either.

What I mean by “readability” here is really about the storytelling. The two chapters — one of them is about the story of the very first tram to appear during the privatization reforms of Japan’s national railway company, and that story is actually described on Wiki as well.

But there’s basically no narrative to this chapter at all — it just tells some sorry little story about a train module inexplicably falling in love with its driver. Unlike the original Maitetsu, which at least had conflict and ups and downs, this “new chapter” is just historical reenactment, like reading a history primer. It has no emotional pull whatsoever, everyone sounds listless, and most importantly… it’s too damn short. It ends before it even reaches a climax.

It’s fine enough if you look at it as a short side story, but as part of a “sequel” it’s honestly not up to par.

And the other one, the “Zhongguo Chapter,” deserves even more snark.

Everyone knows that Maitetsu’s scenario writer, Shin’ya Hyou, was invited to mainland China for a research trip, with the plan being to add Chinese railway content to the game. Originally I figured the story would at least touch on the conflict between “Nakaguni” and “Meiguni” or something, but this so-called “Nakaguni Chapter” made me sick.

The plot has the protagonist coming to Zhongguo on an exchange trip with a locomotive and his little sister in tow, gawking at the absolutely goated Beijing West Railway Station (a dump that both I and Jixiao can vouch for), riding a Z-series green-skin train, and then taking a little steam train excursion in Chengdu, cola’s home turf… Everywhere it’s nothing but “すごい” this and “すごい” that, which kept giving me the hallucination that I was watching one of those foreigners on YouTube who’ve figured out the “wealth code.”

If you really want to praise mainland China’s railways, just take a high-speed train. Why the hell would you hype up the slow green-skin trains? And the game says it’s a three-tier hard sleeper, but the background art shows a soft sleeper. What’s the deal with that? I get that national confidence is a thing, but there’s no need to shill this hard like some country bumpkin.

The game even hired a Chinese VA named Kokomi to voice the Chengdu steam train mod, but that textbook-standard Mandarin is so jarring. Chengdu train, come on, speak Chengdu dialect, would ya? Then there’s that Celestial train attendant who looks like she wandered out of Trails from Zero, plus the watermelon and Secretary Jiang voiced by two ASMR VAs. Listening to the whole conversation gave me goosebumps — the bad kind.

All that said, this “Zhongguo chapter” honestly has nothing much for a Chinese reader to see. It feels more like an NHK documentary introducing China—even the voice acting by Kiritani Hana sounds like narration. It’s better suited for Japanese folks who are into Chinese railways. Of course, it also points out that everyone in China pays by QR code these days, and along the way mentions that getting online in China requires paying a fee (covering VPN).

The dumbest part is that this “Zhongguo Chapter” only unlocks after you clear the entire game. The game does ask upfront whether you’ve played the “main story,” and if you say yes it unlocks After Story right away—except it doesn’t include the “Zhongguo Chapter.” You still have to start over from scratch. Of course, I won’t tell you that you can just skip that restriction via the scenario select.

Looking at it as a whole, Maitetsu Last Run!! (まいてつ　Last Run！！) doesn’t feel like a sequel at all — more like a “powered-up edition” of the original. And yet they can still sell it for another round (and it isn’t cheap at all). That I genuinely didn’t see coming. There’s a Japanese reviewer on ErogameScape who summed up this release by saying Lose as a company has basically been hunting for the “wealth code” the whole time.

At first, they were making loli games, hunting for the wallet codes of lolicon.

Then there’s finding the money-printing formula of lolicon + railways by making a loli + railway game.

Later it made its way onto Steam, hunting for that overseas market money-printing formula.

They saw how massive the mainland Chinese market is via Steam, so they added a new «Zhongguo Chapter» packed with China-praising dialogue to crack the Chinese wealth code.

And alongside the game’s release, they put out a theme song cover album bonus featuring a chorus of the hottest Vtubers at the time — perfectly cashing in on the current otaku obsession with VTuber wealth codes.

Lose has no conscience whatsoever—whatever’s hot, they jump on it, all for the money. I figure next they’ll backport this Maitetsu Last Run!! (まいてつ　Last Run！！) to Switch and PS4 for another round of that sweet revenue-print button, huh?

So yeah — if you’ve never played Maitetsu before, Maitetsu Last Run!! is worth a shot. The original story is decent enough, the presentation is passable, and it’s got real love for railways. I checked the native Chinese version and the translation is solid. It’s a good game on its own merits.

But if you already played this game back in 2016, and you were hoping to get something out of this “sequel”…

Then I’d tell you to just give up. The “new content” in this “new release” is nothing but a handful of photo-traced backgrounds and a pile of new songs… Lose is just out to fleece people — they’ve already found the money-printing cheat code for eroge, after all.

(By comparison, I still haven’t found Sprite’s yet…)