Hibino-san Chi wa Eroge Yasan! (響野さん家はエロゲ屋さん) Review

Sonora is a brand from the infamous cash-grab factory CUFFS. I’ve said before that CUFFS games, despite the pile of aliases, are all basically the same style—but this Sonora alias actually does something a little different.

They built a shared universe across the games under the Sonora label.

What that means: the three games released under Sonora all take place in the same world, so you get characters from different games making cameos, which gives everything a familiar feel.

Gotta admit, the trick works. Sometimes you play an earlier game, then in a later one you get to see the previous heroine show up and get involved, and there’s this weird sense of closeness—like “oh, the developer actually cares about the players.” Of course, the more important part is that the background art doesn’t need to be redrawn. Reuse, baby. Save that money!

So this time we’re talking about Sonora’s new game: Hirono-san Chi wa Eroge-ya-san! (The Hirono Family Runs an Eroge Shop!)

Just like the title says, this is a story about “running a shop that sells galge.” The plot is dead simple: the Hirono family’s original shop went under, the owner—the grandpa—vanished off to live it up in the mountains, and the three Hirono sisters are left staring at a dying business. So the eldest, being a total キモウタ, suggests they pivot to selling porn games exclusively.

The other two think it’s insane, but the eldest is so fired up she’s already contacted suppliers, so they reluctantly agree. Gotta pay the bills somehow—it’s the family’s main income, and making money beats the alternative.

So the eroge shop opens, and our protagonist—the second sister’s childhood friend—gets dragged into running the place. (Officially to help her out, and also to provide a male perspective.)

The game’s story splits into three parts: daily eroge shop operations and industry news, most people’s misunderstandings and understanding of eroge shops, and the individual romance routes.

Since running an eroge shop is the main subject, the business side is a big deal. You learn most of it through conversations between the eldest sister and the other two, and honestly it’s pretty interesting—at least as a galge player you get a look at a lot of industry happenings, especially the “marketing” side that most players know least about.

Let me mention what stuck with me. Playing this game, I finally got that most shops order stock based on reservations. If a game gets few preorders, they won’t stock much, and many stores won’t even sell a game without a reservation—unless they’re a big shop with deep inventory. The store manager has to judge whether a game will sell, and the biggest factors are “is it erotic,” “does it match fetishes,” and “is the artist famous.” “Good scenario and story” comes dead last. Painfully, hilariously true to the industry.

Also, even if a shop relies on monthly release dates, it faces its greatest enemy: delays. A game was supposed to drop this month, you’ve reserved display space, and then it gets pushed back—congratulations, as the manager you’re eating air this month. The game offers a solution: run your own shop SNS and blog, update shop news, and partner with online galge retailers—throw up DMM affiliate links, earn a cut from online sales. I figure you could toss in some ads too. This part made me realize how sites like the shitty ErogameScape and Seiya no Heya actually make money. (Man, I wish I could put DMM affiliate links on my blog.)

As a galge retailer, you also have “account managers” from the major companies—what we in China might call “grid management” these days. Companies have sales reps dedicated to each store. Being friendly with them and asking for “store-exclusive bonuses” can massively boost sales. Sometimes smaller shops need to hold “signing events,” inviting artists, writers, or voice actors (unlikely, but still) to the store—that pushes sales too, and you’re competing with big shops for those resources.

When a galge shop orders stock, they don’t look at the game’s “brand”—they look at the company behind it. So whether it’s a CUBE game or a Sonora game, from the shop’s perspective it’s all one company. The game also explains why some eroge makers keep spawning aliases: to differentiate user segments. Some fragile types like moe, some like violation—if a company wants to appeal to more users, they create aliases. I thought this was common knowledge, but apparently not everyone gets it, so it’s nice they address it in-game.

Anyway, running a galge shop is not simple. Just because you love galge doesn’t mean you can run one. It’s fundamentally commercial marketing and management—channels, promotion, inventory, all the same as any other retail business.

In the game, the protagonist and the three Hirono sisters running the eroge shop quickly become known to others at school. Most are shocked at first, but eventually accept it. After all, it’s just an eroge shop, and the sex industry is legal in Japan—though I’m not sure if minors selling porn games is illegal or not. As the second sister explains:

“Yeah, selling this stuff is a bit embarrassing, but it’s our family’s main income. We’ve got to make a living, no choice. And we run it properly.”

And so the other characters come around. In reality, I doubt it’d be that easy.

The individual route choices are as cliché as ever—they shoehorn in a school festival, and before that you get various choices (with obvious heroine guides). Follow them and you end up with the girl you want.

The individual routes have basically nothing to do with “running an eroge shop” anymore. It’s the usual confession, boom-boom, etc. I feel the routes are barely worth reading—the romance writing is clearly lacking, and the game doesn’t even seem to try. It uses extremely forced and extremely stale tricks: the heroine randomly masturbates, randomly gets horny, and the seemingly quiet, aloof goddess is actually a nympho…

Also, I personally didn’t find the HCGs very “usable,” just like the game says:

Why do HCGs have to have H? Isn’t telling a good story enough?

Because the H gives you a choice—if you want the story, just skip the H.

So I skipped it.

Oh wait, the story itself is pretty average. The only parts worth reading are the common route’s eroge shop operations and industry tidbits. I honestly think it’s completely inferior to the previous game’s “aunt” route. By the way, the game has heroines from the previous two games show up, but not the aunt—maybe Ishihara Mai was too busy having fun streaming and didn’t want to voice a game anymore.

Honestly, if you replaced “running an eroge shop” with “running a hot pot restaurant,” the game would still work. The main plot is the three Hirono sisters opening a shop to make a living, the protagonist helping out, and incidentally snagging one of the sisters. But the reason this game has any buzz is probably exactly because it chose the “eroge shop” setting. エロゲームでエロゲームを習う—learning about eroge through an eroge—that’s probably the fun part.

This game teaches you the ropes of running an “eroge shop,” but I still want to bring up reality: there are basically no shops in Japan that exclusively sell eroge anymore. They’re dead. I looked into it—the only survivors are “general stores,” meaning they mostly sell manga and light novels and happen to carry eroge on the side. These days the main promotional channels for eroge are big otaku retailers like Animate, Melonbooks, and Toranoana, and eroge isn’t even their whole business—they don’t rely solely on those sales.

The best “dedicated eroge shop” I could find in Japan closed around 2017. The owner was a real enthusiast, claimed 27 years of eroge experience, but the shop eventually shut down because it wasn’t profitable. He then started an online store, which also eventually failed, and now he can barely keep a blog going, recommending games he still thinks are good. Kind of depressing.

I gotta say, for something like galge, maybe the only way to make money these days is to get a Chinese translation and put it on Steam to fleece Chinese players. The actual dedicated brick-and-mortar stores in Japan are all gone. And the shop in Hirono-san Chi wa Eroge-ya-san! probably doesn’t exist at all. If it did, it’d have to be the only profitable eroge shop on Earth.