Gohoushi Akuma to Oshioki Tenshi (ごほうしアクマとオシオキてんし) Review

QUINCESOFT’s big 2021 opener, and it made me spit out my drink. Gohoushi Akuma to Oshioki Tenshi (ごほうしアクマとオシオキてんし), written as ご奉仕悪魔とお仕置き天使 — “the demon who does maid duty and the exiled angel.”

This thing hit me hard enough that we should set the game aside for a moment and first go over how this label called QUINCESOFT even came to be.

QUINCESOFT started out as a “sister brand” to Lump of Sugar. From what I understand of the industry, you set up a sister brand because you want to do something different, and as its first release QUINCESOFT put out Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro., a surprisingly polished piece of work. It was actually a story-driven title — just without Moekibara drawing it; that job went to Nanaroba Hana. The game also had some mechanical tricks baked in, like picking routes by clicking dice. Given that Lump of Sugar had already put out a run of games with “systems,” such as Unmei Senjou no φ and Magical Charming, here’s what I said at the time:

Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro. is put out by QUINCE SOFT, a subsidiary of Lump of Sugar. Quince is a quince — a very peculiar fruit with the complicated trait of “not being edible as-is.” The reason the subsidiary is called QUINCE SOFT is probably that Lump of Sugar wanted to spin off that whole series of “complex games with some playability” under a separate label…

At the time I figured QUINCESOFT was Lump of Sugar’s market segmentation play — dump all the complicated-system games over here, let the main brand safely keep doing Moekibara kemonomimi, and cover different player needs…

Then a year later QUINCESOFT released Animal☆Panic.

Looking at that one I was kind of baffled. Different artist, and it’s a plain moe game, and… the system isn’t complicated at all, the story has no depth, it’s just moe and effects. Which made my whole brand analysis based on the first game a pile of hot air.

Later I realized this game didn’t seem short on money during production — the effects are maxed out, more lavish than what Lump of Sugar’s main brand does.

This game looks like it’s short on money during production, but once you open it you find out: nope, not short on money. Every girl’s mouth animates when she talks, and the OP even lip-syncs the heroines. Even crazier, for a “magical girl” game, the heroines’ transformations are fully animated! Holy shit, this is a game from Lump of Sugar’s sub-brand, and Lump of Sugar itself already cut the kemonomimi animation from its own games!

So at that point I figured QUINCESOFT was probably just Lump of Sugar’s test plot — new tech gets tried here, including but not limited to “multiple branches,” “full animation,” and whatever works well might get carried back to the main brand…

Then in the first month of 2021, QUINCESOFT’s new game: Gohoushi Akuma to Oshioki Tenshi. I opened it, saw the screen, and spat out my drink. Never mind the game itself — just look at its website:

One word: ugly! Uglier than Android 12.

What is up with this gigantic font?

How did anyone build this twisted navigation menu?

Even Lump of Sugar’s own design is better than this by a mile!

The install size isn’t small either, and the game is actually built in Unity — yet it shows off none of Unity’s benefits (seems like no Unity galgame ever does). Inside it’s still that huge, warped font, and what I can’t stand most: the game has loading screens.

Holy shit. I’ve been playing eroge for years and this is the first time I’ve seen a game besides the stupid Giga titles that needs to load. And this loading is the “real loading” kind — meaning you actually have to “wait a while” before you can continue. You talk to a heroine for a bit, the scene changes, and you have to wait through a “ロード.” That’s more than enough.

The story is dead simple: the protagonist goes to a shrine one day, lightning strikes by accident, and down comes an angel and two demons. The angel says she was exiled to the human world for a mistake, and her job is to lead these two demons to a re-education camp for labor reform. Only when the reform succeeds can she go back to heaven, and the demons can turn over a new leaf.

So how does this labor reform work?

Conveniently, the protagonist’s little girlfriend’s family runs a hot spring inn, so the whole crew gets dragged off to work as staff there — one angel plus two demons begin their gohoushi.

The choices are simple and brutal: whoever’s name you pick is your route. The ending holds no surprises either — the protagonist gets his啪啪啪 in, the heroine completes her reform and returns to heaven, and even after going back the angel gets re-dispatched to the protagonist’s area as a guardian deity, so the two can be together forever.

Seems the game deliberately set up the angel’s return-to-the-same-place ending by saying early on that the crappy little island the protagonist lives on once had a guardian deity, that the god later left, and the position was vacant — so this angel fills it perfectly.

The plot really is that simple, and the art is still that weird. Every artist they brought in is popular with otaku on Twitter, but together it looks like a case of cerebral palsy. Rubii-sama especially — lately I don’t know if he’s short on money or what, but he shows up in tons of games. His style here just doesn’t fit the others at all, especially next to that “dame tenshi” — they’re literally from two different worlds. And while the angel looks pretty cute in a lot of CGs, some CGs are just off-model, especially those warped feet — you can smell them through the screen. Add the flavorless story, the moronic loading, the UI with no sense of aesthetics, and the giant font, and the whole game is, to me, garbage built from “not-bad raw materials.” Story’s unwatchable, can’t even fap to it, no idea what they made this thing for.

At this point I understand QUINCESOFT’s positioning even less. What the hell is this company doing — story games, or a new-tech test plot? The problem is this game has neither story nor new tech. Was it just to test the Unity engine? That moronic loading alone is enough to tell you it doesn’t work.

Or is QUINCESOFT just Lump of Sugar’s trash can — toss in the leftover scraps nobody wants and ship a game out of them? I hope I’m wrong.