Suteki na Kanojo no Tsukurikata (素敵な彼女の作り方) Review

Everyone knows I like games that pull shitposts. Of course, “I” don’t represent the whole world, so from what I understand, most people who play games — especially visual novels — don’t really like shitpost-y works.

You can see this in the little details. For example, I often see people on some forum, when a new release drops, asking:

“Does this game have any landmines?”

“Is this game pure love?”

Both of these can basically be translated as:

“Is this game just a plain romance routine?”

What I genuinely can’t understand is the “plain romance routine” thing. Ever since the visual novel genre was born, it’s been fixed — at least 20 years now. Is it really necessary to repeat the same story over and over and over again for 20 years?

Recently a game pulled a shitpost again, and a big one at that — so big that even the publisher distanced themselves, and players worldwide were cursing it out… That game is the Chinese-first, Steam-exclusive yuri work:

Suteki na Kanojo no Tsukurikata (素敵な彼女の作り方)

Frankly, the story does have some depth. The heroine, Ashiya Sumire, thinks she’s a lesbian and feels deeply inferior about it. She runs into her goddess Koga Nazuna on the street and starts pursuing her. Step by step, the two eventually become something like “lovers” and have some physical contact.

But there are a few weird things about this game. Every time Sumire meets Nazuna, she goes home and consults a “sensei” — a teacher — over SNS on her phone. The player advances the plot through this “teacher’s” guidance choices. So it feels more like the player is playing this “teacher,” using SNS to guide “Sumire” in pursuing her goddess. From that angle, this interaction style actually fits the game’s title quite well.

The game has plenty of branch choices, and you need to pick the right branch each chapter to keep going. But the game quickly exposes its problem in the final chapter — the most controversial part.

Nazuna finds Sumire’s secret on her phone: that she was once gang-raped by men, trained, and even drugged with hallucinogens by the rapists, putting her under a degree of mind control. And when Sumire finds out Nazuna looked at her phone, she instead turns dark and yandere, semi-coercing Nazuna into becoming her slave. The two endings are also very “what the fuck.”

One is Nazuna becoming Sumire’s slave and bitch, collared and trained.

The other is Sumire losing all interest in Nazuna after training her, choosing to imprison her and move on to the next female target, going after the next person.

Neither ending is a happy ending, to put it mildly. If you had to say, the trained one is closer to a typical dark visual novel ending, while the other is more thought-provoking.

Before discussing how the game is, I think it’s worth explaining some parts of the game that many people find hard to understand:

Why did Sumire end up like this after being trained?

From the contents of Sumire’s phone, you can basically understand: she was also deceived by a man, injected with psychotropic drugs, pulled into the BDSM circle and trained. Her mental instability is why she seems a bit crazy now. Becoming a lesbian is probably her dislike of men after being violated by them, and her familiarity with collar training is the反差感 — the contrast — from having been trained before.

Why didn’t Nazuna run after learning Sumire was trained and mentally unwell?

The game explains that Nazuna’s family situation isn’t great, so she has some attachment to Sumire. Compared to her awful mother, this crazy woman actually understands her better. There’s also a bit of Stockholm syndrome at play.

Who is this “sensei” in the game?

I have two interpretations. One is that he’s just an ordinary online friend of Sumire’s. The other is that he’s the “master” who once trained Sumire — meaning Sumire becoming a lesbian and luring other women is also “just master’s task.” And the game ends the “sensei’s” control over the heroine with something like garbled code, as if hiding something more worth pondering.

So after playing this work, I think the production is actually pretty good. The art is polished, the animation effects are excellent. Apart from the stupid HCGs, it’s better than Hook’s stupid new work in every way. As for the controversy, I kept thinking: is this game a landmine?

Looking purely at the game itself, it’s more of a “skilled little shitpost piece.” After all, Japan puts out tons of games like this every month — there are even games about masturbating with ancestral tablets, and father-daughter sex. A slightly humiliating, training-heavy yuri work like this is nothing. Besides, the game has some thought-provoking parts — like whether the whole story is “master’s task” — which is worth discussing.

More importantly, this game has a certain degree of “realism.”

I don’t know if you’ve hung around Twitter. There are lots of “gender-bending circles” on Twitter, and the relationships between crossdressers there are complicated — some are pretty messy. You often see crossdressing otokonoko on Twitter complaining about how unfair their life is, how they’ve suffered this or that abuse, using it to draw you in and comfort them. And when you get to know them deeply, you find that’s not the case — what’s hidden inside is a twisted personality and an abusive character.

There have been several cases on Twitter: a seemingly fragile gender-bender, later tearfully outed by his “boyfriend” as an SM-inclined pervert — cunning and twisted — and after being accused, the person committed suicide. What looked like a same-sex romance turned into a total mess.

I’m not talking about the gender-bending community. I’m just saying that many in the “gender-bending community” aren’t really part of it. Just like many “yuri fans” aren’t real “yuri fans.”

Before release, this game should have revealed its “yandere” and “dark” elements. But the reason it still got slammed as a landmine isn’t because of any “training” or “no good ending” — it’s because the heroine Sumire was once trained by a man.

In yuri works, men must not appear, otherwise it’s a landmine. This has become an unwritten consensus. I remember watching some anime, Koi Kenkyuubu, where a bunch of netizens assumed it was a “yuri anime” and couldn’t accept that one heroine had a boyfriend.

Many say the reason this game got slammed is that “the dev team hid the landmines in the game.” But thinking about it, the game tells you from the start there are dark elements, and the game does exactly that. And plenty of yuri games are far more hardcore than this one. So what exactly is the “landmine”? I once thought about writing a lot — imagining if the game “had no final dark ending,” “had no training,” “added a ’the two live happily ever after’ ending” — whether it would’ve been slammed as badly. But I think that’s not the truth. The real “landmine” is still “men.” In a yuri game, “men” are the original sin.

Frankly, I don’t think the game has a problem. The problem is that the dev team added “men.” Otherwise, think about it — if you replaced the training photos on Sumire’s phone with other women, saying she was once trained by another woman and is now doing the same to other women, I bet plenty of people would be calling it a masterpiece by now.