Renai x Royale Mari & Shion & Aoi Mini After Story (恋愛×ロワイアル まり＆汐音＆蒼 ミニアフターストーリー) Review

Not sure if it’s the pandemic or what, but the number of visual novel releases has dropped off a cliff this year, and a lot of veteran studios seem to have slowly lost their original passion for the craft. Take HOOKSOFT for example—they and SMEE have planned a pile of new titles this year, but… those titles are hard to describe in polite company.

For instance, Hook’s “Yubisaki” is basically an SMEE game, and SMEE’s new title feels more like a Moonstone Cherry game. But both of those games (including the Hook one that isn’t out yet) have nearly identical promotional styles, down to the website intros. Put it bluntly: these three games are “obviously off the same assembly line.”

I’ve been shitting on assembly-line products ever since I first trashed Yuzusoft’s stuff years ago. Sure, an assembly line boosts efficiency, cuts costs, speeds up production, and raises profits. But games aren’t cold commodity goods—they’re vessels for narrative and, to some extent, culture. Churning that kind of thing out on a production line lowers costs, speeds things up, and maybe increases revenue, but the games themselves naturally become boring as hell.

That said, I’m not saying the assembly line is completely worthless. It has its upsides and downsides. The correct way to use it is to maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses under a game’s “director.” Looking back now, goddamn—those “assembly-line games” from Yuzusoft I used to flame have actually become a decent benchmark. These past few years everyone’s just been getting worse and worse, no two ways about it.

After both HOOKSOFT and SMEE’s new titles flopped, I remembered I still had a Fandisk for Asa Project’s game from last year sitting around. This is the classic Hook-family maneuver—put out two ultra-low-cost Fandisks afterward, squeeze out whatever cash you can. Asa Project is no exception.

And yet this “cheap cash-grab” ended up being the best Hook-family release I’ve played recently… because it’s “the real thing.”

Renai Royale: Mari & Shion & Ao Mini After Story (恋愛×ロワイアル まり＆汐音＆蒼 ミニアフターストーリー)—the name makes it clear it’s a Fandisk for last year’s Renai Royale. It includes two routes: one for the designated heroine Mari, and one for the game’s story engine, the two-faced maid Ao… bundled together with her white-haired master Shion.

I don’t get it, man. Why does the MVP maid Ao have to be bundled with Shion from the original route? Is she incapable of snarking without her around?

That said, the game’s quality is still on point—or rather, it maintains the level of the original. Most of the punchlines in the original came from the maid Ao anyway, and in this Fandisk the concentration is even higher, so it’s got more flavor.

The familiar snark, the familiar venomous tongue, the familiar facial expressions, plus new HCGs—it all makes this very short Fandisk feel worth the money. At least after playing it I can confirm: yep, this is the familiar Asa Project flavor.

By comparison, Hook’s other titles, in their blind flailing to change, gave me an illusion: is this really a Hook / SMEE game?

I get the logic—change brings progress, progress brings longevity. Change can bring vitality, but it can also bring ruin. Not understanding your product’s core appeal and just fucking around wildly gets you killed.

Against that backdrop, Asa Project—which changed nothing and just cranked out a Fandisk by the book—ended up being the last one with any integrity left.