Hajilove -Making*Lovers- (ハジラブ -Making*Lovers-) Review

Making*Lovers is an older SMEE game, and it got a lot of praise. Lots of reasons, but mainly:

• Great music
• Funny skits
• Cute characters
• Sweet romance

Don’t know about everyone else, but those four are why I loved it. Then SMEE went off and did some messy isekai stuff, finally realized they should get back to basics, and put out this new game. Probably on a tight budget, because it’s wearing the skin of the previous work — same title, Making*Lovers — but to me these two games are fundamentally different.

Different art: they brought in K-ko, whose style instantly reminds me of those sister-complex games.

Different writer: Hayase Yuu’s name is still there, but playing it, he’s clearly not the main scenario writer.

Different setup: Making*Lovers had a protagonist about to enter the workforce — a web grunt — and the story was mostly about matchmaking. This one got turned into a generic school romance.

Different voice cast: Ono Ryoko only cameos as background characters here. Even with Shirazuki Ao as backup, they still dragged in HOOK’s landmine mascot Shirazuki Kaname. Honestly, any HOOK game with Shirazuki Kaname in it is basically doomed. No idea if that’s an unwritten rule or what.

Sure, it’s branded Making*Lovers, but the only thing connecting it to the previous game is the same background images. Official line: “same world setting.” Yeah, right — everyone knows it’s just to save budget. It’s a porn game, not an open-world title. Swapping a few backgrounds doesn’t need a damn worldview. And even under this “same world” premise, they pulled some ancestor-betraying dumbass move: added supernatural phenomena to the plot, again in Shirazuki Kaname’s route (guess that’s why she’s the landmine of landmines). I genuinely can’t imagine how the urban romance of a web grunt trying to find a wife and ending up married to a rich older woman also contains infinite divine power. What the hell is wrong with them.

Beyond the weird worldview, what pisses me off most is: this is not a SMEE game at all.

Most SMEE games have a common route full of banter, you talk to different heroines each day, and gradually transition from “friends” to “lovers.” That’s the core value SMEE always bragged about. But in this game, you lock in a relationship almost immediately, get to the sex scene fast, and then spend the rest of the long common route (if you can call it that) banging your girl in different positions…

How to put it… Old SMEE games felt like a fun rom-com manga with some porn in it. This new SMEE game feels like a porn manga with a romance theme.

And this high-frequency daily HCG stuff feels real familiar… almost like… a nukige like Imouto Tengoku. Yeah, that kind of moe-nukige where you pick a girl each day, exchange a few lines, and then fuck.

Maybe to salvage some SMEE face, the game added a bunch of useless systems. There’s “choose a location for dates,” “unlock female POV,” and some “training system” I still don’t know the point of. They look cool but have zero interactivity — just fluff. The female POV is mildly interesting, but none of it saves the boring main story.

A lot of old SMEE fans in Japan (me included) are unhappy with this game. Plenty of people like it too, mostly saying “high practicality.” But practicality does nothing for me — I don’t need practical, I can get the real thing. SMEE chased that practicality, threw away the skits and comedy, and cobbled together a stupid supernatural story that ruins the decent Making*Lovers world. I don’t get it. Why not start a new project? Why desecrate the old work? Afraid it won’t sell otherwise?

Anyway, like my title says: this game is not “SMEE” at all, and has nothing to do with the old Making*Lovers. Treat it as a nukige — rub one out and go to sleep.