Monkeys!¡ Review

Honestly, at first I figured HARUKAZE was dead as a studio, that they’d gone full-time into all-ages TokyoToon stuff. Didn’t expect them to come back from the dead with a brand-new title.

The game’s called “Monkeys!¡,” and that double inverted exclamation mark at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Combined with the premise, it gave me the feeling they were about to do a crossdressing bit.

I haven’t touched many crossdressing VNs. Most of them follow the same playbook, and the ones that actually do something interesting with it are rare. The one that stuck with me was Maria†Holic from back in the day, and even that didn’t have much to do with crossdressing, really.

I’ve always appreciated HARUKAZE’s talent for shitposting, so I was looking forward to this one bringing something new.

After playing it, though, all I can say is this game brought plenty of “surprises”—and even more disappointment.

Q: What is “Monkeys!¡” actually about?

A: The premise is dead simple. The all-boys school the protagonist attends is getting shut down and turned into a parking lot. To keep it running, he decides to ask a nearby girls’ school for help, hoping the two schools can merge. Obviously, to convince the girls’ school, he has to dress up as a girl and infiltrate the place to get their approval. The girls’ school is controlled by a “big three”—Tsukishima Karasu, Kiridō Yuki, and Garasu no Miya Shōko. Win over those three, and the merger goes through.

Q: So does the merger succeed in the end?

A: It does.

Q: How’s the story?

A: Like most HARUKAZE games, the main plot is simple, but the narration is stuffed with constant banter and dry gags. And I mean dry. I barely got any of them—it just turned into the writer having a fit on the page. Like the Neko-nin series, there are a bunch of little skits, only this time they’re called stuff like “Kono Danshi wa Muri,” and the content is more dry jokes, even drier. I played the whole thing start to finish and only laughed at two.

Q: But I’ve seen a lot of people saying the game has genuinely moving and hype moments. Why do you say you couldn’t get into the story?

A: I get what they mean. There are some sentimental bits in the mid-game, and for a new player those probably land great. But I’ve played HARUKAZE’s older stuff, and I’m not going to call it plagiarism—it’s just exactly the same formula as before. The protagonist of Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart is an orphan. The protagonist of Ginga-ryū is an orphan. And wouldn’t you know it, the Monkeys!¡ protagonist isn’t an orphan, but he’s still a poor kid who thinks his parents abandoned him, so basically the same thing. To deal with that setup, the game inevitably hits the “searching for mom,” “family bonds,” “motherly love,” “reconciling with your parents” beats, and the staging is almost identical. The writing suddenly turns sentimental, some husky voice starts whispering softly, and boom, the mood is set. They already ran that trick into the ground in Ginga-ryū, and here they are using it again.

As for the “hype” parts, Ginga-ryū did those too—just that Gintama-style thing of yelling about some super-chuuni dream. Maybe I’m just immune to it by now, but I honestly didn’t feel anything fresh in Monkeys!¡’s story. It’s just a rerun of elements from their older games.

Q: Why is the game called “Monkeys!¡”?

A: This is probably one of the few genuinely interesting things the game has going for it. As everyone knows, monkey = saru, and the protagonist’s name, Ukiki Sarukichi, has a bit of a “stray monkey” ring to it (oh god, there’s “stray” again—isn’t that just “nora”?). Later in the game, it gets preachy about how “boys and girls need to understand each other,” and that mutual understanding is what turns a “monkey” into a “human.” That’s where the theme comes out: humans are human because they can empathize with others, and someone who’s lost that is nothing but an ugly monkey.

To drive the theme home, our protagonist also happens to love eating bananas, which ties into his name and is another nod to the title.

Q: Sounds like the game’s themes are pretty sophisticated.

A: Sophisticated my ass. Outside of the protagonist’s name, that preachy lecture at the end, and his banana habit, I don’t see the “monkey” element explained or used anywhere else in the game.

Q: Kiritani Hana voicing the protagonist again should be something to look forward to, right? Didn’t you say she’s your type?

A: This isn’t the first time Kiritani Hana has voiced a man. Only a clueless newbie would be surprised by her playing a dude—never mind the crossdressing VNs she’s done, she’s already plenty famous for voicing Keshi in that anime. Switching to a male register is second nature for her.

What I’m saying is, if you’re going to cast Kiritani Hana as a man, in a crossdressing game, with HARUKAZE’s comedy chops backing it up, I expect to hear her lethal male/female voice switch in action. And this game doesn’t do it.

Not once! Except for a couple of lines in the white-haired guy’s route, nothing at all!

What a waste of a voice actress!

Also, I’m pretty sure Natsuwa Koto is more lethal than Kiritani Hana at this point, so please hurry up and drop a Satou banner so I can whale, thanks.

Q: The way you’re talking, does this game have no redeeming qualities?

A: Of course it has some. The game’s biggest strength is its presentation—it uses a comic-panel style, and there are two big things about that:

First, it’s way better than your typical “talking heads” VN staging. It feels like a 3D comic.

Second, it’s cheap.

This “comic-panel” approach is more lively than most CG-heavy competitors, but it doesn’t require a mountain of high-quality CG art. And the art style itself is deliberately rough, which cuts costs even further.

Remember what I said before? Hato is the master of doing big things on a small budget, and this game shows it again in spades.

The OP also goes for that old Shinbo-style big color blocks—high style, low budget.

This game’s biggest virtue is that it keeps that unique presentation style and that Neko-nin/Ginga-ryū-brand Japanese dry humor going, while delivering the best possible staging on the smallest possible budget.

Q: A lot of people are calling this game a “landmine.” What do you think?

A: First off, Monkeys!¡ completely failed to meet my expectations story-wise. Before the OP, it’s a decent youth comedy. After the OP, you can literally watch the quality fall off a cliff in real time. It sinks into the writer’s self-indulgent sentimentality, throwing in joke after joke they think is hilarious that I just don’t get.

The most criticized route is probably Tsukishima Karasu’s. It’s locked—you can only enter it after clearing the other heroines—and it makes no damn sense. It starts as a typical romance, then our protagonist gets randomly beaten half to death by thugs, and then Tsukishima Karasu starts acting unhinged, out of nowhere turning on the school to destroy it for the man she loves, and then the protagonist, who was half-dead, suddenly wakes up to stop her…

I can sort of see what the writer was going for, but this wheezing, disjointed development had a lot of people cursing at their screens. The writer seems to have forgotten this is a romance game and not Gintama—and even if you’re copying Gintama, you’re missing a Shinpachi to do the tsukkomi, which leaves the whole thing with no tension and just feels baffling…

That said, I think the game is just plain bad, not a malicious “landmine.”

Q: So what’s your take on the game’s sales?

A: From what I can see, Monkeys!¡’s reception is a bit mixed, but don’t forget—it’s been announced for a Chinese localization on Steam. Everyone knows that as long as a visual novel has Chinese and is on Steam, it’ll get positive reviews even if it’s a pile of shit—unless some big X (Twitter) influencer starts a hate campaign. But for a game with Monkeys!¡’s air of superiority and style, surely nobody would want to be honest and admit it’s garbage.

Let’s look forward to this trash game getting its “Very Positive” rating on Steam!

And then we can all watch the monkeys perform in the Chinese comment section.

Can’t. Wait.