Houkago Cinderella Mini Fandisk: Anata to Kaeru Saigo no Gekou Michi (放課後シンデレラ ミニファンディスク ～あなたと帰る最後の下校道～) Review

Houkago Cinderella seems to have a decent reputation, and as the game Hook put out after letting things simmer for over a year, I personally found it pretty fun. The systems are retro in a good way — you get after-school route choices, plus a pair of NPCs (the two stooges) doing fortune-telling for you, hinting at where you might run into which heroine.

The meat of the game is the small talk with heroines after school, and that’s done well too. Not really my thing, personally — after school I’d rather hit the net cafe with the guys, and dates with girls are a pure waste of time — but hey, some people love it. Which is why the game picked up a fair number of fans.

Going by the Hook playbook, once a title sells decently, a fan disc has to follow. These fan discs are usually pretty cynical efforts: no core gameplay from the original, just a few cheap CG sets and some lukewarm dialogue. At best it’s an “after story,” the quality of a free booklet bundled with the game. But Hook still puts it up for sale, harvesting the faithful, whoever it can catch, and it works every time — leaves me with nowhere to file a complaint.

Anyway, back to the game itself: Houkago Cinderella Mini Fan Disc Anata to Kaeru Saigo no Gekou Michi (放課後シンデレラ ミニファンディスク ～あなたと帰る最後の下校道～).

The subtitle literally says “the last walk home with you,” and the content is dead simple: pick a heroine, get told she’s about to graduate, and soon you won’t be able to goof off together on the way home anymore. The mood slides toward melancholy, with a whole “the protagonist is about to be separated from the heroine” vibe.

Then I thought about it and something didn’t add up. They’re only graduating from middle school — if your grades are decent you can go on to the same high school. And even if you fail the entrance exams and end up at a Japanese vocational school, nothing’s stopping you from keeping on dating her, is there?

So what the hell is there to be sad about?

Still, the game gives each heroine a different ending: most of them go on to university together, others end with the two of you working side by side. The template is pretty rigid across the board — heroine shows up, graduation news brings the sadness, the sad mood gets used as an excuse to bang a few times, then it turns out the sadness was temporary and the happy ending is eternal. Roll credits.

And as I said earlier, none of the good features from the original are here. No after-school location choices, and once the two bros show up there isn’t even a token fortune-telling. The game instantly loses its soul.

Honestly I wasn’t expecting much from a mini fan disc, but the sheer by-the-numbers laziness is hard to believe. See the promotional cover art? That’s actually the best CG in the whole game — the one good-looking image gets pulled out to be the cover, and everything else is either porn or a handful of half-assed CGs. If this thing really sold that badly, maybe just don’t put it up for sale.