Amanatsu (アマナツ) Review

For years now, SMEE’s main scenario writer Yu Hayase has been getting cozy with Azarashi Soft. After a few “collab mini-games,” they’ve stopped pretending and just merged, with Hayase even spearheading Azarashi’s new title Amanatsu.

The game looks weird no matter how you slice it. The title and art style are pure Azarashi, but the side characters and dialogue style scream SMEE.

Probably to boost sales, they brought in a bunch of VAs old players know by heart. And goddammit, they dragged out my most hated one, Yukary Aoyama, to voice the main heroine. Every role she’s done except Kazuki Kazami gives me PTSD. The second heroine is Akinohana, who’s currently on permanent vacation, and the third is Mai Gotou. That’s a stacked cast spanning three generations of eroge VAs. If this game had a press conference, the fat otaku in the audience would’ve been screaming.

I was actually hyped for this one, but less than five minutes in, I felt this weird sense of disappointment.

How do I put this “disappointment”… it’s like these story beats have repeated God knows how many times over the past ten years of my life. I wasn’t playing a game so much as being a donkey tied to a millstone, walking in circles, mechanically watching the same old clichés and plots.

To put it bluntly: the game’s story beats are too fucking stale.

If you’ve played pretty much any SMEE game, you’ll feel this even harder. The new content feels so familiar. The protagonist returns to the countryside alone, meets a bunch of weird girls, each one either secretly horny or super outgoing, and even the tsundere is already maxed out on affection for you… with the occasional dirty joke thrown in…

I minimized the window several times to check if the title had something like “Common Route 01” or “Character Route 03.”

It’s so similar. If you told me this was an SMEE game, I wouldn’t argue. Fureraba already did this style to death years ago…

But the game isn’t completely without merit. It adds three bro characters: a fat otaku, a muscle-bound aniki, and a flamboyant weirdo. If there’s anything “new” here, it’s this “three bros” trio.

The daily banter between these three takes up a decent chunk of the game, and it’s fire. Not just otaku culture trash talk, but high-level jokes only deep-closet cases would get. That chemical reaction from politically incorrect content soaked into every line makes you feel like you’re watching a hilarious dark-comedy stand-up routine.

The only downside is the game still has those cliché romance-the-girl segments. If it were just conversations with the “three bros,” the game would clearly be way more fun.

During my playthrough, watching the protagonist reluctantly choose a woman and abandon this trio of有趣 souls, betraying his inner desires to blindly follow societal emotions, filled me with melancholy.

I deeply felt Hayase’s inner conflict. He’s been writing game scripts for years, and his “male-female romance” has shown zero progress. Ten years, and he’s still playing the same old tunes. Meanwhile, his “gay” jokes have gotten more and more sophisticated. I don’t know if he’s been watching too much “philosophy” content or if he’s just tired of heterosexuality, but I can almost feel the deep-closet energy pouring out from between his lines.

So I reviewed the game on social media like this:

As for Amanatsu itself, there’s not much to say. The story is typical SMEE romance. SMEE ten years ago was like this, and SMEE ten years later is still like this. If you’re a new player (are there even new players anymore?), you might find this “witty” dialogue style fresh. But if you’re an old hand who’s played SMEE games for years, you’ll probably get sick of it after a few lines.

If there’s any highlight, it’s the “gay” jokes. In a way, this game is truly “new bottle, gay wine.”