Hana wa Mijikashi, Odore yo Otome (華は短し、踊れよ乙女) Review

Generally speaking, the “cross-dressing” games enesemble puts out have painfully contrived premises.

Most of them go like this: the male lead has some unavoidable reason to dress as a girl and transfer into a girls’ school, where he proceeds to whip it out and go on a rampage.

Even though the protagonist is nominally a cross-dresser, the HCG in these games is genuinely lewd, and he’s the lewdest one of all despite being a guy. And the lewdest guy still fights at full power in the HCG, as if following the principle of “treat every shot like it’s your last, and don’t be afraid of going impotent” — which bumps up the usability a lot. For a while I just mentally filed these games under the nukige subcategory.

But enesemble clearly shifted direction after last year’s cross-dressing title. It started caring about plot coherence, even going for crazy twists. Last year’s game felt like a Frankenstein’s monster of ideas, but willingness to change is always good.

So this year enesemble brings us a new cross-dressing game: Hana wa Mijikashi, Odore yo Otome (華は短し、踊れよ乙女).

The protagonist this time is a traditional Japanese kabuki actor — roughly the equivalent of the dan role in Chinese opera. As a song-and-dance performer, he frequently has to play women. Later, to make his female portrayals more convincing, he just goes all in: dresses as a girl, enrolls in a girls’ school, and dives into the sea of women, striving to become “more woman than a woman.”

Honestly that premise is pretty reasonable. Where the game goes afterward, though, feels a little… familiar.

The setting is Taisho-era Japan — the supposedly utopian period when East and West collided and all sorts of new trends flooded in, giving this Eastern nation a brief decade-plus of glory.

The girls’ school the protagonist enters is extremely open: not just Japanese students, but European exchange students too, each with their own style of dress — kimono, suits, Western dresses. There’s a student-run organization called the “Eika-kai,” filled by appointment from above or by election. And there’s the annual “Nadeshiko no Kimi” contest, where the whole school votes for the “most feminine outstanding student.” So the protagonist, whose goal is to be “more woman than a woman,” sets his sights on the Nadeshiko no Kimi title and starts working toward it…

At this point in the story, do you get the feeling something’s off…?

Do you, like me, feel this game is… awfully familiar?

The protagonist transfers into a new school for some special reason…

The students include kimono-wearers and exchange students…

The protagonist joins a student self-governance group at the school…

The protagonist competes in the school’s annual big event and wins…

This is literally the same old eroge formula!

The “Eika-kai” is just the student council. The “Nadeshiko no Kimi” contest is just the school festival. And foreign exchange students and kimono heroines are in every other eroge anyway…

“Set in the Taisho era” — same soup, different bowl!

So the game is fundamentally a classic school romance, except the male lead dresses as a girl and is prettier than any of the heroines. Which doesn’t even matter, because once you’re on a heroine route nobody’s particularly shocked by his real identity — they just fall in love and start living shamelessly together.

A lot of people know I’m tired of this “same old” eroge formula, but weirdly I don’t dislike this one much. Maybe the common route is short, maybe my expectations were low. Maybe Tsukino Kiiro is great, maybe Ishihara Mai doesn’t talk that much, or maybe the protagonist is just that good-looking.

Sometimes I think if you treat this game as a “Taisho-era pretty-girl art book,” it’s worth the price of admission — and the OP is genuinely good, so there’s really no reason to complain.

I used to be puzzled and confused by how feminine the protagonists in enesemble’s cross-dressing games are. Sometimes I felt the character was just a pretty girl they insisted on calling a guy. But the truth is, if a man wants to become a woman, with enough effort he really can become “more woman than a woman.”

As for the specifics, I figure those who know, know. Let me just quote some images I saw on Quora: