Kiss kara Hajimeru Egoism (キスからはじめるエゴイズム) Review

There’s a weird phenomenon in the visual novel scene: a lot of works that advertise themselves as “telling a story” keep getting more and more horny and “practical,” while plenty of titles that come right out the gate branding themselves as “hardcore” suddenly start telling stories for no apparent reason.

This isn’t unique to visual novels, either—Japan’s adult film industry is the same. That’s exactly why I love watching stuff directed by “Maeda the Literary Giant.” You get the visceral impact of flesh, sure, but also plenty of food for thought.

It’s like how we judge people. We always slap the label of good guy or bad guy on them based on some kind of “contrast.” A guy who does ten thousand good deeds becomes a bad person after one bad one, while a total scumbag becomes the representative of conscience because he did one good thing. So some game producers deliberately go down this route, trying to cram something more humanistic into a nukige that’s supposed to be pure fap material. It’s one of the easiest ways to birth a so-called “masterpiece.”

Of course, it doesn’t always work.

Kiss kara Hajimeru Egoism (Egoism Starting from a Kiss) is one such game. The maker, “Satsuki,” is probably known to nobody, but it’s actually the old “Sumire.” The story is simple enough: a shut-in protagonist stumbles upon a “latest test model” leaked from a company that develops sex robots—basically a female robot built to be a cum dumpster. But this robot has a strong sense of self and despises “having sex with strangers,” so she escapes the factory. The protagonist takes her in, and the two start a bizarre cohabitation.

The protagonist names the robot “Ego,” as in ego, proving she has self-awareness. Ego says she forgot to grab her charging cable when she fled the factory, and the only remaining way to charge is by absorbing semen through boning… (Couldn’t I just inject protein directly into her pussy? Guess not.) So reluctantly, the protagonist “charges” Ego on a daily schedule. After days of this, like three meals a day, they fall for each other. Eventually Ego loves the protagonist, and he loves her back. But reality is cruel—Ego is a test product that escaped the factory, and the protagonist keeping her means paying compensation. In the end, the factory reclaims Ego.

But later, though he loses Ego, he’s moved by her “sense of self.” He turns his life around, gets a job, saves enough money, and buys the factory’s latest “sex robot”—a custom-made version for himself. This robot has the memory of the former test unit Ego sealed inside. When he boots her up, he’s finally reunited with his former robot wife…

Story and setup-wise, this game is obviously a nukige, what with the “mana recharge” three times a day.

But the game isn’t content being just a nukige. It throws in a bunch of so-called philosophical elements like “id, ego, and fuck-me,” trying to make players feel it has deep meaning. “Sure, you got a sex robot, but she has self-awareness too—you can fall in love with her.” It’s like buying an onahole and, after you’ve busted a nut, staring at it and pondering what it’d be like if it had a will of its own.

Does that have meaning? Maybe. Maybe not.

But at least in my view, this game’s attempt at “meaning” is meaningless. Cogito ergo sum—everyone’s thoughts about the things around them are independent. There’s absolutely no need for guidance from your weird porn game.

And besides, the writing isn’t even good. Most of it is nukige-tier, with occasional forced attempts at profundity that feel stiff as hell. And what’s the point of the protagonist’s host-club and hookup backstory? It’s just forcing sorrow for the sake of it—deliberately making people feel sad? Like how everyone on the internet claims to have depression the moment they mention pain?

A major theme is that the heroine robot was manufactured as a cum dumpster but hates her identity and wants to fight it. Yet in the actual plot, she resists for maybe two days before running out of battery and needing three rounds of charging a day. You’re telling me that’s “hating her cum-dumpster identity”?

You can see the development budget was low—everything’s simple. It’s a “short piece,” taking the nukige route, but the makers wanted to be clever and force in “philosophy” and “reflection.” It doesn’t work. It just ends up middling. Playing it feels like wasting time, but not entirely… After all, the story unfolds pretty completely, and the title is quite ironbox-y. The way the protagonist logs in as her master is indeed a kiss, so it really is “egoism starting from a kiss.”

But the game’s length and positioning still give off a “chicken rib” vibe—the kind of thing that’s not bad enough to toss but not good enough to savor. No matter how pretentious the title and description, at its core it’s just about picking up a tsundere human-shaped frigid onahole.

Next time they tackle this kind of subject, they should get a better voice actress—someone like Kitami Yuki, maybe—and it might not feel so lukewarm.