Haruka Ao no Hanayome ni (遥か碧の花嫁に) Review

There’s a classic meme about Intel releasing the 11th-gen i7-11700K, which benchmarks showed was not only worse than cheaper competitors but even worse than the previous generation—a pure reverse toothpaste squeeze. Gamers Nexus famously called it a “waste of sand.”

After playing Lump of Sugar’s so-called “new” 2023 release, I had a similar thought, and it led to the question in the title:

If selling a CPU with reverse toothpaste squeeze is a waste of sand, what does developing a completely pointless galgame count as?

Honestly, when I first saw the promo art for Lump of Sugar’s new game Haruka Ao no Hanayome ni, I felt a tiny bit of relief. After years of coasting, they’d finally abandoned the old “animal-ear loli” formula for making up stories. Look at the heroine front and center—that figure. Damn. Very good game, made the shark’s dick spin.

I wasn’t expecting much from the story. Same old thing: cobble together a fantasy world to justify the “animal ears.” What I cared about more was whether Lump of Sugar would build a whole new story structure around this new style of heroine, one that lets players directly immerse in her charm and quickly get into emotional and physical communication with her—achieving double satisfaction on both mental and physical levels, fast.

Put bluntly: can this go the nukige route?

So, with that try-it-and-see attitude—and to verify whether the shark’s dick can spin anywhere other than a donkey’s hole—I checked out the game.

All I can say is: unfortunately, none of what you want is there.

The game doesn’t break out of Lump of Sugar’s existing framework at all. If anything, it’s more long-winded, and it even tries to lecture the player with some grand principles. It starts with the protagonist, his sister, and his girlfriend getting caught in a shipwreck and falling into the sea, only to end up in the world of the undersea people, who rescue them. Turns out there’s a whole hidden world down there, with its own races and nations. The princess takes one look at the protagonist, her eyes light up, and she invites him to marry her and marry into the royal family on the spot. Then comes the familiar “Nordic fantasy world with a Japanese flavor” development.

That’s not necessarily bad. As a visual novel, chatting with 2D girls is fine. But the funny thing is, the game starts attempting “grand narrative.” It piles on setting: the subtle relationship between undersea people and surface people, interdependent yet opposed; a whole system of bilateral negotiations and contacts like goods smuggling; and when the protagonist decides to return to the surface to visit family, it pulls a “Peach Blossom Spring” twist—except more extreme, with the protagonist, his sister, and his girlfriend taking amnesia pills.

What really baffled me: the sister, who had tons of screen time early on, takes an amnesia pill and goes back to the surface, then never appears again. The protagonist follows his girlfriend back to the undersea world, planning to become the princess’s son-in-law…

At that point I was confused:

1. The sister gets so much screen time, isn’t romanceable, and then gets forcibly written out midway? What was the point of her character?

2. The undersea queen takes a liking to the protagonist and wants him to stay as king—fine. But why does the girlfriend, a side character, follow him back undersea? The moment the man you love decides to return to the sea, he’s made his choice. Why are you still following him?

Then the game unfolds predictably: the protagonist returns undersea, the queen and he establish a romantic relationship, and the queen suddenly gets a flashback—turns out she came to the surface as a child, met the young protagonist, was saved by him, developed feelings, and even made a childhood marriage promise. So years later, seeing him again undersea, she immediately proposes…

The plot becomes the queen and protagonist marrying and continuing the grand narrative—promoting peaceful coexistence between undersea and surface people, claiming it’s in the best interest of both races, and incidentally helping the newly crowned queen through an undersea crisis.

There are some romanceable side characters, mostly unrelated to the main plot. The maid, for instance, gets a bit of backstory: she was once a member of an enemy undersea nation, sent to assassinate the queen, but was moved by her and stayed by her side (the queen is very trusting).

As for the girlfriend who followed him undersea, she’s a total loser; the two have a little adventure and narrowly survive, and that’s that.

Objectively, Haruka Ao no Hanayome ni seems fine. First, it’s politically correct—calls for peace and love between races, and tosses in a bit of marine conservation as a public service topic. It doesn’t touch any sensitive topics that might upset otaku. Even the non-romanceable blood-related sister exists to avoid ethical issues, and there’s none of that “clever dark plot” from before that scares off the fragile babies. All battles between nations and races end in the victory of love and justice; there isn’t even a clear villain. Everyone has their unspeakable hardships and misunderstandings, and those misunderstandings get resolved in a perfectly normal way.

The game even has some dialectical thoughts on echo chambers and “brainwashing.” Most undersea people are isolationist, refusing foreign exchange, and the media and books portray surface people as ugly and dangerous. The queen’s sister is the rebel who doesn’t buy it—she’s always longed for the surface, doubts the smears in undersea literature, and decides to see for herself; after all, only surface people know how surface people live. Eventually she renounces her undersea citizenship entirely and defects to the surface. The game elevates its stance: she becomes a bridge for exchange between undersea and surface. In today’s increasingly complex international situation, it’s hard not to see the mapping.

The art is above standard—at least a normal performance from Moekibara, and much better looking than his Furina. The music is standard. The game system doesn’t support ultra-high resolutions, but at least uses 3D acceleration, so high-spec PCs get a decent experience, and the controls have everything they should…

Even the “ugly option menu art” I complained about in the previous game is fixed—the UI is much better, clearly designed by someone.

So what exactly is wrong with this game? Why did I feel so unsatisfied after finishing it?

I thought about it for a long time and could only conclude: the game is too “ordinary”—so ordinary it feels outdated.

Haruka Ao no Hanayome ni is a game that strictly follows the galgame framework: lolis, big breasts, a maid, a childhood friend, even a sister (but not a blood-related one). The story advocates traditional Japanese “peace and love,” and it satirizes reality like scratching an itch—just enough to notice, then stops, giving a fairy-tale ending completely opposite to reality. Visually, it uses its artist’s strengths to expand the role of animal ears. The whole production feels like Lump of Sugar, after various unsuccessful experiments, went back to its old three-trick pony.

In other words, the game has no obvious flaws, but also no obvious merits.

Like a generic-faced nobody in a crowd—no one notices him, and nothing interesting comes from his by-the-book life. I realized that when a game is too “ordinary,” I don’t even know how to evaluate it, or whether it has any value.

Oh right, as an R18 galgame, it has one remaining value: “practicality.” That brings me back to what I said at the start—we shouldn’t demand grand truths from a galgame. If it gets you off, that’s enough.

I’m sure you saw the princess’s impressive figure in the promo art. This is Moekibara’s first time using a non-loli as the main heroine, so the firepower must be exceptional.

But the game kills that thought in the most exasperating way.

If you count from the start, you need roughly 20 hours of playtime to see the princess’s first HCG. If you’re in a hurry and hold Skip, it still takes about half an hour. I don’t believe anyone can keep their little brother erect for half an hour—not even the shark whose brain is in his dick.

I want to curse the game for being too wordy, but it’s not really wordy. It spends nearly 20 hours explaining the whole backstory, the love-hate between undersea and surface people, your trip home, and touring the undersea world…

You say your little brother can’t wait, but the princess decided to marry you from the start—irrevocably. The meat is already in the pot. What’s the rush?

Besides, for the entire first half, the princess is all smiles and gentleness, like a holy mother with a halo visible above her head. Combined with her calm voice, I felt my soul being cleansed. Forget holding Skip for half an hour—after five minutes, I’d lost all desire.

The only early temptation is the young princess making borderline moves, but am I the kind of person who goes after lolis? I am not!

And the loli scene comes even later than the princess’s—you need to hold Skip another five minutes to see it.

When I snapped out of it, I realized: the promo poster looks so tempting, but in actual play, it’s not even a nukige—it’s more normal than an average R18. You could delete all the R18 scenes and it wouldn’t affect the game in the slightest.

So Haruka Ao no Hanayome ni is a game that doesn’t stand out anywhere, not even in practicality. No obvious flaws, no obvious merits, not even obvious things to complain about—hard to leave any impression.

After playing, it doesn’t leave you with anything. It seems to have a bit of every element, but only a bit. It tells a story, but that story has been told countless times in the galgame industry. It draws an impressive big-breasted princess, but in the world of galgames, who the hell doesn’t have a big-breasted princess?

So what is this game? It’s not even as good as the one that perfectly triggered every landmine. I honestly think this game is pointless. Even a piece of crap would be better than something this thoroughly mediocre—at least it would make me angry enough to write a rant.

So back to the beginning:

If selling a CPU with reverse toothpaste squeeze is a waste of sand, what does developing a galgame with zero highlights and zero meaning count as?

At the very least, I consider playing this game a waste of time.