Boku no Kanojo wa Ningyo Hime!? (僕の彼女は人魚姫！？) Review

Years ago — don’t ask me where, probably the Google Play Store — I came across a game called Boku no Kanojo wa Ningyo Hime!? (My Girlfriend Is a Mermaid Princess!?). It was a mobile game, but it looked like a visual novel. I didn’t have time for it back then, so it went on the pile.

Later I found out it had actually been ported to PC and put up on Steam, complete with a bunch of language options. So at some point it ended up in my Steam library…

Well, I have to admit it: I’ve been “cleaning out” the visual novels in my Steam library lately, so this Mermaid Princess became the next target.

I did finish it, and picked up all the achievements along the way. But when it comes to actually reviewing it, I find it hard to say anything.

The first thing that put me off was how awkward it all reads. The game ships with Chinese support, but the Chinese reads like a foreign language. I even suspect the original was Korean, and the Chinese is a second-hand translation from Korean into Japanese and then into Chinese — there’s no other way to explain how much of the dialogue makes no sense. And I checked the Japanese version too; the Japanese isn’t smooth either. That’s pretty abstract.

My guess is that the Chinese version was handled by a Taiwanese team, since the phrasing is very close to how young Taiwanese people talk. No wonder someone like me — mainland, middle-aged — finds it a slog. Does Taiwan not have any Chinese teachers? Nobody to check this mess of slang and phrasing?

The story is pretty by-the-numbers: a village with a legend about a “mermaid princess,” and so on. It reminded me endlessly of Kanata no Ningyo Hime, and honestly the basic narrative is quite similar… but this Mermaid Princess is nowhere near Kanata no Ningyo Hime. I saw some idiot on Steam posting a ten-thousand-word “analysis” of this game’s plot, and I have to admire that, because I’d basically forgotten it all by the time I finished.

The game has choices, and the choices are incredibly bare-bones. There isn’t even a decent button — just bare text sitting in front of you. If you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t know those words were clickable.

If the only problems were a murky plot, a low budget, and crude presentation, that wouldn’t fully justify me not recommending it. The real killer is another piece of news about this game: Boku no Kanojo wa Ningyo Hime!? got a Switch release. And the Switch version doesn’t just add new CGs — the character sprites are animated… it even has a more complete new story.

Which instantly makes the Steam version look like a half-finished 🤡 of a game. Who knows if they’ll ever reverse-port it back to PC for another round of milking. I doubt it, though — this game has basically no following. If your average forgettable visual novel is good for nothing but a cute heroine, this one can’t even manage cute. Even with well-known voice actresses on board, the terrible writing makes it impossible to feel any “cuteness.”

A game this unlovable, where the PC version is worse than the Switch version — I can’t think of a single reason to recommend it.