Nandome ka no Hajimemashite (何度目かのはじめまして) Review

Purple Software out of nowhere dropped this thing called How Many Times Have We Met (何度目かのはじめまして). Turns out it’s not their usual dumbass fantasy schtick — the title alone screams time travel: “the umpteenth first meeting.”

And I, also out of nowhere, ended up playing it. The plot is simple if you want it to be, complicated if you don’t.

Basically, the protagonist is a corporate drone with zero hope in life, shuffling around like a walking corpse. By sheer coincidence he runs into this black cat-looking thing. The cat talks, says it wants to form a contract with him and grant his wish. He naturally says his life is garbage right now, and the cat offers to send him back to the happiest time of his life… high school. About seven days’ worth.

He agrees, the contract is sealed, he puts on some weird bracelet, has some blood drawn, and successfully rewinds time back to high school.

But once he’s there, something’s off. In his high school days he was apparently close with a girl named Midori — close enough to be borderline romantic, maybe even lovers. And Midori knows him well, basically treats him as her boyfriend by default… The problem: the protagonist who traveled back has zero memory of this “Midori.” Like, he doesn’t remember ever knowing this girl in high school at all. He’s convinced he was single his whole life, let alone having had a girlfriend.

Even weirder: once the seven days are up, Midori vanishes completely. Literally vanishes. Poof. Nobody remembers her. And the protagonist gets yanked back to his corporate-drone timeline.

He asks the black cat. The cat says it doesn’t know — this is all his past, after all. That piques his curiosity, so he decides to investigate properly and offers more blood to loop again. After several rounds, he finally figures out the trick: no matter what he does, Midori always disappears on the seventh day. And he confirms she really did have some kind of romantic history with him. He also finds out she was secretly studying black magic — and not just her, but his parents too. Shit gets suspicious. After burning through his own lifespan to keep digging, the truth comes out: he had leukemia as a kid and was probably going to die. His parents and Midori’s parents made some kind of deal (or scam? I honestly couldn’t tell — felt like a scam to me), using black magic to sacrifice Midori’s life in exchange for his survival. And her disappearance wiped her from his memory entirely. After that he drifted through graduation, became a corporate drone, met the cat, and went back to middle/high school. No wonder he had no impression of Midori.

So after understanding the whole chain of events, thinking about how he’d dated “Midori” and gotten laid a few times, and feeling guilty, he decides to try saving her. Method: another time jump, back to when he had leukemia, and he chooses to tough out the leukemia himself… (yes, I know that’s ridiculous) instead of using black magic to trade Midori’s life for his. And thanks to his excellent modern medical knowledge, he survives it, holds out until a life-saving opportunity years later, and reunites with Midori when she’s grown up into a corporate drone…

So the thing that annoyed me most about this game is the same thing as those other Japanese galge about “terminal illness”: it’s total bullshit. Leukemia is basically unsurvivable long-term without a bone marrow transplant — it’s cancer of the blood-forming organs, not a joke. And the game’s developments are honestly pretty ridiculous too. I don’t get why they had to drag black magic into it. Maybe they can’t write a good story without edgy occult elements? It didn’t feel clever at all.

Like, imagine watching an incredible magic show, and at the end the magician tells you he’s actually a real wizard, did it all with magic, then flies away on a broomstick. Lame. The whole point of a magic trick is that you know it’s impossible, you know it’s fake, but someone right in front of you pulls it off — that’s the wonder. You’re doing a time-travel/time-loop story and then pull out black magic? Honestly… the second half was boring as hell.

The game also tries to drop some literary references — Goethe’s Faust, Laplace, ancient Roman mystery cults… trying to look smart. But once that scientific miracle leukemia cure happened, none of that mattered. All I can say is Steins;Gate’s stock keeps going up. Being able to write a self-consistent time-loop story already puts you at the entrance level of good works.

Also, I played this too early — I wrote several other commercial pieces in between, so I’ve forgotten the details about the leukemia cure and the black magic transference. What I do remember is the heroine’s huge tits and the exaggerated HCGs… emmm, maybe that’s the real selling point of this game.