Kobe Renai Monogatari (神戸恋愛物語) Review

This is a text-based romance adventure game that first shipped in 1989 on the Japanese NEC PC-8801, titled Kobe Ren’ai Monogatari (神戸恋愛物語). Anyway, one thing led to another and I decided to give it a shot. The game comes on seven floppy disks, though I think I only used six to finish it — maybe the last one is a user disk? No idea.

It isn’t long, an hour and change, and along the way the story keeps prodding you to swap in the next disk. The whole thing weighs 2MB, which in 1989 was squarely AAA-tier capacity. Bear in mind the average computer back then had a 20–30MB hard drive, so 2MB was like eating 100GB out of a 1TB drive today. And an hour-plus of playtime doesn’t look great next to that capacity — it’s on the short side.

Controls are simple: observe, talk, listen, act, leave. Those options bounce around different scenes; move and talk get used the most. Basically you move, talk, move, talk again. Looks like a lot of choices, but it’s a straight line — talk through this scene, move to the next, repeat until the credits.

Which brings me to the story, and it’s a bit… unexpected.

The setup: the protagonist gets dumped right at the start. His girlfriend caught him fooling around with another woman, and he neither confirms nor denies it — either way, his plea to get back together fails and he’s single. Then his buddy lines him up with a job: show three girls from Tokyo around Kobe. He’s got nothing better to do, so he takes it. He drags the three of them all over town and starts flirting with one of them, a girl named Kumiko.

Chatting with her, he learns Kumiko has an ex-boyfriend who dumped her. Our hero sticks his nose in and goes to confront the guy, finds out he’s scum — and then finds out this scum is now hooked up with the protagonist’s own ex. He goes to warn his ex to take care of herself and gets snapped at for his trouble.

So he asks Kumiko what this guy’s deal is, and the more he digs, the weirder it gets. There’s a whole scheme underneath. Turns out Kumiko had been dating this scumbag the whole time. Her older brother didn’t like it and told the guy to get lost, offering him money to walk away. The scumbag said money wasn’t enough — he wanted a new woman lined up for him too before he’d leave the sister. The brother looks at who the guy wants, and it’s the protagonist’s girlfriend. So the brother pays an office lady to get the protagonist drunk and make sure his girlfriend sees it, so she thinks he’s checked into a hotel with someone else and dumps him in a rage. The protagonist was too drunk to remember any of it. That’s the scene the game opens with.

So the whole thing was a setup from the start. The brother, trying to get the scumbag away from his sister Kumiko, pays people to have the scumbag NTR the protagonist’s girlfriend… and then by sheer coincidence the protagonist ends up getting involved with the sister, Kumiko.

The ending: Kumiko wraps up her Kobe trip and heads back to Tokyo. The protagonist, knowing everything by now, confesses anyway. She says yes and promises she’ll come back to Kobe to see him someday. Years pass. Eventually Kumiko returns as a working adult and they reunite.

For a 1989 game, Kobe Ren’ai Monogatari really fits the urban romance drama flavor of its era. There’s some foreshadowing, a scheme-within-a-scheme feel, and the game leans on a lot of photorealistic background CGs. Seeing those on a screen of that era must have been a shock — they’re all famous Kobe landmarks, which is probably why the game has such huge capacity for such a short story.

That said, a story with a dash of NTR in it is going to be some people’s thing and not others. The whole Kobe plot plays out over just two days — very tight — but it feels about right.

I think this game holds up well for its era. At the very least the systems are more polished than a lot of what you get in visual novels today — and remember, the PC8801 ran at a whole 4MHz.