Osananajimi wa Daitouryou (幼なじみは大統領) Review

I used to be a kichiku fan too, way back…

Don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t mean the Japanese kichiku, I’m a normal person, not a pervert. I mean the Chinese-internet redefined “kichiku,” basically those videos where people take footage and make it twitch and spasm.

Around 2008 ACFUN was full of kichiku works, plenty of good stuff too, and I watched them happily. Then with the popularity of things like Yori and Chinese dubs, more and more “snark” comedy videos started popping up…

Of course I enjoyed it at first, until… that kind of video filled the entire internet.

Sorry, I’m the type who gets sick of infinitely repeated content easily. I got sick of this stuff too, I even started finding it boring. I started hating all those messing-around, no-seriousness things, started feeling they were pointless, like current domestic crosstalk, which lost its backbone and left only endless bickering.

Still, domestic snark shows kept booming. I didn’t like watching them, plenty of other people did. By the time “Wanwan Meixiangdao” got popular, I’d barely watched any of it, because it really is just a domestic snark show imitating a Japanese-ish style. Looks okay for a glance, but watch too much and naturally you get annoyed.

Soon others got annoyed like me, they started questioning this stuff on Quora. Honestly, seeing that, I wanted to watch the drama—I wanted to see if the rather clichéd Jiaoshou would come out and explain, say his show has certain life values, can deliver positive energy and all that.

But when Jiaoshou showed up, his answer didn’t say any of that. He admitted it outright: what we make, the content we do, is meant to “amuse ourselves to death.”

Simply put: “We make this show with no big ambitions, no positive energy, we just want to make you laugh, we just want everyone to have fun, fun fun fun, all the way to death.”

At that point I couldn’t help but admire Jiaoshou Yi Xiaoxing a bit, because although the “Wanwan Meixiangdao” he makes is, in my view, totally stupid, the man himself isn’t stupid, and he knows he’s making this for people whose lives are busy, who mock themselves as idiots every day. The point is to make you laugh, you click once, you get a smile, and Jiaoshou gets revenue.

I used to think the internet atmosphere was a mess, full of irresponsible snark, a bunch of people acting crazy with no proper form, but now it seems society still exists, competition still exists.

Society is this snarky and vulgar only to cater to the masses. The masses are like this, and smart people aren’t idiots either—they’ll make more content the masses like watching to earn money.

“Amuse ourselves to death” is a good idea, and a good goal. Since you all like entertainment, then… let’s amuse ourselves to death together!

So for Galgames, some people uphold this “amuse ourselves to death” approach too… like this one, Osananajimi wa Daitouryou.

Chinese title is “Childhood Friend Became President,” an Alcot 2009 work. The plot couldn’t be simpler or more crude: one day aliens come to Earth, accidentally crush the original president to death, then just brainwash the whole world and make the protagonist’s childhood friend president…

Then a bunch of random messing around, and finally the world returns to normal…

The end.

The whole game fully embodies that “amuse ourselves to death” spirit I mentioned earlier, because it’s just a comedy game, from start to finish it’s like a gag manga, stuffed everywhere with Neta, plus random famous quotes, and Gin Tama-like manzai-style snark dialogue…

Honestly I’m a bit tired of this game’s snark, because it’s really not that clever, and most Neta are inserted too meaninglessly. Just because you force a work’s name into the game doesn’t make it a Neta. Originally Neta were meant to boost the game’s entertainment value, but what you’re doing is like changing the drink the heroine holds from plain water to Coca-Cola—even if Coca-Cola didn’t sponsor you and you think it’s a Neta on real society, even so, deleting this drink from the story would have zero impact on the whole game’s plot.

If there’s one Neta I found genuinely interesting, it’s the appearance of characters from Alcot’s old works, including the maid from Clover Heart’s. It’s only been six years, but Nitamura Yūshi-sensei’s art has improved, and the maid looks better too… For those of us who played the old games, seeing this maid again feels kind of nostalgic.

And I discovered Alcot’s secret: they’re pretty hardcore, reusing one image from Clover Heart’s all the way to Love Rec. Yep, I mean this one:

As a Galgame, the game’s romance description is essential, but what’s explosive is that the protagonist needs to choose from the spaceship, the Japanese president, the Russian president, and a passerby to push, and the romance plot is basically nutritionless, because the heroine’s affection for the protagonist is already maxed from the start. I can understand this setting—after all, the main scenario went entirely to Neta and skits, no damn time left to write romance, just develop it casually… This is also a common flaw of most “four-panel manga type Galgames.” The better recent ones are Renai 0 Kilometer and Yukikoi Melt; others, including the early Tenshin Ranman, are also pretty average.

Thought about it carefully, actually I don’t have much to say about this game, because it really has no substance. The plot is dead simple, the art is typical Alcot Nitamura Yūshi style, the music is average except for the Nanjō Yoshino version OP, the system… what system does a Galgame even have…

But even so, Osananajimi wa Daitouryou isn’t a game not worth playing, because it’s an “amuse ourselves to death” work. The reason I’m not interested is that I’m already tired of messing around, but maybe there are still guys who like messing-around plots. For you, this game isn’t bad at all…