Kokoro Resta (こころリスタ) Review

Why play this game?

Because I’m a seiyuu nerd. There’s no way I could see that cast list and not react.

Uiii is in it. Uehara Aoi is in it. Kotori Yuka is in it. Tohno Soyogi is in it. Miyoshida Ina is in it… okay, that’s Shimizu Ai. For me there’s no lineup more stacked than this, except that it’s missing Kiritani Hana.

As for the game itself, who the hell cares… though after finishing it I was still stunned.

Because it’s boring as all hell!

The protagonist is a socially awkward guy hiding his otaku side. The story is set in a future where the internet is everywhere. One day he accidentally installs an app called “Kokoro Resta” on his phone, meets a mysterious girl named Alpha inside it, and Alpha claims to be an A.I. and follows him out into reality to help him—with romance and stuff. She also threatens that if he doesn’t fall in love the world will be in trouble (I don’t remember the details).

So our hero also discovers that the app where he met Alpha has a whole other world inside it, and that online world is pretty big. But staying there costs coins, and the way to get coins is for the hero to take part in more social activities and hit on more girls (yes, really!), which is how you build them up.

And that’s how the story starts. The hero spends every day dealing with various girls, racking up coins, and once he has them he goes back into that online world to keep messing around…

Day after day, day after day… the hero’s daily life is you watching a guy oozing chuuni energy complain about how shitty reality is while acting tsundere about being fawned over by all these girls.

Shame this guy wears glasses but he’s not Katsura Kaima. No capture theory, no famous lines. He just wanders around. His days are symbolic school attendance plus feeding coins into the net and dicking around. Daily-life writing like that is like an animal with no spine—a puddle of mud with zero force behind it.

Oh right, he does hit on quite a few girls. Besides Alpha, there are his two little sisters, the classmate voiced by Shimizu Ai, and the Spanish big-tits girl who transfers in. He also chats up the older lady at the supermarket downstairs. Even so, he keeps dumping all the coins he earned from socializing into dicking around online. After the daily-life route ends the game moves into individual routes, where the hero can choose which girl to date. The dating is blunt and direct—I’ve never seen anyone get into a relationship so straightforwardly. But with that many girls to pursue, the true ending is still Alpha, since she’s the real heroine. After the hero confesses to Alpha she resists, because hey, she’s just an A.I., not a real person.

Everyone’s fought this battle before—the route where you capture a girl robot—so the story goes exactly how you’d guess. The hero chases Alpha relentlessly and finally finds the admin of that social network, who turns out to be the supermarket lady downstairs doing it as a side job.

After a whole lot of yelling, the hero’s scheme to bring Alpha into the real world fails. But luckily Alpha still exists in the network, so years later the hero comes back, meets an Alpha who barely remembers him, and starts a new romance with her all over again.

The end…

The plot of this game can be boiled down to one sentence: the hero falls in love with the A.I. who was helping him find a girlfriend. Not sure if that’s the right way to put it.

The music is kind of interesting—it has this Great Compassion Mantra vibe that fits the hazy, ethereal mood of the online world. The art style, though… unique. I can’t say it’s ugly, because it isn’t, but a lot of the characters’ eyes are genuinely unsettling, and some of the sprite expressions are way too exaggerated, which is a bit hard to take.

The dumbest part of the game is the daily life and some of the basic setup. The little sister always talks through a voice changer on her phone. Shimizu Ai’s character is a brocon, fine, but her brother is a fat slob who’s with her every day. More of the heroines have weird little quirks like that. The scenario writer can indulge himself, but there’s a limit.

Funny thing is, I came for the voice cast, but the heroines aren’t the ones with the most lines. Maybe the little sister has more, but only a little. The hero spends all his time chatting with all sorts of people online. Sometimes I wonder if those non-route characters are the real protagonists. …………

The dialogue in this game is completely non-standard Japanese. Huge amounts of net slang and sloppy vocabulary gave me a splitting headache, but I stuck it out. I impressed myself.

The first time I finished this game I was speechless and angry. The art had no highlights, the story was that boring…

It was only later that I found out this game is actually a sequel…

The previous game is Kokoro Navi from 2003. It describes how the online world in Kokoro Resta was formed and managed, plus more of its rules. The so-called world admin, the supermarket lady in this game, was also an important presence in the previous one.

Seen that way, it makes sense. This game is just a sequel—not a spiritual successor but one that inherits the previous game’s setting. Plenty of important things were already explained in the previous game. If you’d played it, coming into this one and seeing that familiar world view would probably move you. From that angle, this game seems like a decent thing after all.

But then I thought about it again…

What the hell does that have to do with me…

Maybe playing the previous game would help you better understand what this sequel, ten years later, is getting at. Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll ever have the time.