QUINTUPLE☆SPLASH! (QUINTUPLE☆SPLASH！) Review

Having played a fair number of visual novels, I end up talking about plot, and when it comes to scenario structure there are basically two directions.

One is the suspenseful gamble-and-court-death kind, where you manufacture some huge news, some big twist, build up a ridiculously hype mystery at the start, then line up some hype developments and one hell of a reveal at the end. The other is the utterly ordinary school romance slice-of-life, maybe with a little friction over life, studies, and club activities, which gets resolved on the way to the ending.

Personally I like the first one, but not everyone can pull off big news, and running faster than everyone else won’t get it done either. Suspense and crazy twists demand a seriously strong scenario writer to handle—pacing, laying the mystery, arranging the different routes, all of it is interconnected, and one wrong step leads to every step being wrong. Plenty of people crash on the first type, drawing a tiger and ending up with a dog, or the story is passable but the writing can’t carry it, so the mystery lands with no impact, or is outright incomprehensible, and a good premise and story go to waste.

The second type is way simpler—at least you won’t cause a disaster just by writing it casually. It can produce great stories too, provided you’re a gag writer good at digging up the fun in everyday life; Yukikoi Melt and The Shepherd of the Great Library are pretty solid examples of the latter. Still, it’s actually hard to completely botch the second type. Compared to walking the tightrope of suspense, everyday content is safer. Or rather, slice-of-life games don’t ask much of the plot anymore—a lot of people are probably more into the character designs and the CV performances.

It’s not just games; anime mostly runs on the same rhythm. Some live on plot, some live on slice-of-life, and you can see how hard it is to nail the former. Kantai Collection went for a crazy twist and got called “shit-feeding,” while Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka? does daily moe and gets called “healing”—the difference in their setups isn’t even that big, they just chose different scenario routes.

Of course, for some studios, botching a twist-heavy scenario naturally makes them think, once bitten twice shy, might as well fall back on slice-of-life for safety. Like Parasol’s QUINTUPLE☆SPLASH!.

Parasol’s previous work was Hare nochi Kitto Nanohana Biyori. Looking at it now, the story isn’t entirely unacceptable, but the writing has way too many obvious split-personality moments, and plenty of parts make no damn sense. People whose brainwaves sync with the scenario writer would enjoy it; someone like me, who flat-out can’t understand what the writer was thinking, finds it more melodramatic. Anyway, that one apparently didn’t sell great, though the music got a lot of praise…

So maybe Parasol wanted to learn its lesson, and for the new game they didn’t tap that Tanemura for planning—they played it safe, going straight for a school swim club slice-of-life setup, bringing in a bunch of artists and famous CVs. No crazy twists, just honest moe-selling, which at least isn’t much of a risk.

Honestly I don’t care to remember artist names. Out of the huge artist list on this one, the only one I remember is Yukie, the artist on several cabbit titles. CVs I know plenty of—Ui, Kotori居 Yuka, Hanaso Fukei… whatever. I really don’t want to talk about the story, because there’s nothing to talk about. This has to be the shortest story I’ve seen from a non-doujin studio. The protagonist says right off that his school merged with a former girls’ school, and after the merge he moves into a new dorm where naturally everyone but him is a girl. The new school has a swim club, he gets asked to manage it, and ends up dragging all the dorm girls and the girls he just met at the new school into joining.

Then one day you go out swimming and pick who to hang with, whoever you pick is who you romance, and after that there’s nothing special—confess, show off the relationship, quick sex scene, breeze through a bit of daily life, roll the ending…

The slice-of-life is thoroughly average, the kind of average that’s neither bad nor standout, and I retained zero impressions of it. The only one who really counts as a heroine is the shrine maiden voiced by Ui—she’s in the center position of the character lineup, shows up last, and gets some exclusive story, like the protagonist saving her with mouth-to-mouth at the start and her treating it as him being a creep (which, well, it was). In the end it turns out she’s just in poor health, and through effort she wins the swim race and breaks the record, and the route ends there.

The game clearly doesn’t care much about story. There are lots of CGs, one shoved in every so often, some SD CGs, some normal ones, and Parasol’s promotion makes it obvious they don’t much care whether the story is interesting either—it’s already this slice-of-life and simple, nothing to say. They promoted the character design artists, the music, and the CVs more. The story is short, but every girl gets her own ED song. Thinking about it, yeah, that’s exactly it—that’s where this game’s selling point is.

There’s no route lock, and honestly there’s no need for one. There aren’t even any gags in the slice-of-life, so I can’t call this a “four-panel manga” type of visual novel. This moe slice-of-life style is common in anime; it reminds me of a show called Channel A, similar rhythm. But overall the story length is just way too short for a visual novel. If they’d added some fun gags and stretched the story longer, even thrown in a little suspense at the swim race, it wouldn’t feel like it “suddenly ends without saying anything.”

Finally I can’t help but think of the game’s OP: “one bishoujo, five bishoujo,” and paired with the common route, it really does feel like recruiting more members… Seeing the OST-and-character-song CD already pop up fast on Amazon Japan, I figure for Parasol’s project here, as long as there’s loli, swimsuits, music, and character designs, nothing else matters.