Hanikami Clover (はにかみ Clover) Review

Lately the stuff I’ve been playing has been a bit unusual — either hand-chopping, big meat grubs, or hookup — and after wandering the non-traditional aisle for so long, I couldn’t help but miss plain old moe. So when I was grabbing January releases, I figured I’d look for something light and fun.

That’s how, among the January titles, while downloading Toukyou NECRO, I stumbled on this thing called Hanikami Clover.

Compared to whatever Toukyou NECRO is doing, Hanikami Clover is obviously on the classic cute-girl-game track. So I got hyped, saw it was Ryokucha-soft, figured Ryokucha wouldn’t screw anything up — Minamijuujisei Renka (南十字星恋歌) got decent reviews, so this probably wouldn’t be a disaster either. Then I checked the official site for the cast: the first heroine is obviously Gotou Mai, and Hanikami Clover also has Akinohana, Sendai Eri, all solid voices. The most explosive part, though, was when I later watched the game’s OP.

The dere-dere student council president, the sweet senpai, the lewd girlfriend, the little sister who’s a failure-of-a-brother manufacturing machine — all wrapped in a tempting, rhythm-heavy montage.

The tagline was “a love story with a slightly H her.” Honestly, that OP makes it look like a moe-nukige, but hey, at least it beats hand-chopping big meat grubs and hookup games, am I right? Going by years of experience, this had to be a cheerful charmer of a moe game — and even if it’s a nukige, it’d be a comedy nukige, a light and fun one with no special effects. Playing it would definitely be a good time.

My reaction at the time was:

So I dove in without hesitation. But as the story progressed, I realized it was nothing like that at all… At first our protagonist is a transfer student who arrives at a school that looks insanely prestigious, meets the heroine Saeki Rio (the student council president), plus Emiru, the school’s super-popular girl (the “slightly H” one), and also Makina, the chuuni senpai who grandstands on the balcony every day. And of course, waiting at home for him is a “perfect stepsister.”

A very orthodox eroge setup, right? A totally badass harem formula, right?

Then our hero learns that the council president absolutely hates men, barely interacts with them, and mostly ignores his attempts to talk to her. Then one day his shirt gets torn and he has no spare, so if this doesn’t get fixed he’s going home shirtless.

The president says, “Fine, I’ll sew it up. Come to my office after class and get it.”

So he goes a bit early, and finds the president sniffing his shirt while masturbating.

Our hero is shook. The president who supposedly hates men is getting herself off with his clothes. He’s so freaked out he bolts home without even taking the shirt.

The next day he sees the president acting like nothing happened, and starts wondering if he hallucinated it. Not long after, he sees her masturbating in a room again… and the next day she’s totally normal again.

He’s deeply confused — is he losing his mind?

Then one day some brave soul confesses to the president, and she shoots him down without hesitation while our hero watches from the side. It’s so cold he can’t take it, jumps out and asks how she can be like that, wants to clear up whether the masturbating person was really her, says he saw it by accident and it felt like a hallucination — but before he can get the words out, the president collapses.

In the infirmary the teacher says it’s just anemia, nothing serious. He stays to look after her anyway, and suddenly the president snaps awake, pops up, says “欲しいの” (I want it), shoves him down, pulls his pants off and starts going to town on the pipe.

Our hero is shook. Does this count as being raped?

After two rounds she regains her senses and finally explains: she’s actually a half-succubus, half-human, with special powers, but also succubus traits — like a vampire. Just as vampires need blood, succubi need semen.

By this point my expression had frozen solid.

I’d figured this was a standard school comedy of dirty jokes and nonsense, and now we’ve got a succubus… a bit direct.

Then the school’s popular rich girl pops out too, says she’s a succubus as well — a proper one, licensed, with a family — and stresses that no, succubi aren’t like that, they’re actually European nobility; since Japan is so accepting of the supernatural, the family moved here to blend in, etc., etc.

The president openly admits the reason she hates men: her mother is a succubus who brings different guys home every day to bang and drain them, and watching that disgusted her, so she hates men. Rich girl Emiru explains that you don’t actually need to bang and swallow to drain energy — you just take the family’s ancestral succubus-household Chinese-medicine remedy. The president refuses, saying she needs to restrain her own desires; she’s only half, and she’s held it in for years anyway.

Then the hero’s little sister pops in. She’s a shrine maiden, says she read the stars and knew monsters were at the school, didn’t expect two of them, and both had their claws in her brother. She announces she’s joining the student council to monitor the two succubi, so the rich girl says she’ll join too — to keep an eye on the wild succubus, stop her from causing trouble and breaking family rules, and teach her to control her urges. No sooner said than the balcony chuuni senpai drops in too, saying she’d long seen monsters swarming here and needs to join to research dark magic (I forget the reason too).

So the entire harem joins the student council. I was a bit dizzy.

I thought, this is my own fault — I didn’t read the story synopsis on the official site and assumed it was a school moe game, and now they’ve brought out the supernatural. But fine, supernatural it is; Yuzu’s witch game did the same, right? Light atmosphere, lots of joking around — surely the rest would be a fun harem bloodbath.

I was wrong… dead wrong…

The story takes a deadly serious turn. They actually buckle down and do student council work. The president rarely gets horny, and they spend their time collecting opinions from the student body, planning how to improve the student council’s culture-festival events, and making cookies with their own hands as festival prizes. At the festival’s closing summary, Secretary Emiru states that only by developing the productive forces and expanding them can the school’s student council be built into an outstanding organization that truly represents students’ fundamental interests, contribute an indispensable force to students’ all-around moral, intellectual, physical, and aesthetic development, and lay a solid foundation for the healthy growth of Japan’s next generation.

In daily work, Secretary Emiru never forgets ideological work. Whenever she has time she has heart-to-hearts with our hero, laying out the five thousand years of succubus-family history so he can better appreciate his ethnic pride. Their meetings often run 40 minutes; Secretary Emiru’s speeches are clear and accessible, hit right at the sore spot, stick to one central task and two basic points, and contribute mightily to livening up the council’s work. Truly a fine secretary chosen by the school.

Simply put, what follows is completely boring slice-of-life. Remember: boring slice-of-life. Especially when rich girl Emiru grabs every chance to lecture you on succubus history like she’s drilling the Scientific Outlook on Development into your head — it puts you to sleep. The legendary harem bloodbath never happens. Forget the bloodbath, the game barely has any decent CGs; the later it goes, the more it pinches pennies. By the end even the character sprites are just tiny heads, they’re too lazy to do anything, always the same few backgrounds, swap them out and that’s a scene. The plot is mind-numbing, like Japanese textbook dialogue. First time I’ve seen so many people endlessly say そうですか. Even a そうなの would’ve perked me up.

And worse, the story is stupidly long…

When I finally reached the president’s route, I found that the game’s CGs only exist in H scenes, nothing anywhere else, cutting every corner possible. The ending: the president keeps refusing to accept her family and parents, hates her succubus blood, the hero talks her around, she accepts, done…

Done…?

The ED has no singer, no animation, just a staff list — shabbier than a goddamn hentai OVA, and if you’re not careful you’ll click past it and never see it. At first I thought there wasn’t even an ED.

After the ED there’s a very short scene, then nothing…

That’s when I remembered: I never checked ErogameScape’s rating before getting into this. My fault, ErogameScape blocked my Linode IP, I had to use a proxy to see it. Logged in, and holy shit…

Pathetically low, as expected. Some complain it’s boring, some complain the OP is false advertising, some complain the trial version is false advertising.

Obviously — the trial version probably ends right when you see the president masturbating, so everyone assumes the rest will be like that. Who could’ve known the actual main story is Secretary Emiru convening party-building work? What a waste of the art style, especially those cute chibi sprites.

The OP, I won’t even get into it — this game’s OP is absolutely god-tier. To present such a garbage script through such a killer OP, the devs should pay the outsourced OP studio double.

I’ve played a fair number of Galgames, some of them landmines, and most of those landmines I knew were landmines going in, so I played them in the mood for a laugh. Hanikami Clover was a total exception. At first, out of laziness and overconfidence, I didn’t even watch the trial version and jumped straight in. Thanks to that OP, I kept thinking there might be some crazy twist later, so I endured and endured, even reading the succubus history and the plans for solving succubus thirst carefully.

And it was all for nothing. All of it was bullshit.

People say landmine games are games where the story is written by the seat of the pants, with crazy twists at the drop of a hat, heroines dying, whole families dying, nonsensical time travel, dog-blood melodrama oozing everywhere.

But I don’t agree, because with those games, the moment the plot feels off you can still hit the brakes and stop.

A real landmine is colorless and odorless. When you’ve read through the whole thing with high expectations and you look back, you realize how stupid you were — you ate a turd. You want to vomit, but you already swallowed it. You can’t throw it up, you can’t run, you just squat there in pain, feeling the nausea you can’t escape.

Like that story: the scary thing isn’t biting into an apple and finding a worm. The scary thing is finding half a worm.

So like eating a wormy apple, only after I finished the apple that is Hanikami Clover did I find the worm — and only half of it.

Only after I finished the game did I realize it’s a turd, and the turd is poisoned.