World Election (ワールド・エレクション) Review

I’d already made up my mind to play ワールド・エレクション (World Election) long before, and I remember it was the winter of 2015. Surrounded by one landmine visual novel after another, I couldn’t find more than a couple of decent CVs in a sea of games featuring Akino Hana — which, for a seiyuu nerd, is pure agony. Like a plant deprived of sunlight. Like an earthworm deprived of soil. Like a shut-in deprived of instant ramen. Like Four Leaf Clover deprived of TFboys. Then Whirlpool announced their new title, World Election, with heroine No. 1 Kururu voiced by Sawasawa Sawa — a beacon in the darkness that lit up this ugly bastard and left me so hyped I couldn’t even find my bearings.

There’s no such thing as story supremacy anymore, no such thing as art supremacy anymore, no such thing as industry blockbuster supremacy anymore. As long as it’s Kiritani Hana, and she’s the main heroine, that’s the absolute best.

But by the time this game actually came out, several months had passed, and honestly I’d lost most of my interest. You can pretty much guess where the plot’s headed just from the setup: a destroyer god drops out of the sky, a fictional world where multiple races coexist, an election between those races, and the ugly-ass protagonist is of course gonna bang all the non-humans too, plus you know he’s gotta drag the destroyer god herself into bed and teach her who’s boss. Still, I remembered this game had given me hope back last winter when I was in despair, finally letting me escape that sea of suffering where shitheads and Akino Hana were fucking everywhere, and I’m such a loyal, faithful guy, so considering Whirlpool keeps putting out games with decent premises that fall way short in the end, I picked it up in the educational spirit of improving my Japanese reading comprehension.

And yet this game turned out exactly like I expected — and exactly like every Whirlpool game before it.

Exactly what I said earlier: “The setup is solid, but overall it’s missing that one extra push.”

The game opens at a breakneck pace. In under two minutes, the protagonist is hit with the shocking event of a girl claiming to be a Destruction God falling out of the sky on a lonely, empty night. Except this Destruction God doesn’t destroy anything except the bathroom of the protagonist’s dorm. The god says she lost her memory the moment she saw the protagonist, then gets dragged off by the dorm mother, who demands she work off the nearly 200,000 yen debt at a wage of 300 yen a day. So this self-proclaimed Destruction God Kururu also conveniently transfers into the protagonist’s school as a transfer student to make her life easier.

In this fictional world, the protagonist’s school has beastfolk like Faura, demons like Sophia, angels like Parfil, plus humans, robots, and all sorts of other stuff mixed in, so some guy showing up claiming to be a god of destruction isn’t really a big deal. Honestly, from what you see in the game, all this “many races” talk just amounts to a horn here, a tail on someone’s ass there, a pair of wings on someone’s back—it doesn’t give off much of a non-human vibe at all. It’s really just a bunch of different settings, nothing more.

Since the game’s title has an election in it, the common route naturally kicks off with the election as its main thread too. And it’s not some world-scale election — just a school student council president race.

Most of the people running got dragged into it by the protagonist. He lives at the school as the human student representative, but he’s got no real goal in life — just drifting, going back to the dorm every day to game. So his dad calls and asks, what the hell are you even doing at school? The protagonist can’t answer. His dad says, “If you’ve got no big ambitions for studying, then get your ass back here and stop wasting time there.”

“I do have goals, I do have goals, look, I’m getting ready to run for student council, so I didn’t join any other club activities.”

So thanks to the protagonist’s bullshit bragging, he reluctantly ends up running for student council. When he goes to register, he doesn’t really know anyone, so he figures he’ll just grab a few familiar faces to sign as his recommenders. He goes around to all the girls he knows—but they either refuse to sign because they don’t approve of this “running for fun just to sound cool” nonsense, or they say “if you’re running, then let’s make a big splash and do it properly,” which scares him off. In the end he finds Kururu, who doesn’t understand any of it, and tricks her into signing. Kururu figures that if she helps him run for student council, he’ll help her destroy the world, so she goes along with it, and the protagonist becomes a candidate. Of course, this whole thing pisses off the girls he’d asked for signatures—some are mad that he didn’t ask them and went ahead and ran himself, while others already had their own plans to run. Anyway, the candidates end up being the protagonist and a bunch of nameless mooks, plus a demon girl, a beastman wolf girl, and an angel girl.

And then the game’s common route kicks off an in＿＿＿sane＿＿＿ly＿＿＿long election campaign.

The only election-themed game I’ve touched is Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate, but that one, real or not, at least makes the election stuff feel like something—pulling people in, announcing a platform, announcing a slogan, and the whole debate-and-speech showdown. It’s a bit childish, sure, but it’s at least the sort of thing that actually happens in a real election.

But the election campaigns in World Election are basically… worth… next to… nothing.

To put it nicely, you could call it… nah, there’s no nice way to put it. Simply put, it’s a mess. No campaign districts, no vote-gathering, no political infighting—just chaos: fights, fundraising, performances, outdoor cookouts, all sorts of random nonsense. You never even see the protagonist do anything competitive in the election. And even though this is the common route, every heroine gets a scene during the election arc except Kururu. The emotional writing for each heroine is mindless too—each one gets a little vignette of alone time with the protagonist, two CGs, and then dawn breaks and it’s all over.

If you ask me, the only heroine in the common route who actually gets any emotional development is the wolf girl. The others are either obstructing the protagonist, messing with him, or teasing him—only the wolf girl sticks with him through thick and thin. Sure, she’s a tsundere who keeps verbally tearing into him, but whenever he runs into trouble, she’s the first one to jump in and help. Late in the election, once she realizes he’s going to take it seriously, she just bows out and hands him all her votes to help his campaign. World’s best girlfriend, honestly.

Of course, even so—did the wolf girl end up being the true end heroine?

Nope!

So why did it turn out like this? The wolf girl got there first, and even the protagonist’s little sister would complain about how smooth he is on dates—well, that’s just from spending so much time with the wolf girl. But there’s nothing to be done, since Kururu is the main heroine.

At the very end of the common route, Kururu finally gets some screen time. I say that because up to this point her presence has been basically air-tier—she pops in to toss out a snarky line now and then, then fucks off back to wherever. Right before the final vote of the election battle, Kururu suddenly goes berserk for no apparent reason, staring up at that silvery moon in the sky. Then some green-haired fucker leaps out, suppresses her rampage, and drags her off—conveniently leaving a robot Kururu behind as a substitute.

So the robot was a robot all along, and there’s still a difference between her and a real human. The protagonist quickly notices something’s off about this Kururu and goes looking for the real one. The green-haired robot tries to stop him, but the protagonist’s combat prowess is way too insane, so he successfully finds the hidden Kururu and rescues the real one.

Of course, the Kururu they rescued turned out a bit off. She’d lost her memories at first, and then it turned out she’d started liking the protagonist unconditionally, clinging to him every single day. Soon enough the route hit its final stretch, and the protagonist somehow won the election without so much as a ripple of drama. Kururu became his assistant, the two grew closer and closer, the protagonist confessed to Kururu, and she said yes. And honestly, I can’t tell whether the Kururu at that point genuinely meant it, or whether she only said yes because her brain was still scrambled from losing her memories a second time.

So it’s confessions, dates, and sex again — the game’s about to wrap up, but a new twist shows up right before the end. One day Kururu sees the moon again, runs into that green-haired robot again, realizes something inside her has awakened, and seems to grasp a few truths about herself. Next thing you know she’s hunting down the protagonist and demanding he marry her.

The marriage demand is extremely urgent — pretty much the speed of meeting you in the morning, dragging you out to buy a wedding dress at noon, and having it on and ready to marry you by nightfall. The protagonist isn’t really unhappy about it, just feels it’s too fast, but considering Kururu’s acting like her ass is on fire, he doesn’t say anything. In the end, after the wedding that night and one last round with her still in the dress, Kururu meets the green-haired girl and says she has to go now; the green-haired girl nods. After that the game just inexplicably ends — the protagonist is asleep, the others are gazing at the night sky, and they notice the world starting to change. The moon overhead casts a purple glow, and far off on the other side of the globe, earthquakes and tsunamis begin, as if the end of the world really has come.

I’m genuinely baffled. What the hell was that ending supposed to be…

Of course, the ending gives you a hint at the very end: “Got a コード, unlocked the scenario「？？？」.”

The “???” route’s content is really short — you just go in and see where Kururu comes from. Turns out Kururu is one of the Mechanical Empire’s lot, sent to destroy Earth. So calling herself the Destruction God Kururu wasn’t wrong at all, but for some reason she failed, and then for no clear reason Earth ends up getting destroyed anyway.

After that, “???” wraps up and a new chapter begins: World Selection.

Sorry — maybe my Japanese is just too bad, maybe it’s because I always play games late at night when I’m half asleep, or maybe this game just keeps putting me to sleep. Either way, I didn’t really follow this stretch of the story. All I can do is guess based on the clues from earlier.

First, when Kururu shows up, the protagonist says he’d looked into her and figured she was probably from the Mechanical Empire, calling her a possible “android”—i.e. a robot. But after spending some time around her, he realizes Kururu isn’t any kind of robot at all. She’s just a plain old human.

男主本身作为人类是有特殊能力的，这个能力称为ダミメーカー（dummy maker），日文汉字是赝作师，效果就是复制别人的能力一个小时。

In the end, the protagonist wakes up to find that Kururu is gone, and Earth looks like it’s been wrecked by tsunamis and earthquakes. He grabs the green-haired girl and demands to know where Kururu is. She won’t talk, so he violently copies her robot’s ability and uses it to track down the origin of Kururu’s existence: the Mechanical Empire.

Inside the Mechanical Empire, the protagonist meets a character called Mother (マザー). She looks exactly like Kururu, but claims she’s the true ruler of the Mechanical Empire. She says she created Kururu to destroy Earth, and that her name really is Destruction God Kururu. Kururu’s power is mind control, and it spreads. The original plan was for Kururu to fall to Earth, and the first Earthling she met would be dominated by her—then that dominated person would go on to dominate someone else, and so on. Unfortunately for them, the first Earthling Kururu ran into after landing was the protagonist. He has the Dummy Maker (ダミメーカー) ability, and that ability is so overpowered that it canceled out Kururu’s power—and also gave Kururu amnesia.

Then Kururu shows up, and this Kururu says she’s going to take out Mother, since she thinks Mother conquering people is wrong. At the same time Kururu also says Earth needs protecting, and the way to protect it is… everyone gets controlled by her, and then she’ll protect it. Kururu at this point is probably a little unhinged.

Last thing: Kururu comes to Earth and freezes/controls everyone. The protagonist can’t be controlled because of his Dummy Maker ability. Kururu says this is for the good of Earth and of him. He tells her to cut the bullshit and goes one-on-one with Kururu. In the end he cheats by simultaneously copying everyone’s abilities around him and beats the shit out of the out-of-control Kururu. Earth goes back to normal, and Kururu does too.

最后机械帝国和地球也恢复了正常。マザー自己也说，虽然理解不了クルル的做法，不过就这么着吧。男主和クルル一起迎来了结局。

Ah, by the way, I only understood about 20% of what Mother was saying, the rest went completely over my head! I originally wanted to go online and look up spoilers to figure out what it was, but unfortunately all I could find were people thirsting over Kururu or getting off on the game’s cute girls — almost nobody paid any attention to the mechanical empire behind the game or the origins of artificial humans like Kururu. So I figured forget it, it’s just a moege anyway, agonizing over the lore seems kinda dumb.

Yeah, World Election really is just a moege (廃萌). Sure, it stirs up one hell of a big fuss at the end and looks like it’s going full-scale spectacle, but deep down it doesn’t change a thing — it’s still a moege that just happens to go full-scale at the end.

The game has plenty of flaws, and the first one that hits you is how bad the audio is. The CVs’ volume is all over the place—Akino Hana keeps getting louder, Kiritani Hana keeps getting quieter. Next is the presentation, which you can’t describe as anything short of garbage. I get that Whirlpool probably hasn’t done much with combat before, but if you’re going to put combat in, then do it properly. Don’t give a character a fireball in her hand, flash the screen a couple of times, and tell me they’re fighting. And don’t have a character about to strangle someone to death and just toss in a couple of lines of dialogue instead—is it really that hard to put in a CG?

Also, the game has pathetically few CGs. Plenty of key scenes were crying out for one and didn’t get it. Outside the H-scene CGs, which are plentiful, the single routes are downright stingy with normal CGs. Some people complain that the game has too many artists and the characters’ faces don’t even look consistent. Honestly, I don’t care about that. What bothers me is, sure enough, that there just aren’t enough CGs. There are a lot of battle effects, but they’re terribly expressed. The finale was supposed to get you fired up for a moment, but I’m very sorry to say that apart from the MC’s cheat-mode CG, I couldn’t see a damn thing. All I saw were exploding bubbles flying across the screen. If you insist on calling that a battle, I’ve got nothing to say. And even the MC’s cheat CG isn’t that good. Some people say it looks cool, but no matter how I look at it, it looks like he’s rubbing his own nipples, which gives it a thick, jarring sense of wrongness.

Compared to all that, there’s honestly not much worth saying about the game’s actual story. Is the story structure good? No. What about the setting? Serviceable, but it does basically nothing. So is the script bad, then? Hard to say.

Yeah, it’s hard to say. World Election’s scenario writers probably split the work up when they were building the script. Personally I get the feeling the common route was one person and Kururu’s solo route was another, and between the lines you can see a kind of restraint from the writer — like he’s holding back from letting the game stand out or get too out of the ordinary, constantly working to flatten it into plain boiled water. You can see it in the details. Every time Kururu pops up, her snark and her wallowing in world destruction are full of genuinely sharp dialogue, but right after the bright spot appears the writer yanks it back fast — like handing you a popsicle on a hot day, and the moment your tongue touches it the guy pulls the thing away. It’s scratching an itch through your boot; zero payoff. And yet you can’t really call the writer terrible. He can definitely write. He just won’t do it properly.

You can see it too in the tsundere wolf girl on the common route, and in the heartfelt confession on Kururu’s route — especially the ending of Kururu’s route, where Kururu asks the protagonist, “When you say you like me, what kind of like is that?”

“How much do I like your stories, you ask?”

“Is it the kind of like where you came back to save me when I fell off the cliff?” “Is it the kind of like where you feel happy when you’re with me?” “Or is it the kind of like where you want to be with me forever, and never want to leave again?”

Honestly, if you play enough eroge, confessions mostly follow one formula. Very few are written this well — 666, as the kids say — and it really shows off the writer’s sugar-sprinkling skills. But, like I said earlier, it’s over fast: right after the confession the whole thing gets quickly reeled back in and never mentioned again. Leaves you scratching your head.

The scenario writer knows how to have fun, and knows how to write — I could tell that much from the game itself. But for some reason he just can’t let go. He’ll be building up a good head of steam, then cut it off dead, leaving you with no idea what just happened and me staring at the screen with a giant “what the hell” plastered across my face.

World Election is Whirlpool’s 10th anniversary title, and I’m sorry to say I have no idea what makes it anniversary-worthy. If anything, it feels less thought-through than last year’s whale. The whale was just as bland up front, sure, but its final stretch actually landed, and in the whale’s individual true end, Akino Hana’s voice work was solid too — richer in emotion than the one in Kururu. I’m not saying Kiritani Hana did a bad job here. Not at all. Kururu is written as someone who speaks without much emotion; that’s the setup, so you can’t blame Hana-nee for it.

Then I noticed the tenth-anniversary branding got used elsewhere — for one, basically every woman in the game is romanceable, everyone gets a route even if it’s just a mini one. The devs also put out an expansion pack with an art collection of all the Whirlpool characters from those ten years.

oh, okay, maybe Whirlpool figured “as long as you can fuck every girl in the game, that’s our show of sincerity.” Not the “actually put effort into the game’s own route” thing I had in mind. Honestly, can’t say they’re wrong — otaku eat this shit up. Same way Yuzusoft and SAGA PLANETS both dropped story in their new releases and went all-in on selling characters. Otaku won’t remember what the story was about anyway, and they can’t be bothered to. Long as the girls are cute enough and dressed slutty enough, buy a tapestry and a hug pillow, put ’em in your room, hug your waifu — that’s happiness right there. As for what happens in the game’s story, who the fuck cares. The protagonist? Who gives a shit about him. The characters belong to you and nobody else.

Right, if games keep getting made with this same formula, I figure I won’t even need to play future ones—just read the premise and I can fill in the story myself. Even if I do play them, nothing sticks. It’s the same as World Election: looking back now, the only impression left is that cute destruction god voiced by Kiritani Hana—the ramen-loving one who helps the protagonist with his election campaign. That’s about it.