Purely x Cation Review

First off, my coworkers, friends, and classmates basically have no idea I spend my time like some kind of hopeless wreck bingeing Japanese porn games. If they have to understand it at all, they just figure I’m watching anime and playing Japanese RPGs. Honestly they know squat about Japanese adult games — to them it’s all at the level of things like Tail Strike and Artificial Girl.

Of course, there was one adult game whose name they all learned recently… Purely x Cation.

Thanks to Ali213, thanks to the diligent reposting by sites like Chunan Beta, the news that “a Japanese adult game maker will use industry-leading Denuvo DRM to fight piracy” became common knowledge. I know AKBsoft president Kei Misumi hates piracy, but this whole putting-the-cart-before-the-horse move is something I really can’t understand. Honestly, when Purely x Cation was first being promoted, I watched the Youtube intro and thought it looked pretty good — the E-mote effects especially were spot-on, way above some things like Maitetsu. But the president always rushes out to flex and beg to get slapped down. Last time that game The Office Worker’s Hookup… oh no, Romance Situation got cracked half a day after release and slapped him in the face, and I felt kind of bad for him, but this time he comes out provoking people again and I really don’t know what to say. Doesn’t he know the way to make real money is to keep your head down?

Besides, I had actually considered buying the legit version of this game, because Denuvo isn’t that easy to crack — if it really came out and I couldn’t play it, that’d be a shame. But then I looked at the bonus items on the game’s official site and I was speechless. Apart from one illustration there was basically nothing. I don’t know if the president spent all the money on the DRM. Given the well-known fact that “buying the game = buying the bonuses,” the president is still this stingy — how could this game possibly sell? Even someone like me, dying to play it, lost most of the desire to buy… I figured if there’s no crack, then just leave it, deal with it later.

But reality is dramatic: two days after release the game got dumped and cracked. The cracker was quite smug about it too, saying the game didn’t use Denuvo at all, and the crack just bypassed the so-called online authentication. After all, this is a nukige with one of those engines everyone’s seen to death… Anyway, the president got slapped again.

I don’t know what the president is thinking now. I just hope it doesn’t affect future games — adding more bonuses is the real way to go.

So back to Purely x Cation itself: how is it?

I can say it does live up to the promotional expectations — a romance-raising game that lets you experience the beauty of first love.

Look carefully, I said this is a romance “raising” game — meaning it has “raising” elements, not just a simple story. This type of game is very clear about its nature: the calendar is the clue, each day triggers different events, and until the calendar reaches the ending date, endings are given based on your relationship with different female characters. So for this kind of galgame the dates matter a lot. Some other types of galgame have calendars and dates too, but those are just for show with no real use.

In the game the male protagonist can customize his name, and even customize what the girls call you. There are quite a few options for the nickname, though not comprehensive. My protagonist was named Li Sensei, and the girls all called me Rikkun or Rise-senpai. Hearing that voice at first was a bit embarrassing… but after hearing it a lot…

Still embarrassing!

Anyway, the story of this game follows basically the same formula as those romance-raising games from the last century: you’re a single male student who just moved and transferred here, living alone, and at this new school you’ll meet new friends and new girls — girls including but not limited to classmates, underclassmen, teachers, and senpais. In your school life you can start choosing to date one girl and begin your first love.

Yes, first love — that’s exactly the game’s promotional slogan.

What drove me to play this game was the cute character designs. Yes, even though I’m a seiyuu whore, this time I played because of the faces. I’ve always felt that “only girls can draw girls well,” so I’m very satisfied with Nanaroba Hana’s character designs — honestly I was moe’d the moment I saw them. Of course it’s not my first time seeing Nanaroba Hana’s designs; several games from Lump of Sugar had her art too, but I always felt Lump of Sugar’s coloring was “dirty,” not as clean as it looks in Purely X Cation. So overall, the girls in Purely X Cation hit me harder.

The art is the driving force for playing, which is to say the game’s CVs have no highlights. Himari and Mei are both people who voice nukige every day, and Yuika even used that female pervert voice from Cutting the Lizard’s Tail — I completely couldn’t get into it. The only one who can carry is Akino Hana, even if she’s pretty trash. But at least her character is set as a somewhat quiet type, officially described as a “不器用な後輩” — an underclassman — so I had no choice but to go down the underclassman route.

Pursuing the underclassman is more troublesome than the other heroines. Although as the protagonist you see her at the school gate right at the start, you never get a chance to talk to her, and she’s very withdrawn, basically unwilling to interact with people. So at first the story’s knowledge of her is limited to the protagonist passing by, or accidentally overhearing her conversations with others. From those “accidentally overheard” bits, she’s someone who doesn’t want to trouble others, has no confidence in herself, always thinks she’s stupid (不器用), and also gets lost easily — because she’s stupid, after all…

Then the chance finally came: one day she got lost and ended up at the protagonist’s classroom door, so I immediately chose to go help, and after that got a chance to know her. Although the protagonist already knew her name, he still pretended it was a first encounter to flex. He learned her name was Aoi and gained her favor.

If there’s a first time there’s a second. In front of the station the protagonist finally intercepted… oh no, stalked… oh no, happened to run into her! He ran into the underclassman and found she was about to take the train home. After chatting he learned she’d just rented a movie from a video store and that one of her hobbies is watching movies. This intel is very important. After saying goodbye, the protagonist faces the strategic choice of how to pursue her.

The underclassman likes movies. You want to pursue her, so how can you not have a common hobby? So based on this intel, start raising your film appreciation skill.

I should mention the game’s raising system here. After school each day you have two movement choices; you can move freely around the town as set in the game — places including the school, the beach, the gym, the bookstore, the internet cafe, the supermarket, the shopping street, and all sorts of places. Some heroines appear in certain places, indicated by their portraits, and you can track… oh no, go over and run into them. When you can’t track… oh no, run into them, you can choose to go somewhere to raise your stats, including stamina, knowledge, film appreciation, music, etc…

So if the underclassman says she likes movies, can we just grind film appreciation like crazy?

Too naive!

The game has difficulty selection when creating a character: Easy and Normal. The difficulty shows in where you enter the individual route. I went straight to Normal. Maybe on Easy you can just grind film, but on Normal you can’t do that.

The protagonist’s stats are divided into basic stats and extra stats. Basic stats are stamina and knowledge; extra stats are music, film appreciation, etc. It looks super deep, but after thinking it over I found the game’s rules are absurdly simple.

On Normal mode, to pursue a target you first need to make sure your basic stats are high enough — there should be a passing line — and the remaining four stats correspond to the four heroine routes. In other words, to make sure your pursuit goes smoothly, you just need to raise two basic stats and the one stat targeted at a specific heroine.

For the underclassman, keep stamina and knowledge at the required values and grind film appreciation like crazy.

So thinking about it that way, it’s not that hard, is it…

After that the progress is about the same as a normal pure-love galgame. The protagonist and the underclassman run into each other more and more (actually chosen on the big map), and start using “oh what a coincidence, you like movies too” as a common topic to develop more contact. The protagonist discovers her love of movies is unusually strong — she’s seen almost all the famous ones and has quite a lot of insight. The protagonist starts pretending to ask her for advice, getting her to recommend movies and write an “osume list” — in short, shamelessly cozying up to her. Eventually she comes to trust the protagonist, starts inviting him to movies, and even challenges horror movies with him — her worst genre (among them was a bad film that seemed to be mocking Attack on Titan).

Later the protagonist and the underclassman get closer and closer, spending more and more time together. She even comes over to his house a few times to watch movies (and there’s an ad for Hulu — the game says after registering on Hulu you can watch movies free for two weeks; I checked the Japanese Hulu and it really is like that). Then one day she invites the protagonist to climb the hill behind the town.

That day she was strange, wanting to say something but holding back, and the protagonist is an idiot who can’t tell, instead asking if she feels unwell. Then they leave and nothing happens. The protagonist thinks she was really weird today and only then remembers his feelings for her (whatever, I’ll forgive this turn for the sake of all that daily time — he should’ve confessed long ago, it’s been over 20 days in-game). So soon after, he invites her to the same hill and confesses.

The confession goes smoothly, obviously — because if your stamina plus knowledge plus film appreciation don’t meet the pursuit conditions, you can’t even enter the confession route. Anyway the protagonist finally becomes a normie with a girlfriend. After that the story goes sweet: still going to school together, eating together, watching movies together, going home together, living together (what the @#!@#), having sex together (what the @#!@#!@#), living sweet couple days. The sweetness keeps rising until I can barely take it, almost a diabetic reaction. And after the confession there are quite a lot of H scenes — constantly banging — my kidneys can’t take it. After that there’s no real turbulence; it ends with the protagonist meeting her parents and friends. Maybe they’ll get married in the future, but before that they’ll keep being a good couple.

At the very end the protagonist looks back on how he and the underclassman went from meeting to falling in love: at their first meeting he was just a single guy who’d just moved and transferred, and she was just an otaku girl bad at communicating with people. By a twist of fate they met (bullshit, it was me picking on the big map like a stalker) and discovered their shared love of movies, and their lives began to intersect (bullshit, it was me grinding film appreciation every day), and finally confessed (I couldn’t stand watching it anymore so he confessed), becoming happy lovers (every day I can only watch the protagonist bang through the screen while I can only jerk off), truly a pure and beautiful first love (and yet I’m still a virgin).

So let’s look at Purely X Cation as a whole. First the art — whatever others say, I think it’s very good, plus the E-mote bonus, and the E-mote performance is very natural, way better than other things like Maitetsu — at least the head no longer wobbles around like a balloon. The game’s music is standard, the CVs have no highlights but no flaws either, and Akino Hana’s underclassman is pretty moe… Recently I read Akino Hana’s personal blog and thought she was pretty… moe too. As expected of someone who’s been on TV… The game system has difficulty and raising, but as I said before it has rules, and following the pattern there’s almost no difficulty (no difficulty even with a guide). As for the story, I can say there’s absolutely no problem with it — the game advertises “first-love sweet romance,” and what it presents to you is exactly that kind of romance. The dialogue is all clean, clean enough to use as a Japanese textbook. I have to say Purely X Cation is the easiest Japanese game I’ve played in recent years — I barely looked anything up. By comparison some chuuni masterpiece forced me to use machine translation. In that sense this is a pretty good entry game for Japanese beginners. After all, pure first love is flawless and beautiful, without too much weird stuff — not only easy to read, but sweet.

What’s most praiseworthy is the game’s immersion system: not only can you customize the protagonist’s name, you can customize what the protagonist is called, and when you establish a relationship you can change how the heroine addresses you — even the terms for both parties’ genitals in H scenes can be changed. You know in the later part of the underclassman route she’s supposed to call the protagonist onii-chan. With my own name in there it’s no longer embarrassing — instead I feel very proud!

But setting aside my personal views, objectively I’m not very optimistic about this game. In one sentence: “It succeeds because of first love, and fails because of first love.”

Purely X Cation chose the most conservative, classical romance-raising sweet-selling route — a route I already saw back when I played Tokimeki Memorial as a kid. But after all these years, still using this route is… a bit… lame?

When the Purely X Cation trial came out, Japanese players were already saying the game had no big problems but was a bit boring. In fact, among current galgame story types, Purely X Cation’s dialogue compared to games released around the same time is not just boring — it’s dull. There’s almost no banter in the dialogue, just girls acting spoiled toward you. The whole story has no turbulence: you’re a transfer student, then you fall in love with someone, and really you just go through these stories to reach the ending. No foreshadowing, no development, no twists, just as it should be, naturally, without surprise. The game adds raising to make up for the difficulty, but this raising isn’t even comparable to Tokimeki Memorial 4 from a few years back — it can’t even match Tokimeki Memorial 1. That one had a calendar and dates, while Purely X Cation just has one big map and what you do each day. In terms of playability it’s no match either, and overall it’s a bit neither-fish-nor-fowl…

The game advertises sweet first love, but the sweetness of first love can’t have big twists, no foreshadowing or super developments, and it can’t get you fired up — you just smile stupidly at the girl like in Love Plus. But this game isn’t on a handheld, so you can’t carry it around. It has a bit of everything but falls short everywhere. Add the early DRM fiasco, creating the awkward scene of “pirates have already finished the game while legit buyers are still stuck on the online authentication at startup,” so I’m really not optimistic about this game’s sales and reviews.

Actually my feelings about Purely X Cation are complicated. Maybe my tolerance is high — I think that although the story is plain, communicating and talking with a moe girl on the other side of the screen, just watching her smile stupidly, is a kind of happiness, and such a game is pretty good. But on the other hand, this “pretty good” can’t last too long: the later part has too many H scenes and too much sweetness, and I got a bit tired of it. I even started hoping for a super development, knowing full well it wouldn’t come.

First love happens only once for everyone — in reality and in galgames alike. Everyone who just starts playing galgames finds “the feeling of first love” in some work, and that feeling may come many times, but the strongest and most unforgettable is only once. After that it only fades, gets tiresome, or becomes routine. For Purely X Cation I put in as much as I could and got some sweetness, but only some. That’s why after finishing the underclassman route I had zero interest in pursuing anyone else. I feel that for this game, everything is already over.

Maybe all these multiple-choice romance simulation games share this problem — Fureraba is the same. After finishing one person’s route I don’t really want to pursue anyone else, because this isn’t a novel and there’s no real story; the game itself is about you falling in love, and you’ve already made your choice. To turn around and go after another one always gives a sense of betrayal and guilt.

First love only happens once. Maybe for many galgame players like me, the “first love” in games has long passed, so when Purely X Cation arrived it was hard to get much emotion out of it. Of course… maybe in reality I still have a chance to be moved by a “real first love” (bitter laugh).