Pure Marriage ~Akai Ito Monogatari~ (Pure Marriage ～赤い糸物語～) Review

I keep asking myself one question: when is Lass finally going to croak?

And then last time Lass put out some half-assed cobbled-together nukige, and instead of dying it went and opened a new label.

Lass Pixy, dedicated to Lass’s pure-love games — like this new release, Pure Marriage Akai Ito Monogatari. Pure love and brides, the polar opposite of that ninja training thing from before.

But then I looked closer: the game has three heroines, and the first release is literally called “Pure Marriage ~Akai Ito Monogatari Madoka-hen.” They’re selling it heroine by heroine? The price is cheap enough, though — a bit over 1400 yen, less than some single CDs go for.

What does that remind me of? Some X no Seiiki, maybe?

Probably eroge just don’t sell anymore, and eroge studios just can’t survive, so everyone’s doing the low-budget split-release thing. Not just Feng — Frontwing is copying Neko%% on Steam with a new game, and light has that Four Seasons of Lies series. But do the math on Lass: finish all three heroines and the game still isn’t expensive, way under the usual 9000 yen. I know Lass is dying and flailing, but at these prices, can you even break even? Are you actually making money?

Out of curiosity I played it. And after playing it, I understood. I can tell you responsibly: Lass’s piece-of-shit game really does break even if you sell enough copies. It’s so fucking cheap to make.

It’s a pure-love game, and holy shit is it pure love. So pure that there’s not even premarital sex in it. Fucking amazing. An eroge with no premarital sex — wholesome or what? Pure love or what! I’m asking you, is that pure love or what! A breath of fresh air in the Japanese adult game industry, radiating purification.

The story could not possibly be simpler. The protagonist’s parents are dead, he lives with his little sister, and his childhood friend’s parents are dead too, so she comes over all the time. One day at school he runs into some sheltered rich girl he met as a kid, accidentally breaks some thing she’s carrying, and her father pops out saying this is an ancestral XXXXX and any man who breaks it has to marry his daughter and blah blah blah. (Sorry, the dialogue was too stupid and I couldn’t be bothered to read the setting carefully — I was playing it while queuing for an Overwatch match.) The protagonist is a responsible man, so he decides to grudgingly marry the rich girl. (Grudgingly, my ass.) After agonizing for a while, his sister sets him straight: “You’re marrying a girl you met one day ago? Do you even know her? You’d be better off marrying your childhood friend.” So he quickly elopes with the childhood friend and turns the rich girl down.

Yes. Two high schoolers. Eloping. No sex before the elopement. Isn’t that badass? Isn’t it?! A model of sex education!

And then there’s basically no story left. It’s just sex, sex, and more sex, and that’s when you remember this game waving the pure-love banner is still a nukige. Only the effort put into this nukige is pathetic. I won’t even mention that all the backgrounds are lifted from Shoujo Shin’iki and Mayoi Futari — it’s got priors. But the core of a nukige, the HCGs, are endlessly recycled too. There are only so many images, and every scene cycles through the same few. Maybe some are slightly different, but the difference between them is the kind of thing you could reproduce by screenshotting and bucket-filling it yourself. Zero substance. Truly worthy of an eroge priced like a single CD — a single CD’s worth of quality. By my count, they paid an artist for character sprites (reusable for the sequel), 4-5 HCGs, one head-pat CG (also reusable), and a script with voice acting. That’s it. Oh, plus the OP — the OP is probably the most expensive part, and it’ll be reusable in the sequel too. All in all, this game was an education. Doujin games aren’t even this stingy; plenty of them put real work in. The hardest-working person on this game was probably the writer, and the writer is Lass’s president, that fat fuck Kenji Mana. The president has to make money to pay off debts, so he can put in the effort. The main thing is cutting every other cost.

There are also some stupid choices that pad out your time — like whether to keep kissing or skip to the next step. If you pick keep kissing, you can kiss forever, and all you get is three extra seconds of moaning. Completely useless. Maybe it’s there to make you think the game has “choices” or something.

Don’t doubt for a second that there won’t be sequels. The game tells you right at the start that there’s a legend: “When you kiss your fated person, a red thread appears on your finger and theirs to prove they’re your destiny.” And our protagonist, when the girls lick and heal his finger, discovers red-thread reactions with his childhood friend, his little sister, and that Hirohara rich girl. Which means… at least three heroines are lined up for you to bang. Which means they’re selling you at least three copies.

So what’s the verdict? Pure Marriage Akai Ito Monogatari is a filler-grade Lass cash-in. I just found out Lass’s big proper release this year, Liber 7, got delayed again to the end of October. I’m not even surprised. I honestly think it might get pushed once more to the end of November before it’s normal. Until then, Lass will scrape leftovers from its previous games into small nukige to make some side cash — split the assets from Shoujo Shin’iki and Mayoi Futari, put one half into this pure-love game, the other half into that ninja training thing. Oh right, news just dropped that a new ninja training game is coming out soon too. Another round of cheap cash-grabbing, no doubt. Lass has gotten good at this. It won’t be dying anytime soon.

I don’t know which studio started this “split-up low-budget nukige” trend — probably Ryoka and Feng with XXX no Seiiki — but theirs weren’t this cheap. Still, it’s a decent direction. At least it makes money. Throw in a bit more story, put an all-ages version on Steam, and you could probably make more. But a lot of Japanese developers still don’t get it. So frustrating.

As for Lass, I think it shouldn’t die until it finally shits out Liber 7. It can keep pumping out these little nukige to scam money — they’re cheap, and I saw plenty of Japanese folks on Twitter saying they’d buy them, so it really does work. Lass has surpassed its teacher: Gakkou no Seiiki hasn’t even gone on sale yet, and Lass’s own Seiiki is already having a blast.

So let’s just call this one “Lass no Seiiki.” (lol)