Koiken Otome (恋剣乙女 / ～再燃～) Review

I downloaded Koiken Otome (恋剣乙女) ages ago, heard the story was pretty mid, and never finished it. Then recently I was startled to hear that Shimura Yumi is retiring from voice acting for good…

Which reminded me that Inoue Hana is also in Koiken Otome, so I grabbed it to wallow in nostalgia for a bit.

So how is this game… yeah, exactly as expected, pretty mid. Not that it has zero bright spots.

Worth mentioning in passing: Koiken Otome has an FD called Koiken Otome Sainen (恋剣乙女～再燃～). My personal advice is to play both together, because if you only play the main game the story just ends on a wet fart…

The story is set in a fictional world where something called “douryoku” exists. Boys and girls with the ability to wield douryoku enter a school to study, train, and develop their own douryoku.

When he enrolls, the protagonist is rated at douryoku level SSS, supposedly a rare high rank among his peers, except he has no actual ability.

In other words, he’s got a high douryoku rank but no skills — basically a peasant with huge MP and HP bars, 1-5 attack, and zero spells…

Even so, the protagonist meets plenty of people at school, including Yasukuni Akane, Kamishiro Touko, and his childhood friend Someya Yuzu. Right around then the school announces a tournament: douryoku holders manifest their power as weapons and fight. Akane is all fired up, but you need a three-person team to enter, and your douryoku rating has to be above SA. Note that S rank is further split into SA, SB, and SC — Akane’s is on the low end of S, which is exactly why she can’t find a team. Everyone else is SB (no, really) or SC, and nobody can be bothered to give an SA the time of day.

Meanwhile Eve, the rich girl from the neighboring school, shows up. She’s known Akane since childhood and is rated SC, and when she finds out that Akane — who she always thought was her equal — is only SA, she taunts her and says she’ll be waiting with her team in the arena.

Taunts aside, the immediate problem is that Akane can’t form a team. Kamishiro Touko, who’s SC or above, agrees to join her, but she’s still one short.

The protagonist offers to join, but Touko, Akane, and even the teacher all agree that he’s got nothing but a high rating — throw him into a fight and someone’s dying. Request denied.

The final day to submit team rosters arrives and Akane still has no team. She decides to give up, figuring there’s always next year — the tournament is annual, after all. But the protagonist sees the frustration and disappointment in her eyes, so he runs back alone, digs out the registration form Akane tore in half, tapes it back together, writes in his own name, and gets it submitted.

Akane is happy and worried at the same time. The main issue is that the protagonist can’t do anything, and in a 3v3, never mind him being dead weight — he’s just going to get hit. After thinking it over, they decide that the higher-ranked Touko will protect the protagonist while Akane fights 2v3, and all the protagonist has to do is survive as long as possible.

That strategy works against scrubs, but against any real team it’s hopeless.

So it falls apart at the end of the group stage. Touko gets focused down and kneels, the protagonist gets ignored (because he’s useless), and Akane is about to go down too.

At the critical moment, the protagonist throws himself in front of Akane and hugs her to take the hit. That’s when her power goes out of control — flames swallow the entire arena, one-shotting the enemy team and wrecking the venue besides.

After an investigation, the protagonist’s ability is finally identified… it turns out his power is to raise someone else’s ability to SSS rank, which is why Akane’s fire ability exploded so hard.

With his ability discovered, the protagonist’s team advances further. They run into the team of delinquents from the entrance ceremony and put them down using his power, and finally they face Eve’s team and win after a hard fight.

Actually, the main game’s story ends after the victory. From there you pick a heroine’s route, confess, and fade to black… I picked Kamishiro Touko (Inoue Hana, obviously). Touko’s route just explains why she hates her own ability: her original power was to manifest words, she accidentally hurt someone with it, and then for certain reasons (related to Akane’s childhood) her ability got swapped to the current ice power, which is why she’s always hated this “douryoku” business.

What follows is content from the FD Koiken Otome Sainen, the Kotona subjugation chapter. After the tournament, life is peaceful, but then a strange building supposedly appears near the school. The protagonist goes to investigate and finds a white-haired girl inside. She has no name and no memories, so he names her Hibiki and takes her around — playing, going to school, living together. Hibiki is happy, but the mystery remains: nobody knows who Hibiki is. Her douryoku readings are absurdly huge, and in history class, when the teacher explains that douryoku came from the dragon clan Kotona granting it to humans and that humans later defeated Kotona, Hibiki turns out to know an awful lot about all this, even stepping up to tell stories about Kotona and humans herself. She has no idea why she knows any of it. Then one day Hibiki sees students practicing and tries summoning a weapon herself, and pulls out something outrageous: a black sword, and another version of her own personality. That personality is vicious, and Hibiki awakens, realizing she is the incarnation of Kotona.

The protagonist and company have a hard time accepting that Kotona has returned to the world and is a little girl. They try to communicate with this Kotona named Hibiki and keep hitting walls. Eventually Hibiki gets hurt in a practice match, and Kotona decides to discard Hibiki’s kind personality, cut ties with humanity entirely, and leave the school for her own domain.

Naturally the ending is the protagonist and friends beating the crap out of Kotona and resealing the originator of douryoku, and the world returns to peace.

There’s some fun stuff in the Kotona fight too. The protagonist’s power is boosting others, and here it gets a detailed explanation: he describes himself as more of a rechargeable battery — he can supply power to others and also charge up from them. Kotona’s immense douryoku ends up charging the protagonist, which is how he kills the dragon.

So after hyping up two whole games, the protagonist’s SSS-rank ability turns out to be a power bank! Right?

Koiken Otome really is very ordinary. The character art isn’t great, the CGs are decent — one win, one loss, they cancel out. The OP is great and it’s by Fripside; you’ve probably heard the song from the virgin sword even if you never played the game. But the in-game BGM is mid — one win, one loss, canceled out again. The main story ends on a wet fart (you end on a practice match, what kind of development is that), but the Kotona subjugation chapter in the FD completes it — one win, one loss, still canceled out. The second half of the game’s plot is limp, but the part before the OP, especially Akane’s inner conflict and her melancholy over wanting to compete with no team, is surprisingly well done — one win, one loss, canceled out yet again. The game isn’t very long, and thanks to that it never gets boring. On the CV side, Akane is a rare masculine-sounding performance from Nakamura Eriko, the other heroines have luxurious casting, and Shimura Yumi really does sound soft — but she has too few lines, since the character herself is the cold type.

So after all the wins and losses cancel out, the game still has more strengths than weaknesses… it’d be nice if the plot had a little more ups and downs. As it stands, you can guess exactly where it’s going just from the premise and the OP, and after you finish you’ll find you guessed almost all of it right. If you ask me, that’s exactly where the “boring” feeling comes from.

Thinking about it, yeah — you can’t say what’s good about it, you can’t say what’s bad about it either. For a visual novel that’s already decent. There are so many landmines these days that not making you eat shit is a win.

Still, the direction of this game is a lot like a later one, a game called 1/7 Magic User. Might be from a subsidiary or shell company, or maybe the latter copied the former — either way they’re suspiciously similar in premise, content, and style, and even the OP is Fripside in both. Unfortunately 1/7 Magic User isn’t as good as Koiken Otome; the latter wasn’t even trying with its staging…

Of course, maybe the latter’s premise is just too clichéd — the protagonist is basically Kirito. By comparison, I’d rather watch a power bank protagonist save the world. At least it’s novel, right?

Oh, right — I played this game for Shimura Yumi, but I haven’t said a thing about her the whole time… Guess she deserves her own retrospective:

“Goodbye, Inoue Hana”