Kimi to Yume Mishi (キミトユメミシ) Review

I once came up with a concept.

It was about dreams, and there were people with a job kind of like “private detective” who specialized in entering people’s dreams. They’d go on adventures inside someone else’s dream, and ultimately change that person’s view of something. And of course, they get paid for it.

Sounds a lot like Inception, I know. But I had a slightly different idea. I figured that since you’re entering “someone else’s dream” as a kind of “detective” or “hunter,” the setting and environment of the dream would all be tied to the dreamer. As the “intruder,” you’d need to adapt to the environment fast and exploit “the dreamer’s own internal logic” to get the advantages you need to finish the job.

Say the dreamer is a hopeless MMO addict. You enter his dream and you’ll probably get dropped into some game-like world. You’d have to quickly adapt to the role the dreamer assigned you in that world, and also disguise yourself so you don’t stick out. That means you need to know the dreamer—their tastes, their personality, even their innermost thoughts. Walk blindly into someone else’s turf and you’ll definitely fail, maybe even lose your chance to ever wake up again…

I thought this setup was cool as hell, and I even wrote a crappy short story based on it. If you’re willing to dig, you can find it on this blog. Though if I went back and read it now I’d spot a million problems—too embarrassing to even look at. Still, I’m thinking about dusting off that concept and rewriting it into a proper piece. Depends on whether I get the time and inspiration.

So yeah… dreams are fascinating things. Some say they can predict the future. Some say they reveal a person’s true feelings. The latter even gets used in psychological testing. The world’s complicated enough as it is, and everyone lives so passively—who knows if the current you is betraying the real you? Who the hell knows what the real you even looks like… Maybe even you don’t know.

We’re always searching for our inner voice, but that’s easier said than done. The world’s full of tangled relationships, and we’re always more or less factoring in what others think. Before long, the real you gets changed too—for better or worse…

But no denying it: dreams are full of mystery, and full of fun.

As a kid I used to have that dream where you’re running through the wilderness and suddenly fall off a cliff, then wake up in a cold sweat. Back then I figured it was because I’d been doing so much long-distance running at school—“what you think by day, you dream by night,” as they say.

By middle school I started having all kinds of “end of the world” dreams. I’d be running through elevators and unnamed buildings, with women or zombies chasing me, and most of the time I had no weapon and was just running for my life… At that point, if you tried to tell me “what you think by day, you dream by night,” I wouldn’t buy it. Back then I was watching porn, reading smut, reading hentai manga every single day. So why wasn’t I dreaming about banging girls?! Even when I played games it was just Chenghai 3C at the internet café. Tell me where the hell Chenghai 3C has elevators and zombie chases. Even if you bring up Half-Life, I only played the first one, and that was ages ago—by the time I was having apocalypse dreams in high school, that game was just a modifier for CS. Dreams make zero sense…

Or maybe… the reason I consumed so much porn and never dreamed about banging girls is that I was too pure? Very possible…

(Funny thing is, years later when I played Left 4 Dead I actually felt a weird sense of familiarity…)

These days I can’t be bothered to study the relationship between dreams and reality. Whatever. Now I spend my days playing pure-love games, listening to pure-love songs, browsing pure-love forums—and suddenly I’m having “banging girls” dreams all the time. The bullshit part is, I bang so many girls in these dreams and can’t remember who any of them were… Isn’t that bullshit? Sometimes I even dread the day I dream about “finally seeing the girl’s face, only for her to sprout a giant dick and pin me down and fuck me”—that kind of horror twist. If this keeps up I’m gonna have to stop visiting those degenerate SNS sites.

Oh right… speaking of diving into dreams, plenty of visual novels have done it too. Between Sakura no Mori † Dreamers a while back and those older Purple software games, they’ve all used the setup. We’re always curious about the unknown, and dreams can’t be controlled, so there’s a lot of creative work around them. I mentioned I keep dreaming about banging girls, so naturally some visual novel would want to use that setup to do something…

And here it is…! Kimi to Yume Mishi!

I actually saw this game’s intro a long time ago. Thick nukige smell… Honestly you don’t even need the intro. Look at the art style and you know. And if that’s not enough, just look at all the holy light in the OP. Based on my years of pure observation, games that put mosaics in their OP usually have mediocre stories at best—maybe a fresh premise or decent fap material, nothing more.

So I didn’t give a shit about this game. Then later I found out it was getting absurdly high ratings on Chuuni space (Chuuni 空间, the Chinese eroge forum).

Japanese players were saying things like “looks like a nukige on the surface but it’s actually a tearjerker,” “this month’s dark horse,” “my personal GOTY”—which scared the shit out of me. Even Yuzusoft’s games don’t get that from their own fans (goddammit, I looked it up and yes, some people actually do say that). Someone even gave it 90 points. That got my curiosity going, so I set aside that formulaic Yuzusoft game and decided to see what this one was really about…

First off, installing the game made me feel like it was hot shit, industry-leading—it supports both Windows and Mac! Then I opened it and found two directories… one for each system. Cool.

So why the multi-platform support? I looked at the files—holy shit, it’s running on Unity.

I got excited the moment I launched it. Waited forever for the logo, then got to the title screen with no sound at all. I figured maybe I’d been victimized by a pirated copy, but turns out that’s normal. It’s just like that.

Then the game started and my tablet fan took off. Checked the memory usage—holy shit…

Later I downloaded an official patch and it finally went down a bit.

But the drop only lasted a moment. A little more and you’re back on your knees.

Which is when I really understood why so many visual novels use girigiri’s modified builds… stable, and time-tested.

Now let’s talk about the story… It’s actually simple.

The protagonist was in a car accident once. He survived, and afterward discovered he had a superpower: he can enter other people’s dreams and see what they’re dreaming about.

To make better use of this ability, he made himself an incense bottle and tricked women into thinking it was a hypnotic or dream-enhancing thing, telling them to put it by their pillow (or under it, whatever) while they slept. Then when the woman falls asleep and starts dreaming, he goes to sleep too and enters her dream.

Pretty badass ability, right? Kind of like my concept from the start. But what does the protagonist use it for…? Watching girls’ wet dreams to jerk off… or groping them inside dreams…

Meanwhile, he also has another strange dream. Once a week he suddenly gets incredibly drowsy, passes out instantly, and enters an unfamiliar dream. In that dream there’s a little girl. He doesn’t know her, and she doesn’t know him. After they exchange a few words, the girl falls asleep and he wakes up… He always figured it was a side effect of the accident, and he’s constantly going to a hospital for checkups.

So the story starts like this. He transfers to a school rumored to have tons of beauties and a great uniform, all so he can peep on the girls’ dreams… He also has a bro named Momoken who eagerly tells him who the hottest, most bangable girls at school are, and even shows him photos…

So these are the heroine candidates… Nishizaki Yui, Toujou Nanoha, Hiiragi Marina, and Shigure. The main plot is tied to Yui. The protagonist discovers Yui seems to be doing all sorts of things on the rooftop of the hospital where he has his checkups—like building a shack, throwing a festival—trying to liven up that rooftop.

Why? Eventually the protagonist sees a comatose person in a hospital room, and—holy shit, isn’t that the person from his weekly forced-coma dream? So she’s lying here.

Then the game’s main arc kicks in. After some investigation, the protagonist learns the comatose person is Takanashi Mikoto, also from a car accident. He woke up; she didn’t. He awakened his ability; she didn’t—she just occasionally forces herself into his dreams. Then the game starts telling a proper story. Why does Yui want that hospital rooftop so lively? Because of Mikoto. Mikoto and Yui were best friends. One day they had a stupid little argument, and Yui figured she’d apologize the next day—but the next day Mikoto got into the accident and never woke up. So Yui feels guilty, and she’s trying to make the rooftop near Mikoto lively and cheerful to wake her up (what kind of logic is that). The other heroines all know Mikoto to varying degrees, so they all support Yui and help her do this…

Then the routes are straightforward. The protagonist can enter Mikoto’s dream, so he uses his ability to dive into Yui’s dream, overlapping it with Mikoto’s dream that calls out to him. The two meet in the dream, Yui sees Mikoto and is forgiven. On the first playthrough Mikoto doesn’t wake up. After clearing all other routes, you get Yui End 2, which triggers a happy end where Mikoto wakes and meets Yui again.

As for the other heroines’ routes, they’re all formulaic and barely related to Mikoto. Nanoha wants to write a novel, has a bad relationship with her father, and they reconcile. Marina wants to play piano, her parents want her to study medicine, and eventually they come around. As for Shigure… don’t even mention her. Makes me sick just thinking about it… skipped.

So the story is about the protagonist using his ability to help his girlfriend wake her comatose friend… Is it a tearjerker?

Probably…?

It’s supposed to be a tearjerker, but it’s not moving at all… The reason is simple: the writing is bad.

How bad? Atrocious. From the very start, the protagonist acts like a total pervert and I already felt something was off. He spends every day figuring out how to sneak into girls’ dreams. I honestly thought this was a nukige… if not for the pure-love tag. But looking at it now, even with the pure-love tag, it’s not pure in the slightest.

As the game goes on, the dialogue is boring too. The only thing worth looking at is what’s inside each heroine’s dream. Being a porn game, naturally the dreams are all masturbation and weird play, completely unrelated to the main plot. The main plot amounts to waking the sleeping Mikoto, and that only takes a few lines. The earlier foreshadowing was a bunch of people building a shack and throwing a party on the hospital rooftop for Mikoto’s sake… If you can believe that “making the hospital lively might wake a vegetative patient” excuse, good for you. The daily dialogue is genuinely boring. Nanoha’s CV is Yukina—her voice is naturally flat. Yui’s character is meant to be a zany whirlwind, but the writer clearly can’t write zany and just made her stupid. As for Shigure, I really don’t want to talk about her. She’s a walking pile of dirty jokes, and gross ones, all heavy fetish shit every other line. There’s also a scene where the protagonist’s “hypnosis bottle” gets sniffed by a dog, and that night he dreams of him and the heroines all turned into dogs banging… It’s fresh for about a second. Why do I say that? Because the heroine routes are identical except for the final ending—the dream scenes just get switched around, with obvious copy-paste seams.

I couldn’t get through Shigure’s route. The dialogue made no sense, dirty jokes don’t get shoved in like that, and the worst part is her dream is full of pee play, with squirting sound effects that go on forever. Honestly, this is the first game that made me want to vomit while playing. And I mean actually nauseous, not figuratively. Shigure’s route has this little insert song called “Shigure Dictionary”—it’s just chanting obscene words like a rap, which reminded me of those Bilibili lyric mishears full of genitalia, and apparently some Japanese people think the song is good… I suggest they go listen to “DT捨テル” instead. That’s the real deal, not this “crowded train” “you can’t put it in here” “pickled plum nipples” nonsense.

So that’s the main story. After clearing it, you get an Extra route where you can pursue Takanashi Mikoto. The intro is gross too—they give you a “Virgin-sama” (処女先生), a pun on the game being the company’s virgin work. Then they say some shit like “hey, there are 5 girls in the title and you only did 4, doesn’t that seem wrong? Want to do one more…?”

So Mikoto gets handed to you like a freebie with your phone plan. Her route is just an IF—“what if the protagonist and Mikoto never had the accident”—and it’s nothing special…

So how is this game…? Not good. The engine explodes, the story drags, the individual routes are blatant copy-paste. Music? Oh sorry, I don’t know what music there is besides that one OP melody… Maybe the piano insert is decent, but that’s it. As for the art… ahahahaha everyone’s drawn like a thug with all kinds of weird poses. I don’t think it’s good. And you can’t even tell what kind of game this is. It looks like a nukige, but a disgustingly gross one. I’ve played plenty of weird games, but this is the first one that made me literally want to throw up. It also looks like a tearjerker, but the emotional scenes land with zero impact. Truly incredible…

Honestly the most memorable thing about this game is that every girl in her dreams is posing seductively, wanting the protagonist to bang her… It’s easy to walk away thinking women dream about wet dreams every night.

Bro (said in Zhu Princess’s voice)! It’s 2016! How are you still writing this bullshit setup?! I watched porn every day in high school and never once dreamed about banging girls every night. No matter how horny a girl is, she’s not dreaming about getting railed every night, right?

Dreams should be colorful and varied! And this game’s dreams look kinda H but nothing ever actually happens—it’s all teasing, no payoff, completely meaningless!

The game itself is meaningless! A pervy protagonist, sluts for heroines, a powder keg waiting for a spark, and then it forces some clichéd tearjerker route on you at the end…

What the hell!

Might as well cut the tearjerker route, add more HCGs, and rename it When a Horny Slut Meets a Total Pervert.