Tarareba ~as in What if stories~ (タラレバ ～as in What if stories～) Review

Every so often on some SNS or other, I run into people who claim to know me.

I don’t know them, of course. No idea how they found me.

“Oh, Mr. Li, I’m a fan of yours.” That’s what some stranger who messaged me on Telegram recently said. “I really love reading your blog, especially the eroge impressions.”

Well, that brightened my day a little. Most of the idiots who claim to like my blog all say they enjoy watching me self-deprecate, and the moment they see eroge impressions they announce they skipped it—some even act like my constantly writing about eroge is an eyesore. It’s my own damn turf, I write whatever I want, and these guys strut around like they own the place demanding I serve dishes to their taste. Give me a break.

“Is that so?” Usually I don’t bother with people who harass me, but this one said something I didn’t expect, so I decided to reply.

“Yeah! Though the recent eroge impressions aren’t as good as the old ones.”

Honestly, I had to agree. Lately I just roughly retell the plot, say “good” and “bad,” and call it a day. I can’t even be bothered to think up titles anymore.

“The old eroge impressions were really great, especially the little intros you wrote at the front.”

“Intros?”

“Yeah, the ones before the boring game plot summaries. Your memories of the past, and those little skits about getting dumped in arranged marriages lately—those were fantastic! You don’t do them anymore, it’s just boring game introductions now…”

I don’t know what he said after that, because after I blocked him I couldn’t see the chat log anymore…

Everyone’s time is precious. It’s not worth wasting on boring idiots. In this day and age, when the prologue of a single galgame can take at least 4 hours, having a super-fast-paced galgame should feel like a breath of fresh air…

The OP for Tarareba as in What if stories is really good, so I picked it up to play. Of course, the bigger reason was that every other game kept crashing on the latest Windows 10 Anniversary update, so I ran this one until I could sort that out.

The premise really grabs you: what if the protagonist were given a chance to go back 8 years and do the things he wouldn’t regret…

Everyone has things they regret from the past, right? Using that as a hook is actually a pretty good basis for a game—maybe you could even reflect on life or something by the end…

Then the game ran for about 15 minutes and I was dumbfounded.

How should I put this—the pacing is way too fast. The story unfolds at such a breakneck speed that I couldn’t keep up.

Less than 2 minutes in, the protagonist, working part-time at a convenience store, meets a little girl who asks if he’d be willing to go back to the past. She gives him two conditions:

1. You can’t tell people in the past that you’re from the future.
2. You can’t make your future self regret again.

Before the protagonist can even react, he’s sent back…

He opens his eyes back in his school days, and from there the story is in full flight the whole way. There’s a childhood friend, a student council president, a senpai from the esper research club, and an esper girl who claims to have powers—a whole pile of them. And of course, the protagonist also sees the little girl from the convenience store who sent him back. But he came back in such a rush he doesn’t know what to do, so he just goes about his daily life. Then Christmas is coming up, and some students are assigned to decorate the Christmas tree. That’s when the protagonist suddenly remembers: in the future, his childhood friend will be crushed while decorating the tree, end up in a vegetative state, and when she wakes up she’ll have lost her memories and won’t remember him at all.

To keep his childhood friend from getting hurt, the protagonist dives in when the tree is about to fall. She’s fine, he gets hurt—not badly—and just like that, one of the things that made him regret the future is erased…

You’d think that’s the whole story? Nope. We haven’t even gotten to that mysterious little girl from the beginning.

At the protagonist’s school there’s an esper research club, and its president is a senpai who spends every day studying kokkuri-san, table-turning, esper phenomena, and hauntings. The protagonist is curious why she’s so into this, and as they get closer he finds out: she used to have a little sister. During a fireworks festival, because she wasn’t watching carefully enough, her sister was hit by a car, became a vegetative state, and never woke up. The senpai blames herself deeply—it was all her fault—and wants her sister to forgive her, but her sister is in a vegetative state…

So the protagonist goes to the senpai’s house to see the sister, and—what do you know—the sister turns out to be the little girl who sent him back to the past. The protagonist could always see her, and she’d appear and disappear mysteriously. The little girl was the senpai’s sister’s wandering spirit.

In the end, the protagonist tells the senpai everything and finds the sister’s spirit, telling the senpai her sister has already forgiven her. The sister’s spirit says she’ll return to her body, but it will take time.

So after completing his communication mission, the protagonist arrives 8 years later, and the senpai calls to say her sister has woken up…

And the game just ends. Incidentally, there’s also a route for the sister, and it’s basically copy-paste of what came before, just from the sister’s point of view: starting from the accident, being guided in heaven, and then herself guiding the protagonist back to the past to change her sister’s life course. But the ending has the protagonist not ending up with the sister, but falling for the little sister instead…

All in all, it’s a story about “something in the past left a loved one in a vegetative state, so back in the future they pull off a time reversal to change the tragedy”…

Pretty simple, yeah, really simple—so simple that the game itself is really simple.

How simple? The game advances at breakneck speed!

I did the math: the common route is maybe two hours if you go slow, the individual routes two hours slow, and the final sister True End is copy-paste, so half of it is stuff you’ve already seen—an hour, maybe.

The game is 1.7 GB, yet the install directory includes its own OST and song RARs. The game itself is probably a little over 1 GB.

In a word: short! Really short! Even with the pregnancy ending, it’s short!

I’ve noticed that for galgames there’s a phenomenon where “one short length covers a hundred flaws”—as long as it’s short enough and the story framework makes a certain amount of sense, you can fill in the rest with your imagination and think “ah, well, this story isn’t so bad after all.” So for Tarareba, even though the CGs aren’t pretty, the music is cliché, and the plot isn’t fresh, because it’s so very short, I didn’t feel uncomfortable after finishing it…

If this game’s story were stretched out, it’d probably be landmine-tier. Everyone’s emotional shifts happen way too fast, and the part in the middle where they call out to the sister’s spirit is too cliché and stupid. And there’s almost no buildup for a lot of the tearjerker moments—it just turns on a dime, then whoosh, turns back.

But hey, it’s short, so you grit your teeth and it’s over before long, and you don’t have much to complain about.

As for highlights, besides the OP, the CVs are good too. Akino Hana rarely does a neutral voice, and it sounds great.

Other than that, there’s not much. These days a game demo dares to run 20 hours, and this one, if you just follow the main story, is done in under 6 hours. There are a ton of choices to pad it out, but the leaning is so obvious they’re basically freebies—nothing that can stop the historical march of clearing the game.

Actually, those browser game ads are right sometimes: “Your time is worth a lot.”

So for Tarareba, it didn’t waste too much of my time, so I don’t have much of a problem with it. Think of it as a short story, and it passes…