Koi wa Yumemiru Moutetsu Girl! (恋は夢見る妄烈ガール!) Review

Someone once said that in a highly mature market, to raise production efficiency and lower costs, everything gets strictly standardized — even put on an assembly line.

Which is why Japan, that special place where eroge still actually sells, is no exception for something like the visual novel.

Before I started RSS-subscribing to various release sites, I wouldn’t have believed it — turns out there are a shitload of new eroge coming out in Japan every single week. The release lists alone are a sea of stars, like falling into an ocean of porn where one mouthful of semen-flavored seawater chokes you until you feel like you’re drowning in it.

Lots of releases doesn’t mean high quality. Aside from the monthly big releases, most are small productions or just selling pure porn appeal, not much quality to speak of — the kind of thing you play for a bit and move on. It’s like liking horror novels: you can camp out at the bookstore for new releases, or you can wallow in 5ch horror threads chasing web serials. Different taste, different flavor.

But once you’ve seen enough, you start noticing patterns — especially in a market as mature as Japan’s…

Uh… I mean, even for eroge there’s a “basic formula” baked in. Most studios that want to play it safe follow that formula. Sales might not explode, but they sure won’t tank either…

Games like that have passable art, passable voice acting, passable writing, a passable price tag, and end up being a passable eroge…

Which brings us to Koi wa Yumemiru Mouretsu Girl! (恋は夢見る妄烈ガール!) — one of those “about right” eroge.

The company behind it is actually fairly well known: Chelseasoft, a sub-brand under More. Last year they put out “Sorakoi” — yes, Sora Koi — and I tore it a new one, because the story was dragged out like crazy… and the final twist blew up in the most insane way. This year’s new game completely drops last year’s moe style and pivots to… uh… exactly the “safe baseline” style I was just talking about.

So what does a “safe baseline” “about right” eroge look like?

• First, the heroines’ tits have to be big. The bigger the better!
• Second, the heroines have to look slutty — as slutty as possible.
• Third, the premise has to make the heroines look H, really pushing that “every heroine is a virgin bitch” vibe so the cola-chugging fat otaku can get excited.
• Finally, the story has to be a school drama. No deaths, no NTR, strictly pure love, and the HCGs have to be plentiful. Plentiful!
• Addendum: the plot can borrow from childhood “promise” plus “flashback” developments. Works like a fucking charm every time.

Honestly, it’s not just visual novels — Japanese light novels are basically at the same formula now too. Sometimes the sex scenes in light novels aren’t any less explicit than an 18+ eroge… At this point I genuinely don’t know who’s influencing whom.

So Koi wa Yumemiru Mouretsu Girl! fits this formula almost perfectly. The premise: the protagonist can see a girl’s dirty fantasies in her head whenever he touches her. That’s his special ability. As a kid he played in the sand at an amusement park with a girl, they exchanged gifts, promised to get married when they grew up or something… Then he forgot who that girl was. He wants to find her again, and meanwhile his ability keeps landing him in trouble at school.

What kind of trouble? Big trouble. He accidentally bumps into a girl, sees her pink fantasy, and zones out into a daydream — like the student council president giving him a footjob, or the underclassman wanting to be raped. Of course it’s all fake, all delusion, he doesn’t actually do anything — but hey, you get to see the HCGs anyway.

That childhood-promise girl is obviously the pink-haired Shizuku Yunagi standing in the C position on the promo art. But Shizuku as written in the game is just goddamn stupid. Deep tsundere — the kind of moronic tsundere where you can tell from the way she sticks her ass out whether she’s got hemorrhoids. The more you see it, the more fake it feels, and the voice acting doesn’t land either. Zero interest.

My personal favorite is the student council president, Erika Nekomachi. Her route gets pretty violent about it: the president wants to stay in this village and revitalize her hometown, but her dad wants her to go to Tokyo to study and not stay here. She insists on staying, says she loves this land (somebody check on Mitsuha). Except the bullshit part is that later in the game, Erika also pulls out the childhood-promise gift and claims the protagonist gave it to her. Either I misread something or each route runs on a different worldline. In the end she chooses to go to Tokyo first, then come back home, and marries the protagonist for the ending.

So there’s nothing particularly eventful here — just a standard eroge. The one flashback even gets used by more than one character. Art-wise… at least the president and the main heroine are drawn well, while the other side character looks like a retard. The remaining characters have no sprites and no voice acting, probably budget issues, or maybe that’s the point. The music is typical electronic stuff, the kind most low-budget VNs use — though that’s not an absolute rule, some do put real effort into their BGM.

So Koi wa Yumemiru Mouretsu Girl! is the usual formula on art, story, and music. The premise isn’t exactly fresh, but it’s the one bright spot: the protagonist can touch women and see their H fantasies… Except it’s only used a few times early on, then dropped. Yeah, after that it’s just a normal dating sim, with nothing new. Even the main heroine Shizuku’s tsundere act is the old-school kind — more textbook than a textbook… Honestly, it gets boring to watch.

At the end of the day this is just an ordinary, extremely formulaic eroge. For most otaku, maybe the premise and the heroines’ little short skirts and big tits will get them to fork over cash and jack off to it. Sales probably won’t be a highlight, but it’s not the kind of thing that absolutely won’t sell either. Not high, not low. Not good, not bad. About right…

An “about right eroge” churned out on a standard assembly line, I guess…