Kimi no Hitomi ni Hit Me (キミの瞳にヒットミー) Review

I watched the Spring Festival Gala over Chinese New Year. Actually I’ve always watched it. I don’t know if it’s genuinely getting worse every year, but from where I’m sitting it’s definitely gotten less interesting — I can’t remember a damn thing from it anyway.

A few days later I went back and watched a couple of the performances on YouTube, and they seemed… fine? At least there was something to them.

And today I’ve already forgotten those too.

Why? Setting aside the political bits and the self-congratulatory propaganda, some of the song-and-dance numbers, skits, and crosstalk are decent enough. While you’re watching you might catch a joke and think “oh, that’s clever,” or “that’s pretty funny.” Then it ends, and there’s nothing “gripping” about it, and you forget the whole thing.

Basically: not terrible, not great, no real highlights, and not much heart in it either. You watch it, you laugh, you forget it.

Some games are like that too. Like this one — Kimi no Hitomi ni Hit Me (キミの瞳にヒットミー).

Kimi no Hitomi ni Hit Me means something like “your eyes hit me.” I played the trial version a while back and felt… exactly like I do after the Gala. All I remembered was that the art looked nice, and nothing else.

Then the full version came out and I played it like an idiot, and it felt exactly the same as the trial. You can’t really say the story is bad… but it just leaves no impression at all. Too ordinary. Maybe the only impression is that the art is good?

The plot is offensively by-the-numbers. The protagonist wants to start a club at school, finds nobody will give him the time of day, so he goes to a teacher, who says she’ll help him find members. She then rounds up a bunch of other people who want to start weird clubs — a manzai club, a chuunibyou club, a poetry club, a book club — all of which are one person short. The teacher shoves them together and says “why not just combine into one club?” After some deliberation they name it the Share Club, i.e. the Share Club. And that’s how the story starts.

The daily slice-of-life nonsense isn’t too long. Everyone just talks about their own thing in the club, then the school festival rolls around and they need to put on a performance. The protagonist suggests doing a play, writes a script that works everyone’s club interests into it, the play is a success, and the club gets to stay.

After the play you can branch into the individual routes. Personally I think the route for the anointed main heroine, Hinata Hitomi, isn’t great. Hitomi is the one who wanted to start a “Warau-bu” — basically a manzai club, or if you’re more familiar with the Chinese term, a crosstalk club. Why does Hitomi want to be a comedian so badly? Because her grandmother stopped smiling after her grandfather died, so she’s been working hard to make her laugh again.

Naturally she ends up forming a manzai duo with the protagonist, they do another performance, they invite grandma, grandma smiles, the story ends.

And of course they become a couple while they’re at it.

The only things that stand out in the whole game are the heroine Hinata Hitomi and the shit-yellow-haired Tsukabata Miko. Honestly, Miko’s route is more interesting than Hitomi’s — not the plot, I mean the character writing. Miko is a classic tsundere and straight man, and her dialogue delivery and the VA’s tone are way better than Hitomi’s (sorry, Kiritani Hana… you didn’t have much to work with this time). Yanagi Hitomi, this newcomer (?) — probably her real name is Toda Megumi, so maybe she doesn’t count as a newcomer — is easily the best-written character in the game.

But good writing doesn’t save much. The game is cliché as hell, the plot is cliché as hell, the dialogue is awkward as hell. Sure, a lot of the little reference gags are funny, but once the fun’s over you forget them. The manzai Hitomi performs at the end is, I think, a bit worse than Feng Gong’s act on the Gala. In theory Japanese manzai predates Chinese crosstalk — crosstalk only dates back to the Qing dynasty, while manzai goes back earlier in Japan — but maybe I’m just not Japanese and don’t get the jokes. Fortunately the game is very short: 7 chapters of common route, 7 chapters of heroine route, maybe under 30 minutes per chapter, some even shorter. Skip the H scenes and you save even more time. So for the nice art, it might be worth a play? At least it’s short… though it doesn’t quite reach “short enough to hide a hundred flaws,” because there’s no decent story to begin with.

By the way, the title “Kimi no Hitomi ni Hit Me” comes from a gag Hitomi makes up in-game while trying to write material. She thinks it sounds funny out loud. Honestly the joke is incomplete — if you ask me, I’d add something and turn it into “your eyeballs hit me,” which would probably be better…

Miko’s route is, I think, much higher quality than Hitomi’s. The character is adorable, and Miko herself really wants to be in love — very girly — and the VA’s performance fits the role perfectly. Her conversations with the protagonist are sweet… and behind the tsundere she’s a good person. Probably the biggest highlight of the game. If there’s a reason to play this, Miko is probably it.

Actually, thinking about it, the game’s theme is pretty positive. A bunch of people come together for various reasons to form the Share Club, accidentally become friends through working together, and then the protagonist graduates and the club might disband, and everyone feels a little sad. Sometimes you can use that to reminisce about your own youth. The game’s intent is probably to celebrate youth through club activities, but it’s too short, the writing isn’t very heartfelt, and the comedy is a bit lacking, so it gives off a half-assed feeling. Only the art is really good. Everything else is like a Gala skit — you watch it, you laugh, you forget it. That’s probably what this game is.