Nekonin Exheart (猫忍えくすはーと) Review

Whirlpool — I used to have a pretty good impression of them. Stuff like the old whale-fucking, the robot-fucking, and the early dragon princess-fucking, etc. etc. Feels like Whirlpool just loves playing with human-beast… oh wait, I mean human and mixed-blood. Maybe that’s just their style.

And so Whirlpool’s new game this year just popped out of nowhere, then out of nowhere it was out and on sale… I’d been thinking it wasn’t coming out until May…

The new title is Nekonin Exheart (猫忍えくすはーと), and the premise is dead simple: two cat-eared ninjas show up at the protagonist’s ancestral home, claiming they’ve come to serve as his bodyguards and retainers. That’s the setup everything else hangs on.

So I made a point of hammering these facts: the game itself only costs 2000 yen, and it’s only the first-press edition that comes with a hug pillow that runs 13000 yen.

See? Remind you of anything? Sound like the XXX no Seiiki series? Yep — this game is basically following that series’ playbook.

The appeal here is pretty clear-cut: short story, simple plot, good art.

The story in Neko-nin Exheart (猫忍えくすはーと) is short, and there isn’t much meat to it either. The setup: the world has a group called “Ajins” — catgirls, werewolves, that sort of thing. The protagonist’s ancestors racked up some good karma, so he ends up with two catgirl ninjas assigned to serve him. At first he’s pretty annoyed — the two of them are way too clingy. Later he can’t stand watching them live day in and day out inside a pig-shaped concrete pipe in the park, so he just takes them in.

Right after he takes them in, a bunch of people suddenly set their sights on the protagonist, claiming the two cat girls have him bewitched. Then they up and kidnap the cat girls, so the protagonist goes off to rescue them. After the rescue, the cat girls suddenly unleash their hidden power and beat the villains down to protect the protagonist. At that point the kidnapping crew immediately announces they were never the villains at all — they were just sent by the higher-ups to test whether these two cat girls qualify as proper “ninja.” And so it all ends happily ever after: the cat girls stay, the protagonist gets to have one in each arm, and everything is just perfect.

The thing is, though, the story is way too clichéd. From the moment the heroines Yura and Tama show up, the two of them subject the protagonist to a merciless, full-spectrum, land-sea-air bombardment of doting devotion — and it’s a pretty low-grade kind of doting at that. Hmm, low-grade might be too harsh. What’s the right word? “Classical”? Anyway, these two cat ninjas come out of the gate with the resolve of “I’m going to give my body to you,” so the abrupt appearance of HCGs is entirely expected, and the everyday dialogue has no highlights either — just pure formula like “Master, do you need me?” and “Master, I will protect you.” And the absolute worst part: the way the two of them phrase things in Japanese is just too weird. Tama talks like a spoiled little girl, saying 食べたいもん every other line, while Yura talks like a straight-up ancient retainer, ending every other sentence with ってござる. Most of their speech patterns I can’t even parse — thank god I can read the kanji, so it’s actually easier to just get the meaning from those.

All in all, the day-to-day dialogue in this game has nothing going for it, and there’s not much of a highlight in the other aspects either. If it has any strengths at all, they’d probably be the art style and the length.

Art-wise, the game’s illustrator is Takano Yuki, who also worked on the Da Capo series, and honestly the art’s pretty good — it looks cute, Whirlpool’s coloring style is reliably solid, the CGs are all gorgeous, and the sprites are fine too. The game is really short; if you read fast you’ll probably be done in about 3 hours. And there’s not much in it worth reading carefully, unless you want to learn how to talk like Yura…

Like I said earlier, the devs themselves call this one a mini project—a 2000-yen trifle. It really does look like they’re copying that studio called Feng, the whole strategy of getting by on nothing but key art and dakimakura merch. No idea if it sells. As for the game itself… you can’t exactly call it bad. It fits the niche it’s meant for. Halfway through I even started wondering whether Whirlpool was planning to gut the HCG and put it on Steam, since that one pull-tab game did exactly that. Now that I’ve played it, I can’t completely rule it out, but it’s probably not that kind of release.

Neko-nin Exheart is a game that, apart from the art, doesn’t really have much going for it. The voice cast feels kinda wasted too — Natsumi Takamori’s heroine performance is just okay, and Megumi Maeda doesn’t get to show what she can really do as the second heroine. At least it’s short, so you can just mess around with it and call it a day. Plus it’s dirt cheap, and the art style is nice enough. The real otaku who fall hard for the heroine have probably already gone and bought the dakimakura set — as for the game itself, maybe that’s not so important anymore.