Natsuiro Kokoro Log Happy Summer (ナツイロココロログ Happy Summer) Review

Voice actress Matsunaga Rika (Yomogi Kasumi) must be thanking her lucky stars she got cast in Natsuiro Kokoro Log. Why? Because on her Twitter page, the only character she can actually show off is the main heroine from this game. Every other role she’s done is either some jobber or a boss — and if it’s a lead, it’s guaranteed to be the busty heroine of some nukige getting violated, the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to use as an avatar.

Actually, the heroine of Natsuiro Kokoro Log, Tokiwa Kuon, is genuinely adorable. Thanks to artist Shirakawa Mochizuki’s moe one-hit-kill, this game is a breath of fresh air among “moe-nukige” titles. Story? Music? Voice acting? None of it matters here — as long as it clears the bar, the art style alone is enough to make moe pigs cry out banzai.

But as you all know, I’m not some moe-obsessed fanboy, and I’m not a little-sister complex guy either, so while playing Natsuiro Kokoro Log (ナツイロココロログ), all I really felt was that this game’s protagonist is a total fucking idiot. I said it in a previous post too: this guy is wishy-washy, has zero opinions of his own, and the moment things look bad he immediately tucks tail and runs. When the girl wants nothing from him and all she needs is for him to nod, he instead turns around and goes home. In real life, that’s the kind of scumbag who has a great time banging a girl, then vanishes the second she’s pregnant. And somehow that scumbag is the protagonist of a harem-flavored moe game. I can’t accept it.

Yeah, the protagonist is a total dumbass, but with games like this you’re supposed to treat the MC as thin air anyway — put up with it and it passes. Honestly I still think pretty highly of Natsuiro Kokoro Log (ナツイロココロログ), especially since its OST turned out to be way better than expected. A lot of the tracks have liner notes in the booklet describing what mood in the game each piece was meant to express — you really have to hand it to them for the effort.

And so a fandisc for Natsuiro Kokoro Log got announced pretty much right away, called Natsuiro Kokoro Log HS… no, it should be Natsuiro Kokoro Log Happy Summer. The original game never had much of a main plot to begin with, so as a fandisc, the selling points are naturally the first-press bonus tapestry and the After Stories.

The game gives you seven After Stories: five for the heroines (including the female teacher who looks like Miss Wang), plus two harem stories. On that front alone it’s already showing a fair bit of good faith — most fandiscs just cobble together scraps left over from the main game, and this one actually throws in harem endings. That’s a breakthrough, no?

So I excitedly started with the harem route first. Not that I’m into group stuff, obviously — it’s mainly because this game’s harem route comes first, and the OP prologue is in this route too, so it’s basically the officially designated first route.

The harem route’s story is actually super by-the-numbers — the male lead and the four heroines get roped into working part-time at a shop by the female teacher, and it’s nonstop chaos the whole time. You even get to pick who you focus on during the shifts, except the choice does jack shit. Then, the night after the work wraps up and everyone’s resting, the screen goes black, then brightens… oh fuck, what am I looking at?!

The protagonist and the heroines—yes, heroines, plural—are already stripped naked and lying in bed, ready to get down to it, and he’s asking me which two I want to do first. What the hell kind of pacing is this? But the arrow’s already nocked on the string, there’s no calling it off now, so I hastily pick one, there’s a burst of splooge, the screen goes black and then white again, and it’s morning.

The protagonist catches sight of several embarrassed heroines. Nobody says a word; they just stand there in silence.

So the whole thing just now was a fucking wet dream?

Yes, the protagonist does absolutely nothing. He just has a wet dream — a pretty ridiculous one at that, several tiers below the ones I have every day — and this so-called “harem route” just ends right there, all sloppy and rushed.

I don’t want to see the protagonist, a piece of trash like that, with a girl on each arm — but I want to see a harem route like this even less. It’s ridiculous, zero immersion…

So I figured I’d go check out my favorite route, Tokiwa Kuon’s… and this route is pure After Story. The protagonist is already her boyfriend from the start, and the teacher develops a new VR device and asks him and his girlfriend to test it. This time it can create an independent space for the two of them, for better privacy — written “privacy,” read as “love nest.”

之后的故事你就懂了，男主角和共通线一样借“测试系统”为名，在系统里和我的久遠各种操，海里操，房间里操，海边操，树旁按住我的久遠用力的操，看得我非常的不是滋味儿，其主要原因是不少 CG 男主角还露脸，那张脸仿佛在向我炫耀……

In the end this dumbass protagonist shows up at Kuon’s place again. My Kuon is a proper ojou-sama, her family has money to spare, so she’s not gonna demand a house from him, she’s not gonna tell him to start thinking about marriage plans, and she’s definitely not gonna call him every other day hounding him to answer whether he loves her or not. Rarest of all, she’ll even sit down and play games with him. World’s best girlfriend, honestly. And then this absolute clown of a protagonist goes and fucks her… six times, no less.

The final story is the protagonist proposing to my Kuon, and even putting on a pretentious, fake-sincere act in front of my father-in-law, saying he’ll treat Kuon well. The father-in-law’s expression clearly shows he doesn’t believe the protagonist at all. Out of options, the protagonist drags Kuon’s mother out as a scapegoat, runs to Kuon’s mother’s grave to run his mouth, saying he swears in front of my Kuon’s mother that he’ll marry Kuon.

But every girl has her moments of getting swept up and fooled. Kuon actually said yes without thinking it through, and this dumbass protagonist somehow swindled his way into my Kuon’s family as a live-in son-in-law—just like that. Watching it left me with a mess of mixed feelings.

In the final CG the protagonist shows that face of his again — the one that looks all innocent but is actually the mug of a total scumbag, a bottom-tier fuckboy — and I swear I can see the faint smirk of a winner at the corner of his mouth. It’s like I’m watching my Kuon (久遠) about to tumble into a bottomless pit right along with this dumbass…

Despair… absolute despair…

In desperation I started down the little sister’s route. I’m not a siscon, but I do know her CV Manaka Kano — or maybe we should call her by her other name: Natsuki Nogami.

The little sister’s route is even more of a mind-blower than my Kuon’s. The protagonist just keeps banging his sister over and over, and in the end he doesn’t even give her a proper status — meaning the protagonist never actually becomes her real boyfriend, and he never fully cuts off this physical relationship with her either. It’s just that she’s both the girl he likes and his little sister at the same time. What the hell is that supposed to be? And at this point that dumbass face of the protagonist pops into my head again…

As for the other routes, they honestly disappointed me even more. Kotone has the biggest fanbase but the shortest route, and the final teacher route is 80% the protagonist’s delusions—yet he still ends up sleeping with the teacher anyway. Not sure how to put it. It felt more like a one-night stand than anything else. Bottom line, the guy still got to cop a feel off a girl’s body without ever getting his feelings straight…

While playing, I kept picturing the protagonist’s absolutely clownish face. It made me wonder: how does a spineless, cowardly, wishy-washy, useless protagonist like this get to toy with so many girls and walk away scot-free? Why even create such a shitty protagonist? And why is this called a Fan Disc when it doesn’t give most of the heroines any kind of proper ending? Even the harem is just an illusion. Is the protagonist’s only destiny to marry my Kuon, marry into wealth and status, and reach the peak of life as a live-in son-in-law?

Society’s already this unfair—why do I need to feel reality’s malice again inside a game?

The world is huge, society is huge, and yet your world is always so small—until you discover that on the other side of the dimensional boundary there’s still a beautiful world, where all the pretty girls say they love you. But you can’t cross over to be with them. So another man shows up in that world on the other side. He’s fake, he’s a coward, he’s useless, and yet he claims to represent you. He has protagonist halo, and on that other side he enjoys the happiness you were supposed to enjoy in your place. And you, behind the screen, can only pretend that’s you—until one day it hits you: you’re nothing but an audience member, only able to watch someone else’s happiness and treat it as your own. In the end you’re left with nothing at all…

You light a cigarette and say you can see the past in the smoke. You can’t fuck the girl you want to fuck, so you say all her love went to some thug. In the middle of the night you boot up that familiar game, and oops, you came in your pants.