Casablanca no Tsubomi (カサブランカの蕾) Review

I read a lot of forums, and there’s this pattern I keep noticing. Women-dominated forums are mostly people dunking on scumbag boyfriends. Men-dominated forums, porn boards aside, are mostly people tearing each other apart and crying about getting cuckolded.

Getting cuckolded is a weird phenomenon, yet apparently a really common one. Are that many people actually getting cheated on? Are that many people actually choosing to forgive him or her? Either way, several forums I frequent have picked up new nicknames that don’t even match anymore. Greenery Street. Thunder Bluff. Some people don’t even bother being subtle and just rename the whole forum “Cuckold Forum.”

So lately my browsing is nothing but green everywhere. Halal green, betrayed green, green this way and green that way. At first I found it gross, then I got used to it. I can’t even get someone to take me on as a rebound, so what do I care about cuckolding?

This “getting cuckolded” setup is common in Japanese eroge too. The Japanese call it 寝取る, NTR. Basically your wife gets slept with, which means you got cuckolded. NTR games have their fans, but most of them are the same: you get a girlfriend, she gets screwed behind your back, and in the end you either forgive her or leave her.

But think about it, why is NTR always by convention the woman betraying the man? What about the man betraying the woman?

We call that cheating too, but it still can’t compare to the whole green-this-green-that internet culture, can it.

I wasn’t paying much attention to Casablanca no Tsubomi (カサブランカの蕾) at first. The name is unusual. Casablanca is a movie, and the movie does have a bit of that “forgive her” flavor. But the game comes from a new More brand, and it looks like a nukige. A nukige with such a literary title, is it trying to be Lust, Caution or something?

On release day I heard the news that Casablanca no Tsubomi blew up as a landmine. The protagonist doesn’t end up with the heroine. The heroine kicks him to the curb. A bunch of players said they couldn’t accept it. But honestly, that kind of development is pretty common, right? How many times has Yūsuke Niijima pulled that trick? And one more reckless writer is no big deal, right?

Still, it got me curious. I wanted to see how reckless this game really was, how much of a landmine, so I played it.

After finishing it, I just sat there sighing. This game isn’t a landmine. If anything it’s a story that really makes you think.

The story is set back when the protagonist was in school, some old era, it seems. He lives in a mountain village, and right at the start a girl confesses to him. Her name is Shiina Yuri, and she says she likes him. He thinks it over and agrees to go out with her.

So the protagonist has a girlfriend from the very beginning. Honestly, that sounds pretty nice.

But in reality, he doesn’t like the girl who confessed to him that much. He likes another girl in class, Hirayama Miku. He accepted Yuri’s confession only because he figured she wasn’t bad, so he might as well date her for now. In his heart he’s still thinking about Miku.

One day, in an empty classroom, he finds a pair of socks Miku left in her desk after changing for gym class.

He sneaks them out and starts jerking off into Miku’s socks.

They’re the socks of a goddess, so the fap factor must be high.

He’s going at it hard when someone catches him. A classmate, a girl named Shijō Kana.

Kana is a little-devil type. She’s got him by the balls now. He has a girlfriend and he’s jerking off to someone else’s socks behind her back. That’s too perverted. No way anyone would accept that if word got out.

The protagonist begs Kana not to tell. Kana says, “Fine. From now on you’re my toy.”

The protagonist has no choice but to agree.

After that the perverted stuff kicks in. The protagonist likes photography, and Kana starts making all kinds of unreasonable demands, including that he quickly have sex with Yuri and take dirty photos for her, while Kana herself toys with him and naturally has sex with him too. Her demands keep escalating, and a lot of the play felt over the line even to me. For example, Kana makes him screw his girlfriend Yuri while Kana watches or listens in, and gets off on it.

Soon Kana gets bored and finds a new game. She knows the protagonist likes Miku.

“Go secretly film Miku!”

The protagonist is coerced into doing it.

The voyeuristic filming of Miku escalates, and Miku notices him. Soon Miku starts approaching him, and the protagonist is thrilled to get close to his goddess, so he cheats without hesitation. Then he discovers Miku is actually a slut, a total pervert, and the two of them start all kinds of play. Kana even joins in, and the three of them have threesomes whenever. The most messed-up part is that when Kana and Miku have a threesome with him, the two of them compete with each other, and the target of the competition is Yuri. While he’s screwing them, they demand he keep Yuri in his mind…

Anyway, the three of them get more advanced, more beastly, more disgusting, and I got more and more unable to watch.

And the protagonist does all of this behind his girlfriend Yuri’s back. Yuri still waits for him after school so they can walk home, walks with him in the morning, and comes up to talk to him on her own. He never breaks up with her, but he gets colder and colder. Sometimes he even sleeps with Yuri just to satisfy those two female perverts’ need to watch.

The two female perverts drag him deeper and deeper, the three of them get more and more hardcore, and they even bring up the idea of pulling Yuri in for a foursome. The protagonist starts getting rougher with Yuri, and Yuri keeps apologizing to him, wondering if she did something wrong…

Of course, before the foursome happens, something goes wrong.

The dirty photos he took of Yuri early on get posted on the blackboard…

The protagonist asks Kana and Miku, and both say they’re innocent. Yuri is stunned. Her naked body is shown to the whole class, and she doesn’t know what to do.

And the protagonist chooses to run away… to distance himself. Yuri talks to him, says her parents are furious and want her to break up with him, since their daughter’s dirty photos got spread around… indecent. Yuri demands to know why her photos were taken by someone else. Even now she still trusts her boyfriend and wants him to come clean.

The protagonist feels he really has wronged Yuri and starts wanting to turn back, but Kana and Miku keep showing up to seduce him. Kana threatens, Miku flaunts. Yuri sees how they act, and she seems about to figure something out.

Some time later, late at night, Yuri calls him out to meet at school. He’s surprised to see her. That day she’s bold, actively playing all kinds of games with him. After they screw each other senseless, they exchange a promise to be together forever. The next day, he learns Yuri has transferred schools and moved away…

His vision goes dark, and he never sees Yuri again.

Years later, in another city, he runs into Yuri by chance. She’s all grown up.

“Oh, it’s you!” Yuri looks happy to see him. “So, how are things? Still in touch with Miku and Kana?”

“Haven’t talked to them in ages.” Two easy women like that would never stay friends with him forever.

“Ah, that’s too bad.”

“Um…” The protagonist opens his mouth to say what’s in his heart. “I still remember… our promise.”

Before Yuri can answer, a man in the distance calls her over… The protagonist looks, and despairs. If he’s not mistaken, that must be Yuri’s husband.

“Well then, since you say you remember the promise, let me ask you one thing.”

“What?”

“Who I fall in love with, who I marry, what kind of life I live, you… just watch carefully, all right?”

“…” From Yuri’s expression, the protagonist sees the mockery behind it.

“Well then, see you around, pervert.”

Yuri disappears, leaving the protagonist standing there dazed. Why did Yuri leave back then? Did she find out about his depravity? How much did she know?

Everything is a mystery. The only sure thing is that the cheating protagonist got dumped by his girlfriend and, like a beaten dog, will never find happiness.

To put it bluntly, Casablanca no Tsubomi is the story of a protagonist who has a perfectly good girlfriend, doesn’t appreciate her, cheats and has perverted threesomes with other women, and in the end his girlfriend finds out (or maybe not much), and kicks this scumbag to the curb.

Three details are worth mentioning:

1. The game spends a lot of words on the protagonist’s inner thoughts, that uncontrollable lust, that urge to bang any woman he sees. It really does portray his step-by-step fall into cheating and depravity.

2. The sex scenes are extremely explicit. A lot of the play in the middle disgusted me, and maybe that’s exactly the point, to highlight how pitiful the protagonist’s girlfriend is, and how addicted he is to carnal desire.

3. The game’s ED is a rearranged version of the ED from an older game, ソラコイ. Actually ソラコイ’s plot is a little similar to this game, in that the two leads don’t end up together in the end. But ソラコイ is more or less a tragedy, while Casablanca no Tsubomi is more of a story about a protagonist who wouldn’t have gotten screwed if he hadn’t screwed himself.

The protagonist of Casablanca no Tsubomi is a textbook example of self-destruction. The best girlfriend, a pure love, handed to him from the start. Because he can’t control his desires, it leads to betrayal and cheating, and he goes further and further down the cheating road. His girlfriend stays in the dark, but eventually she wakes up, chooses to cut ties completely, and even gets a little revenge at the end. It leaves you with complicated feelings. Things shouldn’t have turned out this way. Why did it end up like this?

A while back, a bunch of friends told me that at my age, never having had a proper relationship, still a virgin, I should go to prostitutes more so I wouldn’t be so nervous around women.

I think keeping your lower half in check is still important. Following your desires just to use prostitutes will eventually drag you in, and one result is that you’ll miss out on good love.

Sex is part of love, but not all of it.

Casablanca no Tsubomi also showed me my past self. I too once accepted a confession from a girl I didn’t especially like, and it ended with her cursing me out as a “pervert.”

I guess I brought it on myself, and seeing the protagonist of this game felt familiar.

There’s a very famous line in this world: Once there was a sincere love placed before me, but I didn’t cherish it…

As a kid I didn’t get it and just recited along. But as my experience grew, I started to understand what that line means.