Hatsukoi Syndrome (初恋＊シンドローム) Review

Confucius, Jesus, Guang Liang and Shinjou Yuu all said it: “first love is infinitely beautiful.” Especially in Japan, a country with an especially deep complex about “初めて” (the first time), “first love” means a sweeter, more awkward, even slightly painful memory you can’t stop chewing on.

“First love” is the first time someone’s heart stirs, the first time they taste what romance is, the first time they start to mature emotionally and learn the playbook. After going through it, a person might turn into a smooth operator or a cynical old hand who no longer gets moved by the simple stuff. Seen that way, first love really is precious.

First love always shows up without warning, and just like I don’t know when mine started, I’ve still had one. That was back in elementary school, when my grades were inexplicably good — so good I couldn’t tell you why — and my PE was inexplicably good too, to the point where I could win first place just by showing up. Maybe that’s why some of the girls admired me? I pretended to brush against my deskmate’s hand by accident, and she got wildly embarrassed (blushing), though I didn’t notice at the time. I also ran into the class beauty on the way to school, and she wanted to buy me snacks, but I said “your snacks aren’t as good as the ones at my house,” which annoyed her a lot. By graduation I’d received several photos from female classmates. One of them was a girl I really liked chatting with — we’d swap games and talk about the future. She was about my height and always loved talking to me. I said I liked games, so she’d go play the games I’d played. After graduation she called me several times on her own initiative. I’ve forgotten what we talked about. What I remember more vividly is that her outfits were always a little bold — she dared to wear very short skirts in elementary school. Of course, I also accidentally caught a few glimpses going up the stairs. Once she noticed, and she just smiled at me.

I didn’t realize she was any different from anyone else back then. I even did a lot of truly dumb shit. There was a boy in class who kept declaring he liked this girl, and I went along and defaulted to that too, joking about her and that boy left and right. I even wrote in my graduation autograph book wishing them a hundred years of happiness together. In reality the two of them barely talked; she talked to me way more than she talked to him. In middle school we were still somewhat in touch. I think she said something fairly profound to me, but I’ve forgotten it. In high school I found her on MSN, we added each other, and started chatting again. The conversation drifted to the past. She remembered a lot about the things between us — most of which I’d forgotten. Then one day I noticed she had a boyfriend, and I suddenly felt a bit… how should I put it. Uncomfortable? Maybe even a little angry? Only years later did I realize I might have been treating her as someone special without meaning to, and she’d felt the same once — I was just too stupid to recognize what it was.

So years later, hearing the line “なにもしらないわたし、愛を教えて” in the Clover Hearts OP, I can only smile bitterly. Was I dense, or just an idiot?

I’m not sure whether that counts as my first love, but after that whole thing I rarely talked to girls anymore. I got fatter, uglier, more shut-in. Even when I talked to girls a lot, that feeling wasn’t there. Later at work I pursued a fujoshi in the office, and after three years of being strung along I was exhausted. When she finally said she’d only wanted me as a backup, I didn’t even feel that hurt or upset. I just figured, fine, bye then.

So here I am after all that. I’ve met plenty of girls, chatting is no problem, but that unease and pain I felt back when I learned that girl had a boyfriend is gone. These days it’s mostly “if it works out, great; if not, I’ll move on to the next one.” I know the game too well to get played anymore. A while back a female doctor tried to keep me as a backup, and I countered her on the spot. She chased after me apologizing, and I couldn’t be bothered. If emotions can’t get stirred up anymore, why not just be good to myself?

I don’t know if what happened in elementary school counts as my “first love.” I think it does. It’s the one time my heart genuinely skipped and the memory makes me wince. After that it was just calculation and weighing options — the fluttering was gone.

There were two reasons I started reminiscing. One, I was organizing my photo albums recently and found the photo that girl gave me. The other, I recently played a game called Hatsukoi Syndrome (初恋＊シンドローム).

Like I said at the start, the Japanese are obsessed with “first love,” so they crank out a ton of works about it, eroge included. Besides Purely Cation and various pure-love stories about how wonderful first love is, there are also ones like Hatsukoi-san Kaime that depict its ups and downs, and Majokoi Nikki, which uses all sorts of frivolous romances to make first love look better by comparison. So Hatsukoi Syndrome is the story of a protagonist stuck in the shadow of his failed first love.

The title, 初恋＊シンドローム, uses “シンドローム,” i.e. syndrome. Hong Kong and Taiwan like to translate it as “症候群”; the mainland more often says “complications” or “aftereffects.” So the title basically means “First Love Aftereffects.”

Going by the official site’s description, the story sounds like it has a lot going for it. The protagonist liked a girl three years ago, they were good friends, but he never confessed. On graduation day he confessed and she turned him down. That was the end of his first love, and he became a heartbroken man. Three years later he meets a new girl, and the first thing she says to him is “Will you go out with me?” While he’s standing there dumbfounded, the girl he confessed to three years ago shows up too. Every sign suggests she didn’t really mean to turn him down back then, and she still loves him now.

A girl shows up out of nowhere and confesses to the protagonist, and the girl he confessed to three years ago and got rejected by appears at the same time. What’s a protagonist to do?

Very romantic. Very artsy. Very White Album. Should have a bit of a love triangle going, right? Feels like it’d be all youthful and innocent, right?

Bullshit!

The game starts out giving you a pure-love vibe, and then the plot developments hit and I felt like I’d been screwed by a dog.

It all starts when the protagonist one day wanders behind a big tree into another world. He goes in and finds his first love from three years ago, Kurose Haruka — the one he confessed to — and a blonde girl named Luna, who confessed to him under that same tree. The two of them explain to him: turns out they’re mages. Mages. MAGES!! And his first love from three years ago is a mage instructor, while Luna is an ungraduated student!! And the school the protagonist attends is on the surface a normal school, but behind it there’s a secret magic school. And the training process for mages requires experiencing a romance once, or you can’t graduate.

So basically, a mage’s graduation project is to experience a romance and then get dumped, so they can become a proper mage.

That’s not how it works, teacher! I thought you had to be a virgin at 30 to become a mage. When did it become about losing it instead?

Then the protagonist has his epiphany: so his first love from three years ago was just using him for practice? She flirted with him, then turned him down when he confessed, went through heartbreak, and became a certified mage — even got a teaching job.

And now this blonde Luna, flirting with him, tells him straight out that she wants to graduate too, so she asks if he wants to date — get together, then get dumped, and she can graduate and become a mage too.

What kind of setup is this? Every female mage uses the protagonist as a stepping stone for graduation. What is he, a combat training dummy?

After that the plot goes completely off the rails. Luna barges into the protagonist’s house and moves in with him, looking for the feeling of being in love, while Kurose Haruka, the ex he confessed to three years ago, watches with a dark expression from the sidelines, occasionally getting jealous but never saying anything.

This development is so bizarre it’s explosive. It could have been a well-written romance, or a youthful, gut-wrenching love triangle. Why drag in this stupid “mage” setting?

I know Campus is a shell company for Light, and Light is the pinnacle of chuuni, but you can’t just shove magic into everything. Would it kill you to write a proper romance? The game even starts fleshing out edge details for its stupid magic setting — how many schools of magic there are, how to get promoted to archmage, how to level up your magic. Come on! What does any of that have to do with romance? This is Hatsukoi Syndrome, not Magical Syndrome, okay? A perfectly decent- looking “romance” setup gets ruined by an inexplicable magic setting.

Still, the game keeps trying to depict the sweetness of romance — showing how cute Luna is while living with the protagonist, and so on. The artist did a genuinely good job; the music fits the sweet, saccharine atmosphere of love. And worth mentioning is the engine, which seems to use something like a Waifu2X algorithm — no matter how you stretch the screen, it recalculates and redraws the image, meaning you can see very fine detail even at 4K. But none of that covers up the game’s ridiculously stupid magic setting.

I don’t know if Campus’s other “Four Seasons Lies” series does the same thing, or if they share a setting. From what I can tell it seems so — probably all stories about a magic school? I’m not sure. But for Hatsukoi Syndrome specifically, the magic setting is pure taking off your pants to fart — utterly pointless. And the game pours tons of text into this useless crappy setting, which is just incomprehensible.

The late-game developments are even more irritating. After living with Luna for a while, the protagonist falls in love with her. Meanwhile Kurose Haruka, the girl he confessed to three years ago, watches him get intimate with another woman and gets jealous, suddenly decides she still loves him, and confesses to him at the end of the story. The protagonist rejects her, saying he’s already in love with someone else — Luna. And Luna, after dating the protagonist, needs to go through a breakup to graduate as a mage. But then the protagonist fires off a love-infinity move, declaring that even if he gets dumped he’ll still love Luna. And that’s how the main story ends.

Kurose Haruka’s role is painfully awkward. The protagonist confessed to her three years ago; she dated him in the first place because she wanted to graduate as a mage, and she turned him down to complete her mage training by going through heartbreak. In theory she’s loved the protagonist all along, and he’s been stuck in the aftereffects of his “first love” breakup, unable to move on. Reuniting three years later, the two of them should realize something and rekindle the old flame… That’s the proper route the game should take, and it would’ve reflected the title well.

Instead some new girl shows up out of nowhere and steals the protagonist away. His first love from three years ago gets demoted to NPC, and the game flat-out tells you Kurose Haruka is not a romanceable route. What kind of development is that? My real-life first love already went that way — that girl from elementary school married another man. Now you pull the same thing in a game, and shove in a clumsy magic setting on top? Are you trying to start something?

I don’t really get what this game is trying to do. Show how wonderful first love is? Or club the losers like me who occasionally remember their first love over the head? I’m not saying blonde Luna isn’t cute, but her role in the plot is weird — she’s positioned like a third party, and she flat-out tells the protagonist at the start that she’s using him as a stepping stone to graduate as a mage. And in the after-story, even if you pick Luna, there’s a bizarre melodramatic development where her father threatens the protagonist with his daughter’s life. Plus a dumb subplot about Luna being traumatized by her mother’s death so she can’t use magic properly. I don’t know what the writer was on. You could’ve written a perfectly good romance — why go out of your way to sabotage it?

There’s a Japanese guy on ErogameScape who tears this game apart. His complaints mostly miss the point, but one thing he says is right: “first love” is supposed to mean the first romance, and in this game, is the protagonist’s really a “first”?

Thinking about it, you can’t really say the game lied to you. It’s “first love syndrome,” or “first love aftereffects.” The game depicts the protagonist getting over his first-love-breakup “aftereffects.” It took him three years, but he got over it — even if he chose another woman.

Still, it leaves a bad taste. My “first love” ended so many years ago and I still don’t seem to have much drive or feeling. I don’t know if I’ve gotten over it. If first love is a disease, where’s the cure? Find a third party like the protagonist did?