Aoiro Note (アオイロノート) Review

Since I started playing eroge I’ve eaten a fair amount of shit, and my standards have kept dropping. At this point I figure a game just has to tell one story without being brain-dead, draw the characters decently, and not have some Sendai oba-san for a voice actress — that’s a good game.

Fine, a “not-bad game.”

Japanese people like to call an unexpectedly garbage game a “landmine.” You go in hyped, the drop is enormous, it doesn’t just fail to meet expectations, it’s a turd — like stepping on dog shit, like hitting a landmine, you just explode. Pretty apt, honestly.

I haven’t played many landmines, to be fair. Maybe I just don’t want much, so I don’t expect much, and I’m easy to please. No matter how ridiculous a game gets, I figure it’s at least dumb in an amusing way, at least it’s got something.

Whether a game is dumb or garbage mostly depends on the dev team. Some games, I think the devs could’ve just played them once themselves and known what level they were at — no need to let the players judge, judging it themselves would’ve been enough.

One thing puzzles me though: some eroge are clearly made with zero care in every department. The dev team has to know it’s a slapdash rush job. And they still ship it and sell it.

In other words: you know it’s a turd, you put it on sale anyway, you won’t make money, you’ll only make enemies. Why insist on releasing it?

Today’s subject is a game called Aoiro Note.

Aoiro Note probably translates to “blue note.” I almost want to translate it as “Meizu Blue Note” and be done with it. The game is weird from the start because the studio behind it isn’t a game company — it’s a music-focused outfit. Which is common among eroge makers: “we mainly do music, we make some games on the side” companies are everywhere. The label ad:lib seems tangled up with the music circle i.o.sound. Not that this matters; i.o.sound’s music is actually decent, a few of the songs are pretty good.

My point is that Aoiro Note came out of the gate looking careless.

Early in the year the game’s info started trickling out, mostly through i.o.sound: some BGM samples, the OP, part of an ED. Nobody gave a shit, naturally. Then last month the game finally started a big promotional push…

“Big…” okay, it “just started promoting.”

The promotion was half-assed. Post some art, tweet occasionally, and… that’s it.

Anyway, in a July with no Yuzusoft and no major studios, this game still had zero presence. The marketing department takes the blame for sure — lots of people didn’t even know the game existed. Good luck selling that, especially at that price.

9800 yen, no decent tokuten, just a few illustrations. Is anyone really buying this for the artist?

Speaking of the artist, that’s worth mentioning. Credited as “Moo℃団,” but that’s a pen name — the real name is Yoshihiro Watanabe, an animator who occasionally does animation direction. Typical credits include Haganai and Sora no Otoshimono, and more recently Shinmai Maou no Testament I think. Anyway, his style is…

The coloring looks exactly like TV anime.

That might not land without a picture, so here.

If you didn’t know better you’d think it was a screenshot from some anime.

For Aoiro Note that “anime-style coloring” is probably the biggest selling point, and I’m not even sure it’s a plus or a minus — but it’s a feature. Everything else about the game looks profoundly uninteresting.

Yeah, uninteresting. Even from the pre-release info I didn’t want to play it.

The story: the protagonist transfers into a school, wants to start an activity club, and experience his youth.

That’s it.

That’s it.

Does that premise make you want to play? Doesn’t it sound bone-dry? Whether you think it’s terrible or not, I figured it was OK — the reading would be easy, the Japanese dumbed down, good practice at least.

So I played it. Then I skimmed the ErogameScape reviews from Japanese players and got scared.

Only two reviews, both negative:

“Uh… this isn’t a slice-of-life youth moe game at all…” “I recommend saving Miku (heroine #1) for last, because hers is the worst.”

Honestly that made me more curious. What was so bad about heroine #1’s route that it got dunked on like that? Was there some super-landmine twist?

So I opened the game… and yeah. Read on.

As expected, the game is extremely boring. Not just boring — painfully clichéd.

The protagonist enters school, and with his two childhood friends — one boy, one girl… right, one of them is a crossdresser, the kind who’s drawn as a girl and insists he’s male — sets out to enjoy his youth at the new school.

At school he notices a cold, aloof girl in his class, Aoyama Miku, heroine #1. She never talks to anyone, and the protagonist can’t approach her either. Then one day he runs into her putting up club recruitment posters — his first successful conversation with her. Turns out she isn’t cold at all; she wants to talk to people, she just doesn’t know how.

In short, she looks aloof but is actually lonely and doesn’t know how to break out of it, so she secretly put up posters hoping to start a club.

The protagonist discovers they’re kindred spirits and decides to help her, dragging in his two childhood friends and some other girls…

And then the plot gets so formulaic it hurts. They form the club, find an advisor, screw around in the clubroom every day, and the protagonist realizes Miku is actually a great girl — why does she have so few friends when she’s this nice?

Then things move fast. The protagonist and the club girls go to the pool, and Miku suddenly collapses. In the nurse’s office she tells him it’s nothing, an old problem — since childhood she’s fainted for no reason and been hospitalized for half a year at a time, which is why she has no friends.

The protagonist thinks, well, that’s that, and wishes her good health.

But as the days pass, Miku’s condition worsens. After one last club activity she says she has to go back to the hospital, that she’s happy everyone helped her fulfill her wish to “enjoy youth,” and that she’ll rejoin the club when she’s discharged. The protagonist visits her several times, they start dating, and they fuck a few times.

After some time in the hospital, Miku is discharged. She’s more cheerful than before, goes to the summer festival with the protagonist, and while watching fireworks they promise to come again next time.

After the festival Miku vanishes. The protagonist hasn’t seen his girlfriend for a week, so he asks her mother. Her mother says she’s been hospitalized, this time at a hospital out of town.

Another week passes. The teacher announces in class that Miku has died of illness.

The protagonist is devastated. I’m devastated too — except he’s crying and I’m fucking laughing at the screen.

Because the twist is so goddamn dumb.

Then the childhood friend suddenly shows up to comfort him, saying she knew about Miku’s terminal illness all along. The protagonist is stunned. The childhood friend explains: while Miku was sick she secretly came to see her, said she didn’t have long, and wanted to break up with the protagonist. So the second time she forced the doctors to let her go back to school to say goodbye to her friends, and at the summer festival she meant to break up but couldn’t. So she told the childhood friend: after I die, I’m leaving him in your care.

The protagonist says “I’m not listening, I’m not listening, I’m not listening” and shuts himself in his room.

Finally, just as the childhood friend is about to call a doctor, he comes out and accepts that his girlfriend is dead.

But he still can’t let go — after all, he promised her they’d watch the fireworks at the next summer festival. The childhood friend pops up: since she was entrusted with looking after him, let’s do this — she’ll wear his dead girlfriend’s clothes and go to the summer festival with him.

The game ends on a CG of the protagonist and his childhood friend watching fireworks, with the childhood friend hinting a confession, and the protagonist saying “I’ll give you my answer after next year’s fireworks.”

And then the game’s over.

Now I understand why those two Japanese reviewers were mad.

The game is just so dumb. I don’t mean “heroine #1 dies of terminal illness” is dumb — I mean the whole game’s pacing and production are dumb.

It looks like anime but doesn’t use that advantage. There are pitifully few CGs, and anime-style art always lacks the “polish” of normal galge art. The game doesn’t make up for it anywhere, so it looks slapdash no matter what.

The music left no impression. Very few BGM tracks, and cheap.

I don’t recognize any of the voice actresses and none of them stand out. Heroine #1’s CV is credited under the alias “Ranjou Kaika” — who is this, some newcomer?

The game chases trends: “youth,” “student council,” “circle,” and the most clichéd of all, “draw a girl and insist she’s a guy.”

The story I can’t even talk about. It’s not that I can’t accept “heroine #1 dies” — that could be written well. Take a certain game called ASTER — that one was at least passable, because it was drenched in tragedy from the start and hammered the tragic mood to the end while also pushing the protagonist to “move on.” Compared to ASTER, Aoiro Note is pure chaos. It forces cheerfulness at the start, with daily-life scenes so boring they’re painful, then suddenly in the back half it flips — suddenly the heroine has a terminal illness, suddenly she rallies, suddenly she dies. Then suddenly the protagonist treats the childhood friend as a rebound.

A game that keeps pulling “suddenly” out of its ass gives off zero sense of care — like Newbee in the TI7 grand final. You can do a thing badly, but you don’t have to do it this ugly.

All in all, Aoiro Note has no redeeming points, maybe except the art style — and for that I’d just tell you to watch the anime instead. Sora no Otoshimono or Haganai, either works. Everything else has no sincerity and is very dumb.

How dumb? So dumb that after playing it this month I almost don’t want to play anything else. That shit-eating feeling…

It won’t wash off. Hard to swallow.

I can’t say for sure what the dumbest game of the year is — the second half isn’t out yet — but “dumbest game of the month” is locked in, right?