Kiniro Loveriche (金色ラブリッチェ) Review

Every SAGA PLANETS game follows the same formula: individual routes scatter the pieces of the main story, then a GRAND END ties all the threads together and walks you to the true ending.

They’ve done this in several of their titles, from Hatsuyuki Sakura to Kisaragi GOLD STAR to Hanasaki Work Spring! and Floral Flowlove. Roughly: the character routes screw around, maybe drop a hint about the main plot at the very end, and only after you’ve cleared every route does the game unlock the entrance to the real story, the TRUE END.

Honestly the structure isn’t bad. It’s kind of interesting, it builds suspense. But it doesn’t fit every kind of story, and SAGA PLANETS has tripped over this formula more than once, or at least failed to deliver the payoff it deserves. Those games tend to be slice-of-life stuff with a weak main plot, where it feels like “we made a main plot because we need a main plot.” In other words, the route lock is completely unnecessary. It’s a moe game. You don’t need to force-hide a main story and a so-called “truth” behind it. When you finally see it you don’t go “oh, mind blown” — you go “that’s it?” Reverse effect.

In recent years SAGA PLANETS’ choice of premises has gotten less and less interesting. Last year’s Floral Flowlove was themed around “ojousama,” young ladies, which made it look like ENSEMBLE had possessed the company (and of course, in the end the story had nothing to do with ojousama). And when this year’s game was announced I felt the same way: it’s called Kin’iro Loveriche, and the theme is “blonde hair.” Every heroine is blonde. At first glance it looks like it exists to satisfy some specific fetish. I personally don’t like blondes, and I haven’t noticed many people who do (silver hair, I’ve seen people into that). Blond-haired men are never any good either. The whole thing felt kind of nonsensical to me — but based on my prior experience with SAGA PLANETS, this “blonde” had to be a decoy, and there’d be a GRAND END at the end, 99% unrelated to gold hair.

After finishing the game, I figure I was half right and half wrong.

The game opens with the protagonist doing a princess carry down the street, saving a young lady who’s being chased by villains. Turns out it was all a misunderstanding — she’d wandered off on her own, security found her and told her to go back, and he mistook them for thugs chasing her. The hero helps in exactly the wrong way, gets labeled a kidnapper, and gets taken down by the young lady’s guards.

The young lady is a blonde aristocrat, foreign nobility at that, named Sylvie. There’s also a female knight-type always at her side, a sort of head of security, named Elle.

Sylvie clears everything up and says the hero was just trying to help, badly. To apologize, she invites him to attend the noble school she goes to. Conveniently, he’s just dropped out of his old school, so he agrees. Off he goes to this noble academy full of aristocrats and geniuses, and he meets some friends: Sylvie and Elle, obviously; Reina, a fashion-design honors student and total hot girl; Kuriu Akane, a track-and-field prodigy (?) who’s always out running; and Ria, a delinquent who never attends class and just hides on the roof smoking.

I should mention here that the protagonist is a huge fan of a singer named Maria Bishop, and the true identity of this singer is obviously the roof-smoking delinquent Ria he sees every day. You can tell from the voice acting the instant the game starts. Only the protagonist is too dense to notice.

The common route is just daily life at the noble school — chatting and goofing off with the princess, classmates, and the princess’s little sister Mina (Akinohana, bless, prprprprprprprpr), until you reach the route split.

As I said, the game has a route lock. You need to clear every heroine route before the final one opens.

The unlocking is about as blunt as it gets: after the OP, restart the game and just pick a route.

I picked Reina, because I had a good impression of the one lively girl in the cast, and her personality is a lot like Kiritani Hana from Hanasaki Work Spring!. She’s voiced by Sendai-obasan, but you can tell the obasan is imitating Kiritani Hana’s style.

And then the first route blew up in my face.

There’s basically no actual content. The protagonist talks to Reina every day, starts to like her, but Reina is a people-person of the highest order. You play several hours of her route and still can’t tell whether she has any romantic interest in you. It’s just a normal friendship. The guy keeps clinging, Reina keeps brushing him off. He even whines to her about why he dropped out of his old school. She goes “aw, poor thing, there there” and comforts him and does nothing else.

By the way, the reason he dropped out is also pretty stupid. His old school’s baseball team was a powerhouse, and to keep it that way the school forced the brass band to give up their own competition and act as cheerleaders for the baseball team. The protagonist, a baseball player, thought it was wrong for the band to lose out for his sake, so he protested. The school ignored him. He protested harder. He got punished, got demoted to the bench on the baseball team, and the brass band still ended up giving up their competition to cheer. The baseball team’s morale tanked and they didn’t win the championship either. Lost on both fronts. Everyone blamed the guy, said he stuck his nose where it didn’t belong, that the baseball team wouldn’t have fallen apart without him. He got fed up and left.

While Reina was being all unresponsive I was still interested, honestly. In romance that’s the most common situation there is: the girl doesn’t realize the guy’s feelings, and you need some special event to close the distance, some back-and-forth to make it work.

Then the so-called “special event” arrived, and I blew up.

Apparently a noble classmate of his, Ayaka, got her hands on some kind of aphrodisiac incense from somewhere and accidentally left it in the protagonist’s room. She tries to run, gets cornered in the room by the protagonist and Reina coming back, and hides in the closet. So the incense keeps spreading, and all three of them get knocked out. And under the influence… they have a 3P!

Yes. A 3P. He comes inside, too. Afterwards everyone is full of regret, except Reina, whose reaction is mild — she’s mostly worried about getting pregnant.

The protagonist says if you’re pregnant, get an abortion. Reina says no, if I’m pregnant I’m keeping it. Then some time passes and it turns out she’s not pregnant, but the incense incident has turned her and the protagonist into… friends with benefits? They do it now and then, they do it enough that feelings develop, they do it enough that they get hooked, and eventually they figure, well, might as well just stay together.

Reina says that’s fine too. And the route just ends like that.

My face:

What the hell kind of love story is this? This is a nukige, isn’t it?

The route I had the most hope for turns out like this?

Furious, I went for the second route, the jogging braid girl, Kuriu Akane. Her route unlocks after you clear any one other route.

And after playing it I blew up again… what the hell is this route? Copy-paste?

The plot is offensively generic, pure template work. The underclassman declares at the start that she’s actually been crushing on the protagonist for ages but can’t say it. Then some dumb stuff happens, she finally confesses, they bang once, ENDING.

I don’t even know what to say about how half-assed this route is. Later I found this line on the scenario writer Sakaki Kasa’s blog:

僕は金髪４人のシナリオを担当。茜に関しては別の方にお任せしております。体験版段階でもちょいちょい茜が絡んできたシーンはそちらで調整されたようですね

Which roughly means he only wrote the four blonde characters, and the braid girl was outsourced. A freebie thrown in with your phone credit. No wonder it’s so lazy.

So the two remaining characters — honestly I’d lost interest by then, but for the GRAND END I had to keep going.

The female knight Eloina’s route has no highlights either. It just reveals her identity: she’s actually the older sister of the current princess Sylvie, but because she lacked talent in music and other areas she chose the path of the knight and willingly serves as the current princess’s aide. It also mentions that the princess’s little sister Mina isn’t blood-related, just an adopted daughter, because everyone with royal blood is blonde — Sylvie and the knight Eloina are both blonde and look similar, which proves the point.

The final character route is Princess Sylvie’s, and this is where the game’s plot starts getting fucked up.

What’s fucked up about it? First, it’s confirmed that the protagonist met Sylvie when they were kids. In his memory he attended some kind of CAMP event (camping) where he met Princess Sylvie, and back then the two of them found a box in the river with a golden Loveriche inside. Honestly I couldn’t even look up what a Loveriche is; from the CG it looks like some little thing made of gold foil stickers. Sylvie and the protagonist were close back then, and ten years later when they meet again, the protagonist says he’s forgotten all about the past.

Yes, he says he forgot. And then the moment you enter Sylvie’s route, he immediately remembers.

Princess Sylvie says that at that camp as a kid she met her first love, the person she liked. The protagonist assumes the person she likes is him, and figures that since the princess likes him so much it’d be rude not to confess, so he might as well take the easy win. Then the princess says: no, my first love wasn’t you, it was someone named Souma-kun.

The protagonist got ahead of himself.

And a major part of Sylvie’s route is explaining who this Souma-kun is. So who is he? She’s a girl — the roof-smoking delinquent Souma Ria.

Yes. At the start the protagonist says he doesn’t know Ria, doesn’t remember anything from his past with her, and then right at this point in the story he suddenly remembers.

So let’s sum up: as a kid the protagonist attended a camp. The people at the camp included Princess Sylvie, Souma Ria, and the protagonist. Surely more than just the three of them, but at least those three.

The three of them got along well at camp. Souma Ria was dressed as a boy at the time, and Princess Sylvie thought she was a boy and somehow fell for her, so she calls her her first love, Souma-kun.

So that’s the situation. The protagonist hasn’t been rejected, you can’t say he has no chance, so he starts making moves on the princess. But then someone beats him to it.

The princess has some social engagements in Japan, including chatting up the sons of rich Japanese families. One Japanese company starts manufacturing a scandal about their young heir and the princess, trying to hype themselves up, and even plans to force a kiss on the princess and have paparazzi photograph it so they can seize the moment.

Naturally, the protagonist foils the plot. The one who force-kisses the princess is him.

And then it all proceeds smoothly. With the forced kiss as the spark, the relationship develops. The protagonist chooses the princess, the princess chooses the protagonist, and the protagonist marries into wealth and power and becomes a diplomat after they’re married.

One thing worth mentioning: not long after the protagonist and the princess start dating, Souma Ria tells him that she is Maria Bishop, and shortly after she announces her retirement. Souma Ria herself stops singing. No reason given.

So we finally arrive at the TRUE END, but before that, let me say how this game has made me feel so far:

The experience has been terrible.

The daily dialogue is fine, but the overall structure is a pile of sand. A lot of the characters are flat as cardboard, and the main heroine Princess Sylvie’s VA, Nekomiya Yuki, is just bad. No presence at all. Worse than last year’s Nakamura.

The only thing carrying the daily sections is Sendai-obasan, Sendai Eri. She’s the only engine in the story, the only one who sets a rhythm and keeps the game from putting you to sleep — and her route is the stupidest of them all.

The character routes are about as ordinary as ordinary gets. You can’t say they don’t mention the main plot at all, they just do it in the most idiotic way possible.

And there’s exactly one reason it’s idiotic: the protagonist’s selective amnesia.

He met the princess as a kid, attended that so-called camp — so why doesn’t he recognize her the first time he sees her?

And it’s not that he completely doesn’t recognize her. He sometimes remembers things from the past, but every time he says “I have a vague memory, but I don’t remember the details.”

And then that “don’t remember” suddenly gets remembered whenever he enters certain specific routes.

Yes. Suddenly remembered. Earlier he forgot, later, when the plot needs it, his memory comes online instantly.

What does this extremely stupid “selective amnesia” feel like? It feels like during the character routes and the common route you can sense there’s some secret behind the game, something in the protagonist’s past, but he absolutely won’t say. If he just kept his mouth shut entirely, fine. But the game chooses the dumbest possible move: “I forgot.”

The game keeps teasing you, telling you something big happened in the past, and when you get curious and want to see what it was…

Forgot.

The game keeps flirting with you, telling you the protagonist did something as a kid, and when you get curious and want to know what…

Forgot.

The game keeps messing with you, telling you the protagonist dreamed about his childhood again, and when you get curious and want to understand the dream…

Forgot!

Forgot, forgot, forgot — did you forget the thing about fucking your mother too?

If the plot ever needs “fucking your mother,” our protagonist sure as hell won’t forget it. The amnesia trick has been run into the ground by scenario writers at this point.

The character routes also feature an unbearably cute green-haired little sister voiced by Toono Soyogi — and when you want to pursue her…

You find out the protagonist’s best friend has already snagged her. And only late in the game does it bother telling you this green-haired girl is the protagonist’s biological sister, and he never mentioned it, maybe because he forgot that too.

And so what if she’s his sister? Can’t you fuck your sister? Isn’t keeping it in the family fine? Not that I’m into siscon.

I’d already lost my patience with this game during the character routes, but if I hadn’t seen the Japanese praising it so hard on ErogameScape, I wouldn’t have cared about the final GRAND END.

So let’s look at how the Japanese rated it.

• The Ria route (i.e. the TRUE END) is the best part of the game
• The Ria route made me cry
• The Ria route deals with life and death

So what do you think? Do you figure the heroine is going to die? Ria might die?

If you want to move Japanese otaku in that mysterious way, you create a heroine and then write her dying of illness.

I saw Ria smoking in the common route, and she says she’s retiring, so I figured she’d get sick and die.

And in the final TRUE END, GOLDEN TIME, I was basically right. Except Ria doesn’t die of smoking. She has a brain tumor.

Souma Ria has a congenital brain tumor. As a kid the tumor pressed on her optic nerve and she couldn’t see. She had surgery at five and recovered her sight, but a lot of the tumor couldn’t be cured, and the doctors said she wouldn’t live long. She survived anyway, stubbornly, and even attended the camp the nobles held.

The camp was held by nobles to promote “caring for commoners and children in need.” The protagonist is a commoner, and Ria is the “child in need.” Because of her brain surgery she has no hair, so she wears a hat — which is also why she looked like a boy.

At the camp Ria saw the blonde Princess Sylvie for the first time and thought she was beautiful, so pretty. She also met the protagonist. The three of them became friends.

Ria had thought her life was all darkness — blind from childhood, and after regaining her sight, not long to live. Then she met Princess Sylvie and decided she wanted to be as beautiful as her. Ria discovered by accident that she had musical talent and started working as a singer. She wore a wig — a long black straight one for performances, under the name Maria Bishop — and another blonde wig for everyday life, which is the Ria the protagonist meets. She chose blonde because the princess influenced her.

Ria loves watching the sun set, the light spilling gold across the sea. She always says: “Everyone has their own most beautiful Golden Time. Everyone should show their best self during the best time of their life, because once it passes, that Golden Time never comes back.”

Ria has some regrets, and one is that she wanted the protagonist and Princess Sylvie to date, because Ria knows the princess likes him.

What Ria didn’t expect was that the protagonist likes her. (The plot requires it.)

Ria says she isn’t worth being loved, since she doesn’t have long to live, but the protagonist chooses her anyway.

Princess Sylvie is holding a Christmas banquet and wants Ria to perform as Maria Bishop. Ria starts preparing, and then bad news arrives: the tumor in her brain is getting worse. Everyone tells Ria to stop singing. Ria says how can I, that wouldn’t be cool.

In the end Ria insists on finishing the Christmas performance, and immediately afterward announces an indefinite hiatus.

Ria’s condition gets worse and worse. The protagonist can only stay by her side, care for her, and fulfill her last wish: collecting Loveriche marks (sorry, I still don’t know what those are).

On the in-game date November 21, 2018, Ria dies of her illness. The protagonist and the princess stand on the rooftop where Ria loved to watch the sunset, looking at the golden light, feeling Ria’s life.

Just as Ria said, everyone has their own Golden Time in life. Grab your golden hour, show off the coolest version of yourself, leave your mark on the world, and your life won’t have regrets.

Ria didn’t even live to twenty, but her life was more brilliant than most people’s, because she grabbed her own Golden Time.

Life is long, life is short, and the golden period of a life comes only once. Miss it and it never comes back. Everyone has their own golden period. It has nothing to do with lifespan, nothing to do with your body, nothing to do with anything.

Looking at Ria’s route on its own, the game is actually pretty good. Its theme is “grab the Golden Time of your life, show your coolest self, leave your mark on the world.” If on the day you die you can proudly say “someone in this world remembers that I was here,” then death leaves no regrets.

But as I said before, this one good story got ruined for me by the “selective amnesia” in the common route and character routes. The experience was so bad I didn’t even feel like reading by the end.

And honestly, the heroine-with-a-terminal-illness routine has been used by plenty of games. Kin’iro Loveriche isn’t the first and won’t be the last. I think this game would be better if you removed the route lock and kept just this route. The inexplicable route lock is genuinely annoying.

One detail: in the TRUE END, the plot re-explains all the main-plot-related content from the other character routes. You can tell the writer probably only wrote this TRUE END originally, and the other routes were cobbled together as filler. If that’s the case, why add the lock at all? It hurts the experience!

The art and music are the usual SAGA PLANETS style. And because the game worries players will feel bad about Ria dying, it hides a CG of Ria in a wedding dress among the game’s CGs. Whether that’s a hidden ending, I don’t know.

Overall, Kin’iro Loveriche falls far short of last year’s Floral Flowlove. In Floral Flowlove all the character routes connect to each other, all tied to one male side character behind the scenes. In Kin’iro Loveriche the character routes are just scraps cut from the main plot and padded out. Not the same tier, not comparable. If I were scoring, I’d give Floral Flowlove an 85, and Kin’iro Loveriche at best a 65.

Of course, Kin’iro Loveriche does innovate compared to earlier games: every route except the TRUE END and the braid girl can have a 3P.

Yes, almost every route has a 3P. The pattern is roughly: you’re banging your girlfriend, another girl sees, says “me too, me too,” and then it’s a 3P.

Not sure if I’ve just been reading too much NTR doujin or what, but the game itself jokes that SAGA PLANETS’ earlier titles were all “big-boob games” — and what exactly is this one? An orgy game?

And the thing I absolutely cannot forgive: Mina, that very cute little sister who gets plenty of screen time, isn’t a route. She’s 3P only!

Then the hero’s own blood-related little sister, the green-haired one, doesn’t even get a 3P chance!

Unforgivable!!

Might as well rename Kin’iro Loveriche to 3P Loveriche.