IxSHE Tell Review

If you watch a lot of anime or play galge, you’re probably familiar with a certain setup. In Japanese otaku-oriented fiction, the most common one is the “harem.”

This “harem” is a bit different from the Qing dynasty harem dramas we’re used to. Even if it’s somewhat similar to something like The Deer and the Cauldron, it’s still not quite the same.

Japanese harems mostly consist of “the male lead maintaining ambiguous relationships with multiple women for a long time but never fucking confessing.” Because Japan is monogamous, you see—if you confess, that means the other women are done for, game over, loser dogs, and the harem loses its meaning.

This “harem” thing thrives on that borderline-level ambiguity. You can be naked and hugging all sorts of girls, you can see their entire bodies, you can kiss, you can grab tits, you can even touch pussy, but as long as you don’t stick it in, you and she are just ambiguous, the other women still have a chance, and your harem can continue. So the actual fucking is generally the bottom line. Most harem works never cross that line—unless they’re heading for the ending.

However, “harem” in the context of a galgame is a different picture entirely… Because galgames have no bottom line, harems split into “true harem” and “fake harem.” “True harem” is exactly what it sounds like—ハーレム—the male lead does 3P, 4P, 5678P… all sorts of indescribable things. “Fake harem” is still the manga/anime routine: all sorts of ambiguity, all the heroines like the protagonist, but since it’s a galgame you’ll definitely hit a home run and it won’t drag on without an ending like some dumbass manga or light novel.

Most harem setups go like this:

Ahuhu is an unbelievably ordinary high schooler. At home he has a sister who’s an unbelievably brocon and hates squid, next door lives a childhood friend named Xiaozhu who walks to school with him every day, the student council president at school is a sharp-tongued girl who deliberately picks fights with him every day, and meanwhile Ahuhu has a crush on some girl in the school library—a recent transfer student he ran into by chance on the train one time.

Ahuhu keeps saying he has no luck with love, but the story ends with his sister wanting to marry him, Xiaozhu insisting she’s just a childhood friend while actually masturbating to him every day, the student council president being a tsundere who’s crazy about him and only picks fights to talk to him more, and the library girl actually liking him too but unable to say it no matter what, keeping it bottled up inside…

So Ahuhu, while humbly calling himself a loser, simultaneously juggles all these beautiful girls like some romance-blind KY idiot, until some event triggers a choice and a confession…

Familiar? Clichéd? I can’t say for manga and light novels, but at least most galgames follow a similar setup…

Honestly, this setup has plenty of holes, especially the protagonist claiming he has zero luck with women:

“You motherfucker Ahuhu, your luck with women is off the charts!”

You get used to complaining about this stuff. Some games try to break out of the framework, but they always roll back in the end… After all, if you want to write multiple heroines, this is the only way… what else can you do…

Yeah, what else can you do? Well, a company called Hook gave us a different answer, showing us what a harem looks like when it doesn’t follow the formula…

Hooksoft, as the big brother of SMEE and Asa Project, actually puts out the most unremarkable games, I think. Most have really weird premises but stick to pure love routes. The only interesting one was last year’s Amenity’s Life, and I figured Hooksoft might be getting on track…

Then this year they give me this…

IxSHE Tell—the title itself is dumb as hell… Then the tagline: “A romance ADV that begins with a confession”—a love adventure game that starts from being confessed to…

Being confessed to… Isn’t the male lead getting confessed to a regular thing in galgames? But then I thought about it and realized it’s actually not. In most galgames all the heroines like the protagonist, but it’s usually the guy who does the confessing. After all, if the guy doesn’t make a move, it just stays ambiguous forever… If the heroine confesses, the guy will definitely play dumb and pretend not to hear…

So what’s the premise of this hilariously dumb-named game?

IxSHE Tell starts by saying the protagonist is a high-ranking member of a school’s student council. The school originally had a “no romance” policy, and then the protagonist decides that in a few days, he’ll choose to “lift the romance ban”—meaning students can date.

That’s fine, but the crazy part comes later… When the protagonist announces that the “romance ban lift” is about to take effect, all the girls in school go wild.

Because they all want to confess to the protagonist…

Everyone’s raring to go, even reserving the protagonist, telling him to stand still and wait for love letters. Of course, this includes the various heroines who appear one after another—every single one of them looks at the protagonist like a bitch in heat, wanting to date him, no holding back, yes, no holding back at all, just walking up and saying “Be my boyfriend, now.”

The last time I saw this vibe was under Wang Sicong’s Weibo comments with “Hubby, fuck me!”

Soon the day the ban lifts arrives, and the protagonist is literally surrounded and chased…

As the game puts it, girls chasing after the protagonist to date him are swarming all over the school like zombies in L4D.

How terrifying!

After that, the game’s routes are nothing to write home about. The background zombie girls naturally get no screen time; that belongs to the various heroines, who pull out all the stops and aggressively throw themselves at the protagonist. Especially aggressive—the kind of aggressive that’s just short of yelling “Hubby, fuck me!”…

This aggressive throwing themselves at him lasts for about five chapters. In those five common route chapters, the protagonist can allocate his affection points to five girls, 10 points each time, manually adding them—kind of like Diablo stat points. You can also check what other heroines are doing during the common route. Frankly, the other heroines’ perspectives are more entertaining than the protagonist’s, since many involve random guys confessing to a heroine and getting instantly rejected… (Really touching, honestly.)

After the common route ends, the game lets you choose whose confession to accept—whoever you pick is it.

Yes, whoever you pick is it. Even though you could allocate hearts, choose who to meet, choose whose perspective to view, all that does is affect the ranking order of heroines in the final choice. You can still ignore the number one and pick your favorite…

So what’s the point of all those fancy systems earlier in the game?

Oh right, the game also has a “timed choice system”—basically if you don’t choose, the option disappears. But most of the options I saw were “Let go of her hand.”

I’m trying to pick up girls here! Who the hell lets go of a girl’s hand while trying to pick her up? Only an idiot would click that button! So this button looks cool but still has no reason to click… No idea what the point is.

Anyway, I entered a personal route. The route naturally starts with lovey-dovey stuff, and it turns out the winning heroine just naturally accepts everyone’s blessings—no jealousy at all. Then it’s fucking: sex at home, sex outside, sex in costume…

Then it should be time to meet the parents, right?

Meet the parents my ass—the game’s over!

Yes, the personal route is written to the rhythm of those three HCGs. Three sex scenes and the game ends. Then the final CG comes up, which is just the protagonist and heroine getting married and the heroine becoming a wife…

Honestly, I’ve put up with this game this long and there’s nothing left to put up with.

First off, the art is hideous. All the heroines have dead eyes, like low-rent blood elves from Eversong Woods with enlarged pupils. I have no idea how the artist drew this. SMEE and the like are way better than this—even that stupid SMEE game from two years ago is way better than this.

Next is the music. It seems standard on the surface, but overall it feels completely forgettable. Sometimes an intense track suddenly kicks in, probably imitating SMEE’s style… Hook is supposedly a veteran real estate company, so how does their side gig eroge end up imitating their own little brother’s? How does the big brother expect to keep face?

The game’s systems need no further comment. They look flashy but are completely useless. Maybe they’re testing an improved engine for SMEE to use later, I hope.

The only thing the game has going for it is probably the voice acting. They got some big names, including the old auntie Ohashi Ayu and the young madam Nakajima Saki. I have no complaints about the voice acting itself, but the character designs are so unappealing I can’t even get it up. The only decent one is probably the idol voiced by Ohashi Ayu.

The dumbest part of the game is the story. The first half’s common route is five women fighting over a man, and it’s really lowbrow. Normally this kind of jealous rivalry could be written with dramatic effect, but this game doesn’t pull it off. I once complained that some anime “One of Them is My Sister” was too lowbrow, I once trashed “If Her Flag Breaks” for its stupid aggressive come-ons, but now I admit I was wrong. This game is even more boring than those, even more boring than the CUBE games I used to look down on with their aggressive come-ons… This game really fails at the “harem” level—actually, it fails at everything… At the harem level, CUBE’s multiple twins fighting over one protagonist at least have distinct personalities and individual merits, and they’re drawn moe! Moe啊啊啊啊啊!

What does your game have?! Bad art, boring story, just mindless贴. Especially the route I took—the heroine is like a narcissist, calling herself a “Perfect Girl,” then suddenly gets angry after dating the protagonist. I mean, women are like that, but in this game the reason she’s angry is that she wants to lose weight, otherwise she won’t feel Perfect and can’t face the protagonist.

What the fuck, you get angry about gaining weight too?

Although the game put some effort into the HCGs to cater to player fetishes, it’s careless in many places. The HCG CGs are constantly reused, and some angles are drawn terribly. Worse, the HCGs themselves didn’t turn me on—only some of them reminded me of my girlfriend and gave me a bit of a feeling. That’s an incredibly low评价 for a galgame. These games are supposed to make you forget reality, not remind you of it. A porn game that needs reality to get hard… absolutely pathetic, just quit the group.

After finishing the game in anger, I calmed down and thought about it. Actually, this game isn’t completely hopeless—I just had too high expectations. Maybe the project was just trying to set up a “protagonist who’s super popular from the start” premise. The promotional art shows a throne, and the protagonist himself is like Wang Sicong-level in the eyes of women, super eye-catching… oh, not eye-catching, attention-grabbing. Thinking about it that way, it’s not incomprehensible, just that the project wasn’t successful.

Saving this project wouldn’t be hard—just add a setting to the protagonist:

Like he’s a millionaire eager to find a wife to share his wealth; Like he’s a rich kid eager to find a girlfriend to party with; Like he’s a super handsome guy eager to find a cum dump to continue his line; Like he’s some oil king eager to find an East Asian princess.

Just adding one setting like that, and this game might not be so embarrassing… I could even sigh and say the game reflects the truth of the world…

But the project didn’t do that, so we can only lament that the protagonist isn’t an oil king.