Hitotsu Yane no, Tsubasa no Shita de (ひとつ屋根の、ツバサの下で) Review

The game Hitotsu Yane no, Tsubasa no Shita de — literally “Under the Wings of One Roof,” also known as “I Lived With Four Hot Girls and It Was So Great I Forgot How to Jerk Off” — tells the inspirational story of a protagonist who, as a trainee pilot, gets into his grandmother’s flight school through connections, uses his position to live in the same dorm as four hot girls, spends every day flirting and cuddling and never has time to practice flying, then discovers at the final showdown that he’s trash and cheerfully chooses to surrender mid-match.

The game is set in Japan, in some unspecified year and month, where dogfighting in fighter planes has become a competitive sport called FF. Flying planes and shooting planes down is every kid’s dream, but for some reason everyone in this game flies WWII-era relics with zero new technology. It’s supposed to be Japan, yet rival schools show up flying American bombers, and the game also features planes that never existed in history, including a Zero 75, a “Shiden Kai Kai” (yes, twice), and a B36 with reinforced armor that shrugs off AA fire. The whole thing reeks of fantasy.

The protagonist is Sasaki Junichi, a rich kid at school who flies a flashy “Shinden” and enrolls at a vocational school specializing in aerial combat. He’s humble, polite, and utterly without ambition, and his catchphrase is “いや……へへ……あの……” (uh… hehe… y’know…). In battle he’s so scared of going fast that he won’t accelerate, and in practice matches he flails around like a clumsy puppet, obeying the captain without question. He pilots a heavy-machine-gun fighter and is the squad’s only real fighting force — think the mid-lane sniper in Dota, or the instalock ADC Huang Zhong in Honor of Kings. Because he’s weak and useless, the entire team exists to protect him. Terrible player, still demands the carry role — that’s exactly what this is. In matches his contribution is firing two shots and leaving the rest to his teammates, who hover around him like doting healers. And after winning, he develops this mysterious confidence that lasts until the next match, where it gets shattered by the slightest setback. The only comparison I can think of is a modern-day Liu Shan.

The game has four heroines, each with her own personal fighter: the brainless hot-blooded pink-hair, the brainless showoff white-hair, the brainless tsundere blonde, and the brainless nice-girl black-hair. Their shared virtue is “brainless.” Unlike similar games, there’s no single true end — each heroine gets her own ending. Macroscopically, pink-hair shows up first and feels like the main heroine, and her route’s ending is also the most thought-provoking. Judging by the title and the ending narration, the main storyline is obviously the one where the protagonist’s dorm squad competes in the FF tournament.

By all logic, the protagonist should team up with several beautiful girls, fight through the FF tournament together, overcome every opponent, climb from bronze to king, taste defeat and victory, face a formidable final boss, and win the championship through love and courage…

Of course, this is not a game that can be measured by “logic.”

The tagline is “living together, romance, friendship, shooting planes.” And it’s true — those elements are all there, just in proportions you might not expect. Roughly 1% friendship, 5% romance, 0.5% plane shooting, and the remaining 94.5% goes to “living together.” Which fits the title perfectly: under the roof, beneath the wings, inside the harem — that’s where the real future lies. Young people should focus on dating; mecha nerds and military otaku are doomed to die alone.

Given those proportions, most of the game from the start is the protagonist hanging out in the dorm chatting nonsense with the various side heroines. Before school starts, he’s flirting, eating, chatting, and getting his dick sucked…

Once school starts, he’s flirting, eating, chatting, and getting his dick sucked…

When the FF tournament begins, he’s still flirting, eating, chatting, and getting his dick sucked…

And of course, in this game whose main line is “living together,” you can even see the protagonist flying a plane.

There are maybe three to five aerial battles in the whole game, the first three being qualifiers, each lasting under five minutes. The opponents who show up are like fragile little bitches who instantly ban you the moment they’re losing — no tactics, no intense dogfighting, no hype visuals, just trash talk:

Villain appears: “I’m invincible!” Hero appears. Villain sees him: “Eat my cannon, you dumbass, aaaaaaah!” Before the hero even moves, the villain gets shot down by a cannon from who-knows-where, leaving only a scream. “AAAAAAAH HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE AAAAAAH!”

Battle over.

So every qualifier match goes roughly like this:

“I’m invincible! Die, you dumbass, aaaaaah!” (ratatatata~) “AAAAAAAH!” Villain crashes.

As the heaviest firepower on the team, the protagonist contributes basically nothing in combat. He’s always out on the edge, orb walking, never joining the teamfight, mostly narrating while enemy planes drop one after another…

And the aerial combat writing is brutally simplistic. No inner monologue, just three beats: “boss appears,” “boss trash talks,” “boss croaks.” The whole thing is over in under five minutes, then it’s back to the cohabitation slice-of-life, and the protagonist resumes his wonderful days of “flirting, eating, chatting, getting his dick sucked.”

So if the protagonist is this OP, steamrolling through the FF tournament, how does the final match go?

As expected, he runs into a formidable opponent in the FF tournament: a squad from another school flying a B36 bomber.

I don’t really get why an American bomber shows up in a tournament dominated by Japanese high schools, but there it is. The protagonist’s team realizes there’s a serious problem: the thing flies too high, has too much firepower, and they can’t get close. The pink-hair’s engine breaks down too.

Just when the team is about to get wiped, it starts raining. The referee calls a truce and postpones the match to next week.

Then an engineer uncle the protagonist knows shows up with cheat items: blueprints for a “Zero 75” fighter that was never deployed in real combat, and a dusty, unused engine.

They install the engine and blueprints into pink-hair’s plane, and thus is born a Zero Fighter 75 that transcends the era and never even existed in history.

Cheats acquired, final battle time.

The day arrives. The protagonist fights hard and finally takes down the escort planes around the B36. The final boss is exposed. You know what happens when a bomber is approached by a swarm of air-to-air fighters — it’s a sitting duck.

The team unloads everything into the B36.

Nothing happens. The B36 pilot smirks and says his plane’s armor has been modified to effectively resist you dumbasses’ bullets.

We throw everything at it, land hit after hit, and the damn thing doesn’t even lose HP. It’s genuinely despair-inducing.

But I know how final boss fights work — rebirth happens in despair. Right as I’m expecting the hype moment, the phoenix-rebirth scene, the captain issues the next order:

“No point dragging this out. Let’s surrender.”

And the team scatters. Match over.

Leaving me sitting there, completely dumbfounded.

After that the protagonist returns to the dorm and resumes his daily routine of “flirting, eating, chatting, getting his dick sucked” — except this time he actually gets laid.

Well, the personal route is wrapping up. Time to pick a girl and bang.

After the banging comes the ED, then the game jumps to a year later and the team is entering a tournament again. The tournament isn’t shown, just glossed over, apparently they won…

Game over.

And I’m left staring blankly, because honestly I have no idea what expression to make.

This is the first time I’ve seen a protagonist’s team choose to surrender in the final battle, and afterward the whole group is totally fine with it — go home, eat, drink, keep banging…

They say the wise adapt to circumstances. Maybe that’s just how real life is?

What to say about this game… Most people would expect something like the hot-blooded royal road story in Aokana — pink-hair loves planes, protagonist gets inspired by her, accompanies her through victory after victory to the final championship…

But this game is nothing like that. Actually, it never intended to tell that story. As I said, about 95% of the game is the protagonist and the four hot girls “living together,” and the slice-of-life portions are boring and repetitive. The game claims to have fighter plane storylines and even bothers to draw up a faction chart of rival school squads, but it’s all meaningless — the rival teams on that chart are mobs that get sent home within three minutes of appearing, and the B36 team gets maybe five lines of dialogue total…

One reviewer on ErogameScape put it well; this game’s proportions are exactly like this:

<开头> - <超长的日常> - <一笔带过的战斗练习> - <超长的日常(没有开飞机)> - <告白交往啪啪啪> - <比赛（特别短）> - <结尾>

And even so, in that pathetically short battle, the protagonist fucking surrenders…

I played this game to watch cute girls shoot down planes. Where’s the plane? Huh? Where are the planes? I spent 80% of the time watching the protagonist wake up to the blonde’s ass. I never got to see any plane shooting!

I refuse to believe a game flying the banner of “cute girls in fighter planes” turned out like this. The scenario writer clearly had no interest in writing fighters; he just crammed in a few fighter-plane elements. The B36 fight is the only scene with any spark; everything else in the plot has nothing going for it.

Honestly, this script doesn’t deserve this art… Actually, the art is the only thing the game got right. It’s at least on par with first-tier releases. The rest, though, left me speechless.

First, bugs. In many places the font changes. The game does let you set your own font, but this lets you discover something funny: a lot of the names in the game aren’t text at all, they’re images pasted in… fake fonts.

The music is also terrible. The tracklist is decent-sized, but the usage is awful — the same three tracks loop endlessly, and some are used in completely wrong places, creating fake tension.

There are other routes too, but sadly they have even less plane shooting. In the blonde’s route, the protagonist gives up on the final battle entirely and just watches her and her sister do a little airplane duet in the sky…

As for the script, setting aside the endless slice-of-life, the tiny bit of combat reminds me of an essay I wrote as a kid.

The essay was called “My Little Brother and I Play Chess.” I wrote 800 words of flowery prose stuffed with idioms and adjectives, and I even got a good grade for it.

But one thing I should mention first:

I don’t have a little brother, and I have no idea how to play chess.

So how did I write that essay?

“With one masterful sacrifice I caught my brother off guard, but he counterattacked from the flank, leaving me scrambling. I thought for a moment, then turned his own strategy against him, putting him in a tight spot. But crafty as he was, he laid a trap, practically inviting me in. I wasn’t falling for that — I chose to relieve the siege from afar, and with mutual dependence and shared fate, my brother had no choice but to surrender…”

That’s about how someone who doesn’t know chess writes about chess…

And that’s about how the fighter dogfights are written in this game…

In the end I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to know why this game was so bad. It’s already 2018; even writing it half-assed shouldn’t produce this. It’s clearly a case of the essay going off-topic.

Later I learned the game was greenlit in 2015, then shelved for various reasons — an unfinished project — and recently revived and completed.

Looking at the quality, nothing but the art is any good. They hired a bunch of scenario writers, including the lead writer of Memories Off 6, but I’m pretty sure none of them know anything about fighter planes…

Maybe the original guy who was supposed to write the fighter stuff wrote a framework and ran off. Maybe the later writers figured they just needed to fill the framework with slice-of-life and ship it. Maybe someone thought it’d be a waste to let such good art sit in a vault. In the end, this game is a half-finished product. These days, as long as a visual novel looks good, it sells. Who cares about the story…