9-nine- Sorairo Sorauta Soranooto (9nine - そらいろそらうたそらのおと) Review

Around this time last year… a game came out… called 9-nine- Kokonotsu Kokonoka Kokonoiro. I didn’t rate it highly back then, because honestly there wasn’t much to rate. The story barely moved at all, it just laid out the setting.

That game was really just the start of a series. 9nine is a project sold in volumes, and my initial guess is there are three heroines, one volume each, so at least three volumes total.

I already talked about the first volume here: the protagonist gets dragged into a battle between espers. There are villainous espers, and righteous ones like the protagonist and heroine. Some people kill, and someone else stops them, that kind of thing…

Except in the first volume the esper murderer was never unmasked at all. It just ended unresolved, so a year later the second volume shows up again.

The main romanceable character in volume two is the protagonist’s little sister: Niimi Sora (新海天), so the title changed to something built around her name, Sorairo Sorauta Soranooto.

So how does this second volume handle the plot? Honestly I had no idea before playing, because volume one had pretty much written the story into a corner. The criminal supposedly killed themselves, the protagonist got together with heroine number one — how do you get the protagonist to drop his girlfriend and bang his own sister?

Then the game opens and I immediately groaned. Predictable, really: the timeline gets rewound to the day after the “fire incident” from volume one.

Meaning everything after that in volume one gets swallowed up. Start over.

In volume one the sister Sora wasn’t an esper, so she mostly just existed to bicker with the protagonist. In volume two, with her promoted to the main heroine, naturally she gets made into an esper too.

The game says she somehow got a Sacred Relic and gained its power: erasing her own presence, basically like invisibility. It’s still a bunch of people investigating that “petrification killer” esper, except now the sister joins the fight as an esper too.

Investigating the espers actually goes pretty smoothly. The protagonist finds three other espers, and those three have formed a little squad. The leader’s a guy, a total dumbass. He tells the protagonist, come join us, we’re all espers, our goal is to unite every esper and wipe out the normies before they can discriminate against us, and build a utopia for espers…

The protagonist asks: so you’d kill people to build this utopia?

The dumbass leader doesn’t even deny it.

The protagonist says he hates people who kill, and refuses to join. The leader flips out: “You won’t join me? Then as of today you’re my enemy.”

Worth noting, the protagonist is curious about two of the three. One is a senpai, whose power was maybe hinted at in volume one — charm, or something queen-like. She doesn’t actually like the trio, she’s just huddling together for warmth. The other, a hooded woman, is the dangerous one. No real name, just the codename Ghost (ゴースト).

This woman is a total battle freak, gets visibly excited the moment she sees the protagonist, and taunts him to watch his back at night.

And then one night he really does get caught off guard by her… He’d done his homework on her power, something like throwing darts, but that plush-toy-looking otherworldly lewd beast says her power is extremely strong, and she doesn’t just have one.

The protagonist is baffled: can a person even have multiple powers?

The plush explains: grab multiple Sacred Relics, get multiple powers. No limit.

After Ghost runs into the protagonist, she plays friendly for a second, then jumps him. The attack method is familiar — petrification.

So the esper who was petrifying people and then killing them from the start was this one. And she doesn’t just have one power; petrification is only one of them. She kills for fun, and she kills to steal other people’s Relics and their powers.

Right as she’s about to kill him, the sister Sora shows up, and in a panic uses her power to make Ghost invisible.

The protagonist is saved, Ghost is temporarily off the board, but the bad news is the sister’s power has awakened.

According to that lewd beast Sophi, if an esper can’t control their power, over-awakening causes loss of control. A sister like his is prime material, and the end result of losing control is that she becomes less and less present, until she starts to disappear…

Sure enough, the protagonist’s mother starts not remembering she has a daughter, and soon the protagonist himself is affected too — his own mother doesn’t recognize him.

Sophi says it can get a cure that removes the power: basically a fake death, and during it the power gets pulled out of the soul, since power and soul are bound together and can’t just be separated. But the drug takes at least three days to make. Remove the sister’s power, she’s saved and won’t vanish, and the protagonist gets remembered again.

While waiting, Sophi asks the protagonist to keep the sister’s spirits up, not let her get sad, or she’ll really disappear.

So during the mood-stabilizing, the sister says: “Whatever, I’m gonna disappear anyway. Before I go, one wish — I want to do it with my brother…”

The rest you can guess.

In the end the drug arrives, the sister is saved. Bad news: saving her also cleared the hooded woman’s effect, and she comes back for the showdown.

Final battle, obviously the protagonist and his harem brawl it out and put the arrogant hooded woman down for good. (Actually killed her, no圣母 mercy moment. Good.)

After that the protagonist and his sister live happily ever after in shameless bliss, and the game’s ending reveals the mastermind: the protagonist’s friend who’d been playing dumb the whole time. He and Sophi seem to know each other, and he deliberately arranged all this for the sake of the protagonist’s power.

So what is the protagonist’s power? Sophi told him it’s defense, but I think that’s a lie. My bet is time travel or world creation, otherwise it doesn’t line up with the first volume’s OP, or with this line:

Anyway the game ends there. The next volume is probably where it opens up.

Overall, as volume two, I think this is way better than the first.

And the good part isn’t even that the plot progresses — it’s that the daily-life character writing is genuinely fun.

The main character is the protagonist’s sister Sora, and 80% of the game is dialogue between the protagonist and her. Her personality is that classic “mouthy” type, constantly snarking and bickering with him. It looks like a manzai routine… completely unrelated to the main plot…

But that routine is so good!!

Honestly, looking back at the whole game, I barely remember the esper war. What stuck with me is the sibling sparring. And Sora’s CV is Kiritani Hana, full-power Kiritani Hana, probably her best showing in recent memory. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the script — with a generic moe-blob role she doesn’t have much to work with, but here the dialogue and bickering are structured so “maturely” that it’s easier for the performance to breathe, and the character comes off more alive.

Though maybe it’s because Izumi’s art doesn’t show women’s ages clearly, or maybe I just don’t get Japanese culture, the sister comes off as very young when she addresses the protagonist — she calls him “nii-nii” rather than the usual onii or onii-chan. Do people actually use that a lot in real life?

Most of the backgrounds and BGM are reused from volume one. There’s not even a new OP — still the old one — and I don’t think there’s an OP video for this game either. A lot of shrinkage there. Shrinkage is one thing, but for a “fast-iteration” volume release like this, taking a whole year to put out volume two means I don’t have much hope for volume three either. Probably next year…

Still, for all the lack of effort on assets, the character writing is fun enough, and the daily dialogue lets you enjoy yourself regardless. It’s very much worth playing — honestly you don’t even need to know the context. The “esper” investigation part drags like a broken-down oxcart, and I think most players don’t care anyway. Even Ghost, voiced by Takamori and one of the main villains, only appears in like three scenes before getting wrecked. Not much to say about her, no impression at all — even that supporting female teacher is better written than her.

The game does have romance, but it’s basically unwatchable. The sister suddenly asks to do it with her brother, and it’s still animated emotes, but that’s about it. Watch it like a porn clip and move on, don’t go looking for any sense of taboo — even though these are actual siblings this time, not fake ones.

In short: the dialogue and bickering are all you need. Plot, toss it aside.

What surprises me is the writer is genuinely great at banter. I’ve played other games he wrote and never got this feeling. Maybe he should come to China and team up with Guo Degang.

The second volume’s ending already reveals who the mastermind is, and volume three, following the heroine order, should be the chuuni girl Natsuwa Koharu’s turn. No idea what the subtitle will be. The first one, Kokonotsu Kokonoka Kokonoiro, got fan-translated as “Nine Times, Nine Days, Nine Colors.” Volume two’s Sorairo Sorauta Soranooto should be “Sky Color, Sky Song, Sky Sound”… so what’s volume three called?