Making Lovers Geki Icha After Story Volume.01 Ako Karen Saki (Making＊Lovers 激イチャアフターストーリー Volume.01 亜子、可憐、咲) Review

Everyone knows game companies these days basically have no shame…

The most obvious sign of that shamelessness is they never “wait until the game is finished” before putting it on sale. They get it to roughly-done and immediately start selling. As for the rest—sell the base game first, deal with everything else later. When it’s done, they bolt it on and call it “Downloadable Content,” i.e. what we call DLC. Some of that DLC you have to pay extra for. So you pay for a half-finished game, then keep paying for the extra content bolted on afterward. Only after you’ve coughed up several times does the content count as fully there and the game count as complete…

Think about it and that’s pretty fucked, isn’t it. Fortunately this dumbass habit is mostly a Western publisher thing; Japanese companies still have some shame… probably.

Why “probably”? Because Japanese companies have learned bad habits too. Make half a game, then put out an expansion pack—it’s become the new normal. Once the engine and framework are in place, adding a few stages is just opening the map editor…

And that goes double for visual novels, sitting at the very bottom of the game food chain, which don’t even need a map editor!

SMEE, a sub-brand of the real estate company HOOKSOFT, is exactly this kind of shameless entity. They love putting out Minifandisks—the really short kind of fandisk, where the content length barely qualifies as DLC. Oh, and it’s not just SMEE being shameless. HOOKSOFT has no shame either; their games get Minifandisks too. If you want to say Asa Project, the other HOOKSOFT sub-brand, is relatively honorable and doesn’t do Minifandisks, you’d be dead wrong—they’ll add new characters and sell a PSV version, charge more, make more money… shame all over the floor.

Is the Japanese real estate business just not turning a profit anymore? Is that why HOOKSOFT is shamelessly grifting every which way?

Anyway, this time SMEE put out DLC for last year’s well-received Making＊Lovers—the so-called Mini Fandisk Volume 1.

The full title:

“Making＊Lovers Geki-Icha After Story Volume.01 Ako, Karen, Saki”

Holy shit that name is dumb as hell. They’re one step away from tacking on a Deluxe Package Complete Edition suffix once all the volumes are out.

The title makes it clear enough: this is the game’s first DLC volume, and it only has after-stories for Ako, Karen, and Saki.

Why did I play this dumbass game? Because I saw Saki!!!!

And I got it for free anyway, so why the hell not!

As expected, the game opens by letting you pick which of the three heroines’ stories to see. They’re all after-stories—some set a year after they start dating, some two years, some a few months. That’s not much, but the game did surprise me by letting you pick the heroine’s hairstyle!

Honestly the difference between the two styles is tiny… and I don’t know whether the CGs later on actually change based on the choice.

Each heroine only gets two chapters. Going by the pacing of the original game’s chapters, clearing one heroine’s after-story takes about half an hour…

Fine, I know, it’s Mini, it’s a fandisk, and it’s only Volume 1. I’ll just take a quick look.

Saki’s after-story picks up a while after she and the protagonist start dating—unlike the original where they’re already married and living independently. She’s still doing weather reports at the TV station, so this is probably set between the dating phase and the ED in the original game.

There are only two stories. In one, the protagonist and Saki deal with a revamp of the weather program at the station. The revamp adds a Mark II hamster mascot, which is even dumber. All the ruckus causes an on-air accident.

The second is the classic “mother-in-law comes to her daughter’s place and meets the parents” setup. The fun part is that Saki’s mother and Saki bicker constantly—you can’t say their relationship is bad, but you can’t say it’s great either. It’s a genuinely funny mother-daughter dynamic. The mother-in-law comes to meet the future son-in-law and spills every embarrassing thing Saki did as a kid. Saki is furious, the protagonist is laughing his ass off.

In the end Saki gets her revenge by dragging the protagonist out to a hotel and going at it, and the two of them stumble their way past the parents, so all that’s left is marriage and kids.

As a DLC—no, a Minifandisk Volume 1—this game carries over the original’s character writing, including the dialogue style. If you liked the heroines in the base game, two chapters of after-story absolutely won’t feel like a waste…

You’ll just feel it’s too short.

Playing this kept giving me a strong sense of familiarity. Maybe it’s because Saki’s dialogue with the protagonist is a lot like my real life—her personality, her look, the way she talks, even the mother-daughter relationship, and the HCGs all give me déjà vu…

People say you play eroge to escape reality. This one made me feel like it was very real, which is a weird feeling.

Anyway, I like this heroine so much and she hits so close to home… that this fandisk is kind of hard to recommend… If someone else played it, I’d get this weird feeling of being remotely NTR’d…