Shamrock no Hanakotoba (シャムロックの花言葉) Review

Japanese works love to bring up “four-leaf clovers” all the time. Most of the time it’s the hero and heroine finding one in the grass—the kind that supposedly symbolizes “luck.”

One use of that trope would’ve been plenty, but unfortunately it’s everywhere now, played out to death. It goes back to games like Clover Hearts in 2003, and from then until now the four-leaf clover legend just keeps multiplying. Sometimes I honestly wonder if Japan is covered in the damn things. Four-leaf clovers are supposed to mean luck because they’re rare, so why can the protagonist and heroine always, without fail, stumble onto one?

I wrote a post complaining about this a long time ago too: if four-leaf clovers stand for luck, then what does the ordinary three-leaf clover stand for? Does that mean three-leaf clovers are unlucky compared to four-leaf ones?

Of course, a three-leaf clover isn’t unlucky. But if you actually use three-leaf and four-leaf clovers as a metaphor for people, the happiness a four-leaf clover gets really isn’t something everyone has. For me, I read it as “the three-leaf clover stands for the ordinary and the mediocre.”

Last year More launched a sub-brand, DOLCE, and put out its first game, “カサブランカの蕾” — that is, “The Buds of Casablanca.” I rated that one pretty highly, because it gave me a lot to chew on: its take on desire and true love is “realist,” and the ending, paired with an old song redone as something new, really shines.

DOLCE put out a new one again this year. Given how More has a habit of spinning up brands for no real reason, this label’s whole deal seems to be cranking out the same type of game over and over. The new one’s called Shamrock no Hanakotoba — “the language of flowers, shamrock edition,” basically. My guess is it follows the same route as Casablanca no Tsubomi before it: grounded, leaning dark. At least that’s what I figured when I stumbled onto one of the promo CGs — a big ol’ 3P shot staring me in the face…

Before I got into this game, I didn’t even know there was a word “Shamrock” that specifically means “clover” — I’d always thought it was just Clover. Naturally I also looked up the language of flowers for clover, and after reading up on it, I get why everyone says the four-leaf one stands for luck.

The language of the shamrock: one leaf stands for prayer, one leaf stands for hope, one leaf stands for love, and the last leaf stands for happiness. If you can find a four-leaf clover, you will find happiness.

And of course, if you didn’t find that fourth leaf… you have everything, except happiness.

Yes, this game is the story of four girls who had everything except happiness.

The game opens in a style very much like Tiny Times — four girls, Sakura Renko, Yukia Matsuri, Kayano Aki, and Yukimiya Nanaka, get together around graduation and entrance exams, saying that even though they’re moving on, they’ll still be best friends, and that they’ll work hard together to find their own happiness.

But as everyone knows, a flag planted right at the start is never going to end well. The main story begins, and it’s told from the different perspectives of the four girls — starting with the first heroine, Sakura Renko.

Sakura Renko: the traumatized girl with a split self

After moving on to the next stage of her education, Renko is living a pretty ordinary life — though she’s not exactly great at talking to people. The only ones she’s close with are her old friends from before. But soon enough, Renko notices some strange rumors circulating in this city. There are two of them:

1. Some girls mysteriously go missing on rainy nights.
2. Some of the glamorous girls at school are actually doing compensated dating.

Among the rumors about girls doing compensated dating, there was one name Renko knew very well: Yukimiya Nanaka, one of her good friends.

Renko heard rumors that Yukimiya Nanaka might be doing compensated dating, but she’d never actually seen it herself, and it’s not exactly something you can just ask about in front of other people. So she can only wait until the two of them are alone and slowly work her way around to asking…

Before I could even get a word out, Yukimiya Nanaka started talking first:

“Renko, what do you think our price range should be?”

Renko didn’t know how to answer, or why Nanaka Yukimiya had asked her that at all. In the end, Nanaka Yukimiya vanished into the night.

After that, Koiko never saw Nanaka Yukimiya again. Word was she’d gone missing and stopped going to school.

Later, Renko heard that other people in her class were also doing compensated dating, and that other people in the city kept going missing too — many of them connected to compensated dating. Renko herself started noticing a lot of things that didn’t add up. For one, she kept having nightmares — dreams where she was being raped, drugged and raped. Sometimes she’d forget what happened the night before. Sometimes she’d wake up to find a pile of money on the table…

Renko doesn’t know a thing, but the game’s perspective shifts one rainy night.

When it rains, Renko transforms into Coco and wanders the bustling red-light district, searching for something. She’s looking for Nanaka Yukimiya, but comes up empty.

This Coco and Koiko have completely different personalities — meaning Koiko and Coco are two separate personalities sharing one body, yet their memories aren’t shared.

Sometimes Coco also does compensated dating, and the money she earns is exactly the extra that Renko sees on the table the next day.

Why does Koiko have two personalities? Why does Coco’s personality surface on rainy nights? And why does Koiko keep having nightmares?

At the very end of this chapter, Koiko suddenly has an epiphany—and then the chapter just ends, leaving it hanging and moving straight into the next one.

Yua Matsuri: From Pure to Fallen

Yua Matsuri is the most innocent of the four girls, and the most optimistic too.

Not long after she moved up to the next level of schooling, she was also the first among them to get a boyfriend. She’d heard about some students in the city doing enjo kosai, and about people going missing on rainy nights, but Yumisora Matsuri figured none of that had anything to do with her. She loved her boyfriend, and as long as her own little life stayed nice, that was enough.

Then one day, her boyfriend suddenly told Yuzora Matsuri that he’d gotten himself into some trouble (I forget whether it was about a job or a loan), and he needed to come up with 500,000 yen fast or there’d be hell to pay.

Yuuzora Matsuri says she doesn’t have that kind of money, and then this boyfriend of hers drops an absolutely wild line:

“How about… you go sacrifice your dignity a little? We could raise the funds in no time…”

Yui Sora Matsuri turned it down at first, but after seeing her boyfriend cry that hard, she reluctantly decided to give it a try.

Calling it “sacrificing her virtue” is just a fancy way of saying she’s doing compensated dating.

第一次的援交对象是一个很 Gentle 的人，给了唯空まつり很多钱，好几万。援交后，男朋友打电话来，问的不是唯空まつり怎么样了，先问的是“多少钱？啥时候给我？”。

After that, Yuzora Matsuri secretly started doing compensated dating again, to pay off her boyfriend’s debts. But she also realized that her boyfriend didn’t care about her at all—he just wanted the money, fast.

Word about Yua Matsuri’s compensated dating gets out fast, rumors start spreading around school, and she can’t really hold her head up anymore. In the end other guys at school even get a hold of her secret and keep demanding she sleep with them. Matsuri thinks of her friends, but she can’t find Koiko, and her best friend Chino Aki is gone too.

Isolated and with no one to turn to, Yui Sora Matsuri sinks deeper and deeper into the quagmire of compensated dating. Her secret gets found out, her reputation is ruined, and her boyfriend doesn’t care about her at all—only about the money. By the end of the story, the boyfriend even confesses that he deliberately sold his girlfriend off into compensated dating to pay off his own debts, otherwise his life would have been in danger.

Yua Matsuri gets sold off by her own boyfriend to a secret brothel — the kind that looks like a bar on the surface but is a brothel underneath. Day after day she’s forced to take clients nonstop to pay off the debt, stripped of her freedom, and she stops going to school too.

The school rumor mill says that Yuuku Matsuri (唯空まつり) was doing compensated dating, and then she disappeared.

In the end, Yuuzora Matsuri despaired, lost everything, and wanted to call a close friend to say goodbye. Standing in the subway station, ready to jump to her death as soon as the call ended.

And the story ends right at this moment.

Aki Kayano: the yuri girl who gives in to desire

Kayano Aki is a girl with lesbian leanings, and she has a crush on Yuuzora Matsuri. So when Yuuzora Matsuri told her she had gotten a boyfriend, Kayano Aki was downright jealous.

Because Matsuri is no longer just her own — she belongs to another man now.

Later, by sheer chance, Chino Aki spots Yua Matsuri going at it with another guy in a street corner — full-on outdoor action, and pretty intense at that. And for some reason, the more Chino Aki watches, the more turned on she gets… so she starts touching herself.

While she was touching herself, some people having sex outdoors spotted her. A handsome guy showed up and saved her. He said his name was Saku — he looks super androgynous and has blond hair, but he’s definitely a guy.

While the two are talking, Saku tells Chino Aki that they’ve got the same problem as Aki — even though they’re male, they can’t figure out their own gender, just like Aki is female but always ends up liking girls.

两人聊得正起劲，最后 サク 提议：

“Aren’t you jealous of that paku-paku feeling Yukumatsu Matsuri gets to have? Want to give it a try? Honestly, I’m not even sure what paku-paku feels like myself—if we try it, won’t we figure out our true gender soon enough?”

So the two of them went at it, and Kayano Aki felt an insane amount of pleasure in the process — that’s when she realized she had a latent sex addiction.

After that, Kayano Aki started to enjoy having sex. Saku said she’d rounded up a bunch of “her own kind” for him—all old virgins, older guys past their prime—but Saku claimed the reason they were still virgins was that they couldn’t accept their own current gender, and she hoped Kayano Aki would save them.

Turns out Kayano Aki herself didn’t refuse either — she just went along with each one of them, easy as that. Her good friend Matsuri had long since been forgotten.

In the end, Chino Aki discovers that… Matsuri has already sunk deep into the mire of compensated dating. Chino Aki wants to save Matsuri, and that’s when Saku turns on her too:

“Aren’t you doing compensated dating yourself?”

Only then did Kayano Aki realize that what Saku had dug up for her—some dead-last fat otaku with “gender identity disorder”—wasn’t that at all. He was just an old-virgin fat otaku paying for sex, i.e. compensated dating.

And now she couldn’t get out of it either — someone had caught her red-handed. Kayano Aki holed up at home, listening to the knocking at the door, too scared to open it, able only to pray God would bail her out.

And so the story comes to a close here as well.

Yukimiya Nanaka: The Beginning and the End of Everything

The final chapter of the game belongs to Nanami Yukimiya, and it’s also the longest one — it ties together the stories of everyone who came before.

Yukimiya Nanaka never got along with her parents growing up. She hated being pushed around by them, so she decided to move out and live on her own once she started school.

But living alone as a student costs a lot of money. Yukimiya Nanaka is barely getting by with her part-time job, and it’s only getting harder to make ends meet.

Yukimiya Nanaka absolutely hates being broke. She wants to make more money—and that’s when a guy named Kouki shows up and offers her a way:

“Do compensated dating. If you do compensated dating, you’ll have money.”

Yukimiya Nanaka already hated herself—put simply, she had no self-love, and didn’t expect she could ever get anything like love. So she said to hell with it and went into compensated dating.

The first compensated date brought in a lot of money. (Same setup as まつり’s.) 雪宮七華 realizes she’s suddenly flush, life is good, and figures she’s not so bad off after all — so what if it’s compensated dating? What’s wrong with having money? Buy whatever she wants!

But rumors also started going around the city that Nanaka Shiromiya had begun doing compensated dating.

Her good friend Koiko went looking for Nanaka Miyamiya to ask what was going on, but all Nanaka gave her was this:

“Renko, what do you think our price point should be?”

之后，雪宮七華想要停止援交，但一方面离不开那容易来的钱，另一方面是被负责援交的那个“风俗店”的人コウキ灌下了致幻药：Bluerain。

This hallucinogen is addictive after a single dose, basically a drug—you feel awful without it, and once it kicks in you get horny, and the more you take it the more depraved you become.

Kouki said to Nanaka Yukimiya: “This medicine is crazy expensive. If I keep giving it to you every month, you won’t be able to afford it unless you work hard at compensated dating and make some money.”

In the end, because of her dependence on that drug, Yukimiya Nanaka became a slave to that brothel’s Kouki, turning tricks every day to make money.

But then Kouki made a new demand of Nanaka Yukimiya:

“You’ve got a good friend named Yuuzora Matsuri, right? Think you could rope her into compensated dating?” “No way! Besides, she’s got a boyfriend!” “A boyfriend. Does he love her?” “Of course he does!” “That’s not necessarily true…”

結果那天，唯空まつり的男朋友成了雪宮七華的援助交际客人。而且听说这还是唯空まつり的闺蜜之后，他干得更起劲了。

While they were going at it, Yukimiya Nanaka took the pill too, and the two of them just fucked all day long.

At the very end, Kouki shows up and talks shit to Yura Matsuri’s boyfriend:

“Ohhh, come on — I told you to do a little compensated dating, and you go and take this long? And you took our pills on top of it? You know you’ve gotta pay up if you break one of our girls, right? And those pills are expensive, you know that? 750,000 yen total. Fork it over, now!”

Only then did Yuuzora Matsuri’s boyfriend realize he’d been set up in a honey trap, and Yukimiya Nanaka had no sympathy for him either — he’d cheated on his girlfriend, so he was no good.

“But I don’t have that kind of money!” “Then I’ll cut you a deal. One week, 500,000 yen. Can’t go any lower!” “I don’t have 500,000 either!” “No money means you lose your life!” “!!!…” “Want me to point you toward a way out?” “What?” “Just have that cute girlfriend of yours make a little sacrifice, and the money’ll be there…” “…”

最后，在 Kouki 的怂恿下，唯空まつり的男朋友开始诱骗她去援交。后面的故事前面都说过了。

After that, Nanaka Yukimiya got assigned a new task: keep tabs on Aki Kayano, and make sure Aki Kayano witnesses the scene of Matsuri Yuuzora doing compensated dating…

After that, Nanami Yukimiya was made to go find some old virgins, and those old virgins all got tossed to the sexually frustrated Aki Kayano.

I already covered what happens to Chino Aki earlier… not going over it again.

So basically every single thing that happened traces back to Yukimiya Nanaka making one dumb call, getting into compensated dating, and then getting blackmailed into dragging her close friends down into it one by one. Sometimes Nanaka even tells herself she’s helping them — because even if she didn’t do it, that Kouki guy would’ve dragged them in anyway, and he’d have done it a hell of a lot more brutally.

This bunch are pros at dragging girls into compensated dating — those city rumors about people going missing? That’s all their doing.

Yukimiya Nanaka learns from Kouki, the manager of that brothel, that everything seems to be connected to Renko. There’s a big boss behind the brothel, and that boss seems desperate to find Renko. Since he can’t find her, he goes ahead and has his men corrupt all of Renko’s close friends, turning them into enjo-kosai girls to force Renko to show herself.

“Renko seems to be one of his relatives.” Nanaka Yukimiya got this piece of information from the person in charge.

Then one day, Yukimiya Nanaka finally escaped that hostess bar, and on the street she saw Koiko… After crying, Koiko also told Yukimiya Nanaka the truth:

So it turns out Renko had a split personality. Only the personality she shows when it rains is the real her—the other, pure Renko was just a persona she created to escape her inner trauma.

When Renko was little, her own cousin raped her. He drugged her with that Bluerain stuff. After that she went through a dark stretch — the cousin had power and connections, and since he was family, her parents didn’t want to make a scene either. The whole thing got buried just like that.

Renko hated that cousin, and her parents too, so she struck out on her own to live alone, and by sheer force of will she kicked her dependence on the drug.

Except that afterward, Koiko’s psyche split into two: the real Koiko, who only appears when it rains, and the fake Koiko, who’s around the rest of the time.

Renko dodges them well, but her batshit cousin still wants to catch her now that she’s run off. He’s got power and money, plus some bars and nightclubs on the side, so he has his underlings handle it. The plan is to keep tormenting Renko — and since they can’t grab her, they start with her good friends. One by one, he’ll drag down those sisters who swore they’d “definitely be happy together”…

After Yukimiya Nanaka learned the truth, she realized that she too was nothing more than one of the pieces in a much larger scheme…

The ending is honestly a bit of a stretch. Koiko supposedly saves her sisters one by one all by herself — either by secretly taking them away and hiding them, or by marching up to the Boss alone to argue it out. Even more ridiculous is the subway jumper: she just runs over and pulls the person back. Does she teleport or something? There was a bit of foreshadowing earlier: a scruffy old homeless guy on the street (mentally ill) calls Koiko a “saint” and says he’ll follow the “saint’s” orders — so that old man goes and stabs the crowd at the brothel bar… Things blow up, the police get involved, and it’s all over.

In the end, naturally, the girls all come together again. Even after everything they went through, they still manage to get their freedom, more or less. The heroine’s multiple identities say their goodbyes too, and everything settles back into the ordinary.

Got my freedom, sure. But this ending — is it really a happy one?

The language of the shamrock: one leaf stands for prayer, one leaf for hope, one leaf for love, and that last leaf stands for happiness. Find a four-leaf clover and you’ll find happiness.

Maybe these girls will find someone to pray to, some hope, even love — but after everything they went through, I don’t think there’s any happiness left for them.

Just look at the title of this game—something about it feels weirdly ironic.

Overall, Shamrock no Hanakotoba (シャムロックの花言葉) landed a bit below my expectations. The main issue is that the final twist is way too convenient — Koiko, a frail girl, somehow taking on the whole criminal organization single-handedly is honestly kind of bullshit. Still, I get it. If the game went that dark and every girl fell into becoming a cum dump, that’d be a bit too…

The story uses multiple perspectives, but overall it’s actually pretty simple: a wealthy, powerful pervert who’s fixated on the main heroine wants to make her suffer by corrupting all her close friends. Still, the multi-perspective writing has its bright spots, including plenty of small details that line up with each other, so once you’ve read the whole thing you get that “oh, now it all clicks” feeling.

Overall the voice acting is decent enough, though I don’t really recognize any of the CVs. The art style feels oddly familiar, but it’s not drawn by MORE’s usual lead artist. Is this some kind of imitation?

The soundtrack is surprisingly decent, too — none of that cheap-sounding synth from the usual suspects. It’s just that the whole game reeks of “we ran out of budget.”

First off, there’s no OP — no idea if I just clicked past it or what. The ED is bare-bones too: title card plus subtitles. And the real penny-pinching move? Almost every background in the game is lifted wholesale from another title, ゴールデンアワー. The game store, the intersection, the bridge, the rooftop — all yanked straight from that game, untouched. Dunno if MME blew the budget on the concert or just figured they’d spread themselves too thin with too many brands, but even though it doesn’t clash much with this game, that cheapness still rubs me the wrong way. Especially since this one isn’t even priced cheap. The only original art is the HCGs…

All in all, this game’s strengths and flaws stand out just as much as each other:

Highlights:

• No male protagonist — it’s pure female-POV storytelling
• Multiple characters and perspectives, pieced together at the end; there’s suspense, and it’s genuinely novel
• The music really fits the mood
• Tight pacing, not much filler downtime
• None of that dumbass “love,” “friendship,” or “everyone throws themselves at you” crap. It’s grounded and realistic — you could honestly film it as a short movie
• The HCGs are drawn pretty well

Cons:

• The ending is too naive; a dark ending would’ve been more realistic.
• The villain’s motive is pretty dumb — the cousin is that dead-set on raping his cousin?
• At the end the heroine is basically Superman when she saves someone — jumping onto the subway and still pulling them back in time.
• Way too cheap: no OP/ED animation, and all the backgrounds are recycled from older games.
• It doesn’t hit as hard as Casablanca no Tsubomi; just feels like a plain artsy nukige.

I heard the MME boss has gotten himself a new Mac Pro. Just hoping that, beyond at least getting the vocals and backing track properly mixed in his compositions, he’ll step up his eroge game going forward and make more “realistic” socially-grounded visual novels. Because I’m honestly sick of all these boring, dumbass school-setting ones.