Raspberry Cube (ラズベリーキューブ) Review

Some guy with a screw loose once laid out the whole “old school” vs. “new school” thing.

Of course, a guy with a screw loose doesn’t talk like a human being, so what he meant was Old School and New School. Put bluntly: “new type” and “retro type.” You see this pattern in other games, you see it in music genres, so naturally you also see it in the eroge space.

Remember what the earliest eroge were like?

You’d have a male lead meet a pretty girl, and after about two lines they’d start fucking, and then it was over. Same as what Carmack the Great said about FPS games: “The game is the porn, the story is superfluous.” The subtext: games exist to make you feel good, so why the hell bother with plot and authorship? If it doesn’t get you off, why the hell are you playing it?

Normal games are already pigeonholed that clearly, so what about eroge?

What’s an eroge for? So you can watch it like porn!

So why the hell go through all that asinine setup and payoff? Just drop the pants and get to it!

If that’s what you actually think, you’re way too naive. Adult products nowadays are no longer that simple. If an eroge were nothing but people screwing on sight, what would you even need porn for? Eroge target the 2D otaku crowd with surgical precision, and what they need isn’t just Fuck—it’s “cute girls” and the “encounter and companionship” they provide, with the HCG as the final payoff.

In other words, the otaku who play galgames are bad at dealing with real girls, so eroge just hand them an opportunity.

So how do you define an Old School eroge?

Go look at Wagamama High Spec from a few years back—that’s a textbook Old School galgame.

Standard male lead, standard heroines, standard plot, plus plenty of new memes thrown in. No bullshit isekai escalations, just school life and romance, a little sister and a senpai, and comedy on top. You could say Wagamama High Spec is the most successful Old School eroge in recent years, no contest.

Wagamama High Spec’s success also made me remember the developer’s name, Madsoft. Sure, the name is obviously poking fun at Microsoft, but it’s memorable enough. So this year Madsoft put out their new title, Raspberry Cube (ラズベリーキューブ). I read the blurb and a lecherous grin spread across my face.

“Yes! The familiar Old School style again.”

So I was hyped from before launch, I even downloaded and played the demo—it felt pretty short, but I was still looking forward to the full version. Then the full version came out, I ran it, and… I started to feel something was off…

For one reason only: this game is cheap as hell.

First, the basic plot: the protagonist’s parents get divorced and things blow up, so he has nowhere to live and moves out to live alone.

He returns to his childhood hometown, contacts a busty landlady onee-san, and lives in her house. He transfers to a nearby school, meets a busty student council president and a busty classmate, takes a part-time job with the latter, and also runs into a busty vegetable-growing girl at school and the two exchange some looks.

And then…… that’s it!

Then you start getting choices—who to go see each day, and whoever you see, you get a few more lines with them. After about three conversations you’re locked into their route, and after that you barely see any of the other heroines.

That structure isn’t inherently bad, since SMEE and HookSoft games do the same thing, but Raspberry Cube doesn’t just have a short common route and fast route locking—the story itself is fragmented.

Take the student council president Sakuraba Victoria Ruri’s route. From the start, this loli-busty president is pulling all kinds of pranks on the protagonist: smearing her secret concoction on the doorknob at his house, throwing rocks at him on the street, spoiling movies he hasn’t watched yet, chasing him down to beat him up, putting up big-character posters to denounce him, getting other people to pummel him, and interfering with his sleep…

All of it gives the impression that the protagonist and her must deeply hate each other, and as the game progresses, this “deep hatred” finally lifts its mysterious veil.

Turns out the protagonist met Ruri when they were kids and they played together. Ruri had a bit of a thing for him (fucking hell, this trope again) and wanted to spend more time with him, but back then the protagonist was a brat—or rather not developed enough to have sexual needs—so he found girls annoying and didn’t give a damn about her. He just said he was moving away and left, and poor little Ruri kept waiting there. When he never showed, her love turned to hate. She figured being a simp gets you nowhere, so she worked her ass off and became a busty strong woman, made student council president—and then this asshole transfers in. Old flame… no, old nemesis meets, eyes red with rage, and so begins the harassment and targeting, which is the opening act of the whole story.

Eventually the protagonist has a sudden flash of insight and remembers all this childhood crap, then goes to apologize to the busty president Ruri. The moment she sees him apologize, Ruri immediately reverts to simp mode, says she forgives him, and the two become a couple. After that the game does a useless event about helping the president deal with school problems, and then it ends.

Raspberry Cube uses a vignette format, kind of like four-panel comics… Whether it’s the common route or the individual routes, the plot is extremely fragmented—after a scene transition, previous events are glossed over with little connection. This approach can work, like it did so brilliantly in Ouchi ni Kaeru made ga Mashimaro desu, but unfortunately Raspberry Cube’s script just isn’t up to it. Forget everything else—it’s a full three Senren Banka worse than the company’s previous title Wagamama High Spec. I looked up writer Oumiya Yuu’s other work; he’s done a lot for Whirlpool, and some of it’s passable. Maybe it’s the company’s demands, maybe the budget was too thin and they didn’t pay enough for him to write properly. The main story here could be summed up in one sentence, yet it’s stretched out—and the stretching doesn’t fill the space with anything interesting, just a bunch of stale gags…

I don’t know if Madsoft thinks that as long as the artist draws pretty and the plot has no landmines, it’ll get high marks. But the artist Hasune isn’t even that good-looking—everyone has the same face, worse than Shirahata Mochizuki… mainly it lacks that sense of “cute.” The voice cast isn’t much of an advantage either. Aside from 43-year-old Ono Ryouko back in action, there’s my favorite newcomer Konami Suzu, and the rest of the performances do nothing for me.

They added a bunch of side characters for the meme value, but the side characters have no presence—including that busty crossdresser, who shows up for less than three minutes, fucks off, and brings no laughs. I don’t think Madsoft should be at this level at all; their previous games were far more polished, with better production too. Maybe the company is busy pushing the light novel their main artist illustrated, Dare ga Yonda no, and isn’t paying attention to this new game. But even a little more budget would have kept it from turning out like this. Personally I’d say it’s at most the level of a 30-yuan nukige on Steam, yet this new title is priced like a standard 9000-plus yen release. I don’t know if it’s meant to fleece the fanbase or sell on faith.

Oh right, the game has another problem: after you upgrade to Windows 10 1809 Fall Creators Update, the game won’t launch at all. Changing your region, deleting config files, none of it works. No patch on the official site, and everyone tweeting at the official account is apparently still on Windows 7. I don’t even know what to say. The installer also contains a Bat file—I have to suspect the company’s programmers ran off…

Since I upgraded to Win10 1809, I couldn’t launch the game, so I could only finish Sakuraba Victoria Ruri’s route, while Ono Ryouko’s route is sealed away on my tablet…

Of course, someone beat me to it and All Cleared the game… my wife.

A word of warning here: if you’re sleepy, don’t play eroge on a tablet in bed, because if you accidentally fall asleep, someone will take over your tablet and finish the game for you—and that’s exactly how I tragically got beaten to the finish.

When I woke up, my wife was already holding the Surface, having cleared the whole game:

“Why are you playing this? Why are everyone’s boobs so big in it?” “No no, that’s just how the art style is in Japan, they like drawing big boobs. I just treat it like a comic.” “But why is everyone’s boobs big? Shouldn’t different characters have different boobs?” “That’s because they need to attract the otaku, and otaku like big boobs.” “Do you like big boobs?” “I don’t care about boobs. Anyway, what have you been pressing on that thing?” “I can’t read any of it, I was just mashing buttons, and I found that if I mashed enough, choices would pop up, so I picked randomly, and then it ended.” “What did you pick?” “The portraits, and the middle… whatever came out.” “…………” “What? You got a problem? And I saw it, there are scenes of women with their boobs out! And the boobs are huge!” “That stuff’s censored, you can’t see anything.” “There’s no mosaics! There’s none on the boobs!” “I didn’t mean the boobs.” “You still haven’t told me why everyone’s boobs are so big in it!” “…………”

So I only cleared one route, and I can’t find a way to run the game again anytime soon. Kaido Mikoto, Ono Ryouko’s character, I only got halfway through, and the story looks just as fragmented and four-panel-comic as before, and more boring than the president’s route too. Maybe this game is just that level.

I once tried asking my wife, “What scenes does that black-haired girl in the game have?” All I got out of it was “big boobs,” nothing of any value. I’ll put this game on hold for now.

My wife also told me she tried searching for info on the game:

“Since I can’t read Japanese, I could only search the English below it, and all that came up was stuff like ‘Raspberry Pi Box’—little circuit boards and the like. What does that have to do with those big boobs?”

“It’s Raspberry Cube, not Raspberry Pi Box…”