Koi wa Mofumofu! Love Me Teddy (恋はもふもふ!ラブ・ミー・テディ) Review

I’ve played a lot of games with interesting premises, and the one that left the biggest impression on me is definitely the one where a heroine turns into an alpaca.

That game was actually pretty touching. The moe girl you love most turns into an alpaca—that’s the moment that tests whether your love is real. It’s worth recommending, too.

Besides heroines transforming, there’s also the protagonist-transforms genre. The famous recent one is that game where the protagonist becomes a black cat. It even got an anime, so I won’t go on about it.

This kind of game always produces a lot of comedy. It’s a comedy-grade absurd premise to begin with—the protagonist suddenly turns into another species, so of course there’ll be plenty of laughs.

So this genre has a new member. More, the well-known rhythm game developer, has a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary whose brand got renamed—and that renamed brand, KATE, released its latest work: Koi wa Mofumofu! Love Me Teddy (恋はもふもふ!ラブ・ミー・テディ). Literally, “Love is Fluffy, Love Me Teddy!”

Don’t bitch about why it isn’t “Love my teddy” yet—I looked it up, and “love me teddy” seems to be a reference to something. The premise is easy enough to explain: the protagonist turns into a teddy bear, gets taken home by several girls, and gets rubbed all over.

The setup is blunt and simple. From the very start, the protagonist just turns into a teddy bear plush. Then he’s quickly picked up by a girl!

This girl is also the protagonist’s classmate, Tendo Yurin. She’s overjoyed to find the teddy bear—hugging it to sleep, playing with it every which way… driving the protagonist crazy.

The next day the protagonist runs off (still in teddy bear body), gets picked up by another girl, taken home again… then runs off again, gets picked up again… and so the cycle repeats.

Of course, not every girl likes this teddy bear protagonist. One named Kusatsu Mei sees him and kicks him flying out the door.

After all that running around, the protagonist ends up back with Tendo Yurin—she was the first one to pick him up, after all. And Yurin really loves this bear. She even talks to it a lot, including about the fact that she likes the protagonist.

Yurin says she’s known the protagonist since childhood, and that she’s had a crush on him but never knew how to express it. She doesn’t know the teddy bear in front of her is actually him, obviously. The protagonist’s heart races hearing this, and then Yurin kisses the teddy bear—and after the kiss, he turns back! But only for a moment before he’s a teddy bear again.

Once Yurin learns the teddy bear is actually the protagonist, she’s a bit surprised but accepts it. Now the protagonist faces a choice:

Stay with Tendo Yurin, or run off and find someone else.

If you choose Yurin, the protagonist and she become a loving couple. After they confess, he inexplicably never turns back into a teddy bear again, and they head to a Happy Ending.

I think this ending is OK, honestly—just too short, too throwaway, too bare-bones. You have to fill in a ton of story from the handful of CGs.

But the game leaves one question: why did the protagonist turn into a teddy bear?

That’s where you choose to leave Tendo Yurin and go down another route—the one for Kusatsu Mei, the girl who kicked him.

Mei’s family runs a bathhouse. If the protagonist chooses to go to her, she picks him up, and she seems to fully understand that the teddy bear is the protagonist. After some questioning, Mei explains that her family’s bathhouse has a “bath god” (yu-gami), and that the reason the protagonist turned into a teddy bear is that he came to bathe here a while back, offended this bath god, and got punished.

The protagonist thinks back and pretty much figures it out.

He came to bathe here recently, tried to peek at the women’s bath, got caught by the bath god, and was punished by being turned into a teddy bear plush.

So the protagonist goes to beg the bath god for forgiveness. The bath god says: “Lifting the curse is simple. Just show me ’true love,’ and the curse will lift on its own.”

That also explains why, on the other route, the protagonist never turns back into a bear once he gets a girl.

Now on this route, the protagonist starts building a relationship with Kusatsu Mei, they become a couple, the curse lifts, and he achieves redemption.

Put plainly, this whole “protagonist turns into a teddy bear” game is: the protagonist peeks at the women’s bath, gets punished by the bath god, turns into a teddy bear, and the cure is for him to find a partner like a cola commercial—and he happens to find one through his teddy bear adventures and live happily ever after.

Think about it—is that really a punishment for the protagonist? Isn’t it more of a reward? If you really wanted to punish a horny protagonist, shouldn’t you turn him into an inflatable doll? Being a teddy bear hugged and passed around by girls is way more of a reward than being an inflatable doll getting pounded by dudes.

In the end it’s the old “god gives you a push” routine—it’s been around since Tenshin Ranman!

Sure, the routine is old, but that doesn’t mean this game is merely mediocre. On the contrary—it can’t even pull off the basic old routine.

Turning into a teddy bear should be packed with comedic bits, but this game barely uses any of it. It’s just pure fanservice.

“Wow, as a bear I can see boobs!” “Wow, as a bear I can see panties!” “Wow, as a bear I can see nipples!”

No shit—I’m playing from a god’s-eye view. I can see more than you can as a bear. I can see the boobs, the panties, the nipples, and I can even see your dick, protagonist!

So the game completely fails to use the “transformation” element—it’s just wasting fanservice.

And the premise could originally have supported a pure-love route, like that alpaca game, letting the protagonist reflect on how hard-won happiness is. But this game doesn’t. Once the protagonist finds true love he never turns into a teddy bear again, and then the game is no different from your standard eroge humping.

And the game is still cheap! (Why do I say “still”?)

I counted the BGM—maybe five tracks. The OP sounds great but feels like it’s copying the effects from a game by a certain now-defunct company. The ED has no animation, just plain text. There aren’t many standalone CGs—it’s just a patchwork of HCGs. The most unforgivable part is that the game wastes great voice actresses.

The best VA in the game is probably Igasaki Ayaka, and they had her play a stutterer…

The worst VA in the game is Yuika, and she has the most lines!

The VA with the most potential is Yomogi Kasumi, and they had her do a boyish voice!

All things considered, the only thing this game has going for it is the art. It’s the same artist as the earlier Casablanca no Kaben, and it’s a big improvement over that one. Such a shame! All that good art, wasted!

Also, the first childhood friend route is actually not bad—it just feels completely under-budgeted. It wraps up abruptly halfway through. And even the bathhouse daughter’s route, which looks like the main one, ends with the two of them scrubbing the bathhouse together. It’s painfully awkward.

Anyway, after taking a sip of cola that’s no longer branded by a certain non-virgin, I thought about it: this game could actually be saved. Change one setting and it becomes a masterpiece!

Just change the protagonist from a “teddy bear” to “Winnie the Pooh.”

A god game and a shit game are sometimes one thought apart.