Kizuna Kirameku Koi Iroha -Tsubaki Renka- (絆きらめく恋いろは －椿恋歌－) Review

Tsuki Kiraboshi no Koi Iroha (絆きらめく恋いろは) looked like it had nothing going for it when it came out, but the sales ended up surprisingly good—and the reviews were really high too.

The high praise isn’t because the game itself is all that good, or because the main heroine is written all that well, or because the main story is all that great either…

It was because of the game’s second heroine — Tsubaki — who looked so cute and charming.

So what is Tsubaki’s route actually about? She’s the one holding her family’s biggest prestige and resources, yet she gets dunked on by every self-made striver, and in the end she barely preserves her own dignity. So what’s there to praise about this plot? But the masses just think Tsubaki is moe, is cute, and completely ignore the psychological portrayal and the stuff about effort and striving—the only parts of that route I actually found decent……

トニカクカワイイ — in other words, as long as it’s cute, that’s all that matters.

This is some absolute bullshit! Again! AGAIN! The story got beaten out by moege fluff!

And this time, to throw a bone to the moe-blob crowd, the game got a fandisc — the protagonist isn’t the original one, the route isn’t the original route, it’s… Tsubaki.

The game’s title even became Kizuna Kirameku Koi Iroha -Tsubaki Renka- (絆きらめく恋いろは －椿恋歌－).

So how does this game actually hold up as a fandisc?

Honestly, it’s not bad.

The game picks up from where the original’s Tsubaki route left off. It seems to skip the True End portion of the original game, and a fair amount of the stuff about the cursed sword gets glossed over — instead it just continues on from the point where the protagonist and Tsubaki are already a couple.

It’s about a mysterious yokai clan that shows up within Suzakuin Tsubaki’s family, out for revenge against the Suzakuin household—and the yokai make it clear the targets aren’t the Suzakuin elders, but the Suzakuin daughters.

Speaking of the Suzakuin family’s daughters… naturally that brings us to Suzakuin Tsubaki. But the Suzakuin family actually has another daughter—Tsubaki’s older sister, Suzakuin Miyako. She apparently cut ties with the family and is currently hiding her identity at school working as a maid.

Then a transfer student suddenly shows up at the school: Kaguya, a tiny purple-haired loli. The moment she arrives she gives off serious “I’m a big deal” energy, and she’s dripping with bloodlust. Her target is obviously the school’s next tag tournament—basically 2v2 mini-bouts. For this one, Tsubaki picks Aoi, the girl she’d had bad blood with before, as her partner. The mysterious transfer student Kaguya teams up with the weakest green-haired girl in school, hands her a sword, and tells her, “With this sword, you can beat anyone easily.”

Of course, that sword is actually not a good thing. It’s a cursed blade of sorts—it can control people’s minds. But after Green Hair gets her hands on it, she finds herself suddenly wielding tremendous power, enough to easily beat down a lot of the strong fighters at school. After a few matches Green Hair gets carried away too, like she thinks she’s the hottest shit alive. This weird team even goes on a winning streak all the way to the finals, where they face off against Tsubaki’s team.

When the final match began, Tsubaki immediately noticed something was off — her opponent was simply too strong, and she felt like she was being bewitched by a powerful malevolent aura, her body starting to fail her as well.

But even with the cursed blade, Midori is still a scrub. Give a scrub top-tier gear and he’s still a scrub. In the end, Tsubaki and Aoi beat him anyway… The referee declares Tsubaki’s team the winner, but their opponent Kaguya doesn’t get it:

“That’s it? Aren’t you supposed to kill the other side to win the match?”

Then Kaguya flat-out declared she was going to take out Tsubakiin Tsubaki — she came here specifically for her — and vanished.

That night, the city went strange—this Kaguya had kicked off some kind of ritual, and a reek of youkai energy just swallowed the whole place. All sorts of illusions started cropping up, hunting down Tsubaki and the others trapped inside the city.

That’s when the school teacher (the white fox from the previous game, the one said to be an ancestor of the Shujuin family) saves the protagonist and Tsubaki’s group, and explains the truth:

1. That Kaguya is a cursed blade the Shikouin family accidentally forged years ago. Once they realized it could hijack your mind and turn you bloodthirsty, they sealed it away.
2. Being sealed made the blade resent the Shikouin family, and recently it managed to take human form as a youkai and started hunting them down for revenge.
3. Kaguya’s method of revenge is to kill the daughters of the Shikouin family, which puts Shikouin Tsubaki in its sights.
4. Right now the city and the school are already wrapped in youki, turned into a barrier in another world. To beat Kaguya you have to take out several key points, break the barrier, and only then can you face her.

So the people on the scene split into three groups and started breaking the barrier.

First, Tsubaki Suzakuin’s older sister, Miyako Suzakuin, leads the group along with Sakuya Izumi, and they take out the whole army of phantoms. Then Aoi Sengoku and Shion Aihara go defeat the mind-controlled green-haired girl. Finally, Tsubaki Suzakuin and the protagonist face the boss head-on.

The fights here actually have one big highlight: the battle between Tōko Shukuin and the illusion.

As the original heir of the Suzakuin family, Tōko’s combat ability far outstrips her younger sister’s. Facing the illusions, she… actually managed to take on 25 of them at once.

And her combat power is basically maxed out — she’s absurdly strong. The only thing that can stop her from winning is her blade’s durability running out and snapping, so this lady just pulls out a whole pile of weapons and goes full Unlimited Blade Works.

Her teammate Uwaisumi Sakuya, who fights alongside her, has zero presence at all — because she doesn’t even need to lift a finger. Shurakuin Tsubaki handles the whole thing by herself, and she’s gone completely bloodthirsty, taking on practically a hundred enemies alone.

Kamiizumi Sakuya even went and asked a goofy-ass question:

“How do I get as goated as you?”

Of course, with the onee-san Tsuuko Sukakuin going on a rampage, the barrier got smashed outright, so Sukakuin Tsubaki’s final showdown with Kaguyа ended up being that much easier.

Naturally, it starts with a war of words: Kaguya says that she, like Tsubaki Suzakuin, is nothing more than a tool of the Suzakuin family—once she’s outlived her usefulness, she’ll be thrown away.

Kaguya was forged as a blade, and when it turned out not to be what the Suzakuin family wanted, she was tossed into the cold palace and left to rot. Same with Tsubaki Suzakuin — she competes as the family’s representative, and the moment she embarrasses them, she gets swapped out… In some ways, the two of them really are the same.

But of course, that kind of trash talk doesn’t work. In the end, Tsubaki Suzakuin obviously has to awaken her cheat powers and finish off the boss, and the protagonist gets in on it too—the two of them even pull off a little flex.

Here’s a detail worth noting: during the boss fight, Tsuabaki-in Tsubaki uses “a fire ability that only the Tsuabaki-in bloodline can wield,” and it’s thanks to this power bursting out in a desperate moment that she’s able to deal massive damage to the boss. Meanwhile, look back at the earlier scene where Tsuabaki-in Miyako alone cuts down an entire crowd — she doesn’t even use that ability… Which tells you just how insanely strong the older sister, Tsuabaki-in Miyako, really is.

The first half of the game actually shows how strong the older sister is—every time Kaguya taunts someone and then sees Suzakuin Tsubaki show up, she just retreats on the spot…

Of course, the older sister isn’t the heroine after all, nor is she the protagonist of the fandisc, so in the end it still takes Tsubaki Suzakuin to beat the boss.

In the end, of course, the boss gets defeated, Suzakuin Tsubaki and the boss reach a mutual understanding, the boss returns to its original form—a single katana—and it ends up being wielded by Suzakuin Tsubaki too. The end.

The game reached its ending too.

So the story goes: a cursed sword abandoned by the Suzakuin family takes human form, comes looking for revenge against the Suzakuin daughter, Tsubaki Suzakuin, and ends up defeated and subdued.

There isn’t much in the way of plot ups and downs. The green-haired girl’s temptation and fall—if you’re not an idiot, you can see where that’s headed from a mile away. I wouldn’t call the story bad, it’s just way too formulaic. Watch the setup and you already know the payoff; pretty clichéd, honestly. Still, compared to the first half of that LASS spiritual successor from a few days ago, it’s way better—at least this one you can actually keep reading.

On the music side there’s honestly nothing to say — barely any new OST, it’s all recycled from older games. The sprite work reuses a ton of old assets too, though they did add some special CGs for specific events, like Shukuin Tsubaki’s beast-ear form when her youki gets riled up. And of course there’s a bunch of new boning CGs, which is about what you’d expect, so I won’t go on about it.

As a fandisc, the game really does go all out to “serve the player” — it throws in a ton of HCGs for both the side characters and the leads, completely disconnected from any story, just pure porn-pic selling… On top of that, there’s a “one-click unlock all H-scenes” feature. So even if you don’t play the game, nothing’s stopping you from getting off — truly wholehearted service for the otaku.

Honestly there’s not much to say about the game’s voice acting. Ui’s performance as the heroine really lands, but something about it always felt off to me — it’s too fake. A character like that just can’t exist in real life, and it sounds weird to listen to. Maybe getting married made me a realist… Still, for most otaku out there this shit probably hits like a truck.

The game does have a “marriage END” at the very end. Click the Bride button in the bottom-left of the title screen and you drop into a short little epilogue showing the protagonist and Tsubakiin Tsubaki’s wedding and whatnot. Two CGs, then it wraps up abruptly.

All in all, as a fandisc this game is more than合格 — at least it doesn’t just sell porn CGs, and it actually tells a story that holds up. The most groan-worthy part is that even though this is Tsubaki-in’s fandisc and the plot is about subduing a family’s cursed sword, the strongest fighter isn’t the heroine — it’s Tsubaki’s older sister, Miyako-in. In this story Tsubaki-in still can’t carry the excitement on her own; she’s mostly stuck in cute-rich-girl mode, and the parts that actually make the game thrilling have nothing to do with her. I have to say, Miyako-in’s battle scenes are genuinely excellent — her carving through a whole crowd single-handedly, complete with Unlimited Blade Works-style detail, got me hyped. That’s easily the best part of the game for me…

As for the rest… maybe I’m just used to it by now. Not bad, not great — it is what it is. Honestly they probably should have renamed the game something like Chronicles of the Useless Sword — the heroine is that useless… her sister carries the whole thing.