Purumai Wars (プラマイウォーズ) is an Asa Project game from 2015. Its position in the Asa Project catalog is honestly kind of awkward — it landed right in the middle of a transition period, where they hadn’t fully given up on the gag humor and the crazy facial expressions yet, but were also trying to lean a bit more into pure romance. That said, the older sister’s route in the base game is still decent, and as far as I remember, Asa Project is one of those rare “conscientious porting houses” — when their games get ported to all-ages handheld platforms, they generally not only promote existing side characters to heroines but also add entirely new character routes, and the new characters’ VAs tend to be “whatever anime voice actor is hot right now.” That’s a fair amount of effort. Some examples: Renai 0 Kilometer PSP version: promotes two heroines, adds two more, voiced by Kana Asumi and Yukari Tamura respectively. Hitotsu Tobashi Renai PSV version: adds two heroines, voiced by Ayane Sakura and Sakura Tange. Which brings us to the game we’re talking about here: Puramai Wars V: promotes one heroine, adds one more, voiced by Aya Suzaki. Looking at how much effort went into these ports, you can see the official releases getting lazier and lazier — and this game is lazier still.

Back in elementary school, my family bought a VCD player. I can’t remember the name of that player anymore. What I do remember is that it came bundled with a stack of pirated VCDs. My dad bought it thinking “once we have this thing we can watch blockbusters at home,” and the discs they threw in were all big prestige movies, stuff like Mission Impossible. So we immediately fired up this fancy machine and watched Mission Impossible for a good long while. Halfway through, neither my dad nor I could stand the movie. It wasn’t that the content was bad, it was just… boring to watch. So for a long stretch after that, the VCD player just sat there gathering dust, because there was nothing worth watching.