I’d already made up my mind to play ワールド・エレクション (World Election) long before. It was the winter of 2015, as I recall — I was staring down a whole pile of landmine galge, and in game after game stuffed with Akino Hana, I couldn’t find a single CV worth a damn. For a seiyuu junkie like me that’s pure agony: like a plant deprived of sunlight, like an earthworm deprived of soil, like a shut-in deprived of instant ramen, like Four Leaf Clover deprived of TFboys. Then, out of nowhere, Whirlpool announced their new title, World Election. The main heroine, Kururu, was voiced by Sawasawa Sawa — a beacon in the pitch-black night, shining on this ugly bastard until I was so excited I couldn’t even find my bearings. No more “story is king,” no more “art style is king,” no more “the industry’s big releases are king.” As long as Kiritani Hana is in it, and she’s the main heroine, that’s the best. Period. But by the time this game actually came out, several months had passed. Honestly, I’d mostly lost interest by then. Just from the setup you can basically guess where it’s going: a destruction god drops out of nowhere, a fictional world where multiple races coexist, an election looming between those races, and of course our ugly-as-sin protagonist is definitely going to bang all the non-humans too, not to mention pinning the destruction god herself to the bed and teaching her some manners. Still, I remembered that this game had given me hope back last winter when I was desperate, finally letting me escape a world that was nothing but 秋野花, 秋野花 everywhere, and I’m a man of loyalty, you know. Considering that Whirlpool keeps putting out games with neat setups that then fumble the landing hard, I went into this one with the noble spirit of improving my Japanese reading comprehension.