Honestly I don’t even remember when I played this one. I’ve been way too busy and tired lately — I’ve played a ton of stuff but haven’t had time to write anything up, so I’m just piecing it back together while sorting through screenshots. As I recall, this is one of those “sold in volumes” little nukige. Most of you are probably already familiar with the racket. The first volume, Ichizu na (Shojo→) Kanojo to Koi shitai, came out last year and I thought it was fine. Apart from me griping pretty hard about how blatantly it panders to otaku, there wasn’t much wrong with it. Its biggest strength was the absolutely gorgeous CG and the stunning, heart-fluttering heroine art — solidly middle-of-the-road as far as visual novels go. A year and change later, the series put out a second volume, and they couldn’t even be bothered to change the name: 《一途な（処女→）彼女と恋したい ver.広橋るな》 Also, I have no idea if putting the “ver” up front like that is even correct. If you’ve decided “ver” is the prefix for the different volumes, then you didn’t add it to the first one either. Setting aside the inconsistent naming, how does a simple little romance thing like this take you a whole year to develop? So I was getting ready to give this a quick look, and it turned out to be nothing like what I expected.

The eroge market has been shrinking hard these past few years. Plenty of studios can’t be bothered making “story games” anymore and have all pivoted to short, punchy fanservice nukige, dressed up as “the pursuit of sweet romance.” In reality it’s just low-cost nukige to recoup money. Everyone knows these games have no substance — you’re here for the CGs — and the devs know it too, so they stuff more CGs in. And since a budget title needs more than one volume, they draw a bunch of heroines up front and sell them off in pieces. Small margin, high volume. Why not? Today’s subject is Itchokusen (Shojo→) Kanojo to Koi Shitai, from COSMOS, a small label under Windmill. If you ask me, the game has exactly two highlights. One is the artist Tsukimoto Jin — the art is genuinely good, and the heroine is genuinely beautiful. The other is the original concept by Houmori Kei. Because Houmori Kei may be an old pervert, but he’s decent at writing “sweet romance” stuff. His old light novel Ore mo Omae mo Choro Suginai ka was pretty good: the male lead desperately wants a girlfriend but is kind of flippant, confesses to anyone he sees, and then by some mix-up ends up confessing to our heroine, who — get this — earnestly and seriously accepts. And so the two begin a relationship where they put the cart before the horse…