IxSHE Tell Review
If you watch a lot of anime or play galge, you’re probably familiar with a certain setup. In Japanese otaku-oriented fiction, the most common one is the “harem.”
This “harem” is a bit different from the Qing dynasty harem dramas we’re used to. Even if it’s somewhat similar to something like The Deer and the Cauldron, it’s still not quite the same.
Japanese harems mostly consist of “the male lead maintaining ambiguous relationships with multiple women for a long time but never fucking confessing.” Because Japan is monogamous, you see—if you confess, that means the other women are done for, game over, loser dogs, and the harem loses its meaning.
This “harem” thing thrives on that borderline-level ambiguity. You can be naked and hugging all sorts of girls, you can see their entire bodies, you can kiss, you can grab tits, you can even touch pussy, but as long as you don’t stick it in, you and she are just ambiguous, the other women still have a chance, and your harem can continue. So the actual fucking is generally the bottom line. Most harem works never cross that line—unless they’re heading for the ending.
However, “harem” in the context of a galgame is a different picture entirely… Because galgames have no bottom line, harems split into “true harem” and “fake harem.” “True harem” is exactly what it sounds like—ハーレム—the male lead does 3P, 4P, 5678P… all sorts of indescribable things. “Fake harem” is still the manga/anime routine: all sorts of ambiguity, all the heroines like the protagonist, but since it’s a galgame you’ll definitely hit a home run and it won’t drag on without an ending like some dumbass manga or light novel.
Most harem setups go like this:
Ahuhu is an unbelievably ordinary high schooler. At home he has a sister who’s an unbelievably brocon and hates squid, next door lives a childhood friend named Xiaozhu who walks to school with him every day, the student council president at school is a sharp-tongued girl who deliberately picks fights with him every day, and meanwhile Ahuhu has a crush on some girl in the school library—a recent transfer student he ran into by chance on the train one time.
Ahuhu keeps saying he has no luck with love, but the story ends with his sister wanting to marry him, Xiaozhu insisting she’s just a childhood friend while actually masturbating to him every day, the student council president being a tsundere who’s crazy about him and only picks fights to talk to him more, and the library girl actually liking him too but unable to say it no matter what, keeping it bottled up inside…
So Ahuhu, while humbly calling himself a loser, simultaneously juggles all these beautiful girls like some romance-blind KY idiot, until some event triggers a choice and a confession…
Familiar? Clichéd? I can’t say for manga and light novels, but at least most galgames follow a similar setup…
Honestly, this setup has plenty of holes, especially the protagonist claiming he has zero luck with women:
“You motherfucker Ahuhu, your luck with women is off the charts!”
You get used to complaining about this stuff. Some games try to break out of the framework, but they always roll back in the end… After all, if you want to write multiple heroines, this is the only way… what else can you do…
Yeah, what else can you do? Well, a company called Hook gave us a different answer, showing us what a harem looks like when it doesn’t follow the formula…