Feeling empty, lonely, and a bit chilly lately, I decided I needed something “short and sweet,” “gets to the point fast,” “heroine’s got big tits,” “preferably that kind of plot” — in short, the “you know what I mean” kind of game. Which is how I ended up with QUALIA Yakusoku no Kiseki.
The premise is about as obvious as it gets: the protagonist is a scientist, he builds a big-titted robot girl, and then there’s that soulful look in her eyes. Sure, this year is drowning in shitty “AI robot romance” galgames, but this one clearly isn’t like those dime-a-dozen ones. What kind of game this is — you get it, right?
Let’s go! My guy!
Hitotsu Tobashi Renai is an old game, one of Asa Project’s earlier works.
Actually, calling it “early” is a stretch—more like early-ish. Hitotsu Tobashi Renai is built around “love one person removed,” and the Chinese patch apparently translated the title as “indirect love,” which honestly fits pretty well. That’s exactly what the game is about.
My opinion of Hitotsu Tobashi Renai wasn’t exactly high at first, because I overplayed it. It’s chaotic the whole way through—the “skipped-over characters” are either insufferably nasty or unbearably saintly, and the art style itself doesn’t look remotely serious. Compared to Renai 0 Kilometer, it feels like it goes too far. If you say it’s going the comedy route, then it insists on throwing in some “romance” on the individual routes. If you say it’s going the pure-love route, those enormous exaggerated facial expressions alone make it look like anything but pure love…
Awkward, isn’t it…
A while back I was mulling something over:
Which visual novel actually delivers a romance experience closest to the real thing?
If I’m forced to answer, the first thing that pops into my head is a game from a company called SMEE.
Yeah, SMEE and HOOKSOFT are basically the same outfit. They bill themselves as focusing on “romance by stages” — the whole hero-meets-heroine, gets to know her, falls for her, and then, uh, conspires with her… wait, no, marries her kind of flow. That’s what they say on the tin, but the games themselves don’t always look that way.
How to put it — a lot of SMEE games feel like gag routines strung together through everyday life. Early on, Fureraba Friend to Lover wasn’t that blatant about it. But later stuff like Pure×Connect and Step Kanojo started leaning harder into comedy, using exaggerated presentation to sell the heroines’ quirks and the protagonist’s snark. Sometimes the protagonist himself turns into a total creep just so you have something to roast.
SMEE’s comedy path keeps veering further off course, though. Last game, that “country love” one, was basically a joke collection — the heroines had no personality, the art was unsettling, and I had a genuinely painful time playing it. Listening to Honda-san’s country ojou-sama rattle off scatological jokes one after another, plus bits about a bunch of people observing sperm… I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The confession at the end was cookie-cutter and half-hearted, and it wrapped up out of nowhere.
Personally, I prefer the style of early SMEE like Fureraba. There the conversations center on “getting to know the girl,” most choices are about communicating with her, and many of the women feel close to real romance — especially Mochizuki Rina and the vegetable-selling senpai Sawatari Misaki. That’s why I say SMEE’s games are closer to real love.
And now SMEE is back with a new title: Making＊Lovers. Still about the player searching for a partner, still that witty, chatty style. They even put out a super simple preview version first — a few minutes of dialogue per heroine, nothing you could really judge. A trial version came later, but I couldn’t be bothered since the game was about to launch.
After finishing the retail version, I have to say this is probably SMEE’s second-best game in recent years, after Fureraba.