If I’m a fan of any visual novel studio, it’s probably LASS. I can’t forget the shock 11eyes gave me right after graduating college, when I spent half a year clearing it on PSP. Honestly, 11eyes isn’t perfect story-wise—the beginning literally put me to sleep—but its combat scenes and environmental worldbuilding struck a chord. Especially the finale: the Red Night going berserk, the swordsman duel, the scumbag protagonist going full cheat mode while the OST track Eye of the Void plays—it all hit in one continuous rush. Thanks to my fondness for 11eyes, the 11eyes anime remains the worst visual novel adaptation in my personal ranking to this day. I’ve played plenty of games since, but few recapture that feeling. From that moment on, I guess I became a LASS fanboy. I went back and filled in most of LASS’s catalog (except the Nanako series…), and I kept an eye on their future releases. Shoujo Shin’iki ∽ Shoujo Tengoku (少女神域∽少女天獄) was LASS’s first game in four years after 11eyes sold like hotcakes. Before release, 11eyes’s reputation and popularity drew a lot of attention, but after launch, the reception was wildly different from expectations. “The biggest landmine of 2013.” That’s the most widely accepted take. Shoujo Shin’iki ∽ Shoujo Tengoku became Shoujo Tenrai. I didn’t want to believe it, so there was only one way to find out if it was really a landmine: play it myself. So I cleared it pretty quickly. The game isn’t long. To be slightly objective: it’s not a landmine, but it’s not a success either.