LOVEREC. -Mini Theaters- is the fandisc for Loverec. Honestly, LoveRec is a pretty solid game. This fandisc, though? It’s… bone-dry. The whole thing is 1.95 GB. The story picks up right where the original ended—the protagonist is about to graduate, and the white-haired little sister plans to sell the film she shot at the next C90. Everyone’s trying to make it happen. Yeah… except that’s just the prologue. The actual filmmaking never comes up.

I haven’t played many Alcot games, but most of them follow the same path: fairly lowbrow (no offense) snark and slice-of-life, cute moe character designs, and music that’s better than it has any right to be. I’d say it wasn’t like this back in Clover Heart, but by the time Clover Days rolled around it had quietly become this way, so my feelings about Clover Days carry over: no matter how you look at it, this stuff is “not especially clever,” but it’s also “not bad.” The plot beats are a bit clichéd, but it never force-feeds you shit. When LoveRec. was being promoted I took a look at the character designs… “Oh fuck, isn’t this just Anzu?” Yes, the heroine named Hitomi looks almost identical to Takakura Anzu from Clover Days, just with a different hair color and eye color. You could chalk it up to Jinmura Yuji’s art style, but the feeling that they “literally just took an old character, tweaked her, and put her on sale” is a weird one. Incidentally, the other two heroines weren’t drawn by Jinmura Yuji, but they’re also a bit off, and overall not as cute as Clover Days. Given Alcot’s usual style, I assumed this game was at most a moe showcase, and from the designs and the rough blurb that’s exactly what it looked like. But after finishing it, I came away feeling something different.