Animal Panic (あにまる☆ぱにっく) is a weird game… First off, the premise is weird. It comes from QUINCE SOFT, a Lump of Sugar sub-brand I’d just been praising for Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro.. I figured it was Lump of Sugar’s experimental plot, a place for oddball new games with strange setups. A year and change later, I got slapped in the face. Animal Panic looks like the most generic moege imaginable, and the staff list gives zero reason to expect surprises. Then, even weirder: I actually played the damn thing for some reason, and found it contains stuff way stranger than I expected.

Honestly? I’m a fan of Nanaroba Hana. Yeah, she’s got some black marks in her history, but I’m still a fan. I’ve always felt that when a female artist draws girls, there’s a kind of charm that male artists just can’t replicate—a sort of “cuteness” that only a girl can understand. So Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro. was naturally on my radar. It got delayed a bunch of times, a trial version came out, I played it, and I felt… weird about it. How should I put this—Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro. is put out by QUINCE SOFT, a subsidiary of Lump of Sugar. Quince is a fruit, a very peculiar one with a complicated “don’t just bite into it” nature. The reason the sub-brand is called QUINCE SOFT is probably that Lump of Sugar wanted to spin off that whole line of “somewhat playable, complex games” into its own label. What do I mean by “somewhat playable, complex games”? I mean stuff like Unmei Senjou no Phi, Magical Charming, Rensou Relation. Games that aren’t just simple branches but have a ton of complex choices. Honestly, I like these kinds of games. But for Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro., it’s a bit too complex.