holotte rio

Kokoro no Katachi to Iro to Oto (ココロのカタチとイロとオト) Review

CUFFS’s HOLOTTE brand spawned a sub-label called HOLOTTE ROI, and they put out a new game titled Kokoro no Katachi to Iro to Oto. The name is pretty generic—it literally means “The Shape of the Heart, Its Colors and Sounds.” The story follows our protagonist, who was born with a superpower: he can hear the “voice of the heart” and sense the “colors of the heart.” Anger is red, happiness is yellow, irritation is purple, that sort of thing. Sounds cool, right? It’s not. Your head gets loud as hell because you can hear what everyone around you is thinking, and it’s annoying as fuck. Our hero is sick of it, so eventually he develops the skill of “automatically blocking out surrounding noise.” This stupid skill is actually necessary, because the game stops bothering to show his power in any complex way. Occasionally the screen flashes a color to indicate he heard something, but otherwise the player pretty much forgets he has this dumb superpower at all. Then the game gets to the point. Two girls show up: a pink-haired one and a blonde one. The protagonist discovers his power doesn’t work on the pink-haired girl—he can’t hear her inner voice, but he can hear the blonde’s. Sound familiar? So even though he constantly hears the blonde’s inner voice screaming that she’s crazy about him while she acts tsundere and tells him to go for the pink-haired girl, he ignores the miserable blonde and keeps heating things up with the pink one.