Was surprised to see this game currently rated at 3.5 stars and decided to give it the love it deserves by giving it a perfect rating.
I normally criticize grindy games, but while this game is grindy, it's a management simulator game and if you like games like those, you'll probably like this too. The gameplay loop is really fun, and the days you spend with Wakari are really touching. I loved this game so much that I played it multiple times and I'm still looking other adult games like this.
The H CGs are pretty hot, though admittedly they're lacking in animation. They're VN style H scenes and honestly they're fine and I would easily give the H scenes 4 out of 5.
I would also stay away from Idol Hands 2 since it's not as humorous and engaging. Part of the fun of the first game is choosing whether you'll raise Wakari as a pure idol, a lewd idol, or the best idol who can be pure and lewd at the same time. However, due to developer getting harassed by "fans", they had to cut the AV content from the game and overall the quality dropped. There's this one scene in Idol Hands 2 where you're just massaging your talent's feet and the manager busts a fucking nut without any contact with his dick and it's truly horrible, but that's a story for a different review.
For now, all I can say is I'd love to play another Idol Hands game if they're more akin to Idol Hands 1.
The story is accurate to the sad real-life response to an Idol having a relationship and performing any sexual activity. With that said, Wakari is a genuine sweetheart. The game makes you to want to help her and see her succeed based purely on who she is as a person and her devotion to you, the player. That leads us into the primary issue with this game and the main reason why I'm giving it a 3/5: the way it handles the sexual coercion to make Wakari do things she has no interest in while having no response from the MC is garbage. Please note, this is not supposed to be an NTR or cuck game. Wakari only wants to be with the MC and she only wants to have sex with the MC. The MC, on the other hand, is written as initially only wanting to use Wakari, but very soon into the game he starts to actually care for her. Then why, pray I ask, does it have him want her to have sex with other men only once he starts to reflect her feelings towards him? The sex progression is set up extremely well at first, but the random cuck shit that goes on is unreasonable. On top of that, him forcing her to cheat isn't ever properly addressed. It just happens and is not spoken of again. Then you, the player, are just supposed to pretend it never happened. It's absurd.
One last thing to add: it has a bit too much grind. A significant chunk of the playtime will be doing repetitive grinding and occasionally playing one of two fairly boring mini-games. Additionally, the "have sex" main option is rather dull. After you do it once you've already seen all it has to offer and you'll not want to play it again, even though you will have to do it multiple times.
Pretty fun game tbh, had fun playing it last year. I remember you can have a several different ending if you have enough money or not. Also having fun with the choices in game, as in you can train this and that.
Played this one today after playing part two first. XD
Pros:
- Decent art.
- Good idea.
- Intuitive mechanics.
Cons:
- Need much more h content.
- Hearts mini game is a real pain in the ass.
- Sometimes it crushes.
- No autosave in order to preserve your gameplay after crushes.
Great game. Sex scenes are good, animation and art is top tier. The chinese voice-acting is really wierd to hear from an anime game, especially when you can understand chinese but the VA is pretty good so it works. First playthrough i didn't even really dive into the porn making and just helped her become a star singer and actor. Helping her fulfil her dreams the conventional way was nice and wholesome. Minigames can be skipped most of the time if you have the correct stats.
If you want to be a manager, this is your game, the only con would be that it has chinese dub and crashes frequently.
The art is pretty neat and the mechanics (mood/fatigue,feeling) make the game enjoyable.
If you like your classic trainer with a bit of internet streamer then I guess this game is for you. It's an OKAY game, really. Though the voice actor could be better.
Positive:
-The heroine.
-The H scenes (it's very static though, so keep that in mind).
-The Arts.
Negative:
-The grind.
-Can be buggy, crashed my game sometime.
-Repetitive.
-The VA.
All in all, it's your classic trainer game with less than stellar VA and rescue only by the arts.
tl;dr: It's a bit grindy (which you expect from the genre) and abandons it's sex-positive theme for coercion (which -- unfortunately -- you also expect from the genre). Playtime: 4.5 hours for a first playthrough, though a second in NG+ will likely be needed to get all scenes (or just download a save from the thread).
Good:
- The game uses just enough voice acting, but you can turn it off if you like. Wakari will have key phrases she uses to set the tone, but not actual dialogue. I like the lack of dialogue since I usually end up skipping 60% of it anyway since reading is faster.
- The translation is good. I may have simply not played enough Taiwanese games, but it always seems to be a coinflip whether they go for a direct translation (which is fine for a metroidvania, but less so for a text-heavy game or VN) or actual localization. This game fortunately uses the latter. There are still some typos and odd wordings (such as the text saying we're at an amusement park while the graphics are of a water park, or one outfit rasing the "perversion" stat which it turns out is the poorly-named "skill" stat).
- Wakari's a sweetie.
YMMV:
- The men are drawn differently from the women. It's sort-of okay since the game has a more whimsical tone anyway, but I still found it a bit jarring at first.
- There's an interesting, non-standard reason for MC to have a bunch of debt, though unfortunately it doesn't get covered until the ending. He actually never brings his debt up with Wakari even though she clearly cares for him and would understand and want to help.
- No contraceptives. Yeah, it's a porn game, but still: Wakari already lost her first chance at being an idol after training for years so I don't think she'd take the risk of getting pregnant now even if she chooses to be an-idol-who-also-has-sex. There's even an event where MC is given condoms so Wakari can get some hands-on experience for a condom ad she's about to shoot and they don't get used.
- ビッチ (or whatever it is in Chinese, I guess) is translated as bitch when slut would be more accurate.
- There's some Wakari == Slut going on even though she's only had sex with one guy. You can enjoy sex without being a slut, but as I mentioned up top, the sex-positive theme is discarded.
- The story is nowhere near as robust as it could be. I get that it can be difficult to distribute motivations properly since few quests have direct prerequisites and most of them are completely optional, but I still feel it would be easy to have events set certain flags then trigger a "Wakari hears what you're saying, but it still really uncomfortable with the idea of an open relationship" event when enough get set.
Yuck:
- The game starts off with a sex-positive theme which is quickly sidelined in favor of coercion. I'm really disappointed that it's once again coercion since this game set itself up quite well to escalate the lewd events through camgirl -> camgirl w/partner -> indie porn -> professional porn. Everyone was talking about how masturbation is fine and natural, so it'd make sense for camgirling to be available from early on. Maybe there's an event where a regular offers bonus cash to see her jerk her bf and things escalate from there. Instead, making money from sex is locked behind paying 200k for an open-relationship seminar (??), taking an event that isn't supposed to be sexy except then Wakari is coerced into it through contract fine-print and threat of legal action (where's my option to go "Call the police and we'll which one of us broke the law"?), a video which isn't supposed to exist gets leaked, and it's straight into streaming sex. Well, after you pay another 150k to unlock it for some reason. And then later when you want to start shooting professional porn videos Wakari really doesn't want to do it. Just bringing it up will spoil her mood until you meet the prerequisites. Even then she still objects to having sex with other men until MC really leans on her. She goes through with it but then she's upset (MC doesn't feel bad about it) and her mood is set to zero. The issue never really gets addressed.
- Though it starts off romantically enough, the coercion and cheating made me really feel that MC is just using Wakari. She clearly cares for him but he's like "We should have an open relationship." There aren't even any proper side-girls!
- The game crashes, though it autosaves at the start of each day so not much is lost. It happens frequently enough (and there's only one autosave slot) that you'll still want to keep a hard-save or three.
- The grind. You expect grind in management games, but the way the loading screen tells you that you can hold a key to fast-forward should raise your guard. Because you will be fast-forwarding. Not just through some text you've seen before, but also through the little animation that plays whenever you perform an activity (seriously, it could've been 1 second long), through the long animation (7 seconds!) that plays when you do a sex stream, and through the thoroughly unnecessary sequence at the end of each day.
- You can't skip scenes. You can fast-forward through them, but they game wants you to play it twice so there's stuff you'll definitely be seeing at least twice.
- The QTE and sex mini-games are uninspired and long. I say QTE, but you really just set your mouse over a specific area of the screen and wait for diamonds to fly into it. It's not rhythem-action and goes on for over a minute when 20 seconds would have been plenty. Sex is also uninspired. You click on panties, click on legs, then rapidly click on vaginal or anal until the bar fills. There's no variation, you get hardly any stats, and Wakari's passion takes a significant hit so it ends up cutting into your money-making time. I only ever did it because some event needed 3 sex in order to trigger.
- It's a real pain to level up lewd stats if you want to avoid coercion. You get some stats from buying outfits/items and can raise some as secondary stats in regular jobs, but if you're avoiding coercion all can rely on is the pitiful gains from sex. Oh, but there was an update! Now you can replay the toy-specific scene during room sex to get a larger bonus to the relevant lewd-stat. But remember how I mentioned you can't skip scenes? Now you have to fast forward through them dozens of times.
It's a cute game. There isn't a lot to it and it's inherently a simple make numbers go up management game, but the flavor events that are there are quirky and have character beyond the boilerplate translation that you might expect this sort of game to have. It's not going to win any awards but it's not that long either.
Minigames can be skipped most of the time if you have the correct stats.
