Well, finally got around to playing this... and man, this was a weird fucking VN... Before anything else, thank you
Ncrdrg and
InsaneMonster for your guides. I'd have never been able to 100% complete this convoluted mess without your work. The work AliceSoft did here with the various triggers and whatnot somehow feels both complex and half-assed at the same time. Complex because there's a wide variety of scenes and outcomes and a lot of theoretical permutations. Half-assed because the game doesn't quite properly acknowledge all those permutations.
For example, Kyouko pops up pregnant at several points... even if the actions you took mean that Mamoru never had sex with her at any time. This is especially noticeable with Ncrdrg's pure love harem guide... but it's hardly the only consistency issue that this VN has where characters reference things that haven't happened. Or if they did, they happened off-screen with all sorts of dubious implications about the narrative.
The other big issue, at least for me, is how detached the gameplay parts are from the story. What I mean by that is that the chastity shield mechanic is more of an excuse for divine intervention than anything, and very rarely does the way it works involve the girl herself actively defending herself. (In fact, the only example I remember off the top of my head is Saya smacking Jouji with a piece of wood... every other time it pops up, it's usually someone/something else interfering or the girl just not running into the problem that she should have run into at all.) It's extra bad with Kotone, where she's absolutely definitely getting fucked at the Feast, because she can't refuse, it just doesn't have any impact on her for whatever reason while the heart shields are up.
Then there's the fact that the game explains absolutely fuck all in terms of how any of its mechanics work, which means that without a guide, you'll likely spend at least some time save scumming to check things out. They're not actually terribly complex, but figuring things out can be a tad tedious. Especially since you also have to balance it out with keeping track of all the triggers for events and whatnot...
Moving on... I have to say that I'm genuinely confused about who this game is intended for. As in, the story is interesting enough to be sure, even if it's basically a soap opera with tons of smut if you look too hard at it... but. Most of the HCGs, over 50% of them, are between the MC and the various girls that appear in the game. On top of that, all of the game over endings are extremely half-assed and leave enough plot-holes to drive a tank line through them on top of lacking true finality in a lot of ways. There's never a point of no-return with any of the events outside of any of the main girls getting pregnant, and as long as you prevent that point, there's nothing stopping you from having them jump on every dick imaginable and then some if you can manage things properly. Sure, there's some events that force impregnation, but they're few and far in between. (Most of them are with Saya, unsurprisingly.)
On top of that, some of the worst endings are only accessible if you REALLY aim for them and make choices that are extremely out of character for the people involved. Like Kotone's ending with Shinohara, you have to intentionally aim for that one...
Hell, there are even Game Over endings that could easily be spun into good endings depending on the details, like the SayaxShinji ending... which still has a number of things in it that don't make any sense on account of Kyoko being Saya's best friend and all that jazz...
There's also no Game Over endings where any antagonist or more of them end up with two or more of the girls. It's only Mamoru that gets to fuck multiples, and of course, all of them. The guy gets the most pregnant sex out of everyone in the entire VN. Indeed, all of the love endings involve pregnant sex at some stage or another.
From where I'm sitting, for a VN that a lot of people say is focused on NTR, this whole thing has very little actual NTR in it. At the end of the day, as far as I'm concerned, NTR is the whole process, that finishes with a break and betrayal that can never be repaired... and this VN doesn't have that much of it in it. There's very few points where you could absolutely say that the MC can't still fix things with the girl of his choice, even if you ignore all the plot-holes around whichever game-over situation they had there which would either make it impossible or would make it fixable or whatever...
The SayaxFunaki ending, where she kills Funaki when he threatens Mamoru because even after everything she still wants Mamoru's kid the most, is an excellent example of what I mean here... It's supposed to be a NTR ending... but there's no reason why things couldn't work out between Saya and Mamoru in the long run anyway after that... Both of Ririko's NTR endings have her loving Mamoru more than anything else and she never has any kids other than his after the first one. It's more like she makes her own male harems than anything else...
In any case, one thing that bothered me about the whole thing was Mamoru. I'll give the writers props for avoiding the majority of the dumb MC cliches that often appear whenever the word NTR is on the table... but it also feels like they wanted to have a bunch of cakes and eat them too. They couldn't decide if he's chad destroyer of pussy (like in certain scenes with Saya where he fucks her all night and makes her cum so many times she completely loses track of how many times she came) or if he's a virgin fuck-boy that cums from a girl touching him a little (like a number of scenes with Ririko). Sometimes he's oddly perceptive, and sometimes he's so absurdly dense that even the theoretical physics of black holes wouldn't explain this level of density. It makes him wildly inconsistent and makes him feel like less of a character and more of a plot device to generate smut of various types depending on which girl he's with at any given time. (Also, fun fact, out of all the characters in the game, he's the one to spout the infamous Get Pregnant! line and variations of it the most. XD)
I'll give them props for Shinohara though, he's an excellent villain with just enough moments of humanity in him (during Ririko's route in particular) to show that he's a person, while also being so complete utter scum that you can't help but smile whenever something bad happens to him and things don't go his way. Though, I do think that it's a weird choice that all the endings focused on him are basically impossible to get without twisting characters into a pretzel and intentionally aiming for utter stupid. Ikki's pretty hateable too, but he's at least not a total sore loser like Shinohara...
That said, there's absolutely NO ONE sane in this VN... None. Nil. Nada. Well. Ok. Shinji might count as mostly sane, and surprisingly, so does Kotone. Most of her issues stem from being trained to be a super prostitute and bathed in so much aphrodisiac that she naturally emits the stuff as part of her scent. Under those circumstances, she's the most understandable of the girls to me. On the other end of the spectrum, for me, is Saya, who's SO dumb you have to wonder how the fuck this woman can actually do any work whatsoever. I've met extremely trusting people before, but she takes it to ridiculous extremes for someone that's supposedly skilled enough to work as the head of a wealthy family. Ririko... well... play her love route. Her ending explains a lot about her issues, though she's definitely not really sane either.
Lastly. I will say that one of the reasons why I played this is because I saw the CG-set for it a good while ago somewhere else. At the time, I'd only seen the description of the VN, and thought that Kotone was Saya's actually daughter and that Ririko or Yukino has to be the MC's sister. The resemblance between Kotone and Saya is seriously uncanny... at least, until you think about the whole relationship between the Kamishiro family and the village. My pet theory is that Kotone is the daughter or granddaughter of one of the Kamishiro women given to village. It wouldn't surprise me if she was a niece or cousin of Saya's... and that'd explain a lot of things tbh.
But. Enough about all this. I'm honestly surprised that more people haven't been discussing the story or characters for this one. There's a lot more to it than a lot of other games on this site... but eh. What do I know? At least I had a pretty good time with it... even if the translation still leaves a lot to be desired. GPT-4 is indeed a massive improvement, but this still would benefit a lot from a massive editing pass. There's only so many times I can see Funaki/Mamoru/etc calling Ikki my husband before it stops being funny and starts being annoying... and there's plenty more where that came from...
