SexNote [v21.0.d]
Good old SexNote. One of the few games that continues to deliver surprisingly decent quality in a surprisingly timely manner. Which is to say, I am a big fan of this game. Five stars. With that in mind, I would still like to review it because there is a lot to review.
The Story
I'm pretty sure that the game is treated almost exclusively as a scene viewer, and if it is played, it's only the newest update. So I took the time to play the game from the beginning because I had missed the last three updates and felt like I didn't get the proper context with just the gallery viewer. (There are always sexy sprites and stills not in the gallery) As a result, this will be a comprehensive long-form story analysis/summary. Possibly the only one of its kind.
So, you are an average guy with an inexplicably large penis in your senior year of high school. You have a mother who lays around in a bathrobe and gets drunk all day, a stepmom who is a CEO, and a sister who exists, I guess. You have a group of friends at school that includes Hinata from Naruto, Belle Delphine from the Internet, and Billie Eilish from Real Life. There's also a chubby little dude named Mike. Canonically everyone hates Mike. So you're sitting around in school getting lectured and see a book fall from the sky. You continue your day until you go outside and realize the book is still there and then pick it up and take it home. You are then greeted by a massive frog that introduces herself as a Shinigami and transforms into a naked woman. And then a clothed woman. And then a chibi version of herself (She says the chibi version is her true self, and that's the version that all of the other Shinigami tend to stay in. The frog is never explained). Your character does the classic freak out and then denial and goes to bed. Of course, it's all real. They go down to the garage for privacy. She explains that the magical world has been destroyed, and since you found the SexNote you're the chosen one destined to restore it. Of course, this is by having sex (Allegedly) or clicking little bubbles. You get to learn four whole spells, two of which make clicking the bubbles easier, and another increases your magical carrying capacity. This leaves the final spell, manipulating others. You use it maybe three times, with very obvious progression checks. Your sister comes in during the middle of this, but since Shinigami are invisible to others, she just sees you standing there with your penis out. So begins your epic quest to save the magical world. I'm not going to lie to you, you don't do much. We have entered the "Menial Tasks for Women" phase. I will try and speed around my way through this because if I'm being real with you, not much happens.
You quickly realize that 3/4 of the content is blocked off by not having your sister completed, so you make a website for her and then have a dream where she sucks you off, and then she asks you if you really thought it would be that easy. Then the next day, she just sucks you off for real. This is foreshadowed by her laptop having a tab full of big penises on it one day and also seeing your penis once. You then help her create a successful online storefront that people allegedly buy from pretty frequently and become her partner. And also have sex. You unlock a bunch of characters by delivering the clothing that she sells. Outside of that, she just sits around the house all day. No school, no job outside of the online store, that's it.
Then there's your mother, you use the mouth power to convince her that she needs way too much sunscreen, and then you jack off on her three times. In one sitting. After the third massive load of sticky liquid from her son's waist region, she gets suspicious and catches you. She isn't mad about this because, apparently, incest isn't a taboo in this world, so she decides that she should be the one to take care of you so you don't harass other people, I guess. You then have sex and stuff.
There's the stepmother's sister, who wants to run a yoga clinic out of her house. You help her out with starting it because the stepmom is sick of funding her dumb holistic schemes. This is also allegedly very successful. Eventually, she comes to you to help her with a client because she has an important meeting at the same time. You realize that the client is someone you have repeatedly delivered clothing to, and instead of doing yoga, you have sex. This happens twice, and then the stepmom's sister realizes that you're not doing yoga and begs that you at least include some yoga techniques in the sex if you're going to be doing sex anyway. Then she has sex with you under the guise of freeing your chakras.
Another plot point is trying to convince Hinata from Naruto to go to therapy because she's being bullied. To do this, you team up with her mom, Older Hinata from Naruto. Eventually, you are able to convince her to go to therapy by agreeing to go with her. This is where you meet the world's most sketchy therapist, Older Bimbofied Hinata from Naruto. (I have no idea why they did it three times.) From there, you have maybe one session that could be considered therapy before it becomes, "Have sex with Hinata and also me to improve her self-esteem." And this actually changes the overworld. Hinata stops wearing a jacket and also fights back at the generic mean girls that currently don't have a route. In order for your lessons to be free, you agree to help out Older Bimbofied Hinata, which means getting certified (having sex with her) and assisting a patient (tricking a random woman who doesn't like sex into having sex with you). You even get to have sex with Older Hinata because her shower explodes and her divorced husband sucks, and the stress leads her directly to her daughter's (quasi)boyfriend's penis. Mom of the year.
Then there's the stepmom. She is the CEO of a corporation named after the developer (The developer also has a spell named after them. It's not a lot, it's just strange that it happened twice). She is also the character that repeatedly calls you a pervert for walking around and seeing her and her wife having sex in super public places like the doorway and the living room. It is very cool, and it does not get old fast. So her story route is that she's tired of paying for her parasitic alcoholic wife and her two kids with no jobs or ambitions. This eventually culminates in her deciding that she wants a separation and leaving the house. (Surprisingly, it had nothing to do with you having sex with her wife or your sister). Naturally, your mother, being the non-alcoholic non-parasitic woman she is, starts sobbing her eyes out repeatedly and getting even more drunk. She then explains that she tried briefly to find a job, but nowhere would hire her because she's been unemployed for years. So she gives up on it and puts the burden entirely on her children because, apparently, somehow, she has spent herself into debt immediately. At no point does she change out of the bathroom or do anything other than get drunk all day. To get to this point, the player character will already have a business partnership with his sister, that is apparently making good money, a job as the assistant of the sex therapist (she constantly talks about being overbooked), and working as a yoga instructor (she also talks about having a ton of clients because of you). However, for this arc, none of that counts, and they all actually tell you that they can't hire you or pay you, so you end up having to work for the stepmom. To progress, you need to intentionally mess up your job so you can get yelled at and femdomed, and then spend a couple of brief moments begging for her to come back by talking about how pathetic your mother has become. You do this until she finally gives in; this is the only time your mother changes out of the bathrobe. To reseduce her wife. She then moves back in so your mother can remain a pathetic leech. Except you are now canonically her slave. Truly a happy ending for all.
A nurse character fondles your mother's boobs in front of you, gets you to fondle them under the guise of a mammogram, and then jerks you off because your penis is abnormally large, and she wants to see if it's safe. Ancient art, and she has two scenes. It is very out of nowhere and connects to nothing.
There's Mike's Mom, who is always lurking, hungry. Mike has been spying on your Aunt, and seeing her gives you an erection, which Mike's Mom sees. She does sexy things with you, and when you're helping Mike study, she does even more sexual stuff with you. A mean girl sees and then writes herself out of the story.
In a rare instance of a route you can do from the beginning without having to complete anyone else's nonsense, your grandmother is struggling with your grandfather's death. You help her get into dating apps, and she immediately starts coming on to you and having sex with you.
There's your teacher, Mia Khalifa, who a random dude is blackmailing into having sex with you for evil sexual reasons. So the thing is, she's inexplicably really mean to you because your grades are bad. You resolve the situation by accidentally destroying reality (And promoting the second game, Lust Legacy) and making the blackmailer forget she exists. Unfortunately, you also make everyone else forget she exists. Whoops. If only you had had anal sex with her like the blackmailer wanted. There's now a new teacher character which is very exciting.
Belle's story is that she's a webcam model, and she was going to win an award in the solo female category, but now the frontrunner for that category is just having sex with a dude. So things escalate, and you are her sexual weapon. Also, you help her mother design a website for Coffee beans. These two plots are not related. She almost catches you having sex, but then she doesn't, and the big cliffhanger is that randomly she walks in while the two of you are talking and says that someone at her work found out about Belle's sex streams and told her, so Belle gets kicked out of her house and lives with a friend.
As for the main plot, other Shinigamis are also visiting you as you sleep and stealing your magical energy because you're stealing their magical energy. You're better at collecting it than they are, but since you're a human and don't need it to live, they feel like you're just taking it to be a jerk. You try and resolve this easily resolvable situation, but it takes quite a while. Also, your main Shinigami seems to prefer it if they were dead but isn't trying very hard to kill them. Your main character finds this slightly suspicious, and the other three Shinigami reveal that they don't think that the SexNote or the prophecy about restoring the Magical World exists. Still, they also firmly believe that the previous SexNote user is the one that destroyed the Magical World.
You then find another Shinigami who's dying in the church, and you manage to convince the nun and the old church lady that worked there that you have a special connection with God because you can talk to her. You also trick the nun into having sex with you instead of the priest because she apparently can't tell the difference between a white and an African American man's penis. The church lady is a widow that just wants sex. When trying to save the Shinigami, it possesses Billie, the widow's granddaughter. You manage to unpossess her (through sex) and then talk to her. She says that the only way to save the magical world and make magical energy is by doing a ritual, and it has to be on this specific date; otherwise, it won't work, so you do a big ritual orgy, and then it doesn't work.
That brings us to the events that I would like to call the "Big Holiday Special That Does Not Impact the Status Quo." The first one was the first Halloween event, where you had a foursome with your entire family, which turned out to be a dream. Then there's the next Halloween event where everyone gets costumes at school, you're dared to climb on the roof of a haunted vampire house, and you fall in. It turns out that that's Lady Dimitrescu's house and that she's actually not a vampire she's just a woman with an amino acid deficit that can only be solved through semen, preferably through the uterus. You do carpentry and sex. Then there's the Christmas special, where the most recent Shinigami has an even better ritual idea with younger participants that you need to possess. High Jinks ensue, and then you have another foursome, except instead of being a dream, this time no one remembers it except for you. (Also even though this is your second time having sex with Billie, she's still canonically a virgin because she's been possessed every time that it's happened.) That brings us to the final Christmas special where once again, you wake up, and every single family member wants to have sex with you at once, so you are very confused but accept it as yet another weird non-cannon dream and go along with it. Then the new Shinigami turns up and says that she has no idea what she's been doing this whole time, which is why all of the rituals keep failing and causing weird horrible consequences. The universe is falling apart, and everyone is going to die. Your original Shinigami, who has been spending the entire game in your garage doing nothing, then shows up, imprisons the new one, and quickly fixes everything. It turns out the new one is just an inexperienced moron. The OG Shinigami explains that the ritual did work, and the portal to the magical world was opened, but it was in vacuum mode, so it mostly just sucked the magic out of the world. Now if you want to get magic, you'll have to impregnate women. But don't worry, it's like magical impregnation which means that they're pregnant, but you get to decide whether the leftover magic becomes an infant. So they will look pregnant but don't necessarily have to have a baby. This game is so weird.
The Structure
I'm not going to lie to you; the structure might be the worst part of the game. So the game is divided into morning, day, evening, and night. Everything happens almost exclusively during the day, and almost every single event takes the entire day. This means that if something happens in the morning, it won't be finished until the evening. The night pretty much only exists because four or five events can only happen in the evening. As a result, you pretty much have to spend almost every morning sleeping, going to class, or doing one of the few repeatable sex scenes that don't skip the whole day. These include asking your sister for help (Blowjob), sex with mom in the kitchen, sex with sister in bikini (RNG Dependent), and peeking at the stepmom's sister with Mike (Hand/Blowjob from Mike's Mom).
Additionally, over half of the Town shuts down every weekend to the point that a button lets you skip the weekend (Why can I not go to Hinata's house on the weekend? Or Belle's?). As a result, there is a lot of dead space. It wouldn't be so bad, except getting the scenes is also "Do X 4 to 6 times". Sometimes like with the sister, it is just spending six days coding a website. Other times it's playing a minigame four to six times and occasionally getting sex scenes. It works very well in a single update format where you're trying to space out the 4 or 5 sex scenes. The problem is that when you're trying to play the entire game or do multiple things simultaneously, it makes you feel like you're wasting a lot of time. The padding is noticeable when you have content to get to. The content is also very linear, which is to say that the last couple of updates require previous routes to be finished. You can only see Belle's route after finishing the teacher, which is locked until you finish the mother, which is locked behind the sister, and so on and so forth. You can go to school, but that option only starts mattering when you want to do the teacher route, which is locked until you complete around 80% of the game. So for that first 80% of the time, you are stuck doing nothing productive for the first-morning segment. The good news is if you use the map button when you're on the map, you automatically warp to your room. You will need that to skip a lot of dead space.
Glitches
So the game is built decently, but it is probably my fault for playing the game on this new version without any bug patches. The first glitch, and the most minor, that I noticed is that the sister's model sometimes clips into itself during dialogue.
Outside of that, if you choose to replay any of the photo shoots with the sister, it resets your story progress to that point in the story, so you have to go through the whole thing again. I did not check whether you could soft-lock yourself with this, but I feel like it's definitely possible.
Also, there is an error with both Church minigames. During the cleanup and Christmas decorations, it doesn't register your clicks, and time moves forward in chunks. So you'll click four times, then wait 30 seconds for it to register all four clicks very slowly, one at a time, and then you'll be out of time. Most of the time, you can't even get four. As a result, you have to use an exploit to complete the game. If you are playing a timed minigame and pause, the time continues to progress, so you will automatically lose when you unpause. However, if you pause and then save before the timer runs out, it saves your minigame progress but resets the timer. This works for all minigames, but with the church, when you load your save, you have to wait until Ren'Py crashes. If you press ignore when you get the error message, you can continue the minigame with your previous progress saved. So you can click four or five things before the timer runs out, and as long as you save again before the timer runs out, you can continue your progress from there. It is super time-consuming but possible.
There also is a buffering issue with many of the animations, where they are extremely choppy, but it also exists in the overworld or game world. Most of the time objects that you can interact with are supposed to get highlighted As you move your coaster over them, and in many scenarios, they either don't, or it takes four or five seconds for them to be highlighted after you roll over them. At its worst, there's a solid 5-second delay after you click something and get the result. Also, whenever you view the gallery from your room, the entire UI disappears until you reload a new area.
If you complete the minigame without much time to spare, you may get both a success scene and a failure scene back to back.
Inexplicably Angelica's Gallery has an empty square at the very end instead of a scene. Not an unseen animation or anything, just the outline of a scene box
The Content
The content for this game is just good. I enjoy the animations and especially the effort they put into the different expressions and poses of the sprites. Often there will be a sprite or a single sexy still that you see maybe only once in the entire game, never to be put in the gallery, and I salute the effort. There seems to be a high-quality and low-quality mode for the animations, if that makes sense. Some animations look lovingly crafted and are super detailed; others look more like sketches. The game is still extremely enjoyable, and I would consider it worthwhile to grind for most animations. As for kinks, the game is pretty vanilla. Mostly handjobs and blowjobs and sex. There is anal, though, which is great for me, but it might be the only instance of something non-vanilla outside of threesomes. There's technically also a light femdom/feet character. Many interactions come down to the classic "get a boner and the chick suddenly decides that she wants to bang you based on the perceived size of your penis". It feels very much like the writer's first language was not English. There are quite a few questionable Engrish moments and very weird phrases. I wouldn't describe things as being delicious, and also I definitely respect the attempt to use innuendos, but my goodness gracious, sometimes we get some stilted dialogue. Also some typos and grammar stuff. "Shold instead of should and was instead of is"
The TLDR
I enjoy the game; I would recommend playing it instead of just viewing the scenes. It has its flaws, but nothing too egregious. It never tries to be more than what it is, and it is very good at it. It is not groundbreaking, but hey, still a decent time.
