How Hinano’s Renai Blogger made me realize I suck at relationships…

Well… I picked up Hinano’s Renai Blogger game. She’s been writing about it a lot for the last couple of months and I can’t believe that she was able to pull it off. I’m not really a gamer (my Nintendo DS Lite is the sorriest thing in the world that if it wasn’t for Animal Crossing, I wouldn’t even be using it daily) and find video games nice once in a while. Well… if recovering from a flu wasn’t one of those “once in a while” moments, I don’t know what is. It took me two attempts to download it because my brother “wasn’t really thinking” and closed the window. He just wanted to close everything so he can load that super loaded site that took forever to load if too many applications were open. 

The game generally follows the story of Chase, a boy who just moved to New York to attend NYU after transferring from Ohio. I think… I skipped it after the first couple of times. He met up with Calawain (and if he really looks like that, I love him more than Crusader! Yes, yes, I’m shallow.) Anyway, Chase will eventually meet three girls and a special bonus girl if you take a totally different route of another girl.

Well… the first route I took was CJ because it was the most obvious. And my stupid mouse hand slipped and I ended up going to the con alone probably dying in a stampede. 

 

 

CJ. Anyway, going back to CJ’s route…. Though it took me a while since I keep getting stuck in Café Zaiya when I realized that I need to go the library, inside the café and Bryant Park to encounter CJ again, meet Natsuka and Jen respectively before moving on. Gimme me a break, this is the first otome game I ever played despite many resolutions to at least try it out once. Anyway, the CJ route is pretty predictable and fast. Kinda like reading or watching shoujo. It was simple and cute. The bad ending was kinda blah – not all that bad really, but it’s something that can be expected I guess.

 

Hinano. I was really going to Natsuko’s route next but decided to pass by Kinokuniya since it was the first option from the subway and ended up meeting Hinano. LOL because her rants in the game were stuff I read about in her blog. Anyway, after going to the fashion district and ending up in her apartment, I actually expected JPMeyer to be there to beat the crap out of Chase (”What are you doing with my woman?!”). Well, I didn’t really encounter what I expected until after I declined to help her home to carry the stuff. LOL at “Thank you, dear.” Sort of reminded me of what a granny would say when you help them across the street. And if I wasn’t expecting a Nice Boat ending, I sure got it here complete with the soundtrack and all! Most of the laughs came from here.

 

Natsuko. Trap! Trap! Trap! The first time I took Natsuko’s route, I ended up with Hinano. The second time, I was considered a pedobear by Natsuko’s mom. My third attempt I was thought a pedophile by Natsuko and fell into Impz’s trap arms. And only after many failed attempts was I able to get the good ending with her, which was a very chaste two-year friendship before they are legally able to date. Is nya-chan really a minor?.

By the way, I only learned recently that Impz was actually a guy so the joke was pretty funny on me. Impz was the best “commercial” of this game.

 

 

Jen. Well, what else can I expect from a sweet girl Jen was based on? I have to say that this has the most romantic arc with the big dorama of confessing in the park and all that. She also had the sorriest bad endings. One was just being dropped on the Internet and another Chase ending up being a pig with a super sorry life.

 

Overall, I’m not gonna end up putting playing otome games as part of my hobby list. It’s not because the game is bad, but it’s because I make poor gamer. It also made me feel kinda bad that with most of the characters, I ended up getting bad endings. I wonder how this plays out with my actual love life. -_- I have no patience playing RPG and otome games are pretty much the same. I think the standing reason why I enjoy this game so much is because I am familiar with a lot of the characters because of their meme status on the anime blgosphere. Maybe. Maybe I’ll pick up a random one just to see if my enjoyment of this is more due to the fact that the characters were familiar or if this is something I could really enjoy.

But, it was a great game! The story was fluid and I had a lot of laughs. I finally learned the origins of the pedobear and that New York is a place filled with many pedobears and weirdos – very educational. Thank you Hinano. You made an extremely rainy day very entertaining! ^^

P.S. By the way what was the dialogue with the Kamashimi song thing???