Otome Game Review: Shinobi Koi Utsutsu ~Setsugekka Koi Emaki~

Welcome to the Vita port of my favorite game of 2014! Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed the original game, the “new” stuff just did not meet my expectations so this won’t be as a raving review as before. This review will only cover the new stuff, so for the original ninja action please check here. The story this time focuses on the 4 new ninjas Toyotomi Hidetora, Kirigakure Tadahito, Ukita Yoshiie and Hattori Hanzo. Toyotomi Hidetora, the next in line to be shogun,  with his loyal servant Hattori Hanzo come to the ninja school and announce that the person who scores best on the next ninja exam will basically get a free pass to enter the Sanada Army loyal to the Toyotomi house. Ukita Yoshie crawls out from under a rock for some reason even though he’s been held back for like 3 years and is now 20 years old at the school (worse than Garaiya!!) Hidetora and Hanzo both announce that they will be students from this day on, mostly cause Hidetora ran around acting like an idiot and his parents wanted him to get trained to be a proper shogun. Unfortunately, Kaede is so shocked by finding out who Hidetora is, that all her training jumps out the window and her jutsu goes off STRONGER THAN EVER! Now anyone who is hit under it thinks that Kaede is already their girlfriend/wife lol. Sanada sensei tells everyone since they already have approval to join  the Sanada Yuushitai, they are no longer eligible to be with Kaede! She must now choose from Hidetora, Hanzo, Ukita or Tadahito.  It’s now up to Kaede to pick her destined dude to win and once again try to train her meromero jutsu under control!

But before we jump into anything, there’s actually a harem route which is really just a digest of the story of the first game but you basically rotate around each guy for a couple scenes. Eventually the vice principal attacks her demanding blood, Garaiya betrays him, and the other dudes save her including Sanada sensei who comes to save the entire gang. This is kind of annoying because a lot of o/c’ness going on the entire time. First of all, the bitches who bully Kaede are pretty much put in their place after Sasuke and Kamakiyo and eventually they gasp APOLOGIZE! Not only that but by the time you get to Garaiya, since there’s no one bullying her, she has barely any reason to even visit him in the library other than “well it’s his turn now” lol. Also all the guys get caught in the kinjutsu but in the original game they were pretty much immune to it due to having tasted Kaede’s blood previously. So yea honestly it felt a bit forced, and in the end it just feels like sensei walking in and being like yo, I own this sexy lady and all the guys being like WTF SANADA (# ﾟДﾟ). Also some of the CGs felt kinda…off? Having played the original routes immediately prior to this there was definitely something “not right” about the way the Cgs looked. I don’t know if it’s the artist or the coloring style but it felt a bit strange.

Kirigakure Tadahito – I started with Tadahito cause he’s the adorable otouto-kun! Tadahito is super excited to be partnered with Kaede but he starts QQing because unlike his brother who’s the best student, Tatahito is a failure. He can’t even use ninjutsu and feels like he’s gonna bring Kaede down. The other problem is, he starts to harbor feelings for Kaede and Kuroudo notices this which starts to form some rivalry between the two brothers. Tadahito also tries to be a little more independent so he doesn’t have Kuroudo doing everything for him, but instead it makes Kuroudo sad and worried that his little bro’s finally growing up! Meanwhile Tadahito’s side family house (??) turns out to be loyal to Tokugawa and they were after Kaede. It’s thanks to the Sanada army that stops the 2 of them from going to the Matsurai  family house and getting captured. Just then one of the main Kirigakure ninjas comes calling Tadahito an idiot and a shame to the Kirigakures. He tells Tadahito to quit being a ninja. That night Tadahito comes to Kaede’s room followed by an angry Kuroudo.  Kuroudo tells his brother to just do as he says and he’ll take care of him but Tadahito is tired of being a dependent useless sack of potatoes. Kaede tells Kuroudo to be nicer to his brother and listen to him,  but Kuroudo is now pissed because ntr XD. Before Kuroudo jumps on Kanade to kiss her (apparently?), Tadahito stops him. Just then Sanada sensei shows up saying he was going to save Kaede had Tadahito not interfered. Tadahito begs sensei to help him improve and be a better ninja.

He tells Tadahito that since his family’s lineage is fog, he should practice jutsus near water. The next 3 days he goes to the river with Kaede and practices until he finally manages to do Suiton no Jutsu. Kuroudo shows up and gives him their mother’s old ninjutsu scroll and eventually Tadahito manages to do the Kirisame no Jutsu that Kuroudo does. Happy that he’s finally achieved doing ninjutsu, next on Tadahito’s list is how to get his senpai to notice him (´ｪ｀)ﾎﾟｯ. After the school festival, while everyone at the school has returned home to visit families Kaede comes back to help clean up. Instead though, she’s attacked by a random ninja who tries to kill her. Tadahito & co. find her and save her but now someone is after Kaede’s life so Tadahito vows to protect her, but Kaede also wants to train further so she can protect herself! Unfortunately since Tadahito still can’t use his jutsu properly, his suiton goes out of control during training and nearly drowns Kaede. After she wakes up, he tells her that he will no longer train with her or be near her because she’s constantly targetted by someone. He tells her to find a new partner for the next exam and that he’ll ask Kuroudo to go in his place. He then lies and says he hates her. ( ；∀；)  When Kuroudo hears about this he’s like fuck yea time for the rebound but Kaede’s like nooo I love your otoutokuuunn!  So as it turns out because Kaede has some Tokugawa blood in her lineage (because of the Kirihime thing) the Kirigakure house wants to kill her just like how they killed Kuroudo’s mom. That’s why Tadahito decided to distance himself so that they wouldn’t think the 2 of them would be lovers and go after her.

While she lays there with a fever unable to speak or open her eyes, she hears Tadahito talking near her and is angry at herself for not being able to respond. He kisses her forehead and says goodbye before leaving – but Sanada sensei hears everything and decides to take action.Kaede then trains with the previous game dudes and beats them all so she can solo enter the competition. At the competition exam thing though, some ninjas who are not students at the academy fight her. They end up luring her out of the school and outnumbering her. Fortunately, Tadahito sees this and follows her to come to her aid despite warnings from the head family to stay away from “one with the Tokugawa bloodline”. Anyway the 2 of them get surrounded in a ring of fire but Tadahito manages to finally use his Kirisame no Jutsu and along with Kaede’s wind they escape and defeat the ninjas. Just then the head of the Kirigakure house dude comes and says that he’s approved of Kaede becuase her ninja skills are OP. He says he will allow Kaede and Tadahito to be together, and says the ninjas they are fighting were not sent by the Kirigakure household. Turns out they were sent by Hanzo and Sanada troupe goes to take care of that (with no other details revealed.) And so in the end, Tadahito confesses to Kaede that he loves her, kisses her and seals her meromero jutsu (but we got no actual kiss CG because we can’t have nice things.) In the epilogue the two of them are on an ichaicha date and it starts raining so they hide under some roof and continue the ichaicha train.

Ukita Yoshiie – Ukita has the Sakamaki Shu syndrome where he’s done some hard livin’ and because of that he doesn’t give a fuck about anything anymore. Due to this he often lies around like a log sleeping in random places and also why he’s been repeating his senior year for like 3 years ina row (he’s 20 years old and not graduated!) He’s so fucking lazy that Kaede has to push him in a CART to town just so he can go to a place to eat ಠ_ಠ. Kaede’s strong will gets to him though and he starts to fall for her, which gives him motivation to stop being a lazy fuck 😆 The thing is when assassination or Sanada troup is mentioned, Ukita gets seriously defensive. When all the other guys find out that Kaede’s basically been doing Ukita’s homework and lugging him around they step in saying that this needs to stop. Tired of his shit, Kaede decides to take time apart to train on her own and tells him she can’t babysit him until she improves her ninja skills. He’s like NOo how inconvenient but Kaede rages that she’s not his maid. Before she goes though he blushes and says normally “I like spending time with you so I’ll be bored while you are gone” (ﾉ´∀｀*). One day during training Kaede is attacked by Hanzo (though they don’t know who it is at the time) but Ukita takes the damage and protects her. He stops being Mr. Lazy and actually uses his Earthquake jutsu to save both himself and Kaede. After this he constantly hangs around her to make sure that she’s not alone – including spending the night in her room when most students return home to visit families.

She tries to get him to do his homework as usual in the hopes that he will graduate. The issue is that his old childhood friend named Kobayakawa was assassinated by the Toyotomi clan and due to the grief Ukita can’t move on with his life or graduate from the academy. The two of them had a dream to be in the Sanada Yuushitai but they killed his friend wrongly accusing him that he was involved with Tokugawa. Kaede snoops around his room and finds out about his friend prying into old wounds knowing that Ukita might get mad at her. All the emotions Ukita has been holding back to ignore the grief of his friend, start coming back as he falls in love with her. One day Kaede gets kidnapped but while she’s dragged away from the academy she drops Ukita’s jute bag on the ground which he finds as a hint. He manages to chase down the 2 ninjas and save her. Ukita asks Kaede to help him move on from Kobayakawa and apologizes for being a pain in the ass. He also gives Kaede a ninja scroll from Kobayakawa that teaches a special type of wind jutsu since she’s trying to get better in that field too. They decide to dig around Kobayakawa’s old scrolls and find one that basically reveals that he got involved in an assassination plot by Tokugawa Takaie GGE’s son. It also reveals that the Hattori Hanzo line (basically everyone in that line is named the same name) were formerly Tokugawas before they became Toyotomis. Because of this both Kaede and Ukita are now suspicious for Hanzo and they report everything to Sanada sensei & his troupe.

Hanzo is pissed that they found out his secret and intends to kill both of them. At the exam, Hanzo disguises himself as one of Kaede’s friends and acts really nasty towards her but both Kaede & Ukita realize it’s him based on the attacks he was doing now and before. Ukita tells the other girl to get the teachers while they fight against him. They defeat him and before Ukita can ichaicha with his bae, Sanada shows up to cockblock ( ≖ิ‿≖ิ ). They win the competition and as a request, they ask Toyotomi to clear Kobayakawa’s name so he can rest in peace. Hanzo is arrested and taken to Osaka castle. After this Toyotomi leaves the ninja academy and says goodbye to everyone promising that Kaede will no longer be targeted by anybody. Ukita also promises Kaede that he’ll finally graduate the academy and he will join the Sanada troupe with her. He does the pinky promise and kisses her on the cheek confessing that he loves her. (I gotta admit I got annoyed when he’s like “Come into my arms baby” and she’s like “why should I I don’t know how  you feel about me!” …right after he was like suki, daisuki, aishiteru! (　´_ゝ｀)..)  And so he kisses her and seals her genjutsu. In the epilogue, he’s back to being his lazy self but at least he actually attends class and doesn’t need to be pushed around in a cart :lol:. They agree to visit Kobayakawa’s grave and Ukita decides to live on for his friend. The last CG was really disappointing close up shot of Ukita meh (´・ω・｀) (even though it was a scene of him asking Kaede to kiss him before they leave).

Toyotomi Hidetora – Hidetora is the next in line for Shogun but he’s like the typical “rich boy who doesn’t understand what those plebeians do”. He gets all surprised and amazed when Kaede teaches him how to get his own water and wash his cup that he throws money at her as a thanks. Kaede’s not used to getting a ton of money for doing something so obvious so she asks him to instead train with her if he wants to “thank” her. Hidetora acts all tough and rough but he’s actually a pretty serious guy and he’s very caring – which obviously all comes out during the meromero jutsu. (So in a way he’s similar to Daisuke.) He also doesn’t know shit about being a ninja so he has to be taught basic ninjutsu. Garaiya thinks that Hidetora came to this school because he was lonely and wanted to just make friends (;´･ω･). He was very happy when Kaede asked him to be on the “same level” as her partner, because finally someone treated him as a human being rather than this “high class shogun man”. When Kaede brings this up, Hidetora just says that he already knows his place as the lonely shogun leader who lives a life of riches – but alone…so he’s already used to it. One day while they’re out in the town, Kaede sees one of the Kirigakure family leaders (the butthole from Tadahito’s route) abusing one of his ninja servants. She steps in to stop it, but the dude’s all like “lol pls I can have you arrested and put a huge shame on the ninja academy for doing this!”

Just then Hidetora steps in and says that the guy’s an embarrassment on his clan by publicly punishing someone and he leaves. Hidetora  then tells Kaede he’s really impressed that she would go out of her way to do something like this even though it might put her in danger. Kaede then realizes he’s really the same nice guy during his meromero jutsu and intentionally acted “like a delinquent” so he’d be sent to ninja school to “get better” (when he really just wanted to make friends lol　’,､('∀) ‘`,､.) He doesn’t actually know ninjutsu but figured if he’s gonna oversee shinobi, he wants to know more about them so he enrolled in this school. Kaede tries to cheer him up because she knows he looks up to ninjas (because he thought one was really cool when he was younger) …but he’s already settled with the fact that he’s just having temporary fun at this school until it’s time to go back to his future-shogun duties. Around this time Hidetora finally starts to fall for Kaede when she basically tells him he should think of himself not just of others. Unfortunately he’s still “the big wig” for Kaede the moment they step out of the castle so she doesn’t remotely think of herself as good enough to even visit Osaka castle with him. Due to this Hidetora is now stuck wondering how to relay his feelings to her without the “rich/poor” wall getting in the way. (;´･ω･) And so finally one day while they are training, Kaede’s attacked and Hidetora protects her to take the hit. Worried about him she sucks on the wound in case there’s poison and finally all he was holding back comes out and he confesses that he loves her. Just then her jutsu goes off but even afterwards he realizes he feels the same regardless of whether he’s under her meromero jutsu or not. With this in mind, he confesses that he loves her. Unfortunately Hidetora’s mom won’t be having any of this because how dare this GENJUTSU girl who has the Tokugawa blood in her ever associate with her beloved son!

And so for the final exam she threatens the family of Kaede & Hidetora’s opponents to lure them out of the arena and into the woods – where hired assassins attack them. When Hidetora finds out that this was all his mother’s doing he is horrified and upset, apologizing to Kaede for his idiotic family.  The assassins say that if Hidetora gives up on Kaede, they will save her life and he almost agrees but Kaede’s like NO WTF!? WE GON’ LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER TOGETHER. And so somehow she manages to get up despite her wounds, and with their powers combine they defeat the 2 assassin ninjas. They win the exam and Hidetora tells his mom to fuck off with her bullshit cause he’s gonna do whatever he wants! m9(^Д^)ﾌﾟｷﾞｬｰ He also then proposes to Kaede in front of everyone but she passes out from all her wounds (after being healed of course) before she can give him an answer. In the epilogue, Hidetora leaves the academy to go undertake his shogun training. Kaede visits his place to give him the “passing” scroll from Sanada and his score is lower than Kaede’s for running around with his horse on school grounds & proposing to her in front of the entire public XD. Hidetora then tells Kaede that nobody will ever attack her again because he knows she just wants to protect everyone and has no ties to Tokugawa. He then asks her to marry him once more and says he loves her. She agrees and as he kisses her, it seals off her genjutsu. Some time later, the two of them are officially married as shogun & wife. His final CG was him in bed so I’m just gonna assume they had sexy time although I guess that’s hard to believe when she’s too embarrassed to even call him by his first name ಠ_ಠ. To be honest I feel like more of the route was spent on the two of them babbling why they aren’t “good enough” for each other and denying their feelings so…I guess the enjoyment wasn’t really there for me as much. Also I’m not a huge fan of the old timey grampa style of talking  that Hidetora had though ironically he’s probably the most appropriate ninja in the entire game lol.

Hattori Hanzo – I really wanted to like Hanzo because of his whole moe tears gap but sadly this route took a Uturn in an unpleasant direction lol. Hanzo is a pro ninja and he’s really just at the school to serve Toyotomi. Needless to say he’s not pleased that he’s chosen as Kaede’s partner…and in fact most of the time his “training” are basically attempts to kill her. Fortunately when things get too rough, Kaede’s man harem usually steps in to protect her from getting brutally murdered. The catch is, Hanzo is just a tsundere crybaby and it aaaalll comes out the moment the meromero jutsu goes off. When he nearly kills Sanada during the special assignment, Sanada decides that he’s too dangerous and tells Kaede that he’ll be doing special training with her after school. Hanzo is pretty upset with this because as hinted in other routes, Kaede has the blood of the Tokugawa in her and the Hattori’s used to serve Tokugawa as well. So Hanzo is pretty much buttmad that she’s taking Sanada’s side but Kaede just thinks “Oh I’m such a crappy ninja I must train to be a suitable partner for him!” 😆 And so as Kaede trains kinjutsu with Sanada (in order to protect herself from being used like with Tokugawa), Hanzo gets really upset and jealous. He keeps saying that he’s a disposable ninja who doesn’t have feelings, but as we know from his meromero state he’s got a fragile little heart. He reveals to Kaede that everyone in the Hattori Hanzo line is replaceable like Ayanami Rei clones. They’ve all died from various things like tasting food for poison, or committing seppuku by buying the WRONG outfit for the shogun etc. He knows he’s replaceable but when Kaede’s like “No! You’re the only Hanzo for me!” suddenly (σ´Д｀)σ・・・・…━━━━☆ｽﾞｷｭｰﾝ!!  He’s got all these feelings for her but due to hiding all feelings for 17 years he’s not sure how to express himself.

During the school festival, he finds out Kaede’s never been to the beach so he sneaks out with her and takes her there. She’s really happy and it puts a smile on his face. With this, he realizes that despite his feelings, he’s still “Hattori Hanzo” and has to do what his mission is – which is to make her marry Toyotomi. Toyotomi had come up to her and told her no matter what his mother asks, refuse it at all costs. After the festival, Hanzo tells Sanada that he’s “given up” and after this he proceeds to basically ignore Kaede in order to put his feelings aside & focus on his mission. He then drugs everyone’s lunch at school so they fall asleep including Kaede. Hanzo then kidnaps Kaede, brings her to some underground Hattori dungeon and locks her up in his uguu cage of love. Because he still has feelings for her, he blabs out everything about how he really tried to kill her this whole time as well as Sanada who got in his way. Even though he attempts to kill her on the spot, his emotions stop him and he just says he’ll give her food but he can kill her whenever he feels like it. ┐(´д｀)┌ﾔﾚﾔﾚ  He then just keeps her locked up in this dungeon for days but every day he brings her all sorts of delicious meals to eat ／(^o^)＼ lol. When she feels sickly, he cuddles next to her and warms her up lolol xD. Kaede is confused on what is going on, and as she read some scrolls he brought her she realizes…THIS REALLY FUCKING SUCKS and demands that he let her out! He gets mad that they can’t have their uguu dungeon of love and admits that the Hattori Hanzo line has actually been loyal to Tokugawa for many years because depending on whether Tokugawa or Toyotomi had Kirihime (the original genjutsu relative of Kaede) in their hands decided the victory of their war.

Kaede’s family line was away from the Toyotomis for a while but now that Hidetora’s mom wants her to marry her son….Hanzo has to kill her. The order from Tokugawa Ieyasu was that “if Toyotomi were to ever get a hold of a  Kirihime, she must be killed.” The only reason the Hanzo line has been pretending to be loyal to the Toyotomis is to make sure that they never get a hold of a single Kirihime. Also the difference here is that they are only loyal to that dead Tokugawa guy and they follow his orders from generation to generation. They take no care what any current Tokugawas are doing so they have nothing to do with Tokugawa from the last game or any Tokugawa loyalists in the current time. It was decided that they’d get Hidetora together with Kaede shortly after Tokugawa Takaie was defeated last game – which is why they had Hidetora come to the school so that it would seem like they “got together naturally by training at the same school together”.  Kaede tries to escape by using kinjutsu but he cuts her neck and sucks her blood to cancel it. Thinking it’s the end she covers her face but then Hanzo just drops his claws and starts crying about how he fucking hates all their predecessors and all this bullshit that they left on their offspring. (；´∀｀) Bad End: Kaede agrees to be the next “leader” of the Tokugawa so that Hanzo can serve her and not be trapped in his eternal servitude to some dead GGE. This means she has to abandon her dreams of being a ninja and when Sanada comes after her, she decides the only way to give up for good is to fight him. As she defeats him, he falls to the ground injured and Hanzo slips in for the NTR and kisses her right then and there (；´Д｀)….as they leave, Sanada lays on the ground going “I love you Kaede…” SIGH WTF REALLY COME ON (ノ｀Д´)ノ彡┻━┻. Ok I know this was the bad end but why does NTR have to get involved sigh.

End 2: Sanada  & Kamakiyo’s bro burst in and rescue Kaede informing her that she’s been in Hanzo’s uguu dungeon of love for 20 days. After she’s rested & recovered, she asks to visit Hanzo in the Osaka castle prison where she asks what he himself wants to do…not what he has to do because of ~his loyalty to whoever~. He admits that he had staged a plot – in all the other routes – to give an excuse to kill Kaede. The whole thing regarding the Kirigakure’s and Hidetora’s mom thinking Kaede is gonna betray them – that was all his doing. He did his job as a “ninja tool” but then when Kaede treated him like a human being, he fell in love with her. He thanks her for treating him kindly and now he has no “regrets”. The day of the exams approaches and Kaede chooses to go solo but she ends up kicking ass thanks to all the LIFE OR DEATH training from Hanzo :lol:. Kaede ends up kicking everyone’s asses until her final opponent: Sanada sensei (but in this game she has no idea he’s the ninja who saved her back then.) He purposely has her use kinjutsu and shows everyone that it’s not really a dangerous or threatening ninjutsu because he easily overcomes it and defeats her. Thanks to this Kaede is “free” and doesn’t have to be forced to marry into the Toyotomi family.  Despite losing to Sanada sensei, she still did enough to score a victory for the competition. They offer her a spot in the Sanada Yuushitai but instead Kaede asks to free Hanzo. Hidetora even supports her and says that his mother is just as bad for trying to force Kaede into their family.  They bring Hanzo to the arena and Hidetora grants him a pardon for all his crimes. Hidetora’s mom has to agree or else she gets the punishment for trying to force Kaede to marry her son. Everyone tells Hanzo to try to slowly move on with his life and ask for Kaede to help him along the way. In the epilogue,  Hanzo tells Kaede that he loves her and she says that she hated him at first but when she saw him bawwing in his uguu dungeon of love she fell for him ／(^o^)＼.  For me sadly, it had the opposite effect and the moment the dungeon thing came up, my likes for him kinda flew out the window. He’s so happy he hugs and (before her jutsu goes off), kisses her. This seals her genjutsu, and he vows to  be with her forever and asks her to be his new master….which is apparently his way of asking her to marry him :lol:.

Sanada End: Well if the game wasn’t already biased to Sanada in the harem route, they gave him yet ANOTHER ending! After Kaede is rescued, he takes her to her room, confesses his love and she realizes he’s the ninja who rescued her all those years ago. So basically dejavu from his happy ending from the first game and for a year he basically “avoids” her until she graduates then he hits dat shiat. The annoying part is once again they have him taking her on his nice boat and they make out on the boat. Like wow I mean ok fine I get it you want to give him another ending, but can you just make up something…different? What is the point of having nearly the SAME EXACT ENDING for him in the SAME SETTING come on!  Also that basically gives Sanada 3 kiss CGS in the whole game while everyone else got 0 – 2. (Poor Tadahito.) Also the whole thing is jarring as hell because the entire time you’re going after Hanzo and supposedly Kaede fell for him when she saw him crying but well none of that matters because suddenly Sensei comes in for the rebound and he warned you about Hanzo and Hanzo tried to kill you so screw that bastard and get with the hot teacher yyeeeaaaahhhh! Kinda glad I did this ending last because it pretty much makes Hanzo’s whole route feel like a joke ._.

 

I played the entire game without using a guide which I guess was a mistake because by not getting every single normal end I pretty much screwed myself out of yet another platinum trophy. I wasn’t gonna go back to redo them though because the skipping takes SO LONG and I really wish Otomate would adopt the same programming team for Clock Zero and add a “jump to next choice” option in ALL THEIR GAMES. щ(ﾟдﾟщ) I don’t know honestly I feel like something just wasn’t right. When replaying the first 6 guys all the nostalgia came back and I remembered why I enjoyed the game. When playing the new guys I was just like…come on…something good happen please??? How to say it, the original game felt like エロエロ術 but this felt  overly cheesy and dramatic.  The game box says Cero C but I feel like that only applies to the first game…second game might as well be Cero B (;´･ω･). What really bugged me is they changed the bgm for the meromero jutsu scenes. Rather than being the nice bgm from the first game, it was some cheesy saxophone bgm and just made the scenes such a joke I was just rolling my eyes. I mean yea the scenes are a joke but in the first game – they were hot. Now they were just eye rolling and in some routes (like Tadahito’s) they just overdid it with the jutsu.  He had one scene where her jutsu would go off, she’d apologize, they would do the training… and like 5 seconds later he’s meromero’d again, wtf! I felt like they were more focused on the Tokugawa plotline than anything and well frankly – I DIDN’T COME HERE FOR A DEEP PLOT. I CAME HERE FOR A DUMB BRAINLESS MOE NINJA GAME LOL.Tadahito’s route was probably the closest route to being a silly/cute/moe route like the first game. So yea, I had different expectations I guess.

All the new guys knew that in order to cancel the effect they just have to get Kaede’s blood via Bakketsu no Jutsu. But no, they refused to “hurt her” or they were just fucking bads who couldn’t do ninjutsu and therefore had to just deal with it ／(^o^)＼. Another strange thing was the entire school festival part. They had everyone dress as butlers, devils, witches, what have you and somehow it’s because Garaiya managed to get all these outfits & decorations. It felt really awkward and out of place. I think it would have been good to have as some A/U omake but trying to incorporate it with the plot felt really awkward to me :/. 　Oh and the biggest offender – in the 2nd game THE GUYS FROM THE FIRST GAME WERE STILL IN LOVE WITH KAEDE. So literally as you are going after the new guys, all the old ones are like cheering you on and trying to hide their feelings…OTOMATE WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO MY HEART ｡･ﾟ･(ﾉ∀`)･ﾟ･｡

There was a couple system issues as well. For some reason in the first game the voice quality of every character aside from the main guy cast sounded like some weird 8 bit mono. Even in the 2nd game, the voice of Hidetora’s mom sounded the same way. Did they have to reduce npc voice quality in order to save space?? It sounded really awkward and jarring when you constantly had clear voices having a conversation with shitty muffled ones. Also, there were apparently bugs in Hanzo’s route that skipped chunks of his route which were fixed in a patch that they released literally the day I finished his route. I only saw them because I had to re-do the route to get another ending. Seeing how I played the game so much after the release I really wonder what Otomate was doing for a month and a half before releasing this. If I was playing at my usual pace I wouldn’t go back to this game just to see these scenes wtf? Who releases a bug fix patch 1.5 months after the game release come on Otomate I thought we were getting better at that!

The final thing that bugged me was the artwork. The coloring style changed compared to the first game and because of this a lot of the CGs looked really strange – as if a different artist drew them. Sometimes it felt like they had a template and they just traced a template of 1 of 5 Kaede head poses and shoved them into the CGs.  Some of the ending CGs were just like…the guy bust shot with the blurred background which felt really half assed. I was really satisfied with the CGs in the first game but there was only a few CGs here & there that I thought were truly well done – most of them being in Hidetora’s route. And yea let’s not even talk about the fact that Tadahito didn’t actually get a single kiss CG….ಠ_ಠ.

Overall I’m a bit disappointed. I think if this was my first time playing NinKoi I might have been a bit more lenient regarding the 2nd game, but the first game had put such high expectations that the 2nd one just didn’t meet them. (Well most of the time sequels are usually not as good as the originals.) Volume wise though, I’d say that it was pretty good. The 2nd game alone could have literally been its own sequel/fandisk and the fact that they included both games in 1 is actually a really good value. For play order I’d recommend Tadahito→Ukita→Hidetora→Hanzo(Which you have to play last since he’s locked behind the first 3 anyway.) Overall I think if you haven’t played the psp version, this is definitely the thing to get. If you have, I would say lower your expectations for the 2nd game, because at least for me, it just wasn’t as good as the original.