Happy Halloween! I have coincidentally picked a perfect game for the occasion! (＾ω＾) Kashino Zakuro gets an invitation one day to a castle for a 3 AM tea party. She seems like your average girl, but she’s suffering from loneliness and guilt because when she was 12, she lost her twin brother. They were out on a family trip and when the 2 of them went into the woods, a fog appeared and they got separated – the brother to never be seen again. She comes to the castle and meets 5 other guys there who have also been invited. They all wear fancy clothes and act like her butlers because they are told she is now the “Queen”. Everyone goes along with it, but the next day when they try to leave, the fog in the forest leads them right back into the castle. Upon their return the owner of the castle, a creepy demon clown, jumps into Zakuro’s body saying that she is now the new “Sweet Clown”. A Sweet Clown is a demon who grants wishes, but as payment he turns the person who made the wish into a pastry and eats them. Turns out that she’s been chosen as the candidate for his new body and the entire tea party invitation is a ceremony just for that. Unfortunately for the clown, Zakuro has no regrets leaving the outside world nor does she have any personal desires. Due to this, the demon clown cannot fully possess her and on top of this she accidentally makes a self-sacrificial wish and ends up it making it permanently night time and locking every window & door in the castle. So now it’s up to the 5 mans to get Zakuro to desire something in order become the Sweet Clown and let everyone out. As usual skip to my final thoughts to avoid massive spoilers.

Mitsuhara Seisuke – Seisuke is a super-narcissist who is an attention whore and has a massive brother complex. He was supposed to be born as a twin, but his younger twin brother died at birth so only he was left. He lies and says that he feels a part of him is missing to get girls to pity him – but in fact he hates his dead twin bro. His parents always compared him wondering what “Sousuke” would be like if he was alive so Seisuke spent time internally raging and working to become Mr. Perfect so that everyone would forget about his dead bro and only focus on him. After being bullied in elementary school, he decided to change for middle school and became Mr. Popular & Mr. Perfect. Apparently he had an ikemen face but wasn’t good at anything else so because of that he got bullied. His parents were in awe of him, he got girls jumping on him left & right so when he is locked inside the castle with only one “plain girl” he is NOT pleased. At first he acts fake to Zakuro to try and woo her to become sweet clown – but Zakuro despite being guilt ridden is not stupid. None of his shit works for her which makes me rage because grr how DARE you not be a dumb girl who falls for me! 😆 Eventually Seisuke convinces Zakuro to be his girlfriend in order for her to become the Sweet Clown. She agrees to go along with it and he says they’ll eventually “fall in love”. Unfortunately time goes by and there’s no falling in love from either side since he never loved her to begin with and Zakuro is too busy thinking about otouto-kun. To try to get this whole relationship thing working (mostly cause she wants to become Sweet Clown ASAP so all the guys can leave the house) she asks Mr. Clown for advice. He tells her that love is a 2 way street and unless she reciprocates, it ain’t gonna happen! 😆 Unfortunately it doesn’t happen because Neige, the donkey mascot(as she calls herself) tells Seisuke to fuck off and stop forcing himself on the “Queen” when she feels nothing for him.

So now the gig’s up, Seisuke realizes that Zakuro has 0 feelings for him and he drops his own act. He admits that he didn’t want to compete for the beautiful face with some dead guy and so when the comparisons were brought up by his parents “I wonder what Sousuke would be like in this situation” Seisuke would flip his shit. He figures since he can’t get Zakuro to let him out the Sweet Clown way (and because he doesn’t wanna turn into candy and die), he finds a random stick and starts beating the door with it hoping to break out of the house on his own. Zakuro finds him and decides to take matters into her own hands pointing out that the reason she felt nothing for him is she lay there like a dead tunafish waiting for him to make the magic happen. She never truly took interest and tried to get to know him but simultaneously neither did he cause he’s Mr. Perfect full of himself, good grades, attends a high class high school so he knows he can “do better”. Zakuro then pretends to kiss him but instead slaps him in the face LMAO XD. She tells him she knew that he was a selfish asshole from the start but that’s what she wanted anyway cause she constantly needs some punishment to make her feel better about her twin bro guilt　／(^o^)＼. He then admits to being a man whore who basically coerced a ton of girls by acting sweet to them. Of course Zakuro didn’t fall for his shit but she says she prefers talking to his true negative self than his fake nice guy persona. Just then he looks at the pin that changes to “red” if Zakuro falls for a guy..and lo & behold it’s red! ／(^o^)＼ They realize then the reason the clown picked her is he only picks those with a twisted personality. They end up having a midnight chat and he admits that ever since he came to this castle, he’s been having nightmares of the time he was bullied in elementary school. So yea needless to say by the time he gets to high school his pride level is over 9000 until Zakuro comes and tramples all over it like Godzilla m9(^Д^)ﾌﾟｷﾞｬｰ. He also admits he got tired of all the girls jumping all over him so he figured he could find someone “interesting” at this tea party he got invited to XD. And so basically this continues and the more “brutally honest” and blatantly cruel he is to her the more….it turns her on cause the pin glows red like all hell lmao.

After he makes out with her and she pushes him away again he gives up and says do whatever you want. Zakuro sits down with her thoughts in her room and realizes damn…I’m in love with this mofo :lol:. She also realizes that her guilt for her brother was just an excuse because she really wanted to be happy and didn’t want to think about what happened to him. She then goes to confess her feelings to Seisuke but as it turns out, he’s given in and fell in love with her too. (￣ー￣) Cannot resist the do-S girl who’s different from all the easy girls he’s gotten in the past www. But yea you know, now what she has a desire, she starts to turn into the sweet clown. It begins with her addiction to sweets and she just can’t stop eating cookies like a cookie monster. But now that she has someone she loves and desires, she doesn’t want to turn into a demonic clown! Zakuro’s desire to be with Seisuke is also what’s keeping all the doors in the house closed because she doesn’t want him to leave her. Because of this she also then starts to try and “hold back” her desires of both avoiding sweets and getting physically closer to Seisuke. Neige tries to get the temptation going though and he takes a bottle of chocolate syrup and squirts it all over Seisuke’s hand telling Zakuro to lick it off. The shit just got real cause hey a guy she loves covered in SUGAR XD. Zakuro tries to resist but Neige shoves the chocolate covered fingers into her mouth and all her resistance flies out the window. Neige then says that once she becomes sweet clown she can only eat sweets and drink tea. Seisuke pries out of Neige info that they can transfer the clown from Zakuro into him and since he has plenty of desires he can easily become Sweet Clown. Once he becomes it, he’ll make a wish himself to let everyone out and says he doesn’t mind losing something….when Zakuro pipes in that she’ll be with him no matter what happens which makes him (σ´Д｀)σ・・・・…━━━━☆ｽﾞｷｭｰﾝ!!

Deep Love End: Zakuro transfers the clown to Seisuke but it doesn’t work and suddenly all of them are returned to where they originally were. Zakuro then emails her parents telling them to live their own lives (cause they weren’t divorcing because of her) cause she will now walk her own path. She then gets an email from an unknown address but it’s actually Seisuke telling her that he wants to see her because he’s madly in love with her after her confession ;-). In the epilogue they’re a raburabu couple on a date at the amusement park and Seisuke tells her instead of living alone to come live with him. He even comes up with a great act to convince his parents to let her stay there. Zakuro figures the clown is still inside her but since the mark on her chest is gone she figures it doesn’t matter for now anyway. Twisted Love End: Seisuke feeds Zakuro tea & sweets non stop until she can only see him and no one else. Eventually their obsessive love for each other turns her into the Sweet Clown & her loyal Ofrenda. Eventually it’s only the 2 of them left in the castle with the servants and Seisuke destroys anything that his queen is fond of – including sofas, flowers, teacups etc 😆 He figures the easiest way for her to not look at anything other than himself is to just blindfold her and she’s is okay with this as long as they’re glued at the hip. Bad End 1: Seisuke nearly dies trying to transfer the clown so Zakuro puts a stop to it and sends him back. When he wakes up he looks into the sky and sees the sweet clown symbol that was on Zakuro’s chest in the clouds. He then finds a note near him that says “I will always be here.” Bad End 2: Seisuke says that he never loved her and it was all a lie so that she’d turn into Sweet Clown. He says that he’s never loved anyone and will never trust anyone. He says that he was the one who intentionally locked her up in that dungeon to scare her so she’d become dependent on him and continue to eat sweets to get closer to the clown transformation. She asks why he did all this and he said because he wanted to “beat her brother” because he hates all “younger brothers”. He then makes a wish for her to “be his” and so Zakuro kisses him and he turns into a pink cupcake :lol:. She eats the cupcake and then Souma slides in for the rebound to take his place as her new Ofrenda. Bad End 3: This is just a common bad end. Zakuro loses her marbles and goes around murdering everyone. Then she ends up spending a creepy love life with a dirty demon clown and eating candy forever and ever.

Kuze Souma – Souma is my absolute favorite character despite him only being 4th in the character poll ( ；∀；). Souma starts off the bat saying he’ll be Zakuro’s “younger brother” to fill the lonely gap in her heart. He is pretty much gung ho on this and constantly gets into fights with Seisuke (though Se-chan deserves it lolol.) Well as it turns out he’s actually a puppet made of pudding created to woo Zakuro into becoming Sweet Clown. She finds this out from Seisuke who overheard it from Neige and is pretty shocked. The fact that he said he’d be her brother and help her find a way to not be SC, she feels like she’s been betrayed. When she asks him to tell her the truth he’s silent and all he does is get jealous whenever Seisuke is around her. She ends up calling him a liar and running away after he pushes her down on the bed nearly kissing her. Zakuro confirms that he was a pudding turned human all for her only from the clown in her head when she sees him during her sleep. She gets angry for this but the clowns like yea well you totally liked having an otouto-kun to protect you while you lay there like a lifeless log doing nothing. She can’t deny the fact that she enjoyed Souma’s presence and everything he did for her and she feels like a jerk hurting the pure guy’s feelings. She then ends up running and finding him praying again and reveals to him what he is. He’s surprised at first but trusts her and her feelings of pity pretty much transform into feelings of love for him. After she hugs him he tells her that he’s getting urges to do randy stuff to her but it makes him feel horrible but she’s like it’s all good babe ♡(*´ｪ`*)ﾎﾟｯ. The worst part about all of this is they’re all ichaicha raburabu but she still goes “we can be close like brother & sister” wow Souma baby no. And so after a while Souma realizes that he’s in love with Zakuro and he doesn’t want to do the whole bro/sis thing. He’s also jealous of Seisuke because he’s just a throw away puppet and Seisuke points out that while Souma was trying to protect Zakuro, he was in fact HELPING her become sweet clown.

Now that Zakuro has fallen in love with him, Souma is her desire and Souma feels like a complete ass but it’s all true. He then cries in the shrine room that he wishes he was born a human and doesn’t understand why a puppet like him was given emotions. He wishes he could have just protected her like a “younger brother” rather than starting to harbor feelings of love for her. BABBYYYYY (´；ω；`)ｳｯ… And on top of all of this, it turns out Souma is actually Sousuke – Seisuke’s unborn twin brother. Apparently when he was a fetus or something he made a wish to sacrifice his own life so that both Seisuke and their mom wouldn’t die during labor. After this Sousuke was turned into pudding – and once again turned “human” for the purpose of being Zakuro’s Ofrenda. (´；ω；`)ｳｩｩ Zakuro wakes up from her dream of this and tells Souma everything. He’s surprised at first but is happy that he “had” a past even though Seisuke is a narcissistic butthole and irritates him xD. They decide to tell Seisuke everything and of course when he hears about it he rages because GRR FUCKING DEAD OTOUTO KUN WHO MADE MY LIFE MISERABLE. He also then bitches about how he’s buttmad that Zakuro didn’t fall for any of his attempts to hit on her. The two them get into a punch fight with each other with Souma raging at Seisuke that he has what he always wanted – a life. Seisuke’s like fine I’ll make a wish to give you my life and I’ll turn into a candy cause I’m tired of living in your shadow. Souma rages at him that he’s an asshole willing to throw away the life that Souma sacrificed himself to give to him. (´・ω・｀) Also it’s mostly because of all the malice (which is like this demonic aura that lives in the castle) that possessed Seisuke that this is going on.

Deep Love End: The brothers fight it out and get over themselves. Zakuro then makes a wish to sacrifice a part of herself so that Souma can become human. The sacrifice is that she becomes narcoleptic but Souma comes to her house to live with her and take care of her. He decides not to go with Seisuke because “Mitsuhara Sousuke” is dead and he doesn’t want to take his place away at his home. In the epilogue, Zakuro and Souma go to the amusement park together where he takes a phone pic of them and sends it to Seisuke to troll him and piss him off 😆 Twisted Love End: Zakuro decides to stay at the castle with Souma by turning into sweet clown. Koboshi and Hinose are NOT pleased that she’s breaking her promise of allowing them to wish for the clown’s demise. Just then Zakuro somehow opens the window and so Seisuke takes the opportunity and jets for it. Because Hinose threatens her with a knife, both he and Koboshi turn into candy that Zakuro and Souma eat. After this Souma and Zakuro are left alone in the castle and they become yandere level obsessed with each other めでたしめでたしｗ Bad End 1: The evil Malice fog Seisuke further flip his shit and he beats the living hell out of Souma. Souma then says he’ll make a wish to save her and Seisuke and he’ll return to being a pudding again. Zakuro agrees but inside she instead makes a wish to sacrifice her life for them instead. (Not 100% sure on this end cause it was mostly symbolical babble.) Bad End 2: They screw happily ever after or something. Wasn’t really sure what happened here since the scene pretty much cut after they started making out on the bed..probably just another “malice possessed us and we’re coo coo for cocoa puffs” ending. I can see why Takuyo wanted you to play Seisuke before Souma cause holy sheit Seisuke is such a scumbag after the revelation of what Souma did for him that when you look back on Seisuke’s route you can’t help but cringe.

Hinose Takeru – Takeru came in first in the character poll and I can only imagine that most people playing sweet clown must be either masochists or hard core Kakki fans or maybe both :lol:. Because Zakuro can’t seem to make up her mind on who will help her be sweet clown she eventually settles on Takeru cause he’s the only one who gives her “advice” even though most of it is in a negative manner. Takeru collects malice inside himself for fun and he has torture device fetish so of course a castle full of medieval torture devices and malice is pretty much heaven to him. Due to having so much malice inside his body though, he often coughs up blood. He also wears an eye patch to cover his green eye which happened after he absorbed some of the malice from bumping into Kobashi a while back. He’s able to control the malice using a special knife that he carries around with him. And so after using a bunch of torture devices (lightly~ as he puts it) to get any reaction out of her (per her request 😆 ) they get into a competition of whether Zakuro can make him fall in love with her. She gets pissed that he says she’s an inhuman log that will never get anywhere in life and she’s like TOUCHE BRO. Sadly it doesn’t work and he gets tired of her mendokusai shit so he tells her he’s gonna just screw her to bring out the lust within. He tells her if she’s against it, to push him away – and she does because she’s falling for him and she doesn’t want that kind of relationship. He then tells her their little game is over and leaves and the loneliness makes her heart ache so much she sacrifices her vision to summon him into her room one morning. She’s not blind but she loses depth perception so she cannot tell how far or close an object is to her. This only affects Takeru though so it seems like he’s right in her face the entire time (well she did wish for him to be right beside her so… XD). The clown offers her to have Takeru all to herself in her dreams but she says that defeats the purpose and she’d rather have a one sided love with the real Takeru in reality. Zakuro then tries to get Takeru to hate her but instead she ends up blurting out that she loves him. She tells him she knows he doesn’t feel the same and wants to be “strangers” but he’s like “What if I changed my mind?”

Unfortunately she’s still not convinced, so she once again makes a self-sacrificing wish for him to “hate” her that way they can start off on a “clean slate” to confirm that any feelings he has for her are his own. (눈_눈) SIGGHH lol.Too bad for her it fails because she loves him too much to truly wish for him to hate her. She has a dream where he does start to hate her and wakes up crying and hugging him, apologizing for ever wishing he’d hate her. Basically the more he pushed her away, the more it turned her on and made her fall for him :lol:. He realized this when he fell for her because he likes it more when she’s opinionated rather than constantly apologizing and making herself a victim. He asks her what her real desire is and she says it’s for him to fall in love with her….but no problem there since he’s already fallen for her but is being an extreme tsundere ww. Meanwhile shit’s hit the fan and Neige has captured everyone threw them into the dungeon filled with malice. Turns out Neige’s got Takeru’s body but her soul belongs to Takeru’s dead twin sister Yahiro and she’s mad that oniichan has forgotten about her! When they were young, Takeru was supposed to drown but she wished upon the sweet clown to sacrifice herself and save him. The reason he almost drowned though, was that he was running away from craycray imouto who wanted to bury him alive. Apparently she was so nuts she thought to “bury” all things important to her, dead or alive. (This is also why Zakuro would sometimes see Neige burying random things of Takeru’s in the garden.) After she was turned into the candy though, the clown took the soul out of the candy and stuffed it into a copy of Takeru’s body with a donkey head sewn on top of it. (； ･`д･´)　 The reason the clown did this was to bring Takeru in so he could absorb all the malice in the castle into himself. Since Takeru rejected his sister’s brocon love, her soul merged with the candy-puppet Neige and now the share a body so you constantly hear them talking to each other.

They run into donkey imouto and she’s fucking buttmad and insane because of all the malice. She then starts taking over Zakuro’s speech saying gross shit to Takeru, but despite Takeru saying that he knows it’s not Zakuro’s real words…it’s too late as Zakuro sacrifices her own voice so she stops saying those things. (´・ω・｀) After this they leave the dungeon and meet up with everyone telling them what happened. Takeru says that her voice will come back eventually if she can overpower the clown inside. She needs to have the desire of course and the desire is to be with Takeru. They go to the garden room together where she finally manages to speak when she blurts out that she loves him and gives him a kiss. He then admits the truth – that he acted the way he did towards her because he wanted her to have the desire to BE ALIVE instead of just taking everything that comes at her like a lifeless log. Deep Love End: And so they find donkey sister going cray cray so Zakuro offers to make some graves with her. This brings out the sister and as they chat together about the importance of things you love, the anger inside Yahiro’s heart melts away. She manages to overtake Neige completely and is now basically inside Neige’s body. She also calls Zakuro her onee-san and starts arguing with Takeru over who gets to spend time with Zakuro :lol:. Unfrotunately the happy moment is ruined by a pissed off Clown cause shit did NOT go as he planned! Their goal is to get rid of all the malice which would make the clown, the castle, and everyone in it disappear – including the bunnies & Yahiro. Yahiro says it’s all good cause she wants to rest in peace anyway. The clown gives her one more test to see whether her love with Takeru is strong enough and I guess they pass since they wake up in the forest and the castle is gone.

The only thing left is a lollypop which is Yahiro’s remains after she made that wish to save Takeru. They decide to bury it near the grave where Takeru and Yahiro first buried the dead cat they found when they were young. Zakuro and Takeru then talk to their parents and decide to move into an apartment together and go to school until they graduate and then pay off the money they borrowed. They bury Yahiro’s candy and then go into the field of flowers where Takeru finally kisses Zakuro on the lips and asks her to marry him. He complains that he ‘pretended to sleep’ so many times in hopes she’d RAVAGE him but was extremely disappointed that she never once laid a finger :lol:. Twisted Love End: This is the weirdest fucking ending lmao. The clown is still alive via malice in the castle and he brings up some sap story about the little mermaid and how he can’t be Zakuro’s prince. He gives up and disappears but leaves some of the malice behind…which then turns both Takeru and Zakuro into….MERMAIDS. They then fill the castle with water and swim around in it lolwut ヽ(。_゜)ノ. Actually there’s so many hints of them spending time in the castle screwing all the time too but they were very VERY subtle…just like most of anything in Takeru’s route lol. Bad End 1: Zakuro gets tricked by the clown who disguises himself as Takeru and ends up dreaming away that she and Takeru are eternally in an amusement park together. Bad End 2: I didn’t quite get what happened here but I think both Zakuro and Takeru absorbed the malice and pretty much go apeshit. Takeru asks Zakuro to push him into the pond in the garden and it makes her feel good to be evil and shit and he feels good to be drowning again…or something ಠ_ಠ?? I feel like I wanted to replay Takeru’s route and re-read a lot of wtf happened in it because a lot of stuff is briefly touched on and “implied” that I think a few things flew over my head. Sadly, I have no time so maybe one day if I ever return to this game again, I’ll probably replay Takeru’s route first thing.

Kobashi Ouichirou – Kobayan is pretty much the main guy of the story. At the beginning of the game one of the housekeepers at the castle, Keifar, tells everyone a story about the “red dress queen”. There used to be a queen who ruled the kingdom but was thirsty for blood so she’d constantly behead people like the queen of hearts from Alice. One day she had an entertainer come to her and she liked him but wanted to see his blood…so she asked him to be beheaded. The entertainer was masked but when she took the head and removed the mask – underneath was the exact same face staring back at her. Turns out that the story is true and it’s not the red queen but the red KING – aka Kobashi who used to be the ruler of this castle. Kobashi, real name Granada (which means pomegranite in Spanish) had a twin brother who everyone liked more than him. One day Kobashi found a small red box but couldn’t figure out how to open. Suddenly the box started talking to him and became his BFF and since he was so lonely he accepted it :lol:. He then ended up going down to the prayer altar and the box opened there and inside was of course the malice. It then started forcing itself into the bodies of everyone who was in that room and they went crazy and killed each other. Everyone at the castle ended up dead and he was the only survivor so just like Zakuro, he has survivor guilt. He then says that this happened centuries ago and he’s actually pretty damn old despite his appearance all because of the malice inside of him. He’s kept alive by his super regenerating health so any kind of aging gets immediately “restored”. He adds that the sweet clown is actually the only other survivor of the massacre who was a human that got fully possessed by malice. And on top of this, it’s Kobashi’s younger twin brother Rossa!

A scholar had told Kobashi not to open the box until he turned 16 but he forgot and did it anyway. Because Zakuro chooses Kobashi (after realizing they are both peas in a pod stuck on their pasts) it activates an “evil play” which turns all the Ofrendas into candy and instead creates candy puppets of them to torment both Zakuro and Kobashi. Takeru isn’t affected because he never ate the sweets at the 3AM tea time. After talking about their pasts and spending time with each other they both fall in love but are too tormented to admit it and now sweet clown aka Rossa, is jealous and angry that his revenge plan is not going just as keikaku. After Neige attacks Zakuro and then stab the crazy donkey and run off, they run into Keifar who turns out was both Kobashi and his brother’s teacher and hated both of them and the royal family. Zakuro starts having hallucinations about wanting to “eat” Kobashi but she denies it. The clown-otoutokun tells her that if she wants to save everyone and not sacrifice Kobashi, she and the clown and both get sucked back into the pandora box that Kobashi opened. There they will be sealed for as long as nobody ever opens the box again and the castle and all of this demonic malice will disappear. Not that anyone would ever access this castle in the first place because it’s in another dimension anyway. Meanwhile Kobashi is being tortured by malice who wants blood in him and so Zakuro offers her blood to him to make him feel better. He says he doesn’t want to hurt her but she just tells him BE A MAN AND DO IT DAMNIT so he ends up sucking some of the blood from her fingers. It’s super effective but it only increases her desire for him! She takes a nap and has a flashback dream when Kobashi was a shota with his brother. Rossa told Granada he didn’t want to be king and he wanted to be an entertainer to make children smile calling himself “Sweet Clown” when he performed. On top of this, Granada discovered that his teacher Keifar was screwing his mom cause she was sad & lonely that his dad was hiring some prostitutes to screw. #royalfamilyproblems After this Granada opened the pandora box, got possessed and indirectly killed his whole family.

The incident was later blamed on Keifar and Granada got off with a clean slate, ruling once more and killing people as he pleases. Sweet Clown Rossa then came back asked Keifar if he wanted to get revenge on Granada with him and Keifar agreed. He put Keifar’s chopped up body back together and then turned the rest of the dead castle people into candy puppets – using self sacrificing which is why only his skeleton is left. Eventually Sweet Clown Rossa couldn’t bear to kill his own brother, so he had given up, created this castle copy in another dimension and started the 3AM tea time thing to try and take his mind off the horrible past. He wanted to continue to live on, since Granada was pretty much eternal because of his healing ability so in order to do this he had to constantly sacrifice people by granting wishes and eating them. Keifar later explains that the reason the clown had a “3AM” tea time is because that’s the time that Kobashi had originally opened the malice box. The clown, aka Rossa, uses that time to try to remember all the things he lost and whenever he “invites” people, he always invites “twins” hence why there’s so many twin problems in this game xD. And so many years passed with this tea ceremony thing and Keifar was annoyed that he was given endless life to get revenge but in the end he just ended up being a bored housekeeper. However once Takeru came to the castle, as a threat to the malice there (since he wanted to absorb it into himself), the malice in the castle started going batshit, possessing all the workers there and making them enraged. This also made Keifar remember his long forgotten anger at Koboshi. Meanwhile back at the ranch, there’s 3 candy puppets running around that look like the 3 guys and they’re all being controlled by Sweet Clown. Puppet-Tomoki comes to Zakuro, who is being strangled by Keifar, and then tells her to get in da box with him because he claims that by being in love with his brother, it’s essentially being in love with him because \TWINS/. Just then Kobashi shows up and tells his angry bro that he can’t die no matter what as he’s tried to suicide a million times in the past to the point that he barely feels pain anymore.

Sweet Clown Rossa tells Zakuro that he loves her and he probably fell in love at first sight when he laid eyes on her – but the true reason why he fell in love with her is actually explained in Tomoki’s route. Zakuro tells SCRossa not to hurt Koboshi anymore and she’ll do her best to try to fall in love with him…but he’s like nooo I don’t want pity I want your TWU WUV! (；´∀｀) Before this goes any further, Kobashi uses Takeru’s malice sword and “cuts” the puppet strings turning the puppet-Tomoki into a cookie sandwich. Gato then shows up and tells Keifar to just call it with the revenge already. Deep Love End: Kobashi gets an idea to try and go inside of Zakuro to talk to his brother and after he successfully does it both of them are inside her soul where they run into Rossa recollecting the past. He mentions how they both had 2 rabbits they named after each other (who ended up being turned into Raspberry and Cranberry after Kobashi killed them.) After talking for a bit it turns out Rossa was just sad and lonely so he sent an invitation to his brother so he could see him again. He was happy that his brother was an inhuman monster who could never die so that he wasn’t the only one who turned into a weird creepy clown demon. After hearing this, Zakurao feels sorry for the poor guy and tell him that if he lets everyone go and ends this whole revenge nonsense, he can stay with her as long as he likes. She says that she knows dat feel when it comes to being lonely and accepts him. Because she accepts him, he disappears and says goodbye to his brother asking him to never forget him. (´；ω；`)ｳｩｩ Noo Mr. Clown nooo!! And so in the epilogue, 1 year later Zakuro visits the castle again. The other 3 guys visit as well (though Souma is now living there because well he’s originally a resident but nobody in this route knows his secret.) The castle & everyone is still there because the clown continues to live in Zakuro’s heart therefore his magic is still active. Everyone makes fun of Zakuro and Koboshi for not “getting together already” and when she meets him again she finds out he heard her love confession to the bunnies in the library that one time. He admits that he has the same feelings and they decide to get to “know each other” more. Lol sigh the romance in this route definitely took a backseat because of the plot dump but oh well XD

Twisted Love End: Rossa is mad and merges with Zakuro to make her sweet clown. He then injects a new type of malice into Kobashi that he can’t control. This makes him go batshit for blood every night so he’s locked up in the dungeon. And every night Zakuro makes a candy puppet clone of herself for him to tear apart so no one else has to be a victim. The thing is, he can’t bear to hurt anyone that looks like Zakuro so he’s been asking Gato to “dispose” of them. Eventually Kobashi admits this to Zakuro, but Zakuro has her own problems now because she starts to feel like Kobashi smells like delicious chocolate. As it turns out, anyone that Sweet Clown takes a liking to ends up smelling like their favorite sweets. So they basically work it out that Zakuro gives Kobashi some of her blood to keep his malice at bay while indulging in his ~chocolate taste~ (lol that sounds so lewd – it probably actually is lewd lol.) In the meantime, she continues to host tea parties to satisfy her own sweets cravings instead. Bad End 1: Zakuro asks Koboshi to kiss her and it lights her desires for him which is the key to open the pandora box. Once she is able to open the box, she seals herself and Rossa inside of it forever.　Poor Koboshi continues to live on forever alone which confuses me since all the malice should have been left in the box but I guess it doesn’t really remove the malice already within him. Bad End 2: Kobashi claims Zakuro is just picking him as a replacement for her brother. He says if she really loves him to turn him into a cake…so she turns him into a chocolate cake and eats him. She then realizes that now that she’s tasted him she can no longer be satisfied by anything…and decides to turn anything and everything including herself into a pastry. Bad End 3: Just a common bad end where Zakuro becomes sweet clown and kills everyone again. It was the same common end I got in Seisuke’s route so not sure why it was considered “new” this time （；＾ω＾）… Still a bit disappointed at the lack of romance for Kobashi and lack of any explanation of what will happen since he kinda..lives forever but then again with Sweet Clown inside of Zakuro wouldn’t that technically make her live forever too? Kind of the reason why I’d love to see a fandisk for this game.

Manai Tomoki – Let’s just cut to the chase, if you expected Tomoki to be Zakuro’s long lost twin brother, you were right. He is indeed her long lost twin brother Kashino Tomoya. Tomoki is the nice guy and Zakuro feels like he reminds her of her lost brother TomoYA. He is really good at cooking and often makes sweets when he feels stressed. Well COINCIDENTALLY Tomoki was also found in a forest 5 years ago with all his memories gone and adopted by a random family. They assumed his age based on “school exams” and they guessed his name because it was engraved in a pocket watch that looks exactly like Zakuro’s. Zakuro and her brother Tomoya both got matching watches back in the day and because they kept confusing them, Tomoya scribbled his name into his. Unfortunately he was a little kid so he didn’t do a good job and when they found Tomoki the kanji looked like　己 instead of 也. Tomoki offers to act like Zakuro’s brother until they can confirm if he’s really her lost otouto-kun and says he’ll call her “nee-san” while she can call him TomoYA. But now it’s too late as Tomoki has fallen in love with Zakuro and he realizes that if they’re siblings for real – can’t bang your sister, but even if it turns out they’re not siblings, she’s too much of a brocon and won’t see him as a love interest anyway. FAIL! As time goes by Tomoki starts having dreams of the past and he comes to the realization that Tomoya lusted for his neesan and wanted to bang her the entire time ／(^o^)＼. So now Tomoki is basically terrified of becoming Tomoya but at the same time he’s terrified of not being able to show his love to Zakuro. Zakuro in the meantime tries to remember the stuff she did with Tomoya but comes to the realization that she can’t actually remember anything about him either!

Because of Zakuro self sacrificing herself to make Tomoki remember his “pas as Tomoya”, he starts having dreams of the past. One of those dreams is him and Zakuro at 6 years old, getting lost in the forest and coming to Sweet Clown’s castle. While there they say they love each other and will get mawwied some day..so the clown gives them the same ring he gave to Zakuro at the beginning of the game. He tells them to come back when they are older and he will “marry them” at his castle. Eventually all this pretending to be Tomoya takes a toll on Tomoki and he starts to get extremely irate. Zakuro realizes what a horrible person she’s been forcing him to be someone just to please her inner wangst. Apparently 5 years ago Tomoya had made a wish upon Sweet Clown and got turned into a pastry but for some reason was then returned to his human self and barfed back out into the forest. However when this happened he was almost a “new person” which is why he had no memories of Tomoya. Tomoki realizes that because of this his “Tomoki” persona is gonna vanish soon and return to being Tomoya which irritates him to no end. When she finally asks Tomoki that he can stop being Tomoya….he snaps and rages at her saying he’s not Manai, he’s TomoYA. Zakuro is shocked but Tomoki manages to calm himself down and apologizes as Zakuro leaves the room crying and drowning further in guilt. After a while Tomoki can no longer control himself and the Sweet Clown transfers himself into Tomoki instead and merges to become majikichi otoutokun TOMOYA! Tomoya wants to turn all the ofrenda guys back into sweets while he can live a sinful live with his neesan forever and ever. Doesn’t help that both he and the clown want to bang her so the siscon is STRONK. He offers to play hide & seek and if Zakuro can escape from him for 12 hours she wins – but its impossible honestly and every time he finds her, one of the Ofrenda’s gets turned into a pastry. He fucking even cheats and before she can go hide he goes “found ya!” and immediately turns Kobashi into a cake :/.  Eventually he catches her all the other times turning the rest of the guys into sweets too.

To make it worse, he then brings them to her room and shoves the macaroon-turned-Seisuke down her throat. She just cries not knowing why this is happening but because dat macaroon is pretty damn good, the pin shines red meaning that it satisfies her desires…and she feels like trash because of this. That night Sweet Clown comes into her dream and reveals that the cookies that she and Tomoki baked together were the recipe for “sweet clown’s heart” and because they both ate it, Tomoki got possessed by him as well. Unlike Zakuro who is “incomplete” though, Tomoya becomes Sweet Clown immediately because of his ravenous desire for his sister :lol:. Obviously it didn’t affect Zakuro since the clown was inside her already. He also then shows her the past when she and Tomoya were 12 and Tomoya confessed that he was in love with her but she was like “umm no this isn’t Yosuga no Sora otouto-kun we cannot be lovers lol”. After losing him in the woods though, the shock made her forget this so in her mind Tomoya was this nice little brother. The clown blames Zakuro for feeding her shota bro with things like “our parents ignore us but I’ll always have you” and subconsciously building up IMMORAL FEELINGS! The clown just wanted to eat the 2 kiddies like he always does and tricked Tomoya into making a wish to free Zakuro from the castle while he gets eaten. Unfortunately for the clown, Tomoya’s siscon power level was over 9000 and the clown just couldn’t handle it so he spit him out. That’s how Tomoya ended up alone in the woods without any memories cause technically he was supposed to have died. Unfortunately it was too late and some of that siscon transferred to the clown which is why he “fell in love” with Zakuro and invited her back to the castle years later. XD And all of this is because he read some crazy religious book that said that twins are actually 1 person who was cut in half so its TOTES NATURALLE to want to bang your other twin! Unfortunately Zakuro rejects his emotions and says that while she loves him as a brother, she cannot love him anymore.

He gets pissed and says if he can’t have her, no one can and tries to kill her…but Tomoki within overpowers him and stabs himself instead. True End: Tomoki takes over his body and tells Zakuro that he loved her but his desires for her were all because of Tomoya inside of him. After he dies he says the castle and everyone will vanish so it will put an end to sweet clown for good. Zakuro cannot bear to see this so she manages to make a self sacrificing wish which creates a world for Tomoya/Tomoki to be happy in…aka a world where the 2 of them are complete strangers. Unfortunately the sacrifice is her own memories and she comes back to her family but feels like she has to look for something. She runs past Tomoki at the amusement park and when he sees her he has no idea why but he starts to cry. Meanwhile Zakuro has no idea who he is and just passes by him with her 2 rabbis who she named Tomoki and Zakuro. Everyone else has been revived as well and you can hear their voices, along with Rossa’s going to some “twins” event at the park. Hmm kinda….sad ending here but I guess unless there wasn’t much of a way to get them to be together…though I personally had a few ideas where they could have made it a “non-incest” ending. I guess Takuyo didn’t want to go that route though (´・ω・｀) Bad End: Tomoya stabs himself but he doesn’t die he just becomes a puppet…and then Zakuro goes all yandere and plays dolls with him forever until he wakes up again (probably because of Malice? it’s not explained.) Honestly, if you were gonna go yandere for him, the 2 of you coulda just happily lived your yosuga no sora life in the castle without anybody getting stabbed. xD Oh also Tomoki admits to the reader that when they were 12, he didn’t let Zakuro go to save her – he did it so she’d purposely LONG for him forever and ever. さすがヤンデレ弟くん！ ＼(^o^)／ I’m kinda miffed the way they ended it with him which basically cuts off any chances they’d ever make a fandisk let alone give him a route (unless it was yandere incest otoutokun route lol). Also kind of annoyed that even though this is the “truth” end they never really went into detail on where the malice came from. We know that it came from that box that Kobashi opened, but who brought that box there? The fortune teller I guess? Where did he get it? What’s the deal? Also it’s strange how none of the malice had any impact in this route what so ever. Maybe the siscon is so stronk malice packed its back and NOPE’d the fuck out ( ﾟ∀ﾟ)ｱﾊﾊ八八ﾉヽﾉヽﾉヽﾉ ＼ / ＼/ ＼/ ＼.

Honestly overall I think it was a good game. For once I actually appreciated the writing in all the bad ends and I felt like they actually were a decent contribution to the story.  There’s actually a lot of yandere in this game, but I quite enjoy Takuyo’s yandere because it’s the type where they have this obsessive longing love for the heroine….rather than the abusive wifebeater kind ಠ_ಠ.  The game makes quite a few references to the Mexican holiday “Day of the Dead” so it was interesting to catch a few things here & there. As far as the heroine, let’s just say she’s as negative as you can get – but not in the irritating annoying way that Alice used to get on my nerves. The two are quite similar (just replace the ONEESAN with OTOUTOKUNNN wangst) but I still found Zakuro to be awwright. Still, she had her moments where I’d be like guuurl what are you doing but in those situations the guys would then complement her negativity and it worked out pretty well. Also it was nice for the guys to call her name out if you left it default, I always appreciate this in my games. As far as the guys go, they are all quite unique and they all have their unique traits. When I say unique I mean they basically stay the way they are from start to finish so it felt nicely consistent rather than “heroine magically changing them”. I think if anything, it’s the heroine changing and finally climbing out of her black hole but if anything I think both the heroine and her dude end up sort of helping each other….like some weird group therapy with cakes and clowns. XD While there weren’t many CGs, and the CGs weren’t exactly spectacular (for example out of context none of them look that great), the writing was what really drew me in and I really appreciated that. The writer is the same one who wrote games like Himehibi, Panic Palette and Kaeru Batake so I will definitely keep my eye out on them in any future Takuyo works.

Now that I’m done raving about the story, the game definitely has its set of problems. The biggest one of course is the sound quality. The sound quality is like some 16bit mono that you’d hear on Takuyo’s PSP/PS2 games and makes me wonder…what exactly are you doing on the Vita then? Surely there’s enough space right? Were you guys trying to be careful to make sure that everything would fit? I don’t know but it’s SUCH a shame because I loved a lot of the BGms in the game, and despite not being full of really popular voice actors, the voice acting was outstanding. But here we have outstanding voice & music and it the sound quality is utter crap. Why!!? Σ(ﾟдﾟlll)ｶﾞｰﾝ Also because they didn’t put any way to keep the “screen lit”, if you play in auto mode the screen will go dim every 60 seconds. (ノ｀Д´)ノ彡┻━┻ Fortunately the story was engaging enough that I would either start manually pressing the O button or I’d just keep my finger on the corner of the screen to keep it lit up at all times. Otomate at least allows you to touch the back panel to keep the screen from going dim but yea there was no escape here so in the beginning it was really irritating.  The trophy gathering was really strange and you’d only get trophies by going back to the scene replay so unless you had a guide telling you which scenes give you trophies you’d have to go through 30 scenes to find the trophies. Fortunately you didn’t actually have to rewatch the scene, you could click on the box, and then immediately exit. The CGs in the gallery were separated rather then “combined” for instances so it made it seem like there’s a ton of CGs but in reality there was maybe like 6-7 with lots of small instance changes.  And finally my gripe is that there’s a few unanswered holes left in the game, a lot of “symbolic assumption” endings with Takeru’s route probably being the biggest offender. I seriously had no idea what they were trying to do with him and one of his endings made me raise several eyebrows 😆

Despite the complaints, I’d still highly recommend this game. If you like the brother trope, if you like twins and if you like twisted romance or just want a nice Halloween game…this is definitely gonna be enjoyable for you.  It really made me realize that no matter how poo the sound is, no matter how unpopular the seiyuu are and no matter how disappointing the Cgs are, ultimately I crave a good story. It reminded me of all those old otome games I played that I thought were really fun because I liked the story despite the CGs being crap or the voice actors being Neverheardof McNoob. Hell my favorite character in the game ended up actually being Souma, whose voice actor I never heard of in anime or other otome games. I was SO SURE Kakki’s character would be my fav but I guess that’s not always the case. I think it’s pretty obvious this year the games I played with “great seiyuu and pretty art” didn’t always turn out that well so here you get the opposite end of the spectrum. If you’re looking for sweet ichaicha romance, you might be disappointed though. Personally I think I like it this way and I’m looking forward to more games from this writer. So thank you 井上愁 さん for being the saving grace and light at the end of my dark and terrible otome game tunnel. Also the pre-order drama CD school parody was really funny, reminds me of old school Takuyo ｡ﾟ(ﾟ^∀^ﾟ)ﾟ｡