So out of extreme boredom due to lack of any otome games I want to play (and because I dropped Eden like a ton of bricks) I decided to browse the English Switch shop and purchased Diamond Girl. I remember seeing the advertising about the mobage 5 years ago but I didn’t wanna do the whole “read 5 chapters a day” thing so I forgot about it until now. Looks like they’ve ported the entire game and routes without any waiting to the switch for $20 in 3 languages – except Japanese. That’s right there is NO Japanese edition of this game! (　ﾟдﾟ) Not only that but the mobile version has ended service 5 years ago too lol. The story is about our heroine Charlotte (default name apparently in the English version) who is some office lady but finds out she’s actually some hidden child of a rich dude. Now she has to become some ojousama and marry into an arranged marriage. She’s sent to live with 4 ikemans, one of which is her personal butler, in a luxurious mansion and is to train how to be a proper ojousama until it’s time to marry her fiance. Please note as this is a mobile game port, this game is unvoiced.

Hayato – Hayato is the butler in question and for no reason what so ever he obsessively falls in love with Charlotte. He constantly spews out poetic things, makes her favorite konbucha and is always okay with her wearing her track suit instead of “proper lady clothes”. He basically spoils her while her fiance says crap about her lmao. At first she thinks it’s kinda over doing it, but then she’s like “damn this is really nice” and she starts to fall in love with him. However he rejects her feelings and when her father finds out he’s like “you cannot marry him because of the Misono family curse!” Turns out that “curse” is just getting wrinkles??? I mean when you get old you get wrinkles….I don’t think being a Misono woman has anything to do with it. Fortunately, Charlotte really doesn’t care, and Hayato doesn’t care if she’s a wrinkly old BBA either so it works out and they become lovers lol. Oh yea and obviously the initial engagement with that other guy is called off lol.

Masaki – Masaki is the fiance who acts like a sexist douchebag, aggravated further by a terrible localization that any “tsundere” he has gets pretty much lost the moment it hits  English text. Because of this he just ends up coming off as a haughty douchebag, constantly insulting the heroine, calling her “tracksuit girl” because how dare she not wear comfortable clothing on her days off. He criticizes everything she does, wears and eats and is generally an annoying twat until the end when her dad gets into a fight with his dad and the engagement is called off. So then Masaki tries to prove with  his business venture that he’s worthy of being her fiance and she’s fallen in love with him because I guess she’s a masochist so in the end the engagement is back on. The entire thing just made me realize that I should probably not play otome games in English because I feel like a lot of the “mood” and “tropes” are pretty much lost in English unless you have a REALLY GOOD localization team – which as we know these days is as common as winning the lottery. In one of the epilogues though he goes to a sporting goods store and asks Charlotte to pick out a tracksuit for him, aww well isn’t that sweet. 😂

Tsubasa – Tsubasa is Charlotte’s 4th cousin (lol?) and claims that it’s totally ok for them to marry and nobody thinks this is a problem so I guess let’s roll with it. He has that sterotypical shota thing going on, but he’s probably only like 3 years younger than Charloette and is literally a rocket scientist writing a research paper of galactic proportions and telling the Misono family to find another heir cause he ain’t taking over the family business. He’s also kind of a manwhore because he has random oneesans making lunches for him until he basically gives that job to Charlotte because he falls in love with her for no reason. The whole thing is really weird and he feels like he’s always hiding something especially when Charlotte tries to get him to talk with his father about his future job prospects and we never really did find out why the hell he had random ladies making lunches for him?? And then it just basically kinda ends open ended and they completely forgot about Charlotte becoming the Misono heir aside the fact that Masaki was like “lol bye bitch”. ಠ_ಠ Well Tsubasa did have some cute scenes, too bad it was all so weirdly put together. His twin sister was really funny, she reminded me of the heroine’s friend in Variable Barricade with her shipping fantasies. 😂

Kyoichi – Kyoichi is the president of the company Charlotte’s father owns, and she’s assigned to be his executive assistant. He’s also her step brother that her father adopted and he wants to take over the business so he kinda forces himself on Charlotte saying that she better agree to marry him so he can take over. He then reads books like a weirdo and goes “well according to this book I guess we should date first” and he has like no social skills — apparently due to the fact that he has a plate fetish. Yes a plate fetish, he is so in love with plates that he literally talks romantic lines to them and gives them all female names. ಠ_ಠ So the entire route he pretends to date Charlotte while still thirsting over plates, and for some reason she falls in love with him…and I guess eventually he finally finds her more attractive than his pottery. Charlotte’s dad is against it because they are “publicly known as siblings” but eventually agrees when Charlotte throws a fit saying she will go back to her grandma’s place and not take over the business if she can’t be with Kyoichi. But also, she says she would probably ruin everything if she were to take over because apparently the only thing in her head at all times are track suits and dried squid.

Well that was certainly….bad. There’s many layers of bad so I’ll just have to go down the list starting with the insanely bad system. The entire thing is just “read text”. There’s no save, the skip is really weird (almost like a fast automode?) and there’s no option for skipping read text – you skip ALL text. Your choices make absolutely 0 impact on what ending you get. Rather, in order to get all “endings” you basically have to just play each route 3 times pressing any choices. So you play it for real/read it the first time, and then just blindly press anything randomly to make your way through until you unlock all 3 ending epilogues. Since this was originally a VERTICAL mobile game and now it’s HORIZONAL they’ve done absolutely nothing to make CGs properly viewable. For example, when you go into the CG gallery the CG is FULLY zoomed in horizontally on your screen so you have to SCROLL UP & DOWN to see the whole thing so if you want to screencap it for later, you basically have to screencap it like 5 times and then stitch it together (　´_ゝ`). They do allow you to screencap a zoomed out version of a cut off CG if you press A, but even the zoomed in CG is zoomed in TOO much so you end up getting the SIDES CUT OFF. So basically there’s absolutely no way to see the full CG in any way other than in the thumbnail. ಠ_ಠ

There’s also no voices, but that didn’t really bother me since I came into this knowing it would not be voiced. The only good part is the artwork – eyeless heroine aside. The heroine’s responses were actually pretty funny sometimes so it’s a shame that visually she’s still the typical eyeless mobage blob. Out of all the characters, Hayato was the only one I liked honestly because Tsubasa was weirdly clingy, Masaki was a shitty tsundere that was lost in translation, and Kyoichi had a plate fetish that gave me Diabolik Lovers flashbacks. (#　ﾟдﾟ) Anyway if you just want some time to kill and you like the artwork and all the stuff I mentioned above doesn’t bother you – then I would recommend at least waiting for a sale or something because this game’s definitely not worth $20 lol. Everything was pretty template character personality wise, and the terrible system only further drove the salt into the wound lol.

On a final note, this chef boy made 1 appearance in 1 scene in Kyoichi’s route and he was so cute and we never saw him again. Honestly I would have rather done his route. 😦