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Misa is your average Japanese high school girl but she has insanely bad luck her entire life. She’s doomed to be cursed, her father passed away and now her mom is pressuring her to become a doctor to follow in her footsteps. Misa gets so stressed she wants to run away from everything and luckily, some pedotengu god (who’s been stalking her since she was 4) grants her wish and whooshes her off to the world of the dead. 💀 So basically this is like Otomate’s rendition of Hanako-kun. Anyway the game was on sale on the eshop for like $20 so I figured why not!? 🤣🛒🛍️✨
Kureha – Also known as KaraKara the scary man who walks around with a rusty pipe through the school hallways….is actually this sweet nice dude who just wants to help Misa get back home. He was a victim of Isao who in the olden taisho days would kidnap kids and sacrifice them to try to bring back his daughter who got spirited away. The spirited away daughter is chilling in the realm of the dead and is like “yea my dad was an asshole sorry about that” so many of the spirits at the school there hate her. One of the victims of Isao was actually Kureha’s sister and she became so filled with rage that she turned into a wraith and is running around like Sadako scaring people. Anyway because this an otome game, despite it being only 9 days, Kureha and Misa fall in love with each other but he tells her to just go back home and he’ll see her when she dies in like 70 years.
End 1: Misa finds the magical wish book in the library and makes a wish to see Kureha again so now she can uh…live the rest of her life as a single woman with ghost boyfriend by her side. End 2: Kureha sacrifices his soul to protect Misa from death but Misa doesn’t want him to disappear so they play soul hot-potato and both of them become a ghost バカップル. Kureha was alright, pretty sweet guy, but the focus quickly shifted too much on Sadako-imouto and it kinda tumbled from there. Actually I could probably say the same about every route in the game but I’ll talk about that more in my final thoughts.
Hibiki – Hibiki is the hangman who lives in his own little mirror world while sporting a cool flower adorned noose around his neck because he well…died by hanging himself. He was also another victim of Isao’s but he refused to let Isao torture and kill him, so he decided to end his life on his own terms. When he meets Misa he instantly falls in love with her and starts going in heat whenever he’s around her because he has like no control over his emotions. Due to this he’s at high risk of becoming a wraith and Misa has to be his therapist (like most Otomate heroines) to get him to calm his tits. This is why Seiya, the hellmaster, stuffed him into a mirror so that he’d have his own space to relax and not get overstimulated but that all changed when Misa decided to poke the mirror one day. Like with Kureha, they fall in love because Misa cannot resist mentally deranged yandere boy, and the 2 of them go to hell together to speak to Isao directly.
I expected Isao to be this crazy dude with no regrets for what he did but he was like “ay yo I’m sorry I was a crazy mfer.” Misa tells him to fuck off and that his crimes will never be forgiven and that makes Hibiki get like 10 boners at once. End 1: Misa gets back to the real world but she can still magically travel to see Hibiki’s ghost form through the mirror so now she has a mirror boyfriend. But since he doesn’t wanna cross over she’s like “bruh what are we gonna do when I graduate I can’t just walk into the school lmao”. End 2: Hibiki chooses to move on to heaven, but visits Misa on her graduation day because god magically let him. Ah yes, I love me some deus ex machina endings, another sad tragedy to hit many routes in this game. I did like Hibiki though, but mostly because his VA voiced Dahut from Virche and I loved that vengeful lil bastard. 😙
Sena – Sena was SUCH a disappointment because I’m excited for Kakki’s voice but man this route just sucked badly. Unlike the last 2 routes, in this timeline, Misa was mysteriously hit by a truck and ends up in a coma while her ghost runs around like Ayu from Kanon while her body lays in some hospital (but she doesn’t know this until the end.)Basically Sena has no idea that he’s dead. He’s been groundhog daying it for a few months because the moment he goes near the hospital where he died, his memories reset and he forgets everything he did, and everyone he met. So every time Misa meets him he’s like “oh nice to meet you, are you a fan?” He also doesn’t seem to understand why nobody is looking at him or talking to him and thinks maybe he just “lose popularity” lol. Even when his childhood friend (who also happens to be in a similar coma like Misa) tells Sena that he’s dead, Sena just ignores it and refuses to believe it. He finally realizes he’s dead when he sees Misa’s ghost spirit and her comatose body in the hospital and stops having groundhog day amnesia…and is suddenly in love with her ?_? (Or maybe because Koyo dropped him on the floor and he hit his head.) He immediately confesses his love to her, even though he’s forgotten her several times so it’s odd that he’s in love with her knowing her for “a day” lol.
Anyway she’s magically able to communicate with him and Koyo via some magical hell-phone she got from the hellmaster. The reason Sena’s unable to move on to the afterlife is because he died from a heart disease he had since he was a child and he never achieved his dream to be a top idol. At this point the game needs another plot device so they make Hibiki be crazy and try to attack Misa while Sena protects her~. It’s really annoying because I liked Hibiki in his route and he had reasons for being like he was but here it was just an excuse to create a bad guy because they really had no idea what to do with Sena’s route. End 1: Misa kisses Sena as he’s weakened and gives him her life to keep him from vanishing. He then becomes really cute and affectionate towards her in the ending which is like a huge disappointment because it makes me wish he was like this his whole route?? Instead the whole route felt like it was derailed by Koyo, Reika and his groundhog day. End 2: Misa goes back to the real world and meets with ghost Sena once a year somehow. Apparently though outside of that time, he basically lives and stalks her daily and even kisses her when she can’t see him. Actually that’s fucking weird as all get out. 🥴
Koyo – Koyo the horror streamer guy who was unfortunately a victim of a yandere stalker bitch – a story way too common in the streaming sphere. His stalker Reika basically simped him when he was first starting out his channel and had very few viewers. She kept donating/subbing to him and he would thank her since you know…that’s the polite thing to do to your viewers. Unfortunately she thought that it meant she was ~special~ to him and when his channel got really popular and he no longer had the chance to thank people individually…they stopped talking. However she had assumed because he was popular he was just trying to “hider their relationship” and so she doxxed him and stalked him and found out where he lives. She comes to his house calling him by his streamer name and he tells her to GTFO. Horrified by her behavior, he finds a new place to live and the day he’s supposed to move he thought the doorbell was the movers but uh…it was her. When he told her he has no feelings for her, and that she’s just a rando to him, she flips her shit, stabs him and herself in a murder-suicide. Of course she gets sent straight to hell for her crimes but then the moment that she’s “finished” (which is insanely short btw???) she’s once again stalking Koyo and calling him by his streamer name Yozora.
The weirdest part is when he’s like “why don’t you say my real name” she refuses because she is in love with her personality she has imagined him on stream and not his actual real self. Also IRL she was just some spoiled rich girl who just wanted someone to give her attention since clearly her rich parents prolly threw her to be raised by maids and butlers. She almost flips her shit and turns into a wraith from all the yandere rage but thanks to the magical flowers hellmaster gave to Misa, they zap her back to her regular ghost self and she’s sent back to hell once more. Ending 1: Koyo and Misa go back to their respective living bodies and then start dating IRL. Ending 2: Sena gets stabbed instead of Misa and then Koyo wants to stay in hell back with him…until Misa’s voice comes back and he decides to leave hell with her. Honestly there was so much frustration in this route, particularly from Misa because Koyo had planned to destroy Reika’s soul completely so she’d stop stalking him permanently but then at one point Misa gets in the way and gets stabbed instead like WHY ARE YOU PROTECTING THE YANDERE MURDERING ASS BITCH LIKE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. (╯°益°)╯︵ ~ ┻━┻ I loved Koyo otherwise, props to him as a fellow streamer for putting up with that kind of bullshittery.
Seiya – Seiya is the hellmaster aka helldaddy to make sure he saves Misa from the pits of hell where she accidentally gets sent to. It’s his own personal thing because he failed to save another human who fell into hell 70 years prior. I really liked him in other routes, being the cool guy to stop shit from going down and keeping Reika at bay….however in his own route he succumbs to the pedo urges and just constantly gets all horned up about Misa and takes every single action of hers to mean something lewd. The worst part is in this route fucking Reika comes back, takes over Misa’s body until Seiya’s like “ok I will have to kiss you out of there” and of course Reika being obsessed with Yozora will NOT let some ojisan kiss her….so this method works extremely well to exorcise and delete her permanently lol. 🤣
Originally Seiya was some orphan and was adopted by an exorcist so his dream was to be an exorcist when he grows up and so his outfit reflects that. In this set of routes Misa’s being creeped on every night by an incubus named Minami, so the bulk of Seiya’s route is just exorcising Minami’s demon ass out of her brain. Before Misa returns home to the living, he tells her to stay single for him so that she can marry him when she’s a dead wrinkly old grandma I guess. 💀 End 1: Seiya’s final kiss to her gave her magical ghost seeing powers so she can see him in the living world, but only him and no other ghosts. 🤣 He then plans to use all his racked up PTO to take off months at a time to spend with her as her living ghost husbando lol. End 2: Misa ends up dying and decides to work at Hell Operations with Seiya and he’s obsessed with her as always. Anyway really weird route, I still didn’t really get why he was so obsessed with her. The only hell daddy for me is the hell daddy in Tengoku Struggle.
Minami – I’m gonna be real at first I fucking hated Minami he was so weird and fake with his “I’m innocent shota-kun uwu” but then in her dreams he was like “I’m gonna bang you silly and eat your soul” while she sleeps lol. Luckily when Reika tries her bullshit in this route, Minami knocks her tf out of the route permanently. So yea because he had ingested some pure human soul inside himself, the human soul started taking over his demonic soul and purifying the evil….which made him a tsundere lmao. So now he starts having all these pure love feelings for Misa because unlike everyone else who tells him to fuck off, she’s like “no incubus-kun I care about u 🥰”. Turns out he had been stalking her since birth because he needed her “pure soul” to expel the previous soul inside of him before it completely took over. However after falling in love with her, he’s given up on taking her soul and just asks her to kill him instead. ╮(*˘ｰωｰ˘*)╭ They decide to have Misa go into Minami’s dream to try to convince that human soul he took in to pack his bags and leave.
The only way to do this of course is to bang cause that’s how incubus get their powers around ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). Misa is hesitant but agrees cause she’s asleep while it’s all happening 😂 but then she’s like uwu I don’t want my first time to be while I’m not awake. So instead they just bang normally (in Seiya’s office while he’s gone which is SO WEIRD BUT SURE LOL) and hurry and have her go into his dream cause her soul is becoming ravenous in hell to the point that she’s imagining books looking like hamburgers 🍔 End 1: Misa absorbs and crushes that other soul inside of Minami but also this causes her death so she can no longer return to the living world. She ends up staying with Minami in hell. End 2: The soul inside of Minami suddenly remembers that he had a family and decides to cross over instead of sit around inside a demon 😂. Misa returns to the world of the living and magically Minami shows up because I’m pretty sure he absorbed a shit ton of souls to get there…😅 Honestly who knows, another deus ex machina ending with no explanation. Maybe they will follow up on it in the FD??? Anyway I find it interesting how out of all the characters, only Minami gets to bang her lol. Sasuga Incubus I guess?
Yukimaro – Yukimaro is a Zashiki-Warashi in training, and has been sent to bring happiness to Misa, who’s spent her entire life fighting off a streak of bad luck and a demon after her soul. When she tries to get rid of him by asking the Oujia board she messed up the spell and now has Mr. Oujia board aka Koharu haunting her as well. Aaand then on top of these two, her stalker god Touka who spirited her away in the first place shows up and now she’s basically living with 3 godly room mates, with no knowledge from her mom or sister. In this set of routes Misa isn’t spirited away or dead but just livin’ the ayakashi boyfriend life. Anyway back to Yukimaro….he’s sweet, he’s cute but MAAAAAN is he a waste of Kenn. Kenn can do SUCH A SEXY VOICE but instead he basically sounds like Wedge from FFXIV. (ノಥ益ಥ）ノ︵ ┻━┻ So yea he literally just spends time doing stuff like watching kiddy morning anime with Touka and helping Misa decide her future.
Ultimately she decides to be a doctor anyway, and once she’s “happy” his work is done and he disappears from her sight as he has now been promoted in his godly duties. Koharu gives Miss the power to see spirits and now she’s horrified at all the deads she’s now seeing 😂. Fortunately now she’s able to see Yukimaro again. End 1: So the only way to break the spell of seeing dead people is to marry Yukimaro, live her life as a spinster and then upon death she would become an ayakashi and be reunited with him. Misa’s like hell yeah let’s do it but Yukimaro says she’s just forcing it so she’s like yeah you got me. Instead Yukimaro leaves the guardian spirit society to become her personal guardian. Misa has gotten used to her ghost seeing powers and has made a few friends like Sena and Koyo😂. End 2: Misa asks Yukimaro to marry her for real this time and they have a secret ceremony on the beach with Koharu and Toka as witnesses. Kinda bummed we didn’t get to see a reunited flash forward scene of them together and the just ended at the beach ceremony. 😅 Feels like Yukimaro was another one who got the short end of the stick.
Koharu – Koharu is the “official” tsundere but I could honestly say the same about several guys in this game 😂. He’s the tsundere fox Oujia board and his duty is to “haunt” Misa for screwing up his summoning. For some reason though he’s really good at cooking with his signature tamagoyaki. He lost his right eye protecting Hibiki as a child from a monster because Hibiki also messed up a spell when summoning him…though not to his fault as he was getting bullied by his classmates. As with all the other routes, it hasn’t even been 9 days but they are now madly in love and Koharu is fighting his inner beast because fox spirits aren’t allowed to date humans. Misa then starts to randomly get fevers and he thinks that there’s a spell on her which is why she is confusing her feelings for being “charmed” by him. Well once he removes the spell (by kissing ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)) Misa’s like “actually no I still love you btw lol”. End 1: Koharu’s clean isn’t gonna accept Misa so he’s like ok I’m out and comes back to be with her. End 2: He puts a “curse” on her so she can see him for 9 minutes a day but they will still live their lives separately. The 9 minute limit is so that his clan doesn’t find out. Kinda silly to be honest, and I would have really loved to spend more time with Koharu, but alas, this game has too many routes to fit into too little time.
Touka – OOH BOY we have now reached the pedotengu route. Basically he was assigned to bring her challenges so that she would overcome them since she was 4 years old. . She eventually became more tough after all the shit she’s been through and said maybe they should thank the God for all the bad luck that made her stronger. SOMEHOW this suddenly makes Touka OBSESSED with her and he basically secretly creeps on her and visits her whenever he needs to “cheer up”. My dude thinks Misa is some kind of idol gacha game waifu but my dude, god or not, she’s a LITERAL TODDLER. So it was bad enough that Touka was already in a shota body because he basically gave his powers to the grim reaper so that he wouldn’t take Misa’s soul. This put him in a perma-12 year old body state and Misa has no memories of this incident because when her soul got nuked out temporarily, she lost all her memories of the incident. And ironically the reason why Grimmy went to take her soul was because Minami was after it, and it was better for her soul to die and be reborn than for the devil to take it and make her suffer for all eternity. (Idk man in Minami’s route she doesn’t seem like she’s particularly suffering 🤣).
Misa wants Touka to get his powers back because she feels bad so she goes to talk to Grimmy with Yukimaro and Koharu on the agreement that she will not sacrifice her life for this. Somehow Grimmy’s like “okay I guess as long as you’re protected from the devil by your yokai harem 🥴”. Anyway Grimmy agrees to return Touka his powers he transforms back into his ikeman self. The strangest thing was that Misa said “I’m not sure if my feelings are the same as yours but maybe they will be in the future” immediately after saying she was in love with him?? And then he kisses her like bruh what. I can’t tell if this is some terrible translation but nothing made any sense. End 1: Touka and co. All disappear and Misa has Minami haunting her dreams every night but she’s getting used to it 😂 Touka magically comes back to her as a human with a much better haircut 😂 Ugh okay then…anyway he looked really hot and finally his voice actor stopped sounding like a 12 year old, but I just can’t take this entire route seriously cause he’s such a cradle robber 💀 End 2: Misa has a 4P end with Yukimaro, Koharu and Touka 😂 YEA. NO. NEXT. Oh wait the game’s over now.
Ehhh I’m not sure how I feel about this game to be honest. There were definitely characters I liked, but a lot of the routes felt really rushed and incomplete. The reality is that the span of each route is only 9 days. In 9 days I cannot take seriously the fact that the heroine and random dead guy suddenly meet and fall in love. It’s particularly bad with routes like Sena where the span of time is even less for them to get to know each other but I cringed every time I saw one of those “I have no idea when it happened, but I found myself falling for [insert guy here].” I played the localized version because I bought it on sale for like 60% off (fuck yea English Eshop sales!!) but there were definitely times where the poor translation completely ruined the mood and feel of a route for me. Particularly what bothered me is how they would frequently translate 好きです as “I care about you”. In the context of otome, that usually means “I like you romantically”. When I see ” I care about you” it’s like how I care about my cats, or my friends. I do not “romantically” care about them but during very romantic scenes seeing stuff like “He cares about me.” and “I realized I care about him” WTF. WHAT. I beg of you English localizers, please have someone beta test your games and give feedback. You cannot see the gravity of your mistranslations when you are just translating text in front of you in an excel file.
I also really didn’t like how when you got into each set of routes, most of the other characters completely vanished. For example it took about 4 routes until I even saw Yukimaro or Koharu show up in game period and Touka didn’t show up until their set of routes either even though he “showed up” in text form throughout the game. I think they really should have thought of a way to intertwine the cast together. In a lot of otome games usually the cast somehow interacts but then when you go into the individual routes they conveniently “bugger off”…which I’m ok with. This time around, most of the cast was just MIA, maybe showing up once or twice before vanishing again lol. I initially thought this game was also supposed to be scary and gonna be full of wifebeaters so avoided the initial Japan release. However after playing it (and avoiding bad ends without CGs because who cares) it’s actually really not that bad at all? The worst thing was probably the fake Sadako if anything lol. Maybe the bad ends are truly scary, but I will never know because once I stopped caring about trophies, I ragequit doing bad ends in otome games forever.
Despite my grumblings, I am considering getting the fandisk, but unlocalized. I want to see what Misa’s way of speaking or reacting sounds like in Japanese because it was really difficult to tell the nuances in English. Also as I mentioned I want to see romantic scenes the way they are meant to be portrayed. I feel like playing the localized version was a huge disservice to myself, as snobby as that sounds. I don’t know how to describe it, but there are just some phrases in Japanese that SOUND BETTER in context than the English equivalent I saw that they chose to use. I don’t think it’s a matter of Japanese vs English but I truly think that you need a bit of human touch or experienced otome gamer to really play through these games to see that just translating text doesn’t convey the mood or atmosphere. (Something shitty companies using AI to translate will never understand.🤪) Anyway I leave you with a random character meme I made based on my thoughts of each character:
Bread Master Lee 
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