Title: 空蝉の廻

Company: Matatabi

Release Date: 27th July 2017

Length: ~25 Hours

Links: Official Site, VNDB

Far from mainland Japan, there’s a small island where oni and humans co-exist which has two gates connected to the afterlife. The entrance is located within the human’s territory and exit in the oni’s lands. The two groups struck a deal in the past whereby the oni protect the humans by defeating the “apparitions” – which are supposedly evil souls that escape from the afterlife via the oni’s gate. The human’s part of the deal is that their shrine maiden must maintain the power of the two gates and make magatama that the oni use to help them fight the “apparitions”. However, due to past tragedies, the humans and oni despise each other and try to stay as separate as possible.

The protagonist, Shizumiya Amane, has recently been told that she will be taking over the role of shrine maiden from her grandmother. Information then comes in that something unusual has been happening to the gates and so she is sent to investigate the oni’s gate. Through her involvement with the oni, she gets to know the secret of the island and the fate of the oni. With the girl and the oni’s hearts intertwined, a tale stained by destiny and prohibition now unfolds…

Characters

Shizumiya Amane

Amane is the new shrine maiden, whom is slightly nervous about taking the role but she’s been in training for it for the past 8 years. She has a tendency to think of others before herself and is always willing to help out someone in trouble. Unlike most humans, she doesn’t have any prejudice against the oni.

Tamamiya Kai (CV Taniyama Kishou)

Kai is the leader of the oni and has a hatred of humans due to the fact he believes that they’re taking advantage of the oni. He has little faith in Amane’s abilities. He is well-respected and a fair leader but does have an arrogant, almost cruel side to him. Kai tends to get carried away when drinking, although is always his most honest when drunk.

Hayate (CV Uchida Yuuma)

Hayate is a soldier heavily involved in the fight against the apparitions. It is revealed that his physical abilities exceed those of the average oni, although Hayate views his strength as a curse. He appears to care little about others and keeps his distance, avoiding conversations wherever possible. He is incredibly loyal to Kai and only answers to his orders.

Yuzuru (CV Tamaru Atsushi)

Yuzuru is a servant of Kai’s who helps guide Ayame to Kai’s mansion. He has a tendency to tease others and never reveals much about himself. He’s actually half-oni, half-human – an existence despised by both groups. After the death of his parents, he is allowed to stay in Kai’s mansion because they’re cousins. As a servant, he’s normally given pretty menial chores to do. All of the other oni avoid him so he stays in a separate part of the mansion to the other servants. Due to being half-human, he isn’t as physically strong as the other oni so tries not to get too involved in any fights.

Sagara Yasuomi (CV Okitsu Kazuyuki)

Yasuomi is Amane’s personal servant and childhood friend. His family have been proud to serve the Shizumiya household for many generations and Yasuomi is expected to continue this. Due to an incident involving his older brother, Yasuomi has come to hate the oni. He cares deeply for Amane and tries to stop the oni from doing anything bad to her while she is staying in their lands.

Hiiragi Tomokage (CV Tachibana Shinnosuke)

Tomokage is Kai’s personal servant and right-hand man. He and Kai have a similar relationship as Amane and Yasuomi. He is well-liked amongst the oni due to his calming, elder-brother like personality. He’s a master tactician though and it can be difficult to tell what he’s thinking or guess his true intentions.

Sound

Opening: Shukumei no Kusabi – Itou Kanako
Ending: Tamao no Hoshi, Utakata no Yume – Hiiragi Nao

The BGM for this game was composed by Sudou You, whom has generally worked on music arrangement for some anime songs before this. The game features 28 BGM tracks.

Artwork

The game’s artwork and character design was handled by PURU whom also worked on Matatabi’s previous game, Rear Pheles.

System

The game’s system is generally fairly straight-forward and easy to use. There’s a love-catch system for the choices.

The mini-game this time is centred around Amane essentially performing a power-up ceremony for the oni during their fights against the apparitions. To play this mini-game you basically just have to press the button it tells you. Once you’ve finished one route, the game lets you press either the start or select buttons to decide the outcome of the mini-game, if you don’t want to waste time playing it.

My Thoughts

Note: It’s worth mentioning that this game features multiple scenes of dubious consent and one route in particular features scenes of domestic abuse, including one scene with a CG. If these things upset you then I’d recommend not playing this game.

Oh, Matatabi, you really never learned from the mistakes of Rear Pheles, did you?

I guess I’ll start with the story: to put it simply, this game is just dull. The writing, while more conventional than the style used in Rear Pheles, is boring and there’s barely any chemistry between the any of the characters. Literally only Yuzuru and Yasuomi bring any humour and lightness to the game, although there are a couple of bemusing parts in Kai’s route too. I understand that they were going for a more serious atmosphere but the game doesn’t really convey the sense of danger or urgency required to pull this off effectively. Due to this, you just feel as though the game is going nowhere. It doesn’t help that the majority of the routes follow the exact same pattern, meaning that you literally read the same thing like 3 times.

My main problem with this game is that they split the routes into 2 separate parts – Yin and Yang. I could explain it myself but this handy chart from the official website does a better job of it:

For those who can’t read the above graph, the “happy” Yang route branches off into the Happy Ending & the Prohibited Ending. The “unhappy” Yin route branches off into the Frenzied Ending and the Blighted Love Ending. It’s probably important to mention here that Tomokage does have both yin and yang routes but only has two endings – happy & blighted love. The other characters have all 4 endings.

Basically, the “yin” route turns the characters into yanderes for some strange reason (the reason is explained in the game but it’s some ridiculous BS). Like, I can understand how Yuzuru (who can appear slightly unhinged on occasion) and Kai (who can be really cruel when he wants to be) could be yandere if pushed but Hayate and Yasuomi are literally so sweet in their normal routes that they feel so disgustingly out of character in those two endings. I like the yandere character-type and feel as though they can be very interesting characters but making a character yandere just for the sake of it really cheapens the whole experience in my opinion. I’d rather that they cut out the yin route, added that hour of reading onto the main route and added in the Blighted Love ending as just a normal bad ending. The frenzied endings could (and should) have been cut completely. The only one that I actually found good/interesting was Yuzuru’s.

The other unforgivable thing about this game is that despite it’s Cero D for smut (and violence probably), the smut is really damn boring. I think the fact that I played Nil Admirari (which does have pretty good smut tbh) really exacerbates the problem. There’s literally only one or two scenes that are even remotely cute, which makes the majority of the scenes pointless to be honest, especially as they’re not even used as an effective plot device either?

Aside from the story, the majority of the characters are alright I guess… Amane is a bit of a meek heroine who just seems to go with the flow and has a tendency to be pushed around by the other characters in the game. This was a bit of a shame and there are quite a few scenes that would have benefited from her standing up for herself or her friends.

Hayate is your typical kuudere who comes complete with his own tragic back story. He can be cute at times but his yandere side just ruined his whole character for me.  Kai comes across as very arrogant in the beginning of the game but it’s revealed in his route that he’s just a huge tsundere, haha. His route should probably be the one that feels the most like a “true” route but it doesn’t because it’s severely rushed. Kai is still quite cute though & there’s a couple of cute scenes that are actually quite memorable.

Yasuomi is the typical clingy childhood friend who doesn’t want Amane to be led astray by the evil, deceitful oni. He also has the added bonus of having the whole “forbidden servant/master relationship” trope in his route. His route went in a slightly unexpected direction and was generally one of the better ones. He does get the happiest/cutest epilogue though, hands down.

Yuzuru was the character I was most interested in from the beginning and his personality never really let me down. If he wasn’t in this game then there would be barely any bemusing scenes. One of the game’s main themes is prejudice and with Yuzuru being considered an outcast by both oni and humans, I was expecting his route to really encompass that theme and have him, for example, prove to the humans that he wasn’t really the big-bad oni they all expect to see (or, alternatively, how he manages to find his place in the oni’s society). Unfortunately, his route is kind of a let down in this regard and doesn’t really deal with this issue, with everyone still treating him like dirt at the end of the game. It’s not really fair because he feels as though he gets two “prohibited” endings. He needs a happy end! Justice for Yuzuru! Although, his frenzied ending was the only one I liked out of the four so I guess that’s a bonus?

Finally is Tomokage, his route is locked until you finish the other four, although it’s made pretty obvious as to why that is fairly shortly into the game. I was mildly excited for Tomokage’s route and it was definitely the best. He actually turned out to be a surprisingly good boy who has put himself through a lot of pain and suffering. His “happy” ending was exactly the kind of bitter sweet that I like and, try as I might, I couldn’t stop from tearing up just a little.

There’s only two really important side-characters: Keita and Shizukimaru, I thought that they might have routes given that they’re on the game’s cover. Unfortunately, they do not. Both of them are pretty likeable though.

The BGM was decent and had that wafuu feeling to it, there’s this one BGM though – Track 11 “Hagukumu Ai” that was so poorly looped I though my game had frozen on me on more than one occasion.
The voice acting in this game was pretty good, although, I’m embarrassed to admit that the only seiyuu I immediately recognised was Tachibana Shinnosuke. I’ve never really heard of Uchida Yuuma or Tamaru Atsushi before but they were both good so I hope to hear them in more things! I should’ve recognised Okitsu Kazuyuki and Tanimiya Kishou but I never *shrugs* to be fair, it’s been a little while since I’ve played a game with them as main characters though…

The artwork by PURU was as nice as expected. Some of the CGs do look a little off but there are also some absolutely gorgeous ones in there! There’s a fair amount of event images, although there’s quite a few dedicated to the Yin routes. Unfortunately, some of the character sprites look a little pixelated though.

This was one of my favourite CGs~ Too bad the scene that goes with it was “meh”.

The backgrounds were also generally done really well and I liked the fact that there was a BG image viewer in the bonus section of the game.

Right, it’s time to talk about the reason this game took me like 3 weeks as opposed to 1 – the system. After playing Rear Pheles, I was pretty shocked by how slow it was but I decided to have faith in Matatabi not wanting to repeat the same mistakes and figured that they’d invest in a decent programming team for this game. It turns out that I was the one mistaken.

First of all, the game is horribly unstable and crashed 5 times on me (yes, I counted) – once during the common route, twice in Yuzuru’s route, once in Hayate’s route and once in Tomokage’s route. There didn’t seem to be any correlation between what I was doing and the crashes because it cashed 3 times during normal reading, once during skipping and another when I tried to save my progress. The quick save feature is also fairly dodgy and will sometimes not actually work, even though normal saving does.

The game also lags a lot during the normal ADV scenes, although it doesn’t have a little “Loading…” sign flash up (like Rear Pheles does) so you just think that your game has frozen and then it skips forward more than one line when it does load. I think you won’t have as many problems with the skipping ahead if you read on auto-mode but I personally cannot stand it and like to read at my own pace.

On a positive note, the mini-game actually runs at a decent speed, even if it is the most boringly pointless mini-game in existence. The jump to next choice feature is also a welcome addition because I can 100% confirm that I would’ve thrown this game out of my bedroom window if I had to manually skip through the entire game almost 10 times (for both versions of the routes) given how damn slow the normal skip is.

Matatabi have accepted that there are a lot of problems with the game (apparently the download version is even more buggy – I honestly don’t know how they managed that) and have stated that they’re working on a patch. I waited just over a week after playing Yuzuru’s route to see if there would be a patch but there’s not been any updates in a while so I bit the bullet and just finished the darn thing. If you had the misfortune of pre-ordering the game then I’d recommend just throwing it in the bin a corner or cupboard and forget about even opening it until they release a patch. Don’t make yourself suffer for this!

Final Thoughts

My Score: 4/10

I think this is the lowest “score” I’ve ever given to a game so that should tell you all that you need to know about my feelings on this one, haha. Programming problems aside, nothing should be so dull that you actually need to stop playing in order to wake yourself up. While there are some good points, no game should ever disrespect its own characters just to shoehorn in stupid “yandere” routes to appeal to fans of said character-type. It was literally painful having so sit through most of these because they were so poorly written.

On a more positive note, the artwork was very nice and I did like Tomokage’s route. Yuzuru was also an interesting character but that’s about all I have to say that’s good. I bought the animate set of this game but can’t even bring myself to look at it because I’m so annoyed at the way this game turned out. I honestly wish that I’d just bought the Hiiro no Kakera port instead!

If, for some strange reason, you actually want to play this then my recommended route order would be:
Hayate → Yuzuru → Yasuomi → Kai → Tomokage

I will never, ever pre-order anything from Matatabi again after this.

I’m not sure what I’m going to play next; my plan was to tackle Shinobi, Koi utsutsu but three historical games in a row is too much for me so I ended up picking up Utapri Repeat Love. Yay for Idol boys!

Thanks for reading & I hope I haven’t ranted *too* much!