Included In: Bundle for Racial Equality and Justice
Genre: Visual Novel
Pitch: A Vocaloid fan is shocked when the virtual idol she adores sends her a DM—and says she's in trouble!
My expectations: Developer ebi-hime has published 39 anime-style visual novels to Itch in the past eight years. I can only see the date they were made available on Itch, so it's possible some were released somewhere else prior to 2015. Regardless, 39 games is a mind-boggling number of games for anyone to develop in one lifetime, and ebi does appear to be a one-woman developer.
Okay, but anyone can throw something together at a weekend game jam and call it a game, right? Well, here's where it gets weirder. Many of the Itch listings include each visual novel's word count and estimated time to completion. Among the pages with this information, most hover around either 50,000 words (2-3 hours) or 100,000 words (4-6). At least one game is double that.
And people are playing these. ebi has more than 3,000 followers on Steam. Three people I follow on Twitter also follow @ebihime, including one of my close, personal friends. AIdol was funded by a KickStarter campaign that raised $2,872. I'm not saying these are huge numbers, but these games have dedicated fans.
I am beyond intrigued.
Review:
Hana is just a boring girl. She doesn’t have friends. Her hair is short. She doesn’t know anything about makeup. She can’t cook. She listens to music. And on top of all that, she can’t cook and she doesn’t have friends!
Maybe if Hana didn’t spend half of her time repeating this list of unremarkable characteristics to herself, she could develop a personality, but who needs to be a human when they could instead be a fan?
Her passion is “virtual idol” Aiko, a Vocaloid popstar who performs hologram shows and sells stomach-churning quantities of overpriced merch. She’s basically Hatsune Miku, except the Lyriq corporation has given her artificial sentience for some reason.
But something sinister is happening at Lyriq. Aiko’s programmer has been fired. Her code has been changed, and her memory has been erased. Now Hana and Aiko must work together to solve the mystery.
This mostly involves oops-I-bumped-into-you-and-spilled-coffee meet-cutes and shirtless boys.
It all bores the heck out of me. After an hour of purple prose and static images of generic anime people, I started skipping dialogue, hoping to get to the end, but I couldn’t even put up with that.
Not for me.
+ The intro sequence—lots of quick cuts and effects set to (I think) an original song. It's lively and well produced; not at all what I expect from a visual novel.
+ There are occasional typos and grammatical errors, but again, it surpasses my expectations for this type of game.
+ Professional-looking artwork. I don't know how much is original, but asset packs are made to be used.
+ Ditto, music.
– I brushed my hair away from my forehead. It's hot today, and I hoped it would help me to cool down. Mom thinks I should try a new style, but I don't know anything about hair. We disagree about hair, but I am lucky to have her. Sometimes when I look at her, I think she looks like she's the same age as me, except her hair is different than mine, and I don't know much about hair. Or makeup. I prefer Aiko figurines. I ordered one from AImazon, an online store that is very popular on the idol forms. Other people on the forums can be rude, which is why I'm thinking about cutting back to only posting for 14 hours a day. With my hair away from my face, cooling me on this hot afternoon, which feels as hot as yesterday, I leave the forum and turn my attention to Tumblr. "Now I understand how someone can write 39 visual novels," I write.
– Aiko asks Hana to help her find her original programmer. Hana asks the idol forum if anyone knows anything. Then she hops on a train and visits Lyriq headquarters. She doesn't get any information there. She spends a few minutes commenting on every person she sees walking outside. (Throughout this scene, the only things onscreen are her internal monologue and a picture of a deserted city block.) She stops into a café and watches a young man order coffee, with all the pointless detail of that scene from The Room. The man bumps into her and almost spills the coffee. The game forgets about Hana and instead follows the man on his walk to his office, where he waits for an elevator, talks to a co-worker, goes up the elevator, and talks to another co-worker about his experience getting coffee. The perspective shifts again to this co-worker. We learn about her life for a few minutes, and then she sits down to do her work. Part of her job is moderating the idol forums. She sees Hana's post and closes the thread. Back at home, Hana reads every response to her question, until she finally sees that the thread has been closed. She texts Aiko to tell her the bad news.
– No.
🧡🧡🤍🤍🤍
Bottom Line: Props for making a complete product with decent production value. Anime and visual novels with minimal interactivity don't usually do anything for me, but even if that is your scene, surely there are better options than AIdol.
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