#baseson

First, a bit of history:

Koihime was one of Mangagamer's early "big" titles and had quite a bit of buzz around it. Their funds and sales were low, and Koihime was long and expensive. Because of this it was first released without voices, with a future voice patch promised for when Koihime reached a certain number of sales. Some fans even set up posts with guesstimates about the game's sales as it went along.

This was way back before Kickstarter – nowadays something like that would likely have been a stretch goal in a funding campaign. Interesting how things change, eh?

Later on the japanese developer Baseson released newer versions of the game called Shin Koihime Musou, with many more characters and routes, but at this time it doesn't have an english release, and as such nothing in this post will relate to that.

Now, to the game itself:

Koihime is a spinoff from Harukoi Otome, later also localised by Mangagamer, where a guy named Kazuto Hongou gets transported to ancient China during the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era. Here he ends up taking the place of Liu Bei and commands soldiers into war. Many known heroes from that time are also there though in this world they are all women. Nor do most of them look remotely chinese.

Although there are many characters, most of who get recruited into Kazuto's army, there are only 3 heroines with endings: a young woman, a loli, and a super-loli.

The story of the game is generally the same at all times, with different scenes and endings achieved by choosing who to spend free time with at certain intervals. Because of this I won't focus too much on each individual route. (Also, I didn't play all of them. Sorry super-loli, it's just not my kind of thing.)

The translation doesn't appear awful, but once in a while you'll run into some pretty confusing sentences, as well as some minor typing/naming errors.

Kazuto:

Let's start with talking about the main character for a bit.

Kazuto is your typical "high-schooler-sent-to-another-world" guy, landing in the arms of attractive girls who proceed to idolize him for his knowledge and oh-so-kind heart. He then decides to become their ruler and help them save their homes.

One thing I appreciate in the story is the fact that while Kazuto is set up as a talented kendo student who reads a lot of books on strategy(!?), he is not made into a superhero warrior when he arrives in ancient China. Instead he fumbles against a group of bandits, and then goes on to have his experienced warriors fight his battles for him, taking up the post as their figurehead.

Other than that, there is not much to say about him. Kazuto is very generic. The moment he gets over his first confusion about being in ancient china, he almost never spends a moment thinking about his home, his family, his friends, or whether he will ever return. Not until the end, anyway. After being briefly overwhelmed by the request to govern a city, he soon accepts his role and spends what must be years campaigning in the Three Kingdoms war without these things crossing his mind. Maybe I'd understand his attitude if there had been established a past of no close connections or things he cherished in the present, but this is not the case.

This not only made Kazuto bland, but also turned him into a premise that very much broke suspension of belief and made him difficult to care for. (Yes, in a world of blonde, chinese pre-schoolers leading armies, I know.)

Also, can I just mention that in a world with very few males with actual faces, one of the few we get is this one?

I guess they wanted to make sure Kazuto had no real competition, huh?

The plot:

The basic premise of the story is pretty simple and standard as laid out above: highschooler gets transported to another world after running into a mysterious boy stealing a mirror. He then becomes the ruler of one of the Three Kingdoms, and fights to unite China, in order to bring peace. Along the way there are more hints towards the boy with the mirror and what his secret faction are plotting in the shadows.

Koihime often moves into scenes with high dramatic potential, showing the deep relationships between some of the many characters and the difficult situations they are put in. But all in all I feel like only one scene really succeeds in its drama, one of the few instances where a character actually ends up losing her life.

Sadly the rest of the scenes rarely ever live up to their potential. After setting everything up they end up squandering it with ill-placed humour, or just bad dialogue, that fails to get to the core of the issue and properly show the emotions of the heroines. It gives them a generally superficial feel, skirting along the edge of interesting topics, with that nagging thought in the back of your mind that this moment could actually have been good, dammit.

Not to mention that this is a game keeping a generally happy/upbeat and colourful atmosphere, while being about young girls literally chopping each other's heads off. It's like it constantly wants to tell us that war is a terrible and dangerous thing, while immediately after pulling back, having one of them say something funny, and then everyone laughs.

The writing sure also doesn't waste time on details. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there are times where it feels like important events are quickly delivered in passing, or solved in the easiest way possible, all for the sake of moving along the plot to where the writer wanted it to be. This leads to some pretty hard to believe situations, and can make it difficult to get immersed in the grander scale of things.

A couple of examples: Early on "the enemy" devises a plan to lure Kazuto to Luoyang to kill him, which is the dumbest plan ever, since it involves him allying himself with the other two powerful rulers in China. At this point it was already established that he had a poor and weak army, so why deliberately put him together with the two strongest armies around when trying to kill him??

At another point in the story, one leading character is being manipulated to fight. Her allies ascertain this fact from watching her from a distance for just a few short moments, then decide to betray their country to save her, based on this assumption alone. Also, while their discussion with Hongou takes place, apparently their entire former army changed clothes to look extra sinister.

The enemy sure doesn't waste any time trying to be subtle either, eh?

I see why both things had to happen to move the plot along, but the way they happened just felt so haphazard and lazy that they didn't work for me at all. While the first one just made the enemies appear dumb rather than the scheming masterminds they are supposed to be, the latter just threw me out of the story entirely.

And then there is the final plot reveal, the thing that explains the whole premise of Kazuto being spirited off to this place, and why everything is so different from the history we know. This isn't revealed until just before the very end, and honestly? I thought the twist was kinda fun. It wasn't a bad idea, in its strangely fourth wall breaking way. On the other hand it was revealed so late, explained in an unnatural and unnecessarily convoluted way, and then never really expanded on or taken advantage of apart from leading into a brief character ending of choice.

Guess there is a lot of excuses for sequels and fandiscs in that reveal though. Ka-ching!

The action!

But hey, this is an action-filled story, right? So let's move on to that.

Action scenes are written – or rather not written – in an interesting way. Most of the time when characters are not shouting dramatic lines at each other, or preparing for charges, the fights consist of images symbolising the swooshing of weapons, clashing sounds, and characters exclaiming "ngh!" and "huyah!", leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps and picture how they are jumping around and swinging at each other.

On one hand this actually works rather well – you've likely seen enough fight scenes, animated or otherwise, to visualise the warriors swinging and dodging around. There are a few times where it feels a bit odd, especially coming right after passages where the text is more than willing to detail a character's movements and actions, but in general I suppose it blends in well with the overall lightweight narration.

On a more negative note, the fight scenes suffer from their outcomes often being predictable and inconsequential, with a few exceptions. While at first they can still be entertaining in spite of this, they end up being very samey and uninteresting after a while, with the duelling generals yelling their usual challenges and insults/compliments at each other, then swinging their weapons around for a bit. It ends up lacking the impact it could have in a game about legendary warriors.

Home Base scenes:

Once in a while, between main story scenes and battles, you'll get to the Home Ba(s)e screen. Here you have a limited number of turns to choose which of the characters in your army that you want to spend some time with. This is how you experience the side stories of both the three main girls as well as the many supporting characters who all have stories of their own. (And there are lots!)

To begin with, I quite enjoyed some of these – especially this game's version of a Team Rocket trio: Enshou and her friends. These three are beaten early on in the main plot, and then continue to travel across the country, having silly and random encounters with the other characters along the way. As mentioned, I quite enjoyed this detour of theirs, almost more than any of the other side stories, until the point where plot flew out the window and it all turned into a pointless sex romp towards the end.

The latter part of the game has a ton of these in its Home Base scenes, by the way. At this point it seems the writer eventually gave up on the story and threw out his brain to just go with whatever came to mind. I skipped pretty much all of these since it's not really my thing, so apologies to those who expected a review of that!

But this is an ero-game... (also, gameplay):

"But this is an ero game!" I hear you cry. "You're trying to give it too much credit in all the wrong places!"

Well yes. You might argue that the main attraction of Koihime is likely the ability to score and get steamy with many kinds of warrior girls, and that because of this, the quality of the writing or the protagonist isn't all that important. And you'd probably be right.

But then again, this game isn't particularly short, and it takes some time and effort to get there. (Okay, so more time than effort, but still...) Which means one of two things: A) People are also in it for the rest of the story. B) They really like the strategic combat parts.

I'm not going to believe anyone would answer B to that question.

The gameplay during battles is a quite dull and forgettable rock-paper-scissors game, and I imagine it was included mostly to give the impression of you being the commander of an army in an epic war. (And, very possibly, to avoid having to actually write battle scenes in the first place.)

Besides, beat the game once, and you can skip all the battles, anyway.

Visuals:

Colourful and shiny like a candy wrapper, and with a few interesting designs. Artwork is decent, but otherwise nothing special. A few of the sprites seem terribly unbalanced and skewed in proportions, especially when placed next to other sprites. (I'm looking at you, Aisha).

CG quality varies – most of them stay on the same generic level, with a few standing out with an extra layer of polish in colouring and style. Extra money spent on more important CGs? I can imagine the team having saved the best artist for just a few images, for the sake of impact and budget.

Backgrounds are quite limited and simple, which means most locations look exactly the same. Not a huge problem, but can sometimes be odd when the graphics place the characters on top of a wall that they are merely standing next to. And when the location of your epic showdown looks like your home.

Music:

Not bad, but also nothing special.

TL;DR:

The good:

The MC isn't a superhero

A few fun character interactions and personalities in there

The final plot reveal was kinda fun in theory

The bad:

The MC isn't very fun or believable either

Often falls flat on promising elements

A lot of boring characters were there as well

Many plot points broke suspension of disbelief

Pointless battle system

I think there is definitely a place for these kinds of light "let's just go with it" stories, and that they can be very enjoyable. I also think it can be done much better than this, without having to step into srs literature territory.

Also, the game's lesson: MEN ARE EVIL. Apart from Kazuto of course. Even when he rapes his friends and is constantly unfaithful.