Really? Really! is one of the games I was somewhat interested in playing when I first started this blog, but I forgot about it pretty quickly and never tried it until now. Shuffle! is one of the few anime harem shows I actually enjoyed watching, and even though I hated, and continue to hate Asa-sempai, it made perfect sense to me that she and Rin ended up together.

I’ve almost entirely lost interest in the series since then, though I do clearly remember all the characters. There’s also a bonus character in the form of a “forgotten childhood friend” known as Sakura. Pretty sure she wasn’t in the anime.

The wiki description says it all. Kaede has lost her memories and is in a coma. Rin and all his buddies have to dive into her subconscious and help her regain it. Alas, due to the magic accident that caused her amnesia, those memories have been fragmented and falsified in parts. Your job, therefore, is to pick up ‘keywords’ that represent the truth and then ‘present’ them at the correct moments in order to correct Kaede’s memory.

It’s 95% visual novel, but you do get to make a few moves here and there. When Rin comes across a contradiction, he goes “Objection!” Phoenix Wright-style (complete with cheap suit) and the game allows you to pick one of several keywords to straighten things out. On your first day at school, for example, Itsuki appears as a particularly hideous girl. Rin couldn’t correct that fast enough. Shortly afterwards Mayumi=Thyme shows up as a busty(!) idol, which completely crashes Kaede’s “system” with its sheer impossibility. And so on, and so forth.

All in all it reminded me of a less-complicated Time Hollow: you go through a scene, you see what’s wrong, the game prompts you to fix it, and you fix it. You keep moving, you find something else wrong, you fix that. There’s no confusion anywhere, there’s no chance of invoking the system at the wrong time and it’s pretty obvious what you’re supposed to use at each point. If you proceed far enough with a scene, you end up fixing everything there is to fix in that ‘memory’ and then you get to see the events of that day from Kaede’s point of view.

I played for 3 hours, including the lengthy prologue, and unlocked the first memory. Lost interest after that because even though I imagine the story will get more and more twisted and the choices less and less obvious as the game progresses, I sadly feel nothing for Kaede and have no personal stake in getting her back to normal. If it had been Primula on the other hand, we might have had something to talk about. Fans of the Shuffle! series might enjoy it. Fans of regular visual novels, not so much, because this game assumes you know all the characters and at least some of the storylines from the main game.

It really didn’t help that the game’s jokes were old by the 30-minute mark but they just wouldn’t stop repeating them. Kaede loves Rin, we get it. Midoriba likes girls, we get it. Mayumi is flat-chested, we get it. It’s funny the first few times but after that, come on. I like snarky protagonists, in moderation, but when the years pass and the jokes stay the same, it’s time to hang it up.

Moving on, I would have started Suikoden II by now, but I took a few hours to recap the first game by reading a Let’s Play of it. As usual I’m surprised at how clearly I remember games I enjoyed playing, even after 10 years have passed. I even remembered where all the sucker punches were. Mathiu! ;______; IstillSad. Thanks to that I am now slightly psyched to start the next one, though I just know it’s going to depress me. More on that as the tale unfolds.