#but I at least want to get a copy with Kurama in it for middle school me

[dontmindme2600]

God Yoshihiro Togashi’s work always fucking KILLS IT (I’ve only read/watched YuYu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter but I’m already convinced he’s a genius)

[i0990]

Koroshiya to Strawberry Review

I bought Koroshiya to Strawberry (Killer and Strawberry) because I enjoyed Kamiaso and the character designs are by Kazuki Yone. The killer and underworld setting also looked promising.

Should take this chance to point out, Kazuki Yone only did the character designs, and stuff like cover art and promo images etc. The actual CGs are not done by her. It was already mentioned before the game came out.

In any case, the problem with this game is not with the art at all, but with the writing. I don’t know how they managed to mess it up so bad but they did. It’s not like the game has no plus points. The character interactions are fun, the bgm is good, and the art is actually still quite nice for the most part.

I think it has to do with the expectation from it being a mafia game. I was expecting something more gritty and action packed, and what I played instead was more of a cafe game with lots of talk about food and only a bit of action. It all adds up to a fairly disappointing experience tbh. I’m actually quite annoyed I gave up Piofiore to play this.

For the first time ever in a review I’m just going to outright say I do not recommend this game. More details below but of course there will be spoilers. To sum up the game: too much time wasted, not enough drama.

There is a lot of complaining and ranting in this review.

*spoilers after the cut*

Plot: Outright the weakest part of this game. There is a common route at first, after which you’ll be asked to choose which guy’s route you want to play. Noin is locked until you complete the other guys. So a game with only 6 routes, all of which are fairly short, and yet, they all share the same generic route. Once you pick a route the key story progression is pretty much:

Incident A => Outing => Present => Incident B => Conflict => Ending

Maybe they wanted to be consistent in their story writing but it ends up being really dull. I don’t want to plan the same assassination over and over again 6 times. Kamiaso InFinite had the same problem where the routes share the same generic pattern (let’s just do everyone’s birthdays yeah), but that’s a fandisc. This kind of copy pasta is just annoying in a main game, especially when it’s not a long game. On hindsight, it makes me glad it’s not a long game. Hasegawa and Noin are the only routes that felt less repetitive, although they still follow the same progression.

The game starts with Ichigo being delivered to Tsukikage, where she’s told she’ll be under their protection. He gives her a smartphone to type on because she can’t speak. Ichigo wonders if this is part of further experiments on her and we see her feeling uneasy whenever someone is nice to her because it all seems like a dream that can be easily destroyed. She’s obviously broken in some way and the guys are killers. So the start of the game was actually quite promising, then as I played it all just fell apart.

The pacing is terrible. Most of the game is just fluff, then suddenly all the conflict is squeezed into the end and feels really rushed. Any tension that occurs in the middle of the route is usually non plot relevant. Like Izuna’s traffic accident, or the locked door in Amon’s route. There’s too much talk about food and coffee. They do discuss assassin stuff like guns and gear etc, but these are not things that are particularly interesting just being talked about. Basically there’s too much time wasted with close to zero plot progression. It’s a game where the guys are hire killers. Where’s the drama? Where’s the angst? >:(

There’s fighting but it’s not well written. For instance in Tsukimi’s sniping scene, the screen blacks out when he takes the shot, after that it’s already them at the bottom of the building. Matsuri then shows up to say she’s taking Ichigo because she thinks Ichigo won’t be happy with Tsukimi, then relents when Ichigo insists she’s happy with Tsukimi. Like ????? The conflict just seems really pointless. After playing the other routes it makes some of the characters’ previous actions more understandable, but if they want to hint at a deeper connection between two chars they shouldn’t do it in a way that ruins the route.

Ichigo does not get her voice or name back in all routes except one. This is a bit of a downer tbh. The romance isn’t very well written, and Ichigo gets attached to the guy very quickly after they are nice to her. It was nice seeing Ichigo get more expressive over the course of the story. Noin’s route, being the final one, is the most informative and has more closure, although the reveal that he’s the boss of Tsukikage wasn’t very surprising. It explain’s Ichigo’s origins. After playing through everything, some of the stuff that previously made no sense is sort of explained, but overall I still don’t like the writing.

Characters: The saving grace that made this game enjoyable. I had the most fun with the character interactions. The guys, despite being killers, have rather colourful personalities. Tsukimi likes making sweets and is terrible at reading the mood. Izuna is like the only sane man in the shop raging at the others, and likes making food with gourmet ingredients. Kurama is a doctor who charges exorbitant prices and isn’t good with socializing. Amon is super exuberant. Noin is a cranky shota and a bit of a tsundere. Hasegawa seems stoic but is actually really sweet. It was funny seeing them make jokes at each other or scolding each other.

The side characters aren’t too bad, but there aren’t many of them. Matsuri is a cool big sis character who looks out for Ichigo in her way. Shirakawa was funny in Hasegawa’s route. Rakia doesn’t show up much.

Ichigo, despite having a blank personality and no voice, was surprisingly likeable. She starts out as this doll-like girl and slowly regains her emotions and starts doing things out of her own initiative more. Some of her responses are also funny, like the time Shirakawa was like ‘Let’s be friends :)’ but Ichigo just went ‘Sorry that will be difficult. Age gap too big.’ Of course her personality is still pretty blank for the most part but for a girl who’s been a lab rat and hasn't been outside for over a year what would you expect. Ichigo is cute XD

System/Interface: This game loses lots of points for having a main feature that as of now, two weeks after release, still doesn’t work -- the broken music player. Broccoli must know about the bug by now, so I can only assume they aren’t fixing it either because they don’t know how to or they can’t be bothered. Or maybe they think if they leave it as it is it’ll force players to buy the ost.

Aside from that the loading time is bad, just like the Kenka Bancho Otome fd. Every time Ichigo recalls something the screen flashes white, then flashes white again when transitioning back to the present. Okay if it’s once off, very irritating when she’s recalling multiple things back to back. Long loading time also means there’s a part of Hasegawa’s route where you will stare at a black screen for a while before hearing a loud sound from the game suddenly. 

Don’t think you can toggle skip mode without accessing the settings menu. I found the font a bit small when I started playing but this isn’t a big issue and I got used to it. Instead of Ichigo’s sprite they put a smartphone at the lower left corner. You would think with a heroine that can’t speak a sprite would be good since we at least see her expressions, but nope. Broccoli thinks players would rather stare at a blank phone screen. The only plus feature is the ‘skip to next option’.

Trophy collection is straightforward in general. If you are missing a CG for full complete try replaying the scene where Hasegawa and Ichigo are in the car on their way to buy stuff and select the other options.

Art/Music: The music for this game is really nice. I like it a lot. But I won’t buy the soundtrack because I don’t want to throw money at Broccoli >_> The OP grew on me heh.

The art isn’t bad, despite it not being actual Kazuki Yone CGs. Most of them look pretty good. A few of the sprites are used in the CGs (Tsukimi’s back-facing sprite being the most common) but this isn’t a huge issue. There are so many CGs of Ichigo in various outfits and expressions lol. During one of the fight scenes they used this one:

which was funny because that is totally not the expression of someone freaking out and trying to stop a fight. 

Ichigo’s smartphone does make some of the CGs look a bit silly imo but that can’t really be helped.

Look at the poor girl frantically trying to get Matsuri to look at her phone :/

In the end I would say the most frustrating thing about the game is how much promise it had, and how good it could have been. Certain things like Ichigo and Matsuri’s connection could have been explored more. Or a bit more about how the guys got into their profession. Giving the antagonistic organization a bigger presence would have been good too, instead of them being a sort of vaguely mentioned and never seen organisation. If only they had taken the time to smooth everything out nicely and not rush things. It feels like a game that didn’t have enough effort put into it by the company, trying to make up for it with nice packaging.

This is the most disappointing vita game I’ve bought to date and unless you are the sort who doesn’t care about shoddy writing, really, save yourself the pain of playing Korosuto.