Checked out the demo for Spray’s new thing, Tsuminaru Rasen no Ori, the other day after I realized the game was already out. You can grab it on the official site––do note, you will need to use something like RLSE launcher to run it because of the engine.
I went in with pretty low expectations, but was secretly hoping it would be at least entertainingly bad because it has a DL edition and might have made for a nice low-effort diversion. Welp, too bad it was pretty terrible and not even fun terrible. Don’t let that key visual fool you, the actual game doesn’t actually look quite that nice.
It mostly just starts out being generic and boring, and if it stayed that way I’d have probably just written it off as “not my thing” instead of the “what was wrong with the person who wrote this? it’s bafflingly terrible” I ultimately came away with. So, our main character Nico is a poor orphan boy who is also half fictional-white-people and half fictional-oppressed-brown people (although he doesn’t look it at all?) and we open the game with him getting berated and physically abused by his boss (are you feeling bad yet?).
After being accused of being a thief for picking up a cufflink belonging to one of the other leads, Claus, he ends up with a job at Claus’ estate, Ashton Abbey. From there it’s just a bunch of Nico learning the ropes of working at the estate and how wonderful everything is, interspersed with the occasional ~weird this place seems so familiar I wonder why~ moment (I bet you’ll never guess what that’s about!).
Finally something dramatic happens when Claus has to give an address at some party (or something I started skipping going into this because I was getting bored), but OH NO HIS SPEECH IS MISSING, the old butler whose name I’ve already forgotten is blamed and ultimately ends up quitting over the incident.
One night not long after that, Nico hears a strange noise and goes to investigate. He sees Glen going through a strange door and down a set of long stairs to some kind of cellar and follows him. Glen catches him and confronts him for following him… and then promptly confesses that he arranged the old butler’s resignation by slowly poisoning his tea because he was in his way. He then continues, telling Nico that he’s really the last survivor of the family who used to own Ashton Abbey and allegedly all died horribly in a fire ten years ago and that he knows him because he used to work for said family––at which point he pins him to the ground and starts raping him to get him to remember this (suggesting that they had been intimate in this fashion previously… which seems really odd with the timeline unless they were fucking when Nico was like 10).
Naturally it works, Nico has a flashback to when he was very young in the estate and a young Glen being there. Mission accomplished, everyone promptly forgets that Glen was just raping Nico and they go back to having a nice little chat in the cellar in which Glen’s ~earnest eyes~ convince Nico that he’s telling the truth.
Glen then pledges his loyalty to Nico and to get revenge for him/his family and the demo ends! I’m used to stupid classic BL rape logic, but what? I mean, tbh that ending being so bizarrely incoherent has me almost morbidly curious enough to pick up the full game to see just how stupid it gets, but the majority of it was just so boring and even the “what the fuck is even going on?” moments weren’t really fun, they were just… baffling.
Also, Glen’s VA sounded so fucking bored through the whole thing. I dunno if he was just forcing his voice out of range and couldn’t really act or was just really not into the project (it wasn’t even like deadpan-serious-butler he just sounded bored/like he was blandly reading lines off a page).
Verdict: Someone else play the full game and tell me how dumb it gets pls.
Unlike Tsuminaru, this game isn’t out for another month and a half. Anyway, this is the first entry in Lune’s new sub-brand Mesu Danshi, Kanojo wo Netotta Yarichin Otoko wo Mesu Ochisaseru Made (something like “Turning the Chad Who Cuck’d Me Into My Sissy Bitch” maybe? lol) or YariMesu. As you may have surmised from the title and key visual, it’s a gross, budget nukige. When people were asking if YariMesu was a BL game the artist said (paraphrasing because I can’t find the damn tweet again) that it’s not a BL (boys love) game it’s a BR (boys rape game), which is pretty apt.
Not a whole lot to say about the trial considering it’s literally the title. There are like 3… and a half? scenes in the trial, which honestly seemed like a lot for a 2k yen price-point game. The lead VA does a p. great job. He also sounds vaguely familiar but I can’t place the voice (I feel like I’ve heard him in some situation CD before).
Verdict: if a game about mindbreaking the guy who stole your girlfriend into your sex slave sounds like something you’d be into, this is the game for you!
Thank you for continuing these write ups! I enjoy reading what you’ve got to say – sorry you had to suffer through Tsuminaru Rasen no Ori being such a clusterfuck!