Today’s deck is the Incubus Tarot.
The theme is very on point. I really like how each minor arcana has a specific palette for each.
As you’ll see, my day got completely consumed by playing one specific game until sunrise which hadn’t happened in a while. Today’s reading feels like reassurance that hey, that’s important too sometimes.
Like I said, my day got consumed by a new game so let’s talk about it.
Otetetsunaide (roughly “Holding Hands”) is the latest Kamichichi game and long story short it’s one in the now sprawling subgenre of Boku no Natsuyasumi-derived games.
The premise is the usual for the subgenre premise of “boy goes to spend the summer vacation with hot family members on the countryside” but there’s actually a shocking amount of depth to the characters alone. Enough that I actually wanna go through them to drive that point home.
The Yumesaki household has four women. First there’s Fuuka, the matriarch and widow. While she looks at first like she’s just the typical MILF type she’s shown to be a very VERY talented cook, you can actually bring her fish and if you do the meal of that day might change because she went “oh yeah this fish looks good for tempura” and such.
Natsuno is the eldest daughter and you can tell that she takes after her mom’s sense of community because she’s become the main PR representative for the town, doing lots of interviews and community events like health checkups and disaster awareness.
Konatsu is still in college and she definitely gives the vibe of a city girl compared to the others, but turns out she’s still a country girl at heart that loves the outdoors. She actually bonds with the main character the most just by giving bug catching nets, making cold noodle slides, setting up a pool on the garden or a hammock in the backyard, and so on.
Ichika is a goth chuuni menhera hermit that makes a living as a streamer and changed her name to Anemone. She’s also the youngest of the sisters and while she’s not necessarily babied you can definitely tell she’s been the baby of the house which creates a fun dynamic with the main character now being the youngest at home.
Megumi is a teacher in the local school and a classmate of Natsuno’s. While it’s summer vacation and she’s not in teaching duties, she hosts a radio warmup thing that becomes part of the main character’s routine through the game.
Doctor Kaguya is the local physician, she’s another contemporary of Natsuno’s and took over the clinic from her grandpa. Said clinic is also near a bamboo forest for extra flavor.
Shizuka owns the local grocery store. While she’s very diametrically opposite to Fuuka in personality she has a shocking amount of depth, seen not just in how she’s a business owner but there’s things like when a couple of the kids actually indulge her seeing her perform a Kamishibai (that thing where you tell a tale flipping through illustrations, think Hellshake Yano).
Meanwhile Emily is the owner of a local cafe, she’s married but her husband is a fisherman that spends more time at sea than on land.
And you can fuck each and every single one of these women.
There’s that one dumb Carmack quote about how nobody cares about the story in porn but I do. I cannot stress how much better porn gets when you have an investment (emotional or, in games’ case, mechanical) in what’s going on.
In fact, due to a quirk in how the game works, I didn’t have access to the proper porn element for the longest time and I didn’t even mind that much. This is a game where in theory you could do a virgin run and not feel like you’re pulling teeth or fighting against the game… in fact, I got shockingly far into a playthrough that was almost like that.
So the game is named after its main “mechanic” where you can ask any of the girls mentioned above to walk with you. When you ask them out you can talk with them and if you’re in a private enough spot have sex then and there. This request to do naughty things is basically breaking that boundary and telling the girl it’s okay to get naughtier, and what this means is that there’s a LOT of events that don’t play out unless you do so.
So here’s an example: In my first playthrough I spent the first night with Anemone, getting the scene with her. Outside of this the porn elements were really laid back on the whole. Most that you could enforce (so to speak) was bathing with any of them which lets you see them naked.
Through the game you go to the nearby beach with one of the Yumesakis at a time, and it wasn’t until I got to the one with Anemone and hers included a sex scene on the beach that I went “wait, hold on…”.
Until that point I just assumed I needed to build more affection or whatever but no, I just didn’t use the Handholding mechanic enough to notice that earlier.
And I didn’t use it as often because the game actually has a LOT you can do so I was distracted with everything else.
The game doesn’t have a specific objective. The closest there is to a running plot is that in the intro we see your character made a promise with one of the Yumesakis to go to the summer festival with them again. This isn’t a mystery though, whoever you choose to go to the festival with turned out to be the person you made the promise with.
ANYWAY, progression. You can get sidequests but aside from that the game sets you up to a really nice routine.
You wake up, go to the radio warmup with Megumin, one of the Yumesakis picks you up and they chat with Megumin for a bit, you have breakfast and a chat with everyone, you’re free until dinner time where everyone talks about their day, everyone takes a bath and you can pick if you wanna go to sleep with any of them rather sleeping in your room.
During the exploration you can see events marked, you can pick up “promises” (sidequests) to complete, you can fish, you can sell those fishes, you can give them to Fuuka for that day’s dinner, you can catch bugs, you can even take photos which prompt every NPC in the frame to make a peace sign.
And I haven’t even mentioned the NPCs without a face. There’s ones like Ken who’s Shizuka’s son and one year older than your character, there’s a girl you only see in the aerobics but she’s around town doing stuff. The world is very interconnected with its characters in a delightful way.
There’s so much mundane detail going on too. Konatsu has vinyl records on her room, when your character points them out Konatsu is like “oh, you know what those are?” and your character is like “Yeah! Dad has a lot of them!”. Or how Konatsu actually follows Anemone’s streams so whenever you see her on her phone you kinda wonder if she’s just seeing her sister’s broadcasts.
Another detail I find amusing is that even the faceless women in the game have similar busty overworld sprites, leaving the implication that the game’s cast isn’t an exception in that front.
So solid game all around, the fact that the characters with portraits are hot ladies? a bonus already, but the fact that you can do nasty nasty things to said ladies also adds so much to it all.
The ladies aren’t the only pretty thing tho, the game is GORGEOUS and filled with SO MUCH detail. I was already sold just on the illustrations and backgrounds but there’s even things like how if you cross into a side of the map from one entrace you’re further away in the sidescroller than if you enter from the other entrance.
Really, if I had one complaint is that RPGmaker is ripping apart at the seams.
…okay, I have more complaints than that, actually. The curve for how many events happen and how much free time you have is a bit chaotic. You have an option to change how much time passes between screens but you end up in a weird middle ground where there’s either way too much free time or not enough.
There’s also a singular scene with the usual nanpa dudes trying to hit on Natsuno while prepping the festival and to the game’s credit it’s more an opportunity for your character to have a precocious moment than the usual “the girl has lost all of her autonomy for this scene so we can hype up how nice the main character is let’s ignore the implication of this never happening before somehow” that goes with that sort of scene, but I can do without those as a whole, really.
Back to positives, something interesting to me is that the cast is so strong in characterization that I find it hard to pick any favorite. On the Yumesaki front alone Konatsu is the one that Activates me the fastest (especially when you add in the part where she loves outdoor activities), but Natsuno is more what I’d seek in real life (professional, etc), BUT Anemone is a kindred chuuni soul.
Hell, even on the body type front you might have OPINIONS. Kamichichi, befitting their name, has put a LOT of care into both body type and breast type/shape. So for example while in these sorts of things my brain tends to default to “bigger means better”, I found myself more attracted to Natsuno’s body despite her not being the biggest.
By the way all the sisters have the kanji for summer (夏) in their name and their birthdays all fall in August. Notably Ichika is trying to go by Anemone which is a flower and “flower” the more traditional option for the “ka” of her name. And her mom’s name has the kanji for flower (花) in it instead. Also the village’s name is Natsukaze (夏風) and Fuuka’s name COULD be constructed with those kanji.
It’s not just the attention to detail, your mind just starts going “oh maybe that’s why…” about a bunch of really mundane stuff.
The main character (who you can name but as it’s often the case in these games defaults to “Boku”) is an interesting case in that he’s the typical precious cinammon roll shota archetype but he’s written in a way where you get why all these ladies get attached to him and then lust over him. Which sounds like the most obvious thing ever but porn games default to everyone else being designed to appeal to the main character rather than the main character being someone everyone else in the cast would find appealing.
There’s this one scene where Konatsu is going to Kaguya’s clinic because basically her period is kicking her ass and when the main character asks what’s wrong she has to explain that women have a day per month where they’re in pain so you get the option to be like “pain pain go away” on her which absolutely melts her heart. Which is kinda what I mean, while the variety of girls is clearly meant to offer appealing options to the player, within the context of the game it’s shown why the main character is appealing to all the ladies on an emotional level outside of having a Disproportionately Huge Magnum Dong.
Honestly I could go on for so long about so many other details. Like how each event and promise you complete gives you an entry for your journal and for each one you can choose what tone to write it in (normal, poetic, or perverted), or the neat visual flair that when affection rises a cloud of hearts pops from the chest area but when lust rises it’s an ominous purple glow at around the crutch area (and if you find a porn mag your character has an ominous darkness that zeroes into his chest), or how every single spot in the game has a background you only see when talking with the girls while holding hands AND a background you only see in the menu screen, or the fact that there’s a gacha where you can get CGs from Kamichichi’s other games but if you give a fox spirit food he’ll reveal the perverted version of a card for you.
I’m currently on my second playthrough to get the remaining events and CGs and I don’t mind it for one second. This year started STRONG with this game.