Hey y'all. Welcome back to my impressions of KoiChoco. This is the first session of the final route, the Satsuki one. Let's Jam!!!
Here are the rules for my play so you know what to expect from this portion:
I wasn't quite ready for this route. I had known that it was partially adapted in the Anime and then dropped pretty quickly midway through the series. The troubled familial history between Hazuki and Satsuke was where it was mostly focused; I was surprised at how much was cut out. This will be a decently long post but there's quite a lot I want to write about (but will heavily edit down).
Honestly, I was surprised that he was with Satsuki in this route during the earthquake. In all other routes, he was pinned to his bed by Oboro and was awakened by it. Here, he snuck out and through a series of events (related to alcohol, mad hijinks and trash teacher-san), he ended up in Satsuki's private quarters playing Shogi. I don't know anything about that game but apparently, it plays similarly to chess and seeing her freaking out about the earthquake was surprising. I don't think the Anime showed it (but I could be wrong).
Of course, drunken, love-struck trash teacher-san would be lurking outside of Satsuki's door after that. She may have been openly hostile towards her sister, but they're still family, and Yuuki bumping into her like this was expected. Carry on Wayward Son.
This scene of Yuuki being confused by his feelings towards his political rival was fun. Her calling him and their banter was adorable. I'm surprised at how standard rom-com this really feels compared to most of the other routes. Satsuki seems pretty normal compared to all of the weirdos in the Shokken, so it should be expected.
This particular scene was one that I really enjoyed. Satsuki snuck into Yuuki's prep room before the next big speech. This was the first time that there was actual confirmation that Yuuki ad-libbed his entire initial speech. I guess there will never be a transcript of that speech in this game, so I will be left guessing what it actually entailed. I'm kind of saddened by that now because it would have been fun to see his true super power (as Mifuyu casually called it once).
I never thought that I needed Hazuki playing the role of Non-chan in my life. I can die tomorrow a happy man now that my love of Non-chan has been satiated by the drunkard. Also, I'm surprised that Yuuki offered to make her dinner again after the last time ended with kind of a sad goodbye. Even though he had ulterior motives for it (see below), the developer's teasing a teacher student romance for this particular brand of weird story was not off the table and would have been a welcomed gag ending. Hazuki is trash but fun, dammit!!!
If I had a nickel for how many times he would openly and publicly express his affection towards one of the heroines, I'd have at least a full quarter. It's not much, but with how the Hive economy is going, it could make me a millionaire. Fu-fu-fu
I'm pointing this particular scene out because the Anime only briefly showed this side of her, but at her core, Hazuki was a mess that had some sense. This was the first time she openly and rawly showed her real self. Yuuki was almost 18 and she was barely 5 years older than him (23 at the time). Her kissing him and directly confessing to him would be illegal for sure at this current moment but I still wanna see it now. I love this entire conversation and how she somewhat apologized for kissing him but at the same time, that last line was a bit too much. Love triangle doujinshi please, for "research" of course.
Wow. Chisato interrupted Yuuki's plan to proposition Satsuki here over the phone (he immediately hung up on the girl), discovered he was with Hazuki (due to the alcohol on his clothing), and decided to "sleep" with him just to ruin his night. I don't know how I feel about this entire scene. Typically, she hadn't bothered me that much, but this was straight up petty. No sex happened but off-screen, she most definitely tortured and teased him with her body. I wish the developers had made that a full CG now.
On this day, Yuuki was in trouble. Angry Satsuki is not a woman to be trifled with, especially when it comes to both Love and Elections. If only she ate Chocolate to calm her fury, it would be perfect.
The fact he openly admitted to his crush that he liked her sister too (but doesn't know if it's romantic or not) was one of the most painful things I've seen in any media. There's such thing as being honest and having a healthy relationship, but I half expected Satsuki to straight up murder him here. What happened next was hilarious, though!!!
Out of the blue, Hazuki called Yuuki to ask if he was with Satsuki and to see if the younger sister had agreed to a duel for his affection. The dialogue here was amazing. I don't know if the translation was a mistake or not, but for the rest of this session, all you could hear was Hazuki repeating the same question around 10 times total using a different tone and different Japanese words just to troll her sister into playing Shogi with her. This is my favorite exchange now of the entire game.
I condensed this down quite a bit and removed multiple scenes that I wanted to talk about but didn't for various reasons. I'm very surprised at how little this initial session shared with the Mifuyu route outside of the Common Route parts and two scenes during the first two hours. I do have one issue with this route that showed up in some of the others but was noticeably more annoying here: there were too many manual skips required to get to the new content. Most Visual Novels with multiple routes (different paths the story can go) allow for skipping due to how often they'll recycle certain elements in every route, but here, every few skips (even if it was previously viewed content) required a manual skip to continue. I hope this issue gets resolved in the second half of the route (and possibly the NekoNyan Unity engine remake). I can't wait to see where this ends up, though.
I hope you enjoyed my thoughts here, and I'll be continuing to post in the future as I go. What were your thoughts? Are you also playing this? Leave your comments below, vote and reblog. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful night.
