Creature Romances: Kokonoe Kokoro

Developer: Nostalgia | Publisher: Sekai Project | Release Date: 2018 | Genre: Casual / Visual Novel / Indie | Website: N/A | Purchase: Steam

Unlike real-life, it would seem that every single anime, manga, and visual novel protagonist has an opposite-sex childhood friend. Once again this is the case in Creature Romances: Kokonoe Kokoro, where players step into the shoes of a high school student named Ichitarou Ichinose. His childhood friend is Kokonoe Kokoro, who wakes up him every morning and ensures that he gets to school on time. Of course, Ichitarou eventually realizes that he’s in love with Kokoro and must work up the courage to confess to her. This visual novel sticks to this trope with one small exception, Kokoro is half human, half grasshopper.

While having an anthropomorphic, big breasted grasshopper as a love interest is not disturbing enough, Ichitarou appears to be a completely ordinary human. Even stranger, he appears to be the only human character in the game world. In addition, he never comments on this fact and appears to be completely oblivious that his best friend at school looks like some demonic creature and his little sister is a bat. Then there is his teacher, who looks like he would be more at home in a Hellraiser movie than lecturing students in a class. This could all have made for an interesting setup, but instead, it all just falls flat once the novelty wears off.

Nowhere in the script does it ever really make any mention of the monstrous characters, so if anyone were to read it without seeing the in-game visuals it would just read like a typical trope-filled slice of life novel. This is a pity as the story is very bland and contains nothing that fans of the genre have not already seen many times before. Scenes like Ichitarou ogling Kokoro when she’s in her swimsuit or accidentally walking in on her in the bathroom are very over-used in the genre. Substituting a pretty girl with a monstrous grasshopper doesn’t exactly make these types of scenes any better.

CR: KK is also a very short game and most players should be able to breeze through it in less than an hour. Nothing really interesting or out of the ordinary happens in the story either, apart from right in the last scene where players are presented with three choices. The correct choice is very obvious and will result in a “happy” ending. Picking either of the other two choices results in a bad ending.

Visually the game looks decent enough for the genre, although we couldn’t get it to run in fullscreen mode. Apart from setting the transparency of the text window the game doesn’t have any visual options either. Backgrounds consist of the usual visual novel locations and include Ichitarou’s house, school building, classroom, and few generic city streets. The sprites look decent enough for what they are but don’t expect any animations. Also, there is a handful of CGs, but seeing as most of the feature Kokoro we were not too heartbroken by the lack of a CG viewer. Seeing a grasshopper pucker it’s mouth for a kiss once was more than enough for us. The music in CR: KK isn’t anything special, but surprisingly the game features full Japanese voice acting for the characters. Finally, the user interface is a rather bare-bones but gets the job done.

All things considered Creature Romances: Kokonoe Kokoro is a hard game to recommend. Not only is it extremely short, but the story is just far too generic even with the monstrous characters. The lack of any real choices or story branches also means that there is very little replay value here. Since it has a budget price the game might lure in a few curious players, but they will soon find that it doesn’t live up to expectations.