Girl next door: Comic Party's Yuu Inagawa

(tags game, gal-game, PlayStation Portable, anime, doujin)

I've been playing Comic Party Portable for the PSP since last week and I finally finished the Yuu Inagawa scenario (猪名川由宇). I must say I should have done Comic Party a lot soon, like when I was actively going to the Comic Market events, since this game celebrates the doujinshi and cosplay scene.

Yuu is a Kobe girl. (And I'm a foreigner in Kobe, hah!) Unfortunately none of Kobe's charm shows up in the game. In fact the whole Kansai area is lumped up, broken stereotypes and all. Still, Yuu's Kansai dialect is the most interesting part. It certainly breaks up the monotony of listening to standard Japanese. She also comes over to your place to make sure you're spending all your time on creating doujinshi. You have to suspend your disbelief on how often she comes to Tokyo though, like 5 times a week! Consider that the Shinkansen round-way ticket is 3_0000 yen... But no, this game mentions the overnight bus, which I've personally taken many times to go to Tokyo. That only costs 5000 to 9000 yen, depending on how cozy you want to get with a complete stranger.

Unfortunately, this is a bad port, technically speaking, because of the slow delays in disc access, voice sample loading, visual fade-ins. It makes for slow progress. I'm going to turn on the "skip scene" option to see if it speeds up. Otherwise I'm going to go bat crazy waiting for stat-up cut scenes to load.

Otherwise I like it. I even play on the bus and train, but it's kinda embarassing whenever a girl character comes on, what with the lusciously vibrant PSP screen viewable from many angles. I keep checking my earphones to make sure that audio goes to my ears and not to anyone else. Yabai yo, kore.

This reminds me that I have to watch the Comic Party DVDs that I have. Maybe after I complete another scenario. Which one should I do though? That Asahi Sakurai one is high on my list, but then again I want to figure out who that "Tachikawa patron" is.

Edit: originally written 2007/04/13 13:01