Otome Moves West | Hakuoki: The Stories of the Shinsengumi Review

Visual novels are huge in Japan, but they have been presented with several challenges in bringing those novels to the West. Visual novels have not really taken hold of western audiences, but Aksys hopes to change that perception by releasing the first entry in one of the most popular visual novel franchises in Japan; Hakuoki. Hakuoki: The Stories of the Shinsengumi is an otome-style, historical fiction visual novel or a dating sim as it is more commonly known. You play as a young girl name Chizuru who travels to Kyoto in search of her father who has gone missing. When she arrives she is attacked by a group of men, but it promptly saved by a group called the Shinsengumi. The Shinsengumi bring her to their headquarters to question her, and after learning who her father is, allow her to stay with them while they look for the missing doctor.

From a gameplay perspective, it is a very simple premise. Think choose your own adventure meets video games. You will watch the story unfold and every once in a while you will have to chose a piece of dialogue. Every decision you make changes the events in the story to follow. Eventually, you’ll get to the end where you’ll watch one of the several different endings available for this story. The game is very simple to play and the story is the thing that is going to keep players engaged. If you aren’t interested in story alone, this is certainly not the title for you. However, if you have been looking for strong story elements in a game, this is a great place to look.

As we mentioned above in the synopsis, Hakuoki: The Stories of the Shinsengumi is a historical-based fiction. All of the characters you meet actually lived and held the titles they do in the game. While not every story element is pulled directly from the pages of history, you still get a strong sense of what was going on in a mid-19th century Kyoto. There are lots of different characters and they all are completely unique with a fully fleshed out background. It is fun to know that all these characters actually existed and if you wanted to know more about them, you could look them up and find their full history. Aside from the history, the story itself is solid. It is certainly engaging and worth a playthrough, especially if you’ve been interested in the genre. Aksys made it easy for Western audiences to approach, play and enjoy this game and they picked a great franchise to start you off on. Though the original game was in Japanese the game was translated well and it maintains the integrity of the original work. When you are working with a game that is almost exclusively dialogue, translation is paramount, and thankfully Aksys nailed it.

Visually speaking, Hakuoki doesn’t offer any visual experience that is going to win any awards. However, the characters and backgrounds are drawn well and present just as well on the PlayStation 3. There are several special scenes mixed in that give users a more detailed look at the situation when the story gets intense. The characters also have very subtle animations like breathing and lip movements that add a little variety to the presentation. With that said, gamers should go into this expecting a fairly flat visual presentation with no video mixed in the game to speak of. This is one of the larger barriers this game will face since gamers in America are more used to experiences that involve full motion video.

While we love that Hakuoki: The Stories of the Shinsengumi offers Western gamers an experience that is not often seen on the PlayStation 3, it is not a perfect game. As many could tell from the title of the game, this game was originally a Japanese game. Unfortunately, there are still some options and features that were left in from the Japanese version of the game that doesn’t make it easier for Western audiences to immerse themselves in the story. For instance, all the voice acting is in Japanese and there is no English voice acting in the supplied version. All the text is translated, and that is great, but in a game that requires so much dialogue and relies completely on the story, this hurt the final presentation for us.

In addition to the lack of English voice acting, we would have liked to see a flow chart or some other way to visually see the choices you make and how they effected the story. This game is a very long game with lots and lots of decisions for you to make. If you miss something, or you wanted to make a different decision, unless you created a manual save, there is no way to go back or see where you missed a decision. This forces the player to replay the game over and over again to see the different outcomes. While this may be fun for some, it comes across as frustrating and going through the story so many times creates fatigue instead of highlighting how great of a game it has the potential to be.

Overall, Hakuoki: The Stories of the Shinsengumi was an interesting experiment. Visual novels are a huge genre in Japan and it would be great to see them take hold in the United States. While we don’t necessarily believe that this game hit every goal it needed to, it did a good job nonetheless. If you’ve ever been interested in the genre from its Japanese counterparts, or were just looking for something completely different than what you’ve been playing, gamers now have a good option to mix up their libraries. While few games are perfect, this game does a nice job at introducing Western gamers to a new genre of gaming and for that it is worth a look.

This review is based on a review copy of the PlayStation 3 version of Hakuoki: The Stories of the Shinsengumi developed by Idea Factory, Published by Aksys