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Review of Pure Pure

SubjectPure Pure
ByHelpfulness: 3
tomtheerogeman on 2019-09-05
ReviewWhen I wrote t12240#1 a while back, I asked about better raising sims that people had in mind, and someone suggested Musumaker. At that time I thought to myself, "how did I forget about a game as legendary as Musumaker!?" and that happened simply because it was being translated. For the longest time I've been avoiding games that are being translated, because reading them seemed kind of at odds with my efforts to learn JP for the sake of reading VNs. In other words, why read something in JP that is/will be in English soon? But since my Japanese has gotten good enough to read a lot faster than before, I think I won't worry about that sort of thing anymore.

Now regarding Pure Pure, the PC version has a fan patch that adds voices for the male/minor characters from the PS2 version into the PC version, but sadly I don't think it's possible to play the game in Japanese with that patch installed. Because of that I downloaded the PS2 version from a Vietnamese ROM site I know of that has a lot of console VNs. It works quite well in PCSX2, but the image quality is awful; blurry, slightly dark, and not as colorful. Increasing the native resolution doesn't work for games that are strictly 2D, but thanks to Reshade's sharpeners the game looks wayyyy better, still not as good as the PC version, but nice enough for me to play it.

Pure Pure's story is a nice relief for the people here that didn't like Nekopara's style of VN. The genre shifts between slice of life, nakige, and romance, making this game a lot more stimulating for the mind. There are also two lovers that you get to romance; Sachi, and your choice of Hinata, Tobari, or (kind of) Yuuki Miwa. How the relationships end and begin is something I'll leave up to you to figure out. Personally I like it because in reality very few people stick with the same woman for the rest of their lives, something that most VNs, actually most stories in general tend to ignore.

The game does have its share of flaws though. I feel like the middle portions of the game are quite boring, where there isn't much going on. A lot of people might jump on the fact that the protagonist is an adult worker rather than a high school student. But really, that part of the game has no drama, no comedy, nothing to learn about animals, or anything that might keep you interested. It's just the protagonist's daily routine, and at this point in the game you would have grown accustomed to Hinata's cuteness, and Midou's Kansai dialect starts to sound like normal Japanese as you would've gotten used to hearing it at this point. The best parts of the game are the times when the protagonist's mental health takes a nosedive, so you end up feeling like a sadist to some extent.

The PS2 version's rating was toned down to ages 12 and up, so with this version of the game we are kept in the dark whenever anyone in the story has sex. Hinata's relationship was changed; now Jun tells himself that he would wait for her to grow up more before he gets physically intimate with her, however the censorship wasn't done very well here. The other characters are happy for them and never seem to question their age difference, or whether or not they have sex. And later they kissed in the mouth publicly, and they are still unfazed. If I remember correctly, even kissing was supposed to be off limits at first, but they probably forgot to change that. Miwa's route never had any sex to begin with, I didn't think this game would have incest in it. I don't know what they did to Tobari's route, since I haven't read it.

The H scenes have been removed from the PS2 version of course, so I bought the PC version to see what I missed. The art is a bit too old to get me off, and even if this game was newer, Hinata is just too pure. Like, see link for example. That's too much innocence for me, personally. Even Sachi is a no go for my libido, because while she might speak Japanese pretty well, she's fucking illiterate lol. But idk, most of the lolis I've seen in my games up to now were not-so-innocent and had at least some idea of what they would be getting into. It's a very minor part of the game, so with the PC version you definitely don't need to enjoy these scenes to like this game. I'm sure it would get a lot of SJW hate though, because of how the dog girls get portrayed as being stupid, needing owners, etc.

While I was looking into the H scenes and such, I also noticed that the PC version lacks a lot of the assets that the PS2 version has. Not only does the console port have more voices and CGs, there are also bonus scenes, extra background images, character sprites that blink, at least 20 20x20 nonogram puzzles to solve, 2 other kinds of minigames (not sure what they are), as well as random people that were drawn into the game's scenery. If console ports really have that many exclusive assets in them, then from now on I'm more likely to consider a console version over a PC one. I was a bit on the fence about it before because I don't agree with censorship, but really nothing's stopping me from getting the PC version as well. It's so sad to think that many people reading this may not get to experience this version of the game, or if there are many other VNs out there with exclusive stuff that never gets inserted into the download version many years later.

I was worried about the vertically oriented text and Midou's Kansai-ben at first, but the text orientation doesn't matter much when it's only the voiced lines, and Midou was still pretty understandable, as his way of talking was close enough to normal Japanese. I only had to look up a few Kansai-specific figures of speech, that was it. The way the 2010 translators worded his dialog was pretty much the same as what Kansai-ben sounds like to me, if I had to describe it.

The last thing to note is that this game barely runs on Android. PS2 emulation is notorious for being heavy on CPU resources, so it may be quite a while before reading PS2 VNs becomes practical on mobile. It's so weird to see a 2018 phone that can't run a simple VN at a decent framerate.

I'm not going to read Miwa and Tobari's routes because after reading without Textractor/mouseover dictionaries for a while I began to realize that those tools are more beneficial to me than I previously thought. For me they aren't just there to look up words I don't know; I also used them whenever I encountered a word I knew but wasn't 100% sure of either the meaning or the pronunciation. In order to be able to read fluently, you should not have to think to yourself "I think it means so-and-so," or "it's most likely pronounced such-and-such." You have to know what it means and what it sounds like without any ambiguity in your mind, and so it might be a couple more years before I feel like taking off my training wheels (lol.) We might get PCSX2 support for Textractor soon because someone asked Artikash if he could update it to do so. It's been too long since I started a new VN due to real life issues, so with that I guess I'm done playing this.

Edit: If you're an EOP and jonesing for a kemonomimi VN then you will love the 2010 patch. It's only a partial patch but it's a story in and of itself.
3 points