Guess what day it is!

Starting from now on, every Wednesday is Hentai Hump Day!  That’s when I’ll post something hentai-related, just so we can all share in some awkwardness.

Well, recently I bought the JAST USA Memorial Collection, which is a collection of several classic hentai games.  There’s the JAST collection, which includes Three Sisters’ Story, Season of the Sakura, and Runaway City, and the Milky collection, which includes Nocturnal Illusion and May Club.  All compatible with Win7… sorta.

Three Sisters’ Story, or Sanshimai, was made in 1996, which is surprising considering how archaic it is and far superior hentai games would come out just one year later.  Like C’s Ware’s Gloria, which is still the only hentai game to feature an Iraqi loli.

The JAST USA Memorial Collection DVD-ROM was released in 2012, collecting all those classic hentai games listed above, but boasting compatibility with Windows Vista and 7.  And believe me, you could NOT play these games without Dosbox before.  In addition, the music and graphics were remastered, breathing new life into the games… or rather, that’s what they would have you believe.  Really, just the music got a minor quality upgrade (the school theme is still unbearable), and the graphics… well, they’re remastered if remastering is adding a blur filter and calling it a day.

Now if you’re like me and you run Win7 64-bit, you’ll have some problems running the games.  First of all, even if you perform a full installation, the game will crash if you try to start a new game without the actual disc in the drive.  Second, save data is all fucked up if you don’t check that the program runs on admin privilege level; a save slot will work for a while until it randomly decides to revert to a previous state, and the CG room won’t update no matter what.  Finally, the Milky games don’t run in 64-bit… unless you use XP Mode.  Fun fact: I didn’t even know I could use an XP Mode in 7 until I had problems running Nocturnal Illusion.  Hentai: it makes you smarter.

The game starts out with an exposition dump set to a still.  Basically, the main character, Koichi’s family fell apart due to the machinations of one Shoji Okamura.  His older brother Eiichi got rich and got Koichi to follow his plan to take revenge on Okamura.  This involved Koichi moving in next door and befriending Okamura’s three daughters while gathering information and bugging the house.  During the process, he eventually falls in love with the middle sister and most boring of the three, Emi.  Because it was the 90’s and people had terrible taste.  In the end, Eiichi is successful in driving Okamura to ruin and run away, leaving his three daughters with his debt.

Honestly, I have to say… that backstory sounds like it would have made a better premise for a hentai game than what Three Sisters’ Story ended up being.  The game starts AFTER Koichi works out most of his conflicting emotions, and for the most part he’s a goody-good with a perverted streak.  He and Emi are established as boyfriend and girlfriend, and even though it started out as a sham, there’s almost no way to back out of it.  You’re stuck with Emi.  Sure, you can have sex with the others, but neither of them have their own ending.

The game is incredibly tedious due to the design choice of making you exhaust all your options before you can move on.  Now, this isn’t 100% the case most of the time, but a LOT of time is spent just checking off all your options like thinking about important characters and looking around.  In the first day of the game, you’re forced to go around the entire school looking for Emi.   Even though you have enough information to tell she left school, you can’t leave the school until you talk to every student you can potentially have sex with and return to your classroom.

Speaking of those girls, they’re completely unrelated to the story, yet nearly half the game is dedicated to a sidequest where you have the opportunity to have sex with all of them.  It’s like they knew damn well the main story wasn’t satisfying enough.

To be perfectly fair, though, the character designs are well done.  It has a kind of Kenichi Sonoda-inspired look to it at times, and you just can’t go wrong with Sonoda.  And hey, this is one of the few games I know of where you have THREE green-haired girls.

The story is actually pretty good considering its age.  Of course, like most things anime in its time frame, it utterly squanders its true potential.  For instance, the cold bookworm Chie masturbates to track team tomboy Yuko.  You can have sex with both of these girls… but not at  the same time.  That’s right.  This is a hentai game that has the audacity to introduce a yuri pairing and not follow through with a yuri scene.

One of the weirdest flaws of this game is the almost random characterization of the main character, Koichi.  His goal in the game is to save the sisters from his brother Eiichi.  Eiichi wants to torment the girls to draw Okamura out and completely destroy the Okamura family.  To this end, he downright attempts to rape two of the girls.  Naturally, Koichi is against this cartoonish villainy.  But then again, when he’s asked by the school nurse to help some girls with their problems, you literally have the option to rape Chie or Yuko right away, though this leads to bad endings (Chie kills herself and Yuko kills you, respectively), and you literally can’t complete the main story without torturing and raping Akiko the security guard.  It’s utterly baffling.

The most blatant flaw is of course the lack of true routes in this game.  Sure, there are multiple endings, but really there’s only one good one, and that’s the Emi one.  But this does bring me to one of the most original things about this game: condom use.  If you don’t use a condom when having sex with Chie, Kumi or Yuko, they’ll get pregnant, forcing a bad ending on you.  And if you use a condom, you have to go to the school nurse and get a new one.  You don’t just magically have an infinite number of condoms.  It’s a pretty hilarious mechanic, really.

Story-wise it’s fairly entertaining and, oddly enough,  unique.  The closest I’ve seen to this story in another hentai is Wicked Lessons, the story of a guy who incests his sister and uses her as a pawn to take revenge on the school headmaster who raped their mother, took her school away from her, and drove her to suicide.  Wicked Lessons has a whole lot more rape, but in its defense… it has a scene where the main character has a four-way with green-haired triplets.

Ultimately, the game is an okay diversion, but it (along with the other JAST USA titles) is probably a historical curiosity even more so.  It is one of the few hentai games to come stateside in the 90s, and probably one of the first to receive a respectable translation (it still surprises me that Mad Paradox happened). In English, better hentai games have come out since, and a better hentai game had already come out in True Love ’95.

So, how does it stack compared to the other two in the JAST USA collection?  Next week’s look at Runaway City might help answer that.