It’s time to wrap up the Milky Collection, and the JAST USA Memorial Collection 5 + 1 collection as a whole.  And there’s no better way to cap it off than with the best game of the bunch: Nocturnal Illusion.

You play as Shinichi (although, rather uniquely, you have the option to change your character’s name), a university student that went camping in the mountains, but got caught up in an early typhoon and fell down a cliff.  He is nursed back to health and wakes up in a mysterious mansion that he cannot escape.

It’s more or less Hotel California.

Most of your time is spent wandering from room to room in the mansion trying to trigger the next event.  The game is almost completely linear, and the trigger points can be very precise, so it gets annoying really quickly.  Sometimes you simply have to move places twice to trigger an event, which is weird on replays – for example, you can move to the dining room, then move to the lobby to trigger an event, but you can instead move directly to the lobby, not trigger the event, then move to the bathroom to trigger the event.  Most of the time it’s just a matter of going directly to the correct room.  And once you trigger an event, you will often have to exhaust all your options, and in doing so might have to use up all the talking dialogue, then go back and look at someone to “unlock” the ability to progress by talking them.  VERY annoying, but it actually does make some sense when it’s used.  Doesn’t make it any less annoying; I’m just saying I get it.

The first person you meet in the mansion is the Mistress.

She’s the one who saves Shinichi by bringing him into the mansion and giving him mouth-to-penis resuscitation.  After that, her primary job is to give vague hints about the nature of the mansion.

She also repeatedly says that Shinichi will be the bringer of “winds of change,” which can guide the girls of the mansion out.

Along with the Mistress is the maid, Miwako.

Miwako kinda tends to run hot and cold on a dime.  Mostly, she just acts like you expect a maid character to act.

We’re also introduced to Yukina, the frightened girl who lives in the room next to Shinichi’s.  She’s introduced really early, but she isn’t relevant until nearly the end of the game.  Until then, she mostly shows up from time to time just to run away screaming at the sight of a man.

Honestly, a lot of the script is description – and damn good description.  It’s a shame that the quality of the translation is downright horrible.  That’s not to say I don’t appreciate that a translation was done at all.  Lots of effort was put in it, I’m sure.  And for the most part, it’s accurate.  Accurate to the point of being overly literal.  I’m just depressed that there was no effort put into quality control.  It’s MESSY.

The next person you meet is the token male companion, Kusayama.

Like I said, you pass the days mostly just meandering from place to place.  The game is divided into chapters.  I originally wanted to say “days,” but each chapter can take several days, and the narration kinda offhandedly skips days (and in one instance, 4 FUCKING MONTHS) between times you can actually move around.

Each chapter basically ends with you getting laid with a different girl.  Going by that rule, the prologue ends with Mistress saving you.

The first chapter revolves around Maya, a journalist who arrived in the mansion just a few days before you.

Maya seems to have a thing about gender equality and distrusts men.  It turns out, she looked for the mansion to do a story on it but ended up being trapped herself.  She was hoping to prove herself to her chauvinist coworkers who are jealous that a woman climbed up the ranks faster than they did.  Yeah, it’s trite and overdone, but hey: gotta fill up eroge girl backstory somehow.

She sorta falls in love with Shinichi after he tends to an injury sustained when she trips through a rotten floorboard in the attic, and after he rescues her from nearly being raped by Kusayama.

It’s also in this chapter that this happens:

It turns out Maya entered the armor as a prank, but her soul was taken away by the armor.  Maya is taken in by the Mistress, who uses her sex-fu to keep her body alive – but her soul is still missing.

Kind of out of fucking nowhere, Shinichi enters a sort of sidequest where he discovers a mermaid in a well.

The mermaid seems to be THE mermaid from the Hans Christian Andersen tale, and her baggage stems from killing the prince she was in love with so she wouldn’t turn into seafoam.  She claims she did it so her love for him wouldn’t die, but yeah, still guilty from the whole murder thing.  Nothing a little sex can’t fix.  After, they learn the mermaid is pregnant (from the Prince, because mermaid pregnancy isn’t that fast… probably), so the mermaid is no longer guilty about not dying.  Out of gratitude, she gives Shinichi a knive and a magic potion that can restore a human’s soul.  Convenient.

So, Shinichi brings the potion back to Maya, gets her soul back, and makes sweet, sweet love.

In a lesser game (or many an OVA), this is where Maya is shoved out of the way for the rest of the story while Shinichi moves on to the next girl.  Impressively, Maya continues being a presence for the rest of the game.  Well, I guess with anime at least, the reasoning is that they can’t waste animation on girls you’re not going to see naked later.  Just as an aside, the anime that immediately comes to mind for being guilty of this is Ashita no Yukinojou.  The girl Yukinojou has sex with in the second episode transfers away, causing him to move on to different girl in the third episode… and that girl moves to ANOTHER COUNTRY after having sex with him.  For a more depressing and justified use of this cliche, watch One: True Stories.

ANYWAY.

Next chapter is all about Miwako.  To be honest, it’s my least favorite chapter for multiple reasons.  Shinichi discovers Miwako in the basement as the subject of physical abuse from a mysterious man.  It turns out this man is an illusion: a manifestation of Miwako’s old master.  Honestly, I paid attention to this story, but I have such little respect for it that my memory of it is hazy.  Miwako worked for her master to earn money for her family, I think, and he grew increasingly abusive towards her.  Then he died, but Miwako never felt at ease because… I dunno, she got used to the abuse or something.  The chapter is literally just Shinichi repeatedly coming to the basement and peeking inside, then fainting for no damn reason, until one day Miwako exposition dumps her backstory and they have sex.

Next chapter revolves around Misao, a spunky girl with the mind of a child.

Misao accidentally wandered into the mansion when she was 8, and unlike everyone else, she kept aging.  The Mistress thought Misao would bring the winds of change, but years of failing to escape the mansion broke her spirit.

A good portion of this chapter has Misao make Shinichi play a game with her.  This game involves entering EVERY SINGLE ROOM with Misao.  Rather than attempt a translation, the translators decided to use the foreign terms “kobun” and “oyabun” with no explanation whatsoever.  Fair enough, but after the game is over, Misao makes a reference to their roles in the game and the terms are translated as “master” and “disciple.”

The chapter ends when Misao shows Shinichi how she discovered the secret behind the broken bathroom (it’s actually a very large and ornate bathing room that didn’t seem to have a mechanism to fill the pool with hot water… so legitimate mystery).  The two have a soak and Misao gets Shinichi to teach her about men and women and fool around.  But they don’t have sex.  Probably because of that whole mind-of-an-8-year-old thing.

Next chapter revolves around Yura, the girl locked in the storeroom.

Yura is one of the oldest inhabitants of the mansion, having dropped in from the 1800s.  When she is first encountered, she is seen having sex with a giant Oni, which turns out to be her transformed brother.  Let’s just take a moment to let the obvious pun sink in.

Out of nowhere, the Mistress reveals her power to show visions of the past to Shinichi.  He sees how Yura was forbidden from seeing her sick brother, who was locked away in a storeroom to prevent his sickness from spreading.  On the day she was supposed to leave home for an arranged wedding, Yura instead urged her brother to run away with her.  Upon realizing her brother would soon die to his illness, she does the next best thing and sexes him.  He dies almost immediately after they’re done, and they get transported to the mansion.  Also, the brother transforms into an Oni, warped by his desire to protect his sister.

In order to free Yura, Shinichi gets some advice from the people in the mansion and reads some books about fighting demons.  The best he can come up with is to make him drunk and kill him in his sleep.  He spends an entire day looking for booze.  While Shinichi is trying to free Yura, Kusayama is attacked by the Oni, and while running away discovers a hidden stash of sake.  After getting drunk and falling off the roof of the mansion, he tells Shinichi about the hidden booze and asks that he hide it.  So Shinichi hides the booze.  In the Oni’s belly.

The plan utterly fails because all he has to fight he Oni is the knife the Mermaid gave him.  He’s forced to retreat and read up on another way to kill the Oni.  Turns out the only way to beat it is with a magical sword.  While he thinks about his dilemma in the bath, he has a dream about a blonde-haired girl who tells him to pull on the two fangs of the tiger statue in the bathroom.  This opens up a hidden compartment with a magical sword inside.  Convenient!

Shinichi re-enters the storeroom and fights the Oni, dealing lethal damage to it.  He then has to explain to Yura that whatever her brother turned into is no longer her brother.  Yada yada yada, this steamrolls into her accepting life outside the storeroom and the two having sex.

Next chapter revolves around Sari, the white-haired girl that only appears at night in the garden.

Sari is often seen in the garden waiting for her long lost lover who went away to fight in a war.

The chapter begins with warnings not to go out at night during the full moon.  One assumes because there’s an Oozaru on the loose.

One day, Shinichi finds an old key next to the flower in the garden and uses it to unlock one of the rooms in the mansion.  It’s Sari’s room.  There, he finds an old photo and letters between her and her lover.  He later discovers a small key that unlocks the chest on her dresser.  Inside is a notice that Sari’s lover died in the war.

Shinichi decides to confront Sari about the truth, but it’s also the night of a full moon.  He soon discovers that Sari has turned into a demon and attacked Yukina.  She reveals that she always hoped that a mistake was made and her lover somehow survived.  She became a demon so she could continue waiting for her forever.  But she got tired of waiting and lured Shinichi out to kill her.  It takes surprisingly little effort for Shinichi to talk some sense into her, and she’s all too willing to give up on her lover and make love to Shinichi (though she also kinda needs some life force to feed on).

The next chapter revolves around Yukina.  She’s been suffering from amnesia, so there’s no easy way to work out her problems.  Turns out though, she subconsciously remembers Shinichi saving her from Sari, so she no longer runs away in fear of him and actually has conversations.  She very rapidly grows to trust him and even spends the night with him.  Just out of the blue.  Shinichi is compelled to take advantage of the situation.

When Shinichi goes a step too far, Yukina’s fear of men instinctively returns, and he backs off.

We cut into Yukina’s chapter for a subchapter revolving around Little Red Riding Hood.

No, really.

Basically, we run away from the big bad wolf until shelter is sought in the kitchen.  There, Red Hood exposition dumps and reveals her grandmother chastised her for being kissed by a boy one day, but she doesn’t understand why it was so bad.  Her grandmother also told her that demons will appear if one gives in to temptation.  Shinichi miraculously puts 2 and 2 together and comes up with the wolf being a representation of womanhood, and Red Hood shouldn’t run away from it.  Armed with this knowledge, we can now write that English 1 essay on symbolism in Little Red Riding Hood.  Oh, and Shinichi has an excuse to HAVE SEX WITH LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD.

Interesting fact: this is one of two sex scenes removed from the initial English release of Nocturnal Illusion, presumably because her flat-chestedness made Red Hood seem underage.  This scene was later re-enabled when JAST USA re-released it.  So hey… score one for JAST!

Interesting fact 2: this is one of three hentai games I’ve played where someone has sex with Little Red Riding Hood.  The other two are Dragon Knight 3 (fuck that Knights of Xentar shit; it’s DRAGON KNIGHT 3) and the RPG Maker game Chasing Little Red Riding Hood.  Though that last one probably shouldn’t count.  There’s at least two other Little Red Riding Hood RPG Maker erogames.

Anyway, Red Hood embraces the wolf and is freed from the mansion.  Shinichi talks about the experience to Yukina.  Shinichi tries to apply whatever lessons were learned to Yukina, but… I’m not entirely convinced any of that ordeal was particularly relevant.

Meanwhile, Kusayama is pissed that all his hard-earned booze is gone.  He loses all trust in Shinichi and rapidly goes off the deep end.  The Mistress shows up and tells us Kusayama embraced insanity because he didn’t want to face his own life.  It’s at this point I’m thinking we might get a Kusayama chapter.  Nope.  I guess I should explain his backstory while I’m at it though.  One day he went on a pub crawl with some coworkers, got blackout drunk, and woke up in the mansion. *cough*

Anyway, Kusayama starts being violent and accuses everyone of being industrial spies, then tries to rape Yukina.  Yukina reaches for a clock and socks him in the head with it, suddenly turning this into a Phoenix Wright chapter intro.

Shinichi chases her to the attic, where Yukina regains her memories.  After her mother left, Yukina’s father became an abusive drunk.  One night, he came home and tried to force himself on Yukina exactly like Kusayama did.  She retaliated in the same way.  Believing she killed her own father, Yukina ran away and found herself in the mansion.

I’m not entirely sure about the logic behind it, but Shinichi basically tells Yukina her father loved her, then dispels her fears by having sex with her.

Next chapter revolves around Arisa, the mysterious blonde dream girl and living French doll.

In case you haven’t guessed, Arisa’s H-scenes are the other scenes removed from the first release and returned with the JAST release.  Also, in the original Japanese dialogue, she just says “My name is Arisa.”  She doesn’t even mention her age.

Fun fact: Arisa, Misao, and Yura all call Shinichi “Onii-chan.”  In the case of Arisa and Yura, this is translated as “brother.”  The translation outright ignores this in the case of Misao, though.

By the way, Kusayama’s fine, sane, and apologetic.  Seems he’s on his way to turning his life around.  I assume.  He never shows up for the rest of the game.

Mistress tells you that Arisa was at the mansion longer than even she was.  For no particular reason, Arisa is extremely possessive of Shinichi and blatantly pushes him to engage in sexual activity with her.  Like reading a book of sex positions together or randomly stripping and slathering honey all over herself while in the front yard.  Arisa goes waaaay too far when she gets jealous of Miwako and whips her in the basement.  It’s at this point that Shinichi makes probably the only important decision in the game outside of the ending: whether he stops Arisa by saying he loves Arisa more, loves Miwako more, or loves them both equally.  If he says Arisa, then Miwako’s ending will be locked since she’s re-haunted by memories of her master.  If he says Miwako, then after Arisa’s sex scene, she goes to heaven (locking her endings).  If you say you love them both equally, both their endings will be open.  Honestly, I’d pick loving Miwako more just because you save more souls that way.

After a couple of days, Shinichi discovers a hidden bedroom behind a library bookcase and learns Arisa’s backstory: she was a sickly child who died young.  The end.  Since she never lived a full live, she possessed the body of a French doll.  Shinichi gives her the loving she never got as a human, and this either satisfies her to the point that she goes to heaven, or she stays behind to get more out of life.

If there’s one good thing about Arisa’s path, it’s that there’s very little wandering around involved.

Finally, after Arisa’s path is over, it’s time to pick your ending.  Basically, Mistress just tells Shinichi that he can leave the mansion, and he only has enough power to save one other person.  Unless you said something stupid to lock an ending, you can pretty much just save here and pick all the endings one by one.

Obviously, there is an option to choose Mistress.  One hopes that this would be the most fleshed out one, and it is… but it isn’t nearly as fleshed out as a full chapter.  Basically, the former caretaker of the mansion gave her a choice: become like the other lost people of the mansion and hope to one day escape by overcoming her past, or become the new caretaker in exchange for erasing her memories.  She chose erasing her memories.  After having sex with the Mistress, you’re given the option to leave the mansion with her or stay in the mansion with her.  Either way, it’s not very fulfilling without the weight of a full chapter’s worth of content behind it.

So, that was Nocturnal Illusion (Mugen Yasoukyoku).  VERY linear, but for its age (originally released in 1995) it has (comparatively) great writing, great graphics, and OUTSTANDING music.  Seriously, have a listen of its title theme:

That’s just wonderful.

There’s an updated version called Nocturnal Illusion Renewal, which you can play in English thanks, again, to the fine folks at The Asenheim Project.  Asenheim Project makes nostalgic abandonware erogames available in English, and this even includes updated titles like Nocturnal Illusion Renewal and May Club DX.

Now, you know a game was done right when you can argue that the update did some things worse than the original.  On the plus side, Renewal is fully voiced, and most of the voices were exactly how I imagined they should be (Kusayama’s voice is too high pitched, Yukina’s too low IMO).  It also has modernized graphics and music, with extra CG and new music tracks.  On the other hand… the graphics can be a bit off.

One of the weirdest changes in Renewal is the northeast room on the second floor.  In the original, it’s strangely always shut and doesn’t even give you the option to investigate.  Unlike the other shut doors, it kicks you straight back to the map.  In Renewal, the northeast room is now a small bathroom.  It still serves no purpose.

As for the music… a couple of old tracks got split into two variations.  One is Elegy, the music that plays while you’re walking around the mansion.

Ragtime has THREE variations in Renewal, but I’ll only provide a comparison of one version.

None of the three Renewal versions of Ragtime sounds like… well, ragtime.  I mean it sounds swell, but when I think ragtime, I think piano.  I don’t think strings and woodwinds.

As a bonus, here’s an upload of Nocturnal Illusion’s Ragtime on a Youtuber who just happens to be a ragtime fan and stumbled across the tune and probably has no interest in hentai games:

Overall, the new tracks aren’t bad in the least.  At least one of them is head and shoulders above the original (Dance of Flame).  But most of them are lacking the charm of the original, at least for me.

Setting the awesome music aside, I’m slightly disappointed there isn’t a new girl scenario in Renewal since one was added to May Club DX.  However, something I’ve always wanted since I first played the original WAS added to Renewal: a Kusayama ending!

It… isn’t translated into English since Asenheim Project for the most part only transplants existing translations.  But from what little I understand, Kusayama makes fun of Shinichi for helping him escape the mansion instead of one of the girls.  Then one year later, they’re hanging out at a ramen stand.  Honestly, that’s all I ever really wanted from a retouch of Nocturnal Illusion.  Well, that and a legit Misao sex scene.  I still feel cheated out of that.

So that does it for the JAST USA Memorial Collection (2012) disc.  It’ll be a while before I do games again.

Next week, it’s Boku no Pico!