Well it’s Wednesday, and you know what that means!

This week, we’re going to take a look at what is one of the best and most frustrating hentai games of all time.

C’s Ware is a Himeya label that, to me, is notable for recruiting some surprising talent and churning out some amazing piles of utter dog shit.  But among their turds were true gems like EVE Burst Error, Divi-Dead, and the game I’m talking about this week, Glo-Ri-A.  And I’m getting really tired of using its stylization, so from now on it’s just Gloria.

In Gloria, it is the year 2017 and you control Kira Akishino, a Japanese MIT student who, along with his friend Georg, gets tapped to tutor a daughter of the rich and influential Gloria family.

Naturally, you end up going to the mansion and meeting all of the girls of the mansion.  At this point, you might be thinking this is a rather generic setup for a hentai game, and you would be right.  What I didn’t tell you is just how much effort you have to put into to get to this point.  Now, don’t get me wrong: it isn’t much effort.  But it’s more than you might think.  Why?  Because.

ALMOST EVERY SINGLE CHOICE IN THIS GAME MAKES A DIFFERENCE.

The very first choice you have in the game?  Whether or not you take the job.  If you choose not to take the job, Kira never sees his buddy Georg again and the credits roll.

The second choice you have in the game is how you respond to Sicile when she asks if you are Kira.  The options are “Yes,” “Who are you?” and “No.”  If you pick “No,” Sicile goes away, and you lose track of her before you can explain that it was just a joke.  Credits roll.

The third choice you have is between making small talk, hitting on Sicile, and raping Sicile.  If you pick rape, Kira gets shot six times and dies.  Funnily enough, Sicile says all he had to do was ask and she would have had sex with him.  As Kira dies, he thinks “But that wouldn’t have been rape.”  This is one of two times in the game you have the option to rape someone as opposed to having consensual sex, and it’s one hell of a way to go (FYI, the other time is somewhat convoluted and isn’t tied a specific path, and it honestly makes me feel bad).

I just can’t stress enough how much I love the sheer fact that EVERYTHING YOU SAY has consequences, with many of them being immediate.

Anyway, on to the girls.  The head of the household is Michelle Gloria.  She’s basically your boss.

The oldest daughter is Etana Gloria, and she’s already being tutored by Georg.  She’s also the only Gloria sister who is actually Michelle’s biological daughter.  She hooks up with Georg early in the game, and despite any efforts on your part, there is no Etana ending.  Hell, it’s impossible to raise her affection past “Like.”  And almost every single good ending starts with Georg and Etana getting married.

Next up is Naomi.  She’s Japanese, the equivalent Kitsune from Love Hina, and a VERY easy lay.  I also find her CGs the second-sexiest.

Naomi has no interest in learning, so there’s no tutoring her.

Charme is the youngest of the sisters and the smartest.  As such, there’s no need to tutor her either.  She’s also half-Arab.

That brings us down to Mary and Sicile, the only two girls you can tutor.  If you managed to get on both of their bad sides, the game ends because no one will accept you as a tutor.

Sicile at first seems to be the maid, but she is in fact one of the Gloria sisters.  Also, she was born in Sicily.  Yeah.  Real original naming.  She scores the lowest out of all the girls.  And has a LOT of mental issues.

Even though Sicile appears to be the “main” girl of the game, most of the game’s 45 endings require that you tutor Mary.

Yeah.

THIS GAME HAS 45 ENDINGS.

Granted, most of them are just minor permutations of a smaller number of “main” endings, but still.  Gotta appreciate that.  And since I already described four endings, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the game has a lot of endings… but you probably weren’t expecting 45.

Oh, right, gotta talk about Mary.  She’s by far the most naive and innocent girl in the game.  That is, she has the countenance and personality of a child.  And yet, she doesn’t have the body type to match.

Oh, and there’s also Lisa, the Russian maid.  She’s the only girl completely unrelated to the Gloria family.  She also has no ending, which is a damn shame because she has some of the hottest CGs.  I often find it difficult to tell whether she or Naomi is the sexiest girl in the game.  But it is easily one of those two.

Anyway, back to the Mary/Sicile thing.

The goal of the story is to tutor one of the girls to improve their ranking in the Gloria family test.

In the Mary version, you try out different testing methods and hope she does better after each progress test (because, well… you’ll be fired otherwise).  It’s mostly a balancing act between focusing on Mary’s grades and keeping her morale high.  Every tutoring session gives you a choice between teaching her, playing with her, and trying to have sex with her.  Amusingly, if you keep going after the sex option right after the bat, Mary actually ends up HATING you, and you get fired without successfully having sex with her.  But put in a couple of play options before going full blast with sex options and you’re good to go.  Strangely, her studying doesn’t really suffer even though not a single study option was used.

The mystery behind the test and the Gloria family unfolds the more you approach the final test.

The Sicile version is absurdly streamlined.  After the first few choices, it becomes obvious that Sicile is a genius who purposely fails the test because of her concern for the other sisters.  Also, every single mystery is revealed within a couple of minutes.  There is only one main ending unique the Sicile path, and it’s mostly Mary-centric.  Sicile’s best ending is done – you guessed it – through the Mary path.

As for the mysteries?  Long story short, the true head of the Gloria family is Charme (Michelle is just a front), but she can’t handle the stress and wants to quit.  The test determines the head of the household, and only people with Gloria blood (no matter how little) may take the test.  In some endings, it’s casually revealed that both Kira and Georg also have a bit of Gloria blood and are thus eligible to take the test.

Normally, this is where I do a rundown of the paths / endings, but THERE’S 45 OF THEM.  But not really.  Here are the main points:

Bad Endings

It’s possible to get shot by Sicile, get fired for trying to take advantage of Mary instead of tutoring her, make it to the end but fail to come up with a way to save Charme, and (my favorite) have sex with Etana in exchange for failing the test  (and allowing Georg to take the top score) but go back on your word, gaining control of the Gloria fortune but getting everyone to turn against you in the process.

The Basic Ending

The basic ending usually involves Etana, Georg, Mary or Kira scoring the highest on the test, becoming the “Master” of the Gloria household.  Georg and Etana get married, and Kira either ends up alone or marries one of the girls.  So a vast majority of the endings are “Master X + Kira marries Y.”  That’s about 20 endings right there.

Naomi Gets The Shaft

Out of the girls Kira can marry, Naomi is in the worst position.  She can be the girl with the highest affection out of anyone, but unless you get on Michelle’s good side early, meet with Michelle on a specific day, and ask Michelle for her blessing to marry Naomi (the above steps are required just to unlock that option), you will default to someone else.  And despite how tricky it is to get Naomi’s ending, her ending is just a generic “P.S. I married Naomi” epilogue.

Charme

Most of the good endings involve unseating Charme from the head of the household, and for good reason: the stress is literally killing her, and she’s destined to die young if she continues.  And before you say something stupid like “why can’t she just resign?” you have to remember that the Gloria family takes their traditions seriously because plot.

Naturally, the Charme-centric endings are the most heartwarming since she’s kind of the center of the whole testing drama.  A lot of the bad endings have Charme being stuck as the head, but one variation has the whole family coming together to help ease some of her burden, and the best variation of Kira becoming head of the household is the one where he also marries Charme… not so much for the actual ending (it’s an epilogue type) but all the buildup to it.  Plus once you clear a Charme ending, you unlock the extra chapter “Love Love Charme,” set after the Master Kira / Married Charme ending and revolves around Charme’s anxiety over being married to a now-busy Kira and being a virgin (they finally do get a sex scene by the end of the extra chapter).

The funny thing about Charme’s endings is that special note is made of Massachusetts law being changed to allow 18-year-olds to marry, and in the Love Love Charme episode, the year is “20XX,” as if to hide just how much older Charme is.  This makes it blatantly obvious that Charme is NOT the 18-year-old the game says she is.

The Real Goal

Since most of the endings are very similar, the real goal of the game isn’t to get all the endings, but to get all the CG.  And it can be unreasonably tricky to get some of them.  One of the trickiest is the Lisa rape scene, as it requires some rather specific choices and isn’t linked to any particular ending (as Lisa has no endings… bummer).

As interesting as it is to have as many endings as Gloria does, it’s frustrating as hell.  One wrong move can make the difference between, say, Mary being at “Like” affection and allowing you to learn about Sicile’s family, or Mary being at “Love” affection, forcing the game to skip that option and railroad you to a Mary marriage ending.  Normally I would be completely on top of this and would have mapped out a full flowchart for unlocking endings, but there are just SO MANY FACTORS that I can barely tell what affects what.

Blah Blah Blah Reason To Post More Charme

So uh… yeah, that’s Gloria.  One of my favorites, despite how little regard I have for C’s Ware.

It isn’t even close to perfect.  The sheer number of endings is offset by how weak most of them are, and it can be frustrating as hell to figure out a lot of them.  The worst thing about the game is there’s a tiny amount of music tracks.  There’s a title track, two or three ending tracks, and one track that plays almost nonstop during the main game from beginning to end.  Yeah, y’know how most games will have track changes depending on location, character, or the scene’s dramatic content?  Nope.  Just the one track.

The game also has issues on a technical level.  I mean, it was made in 1996, after all.  If you use an actual copy of the game on a modern machine, you might find it likely to crash when loading music tracks and the text completely unreadable.  That’s why I once again have to give massive props to The Asenheim Project, your one-stop shop for nostalgic hentai freeware playable completely on your browser.

My last gripe is the same gripe I have with all translated C’s Ware games: the translation.  Granted, the translation for Gloria isn’t as bad as others, like Divi-Dead’s translation being utterly incomprehensible.  The game is set in 2017, but the translators just couldn’t help injecting “topical” humor like the line (and I shit you not, this is a direct quote) “Boy, so what do you think’ll happen to Clinton and Hillary?”

On the plus side, the character designs are great, the colors are outstanding for its time, and it has a lot of ambitious elements that for the most part work well.  It’s just a shame that they couldn’t be implemented perfectly.

Gloria seemed to be popular enough to warrant a 3-episode OVA.  In the OVA, the boys are approached by Etana, not Sicile, and the relationship between Georg and Etana is actually fleshed out a bit more.  (Also, the sub I watched translated Georg as “Beowulf,” even though in Japanese it’s very clearly pronounced ge-oh-gu.  How the fuck you get “Beowulf” from that I have no idea.  It’s especially weird because it’s literally dodgy amateur subtitles plastered over a SoftCel rip.)

The anime also pointlessly changes some characters’ hair colors, vastly downgrading their sexiness.

In the game, Lisa was just an unrelated maid that usually only showed up to have sex.  In the anime she’s given an actual character.  Just… kinda wish that character wasn’t a spy working for some shadowy organization that plots to assassinate Kira and Georg.

As a result of Lisa’s change, the scene where Georg rapes her (which was originally treated about as sleazy as you imagine it ought to be) transforms into something slightly more virtuous since he does it after noticing she’s doing something suspicious.  I mean, it’s still sleazy as fuck, but at least Lisa has it coming to her in the anime.

Another weird diversion is that Kira figures out something’s odd with Charme early on.  The funny thing is that he doesn’t suspect anything about her; he just finds out something is suspicious after he spends all night TRYING TO HACK INTO HER PERSONAL COMPUTER FOR KICKS.

Again, Georg spends a LOT of time trying to win over Etana when he wins her over quickly and offscreen in the game.  How does he finally win her over?  In one of the most ridiculous ways possible: he chases after her on horseback, then rapes her.  The Georg/Etana relationship was never presented as anything less than completely genuine on both sides, so that’s just a travesty.

Anyway, the search for a new head of the Gloria household starts after Charme gets sick and unfit to work.  It’s determined that the successor will be chosen by whoever can figure out how rival Boone funded his takeover of a Gloria-owned automotive company.  Yeah, it’s a fucking unnecessary villain to introduce just to avoid the whole test thing.  The funny part is that it’s not anywhere close to an improvement.  After Charme gets sick, Etana says “let me take over!”  Michelle says no because “you are not the one.”  Then everyone realizes that Kira and Georg were brought in as potential successors.  It’s like they threw in elements from the game and didn’t give a shit about to tie them together logically.

Long story short, good guys win, Kira ends up with Mary, and there’s no Charme sex scene.  Fuck the world.

It’s a subpar adaptation overall, and cheap as fuck.  There’s Sailor Moon Crystal levels of stiff walking animation at times, and the animators felt it was too much trouble to draw Charme’s leopard skin top for all 15 seconds it would’ve been onscreen, so they just gave her a solid orange one.  Yech.

And so we see a prime opportunity to fix the flaws of the original game was utterly wasted to produce something several degrees worse.  Goddammit, PinkPineapple, you’re better than this.