Black Cat
Magister
Chapter the first; A game for real men.
In which the game is introduced to us, as well as the heroine of the story to come. Some random information is given by our hostess and then the story starts. Shortly afterwards, the first choice is given to us!
Yo Jin Bo, released back in 2005 by TWOFIVE and brought to the west by Hirameki International in 2006, was for many girls the first Otome game they were able to play and the one that got them interested into the genre to begin with. For the unlearned among you I will explain: An Otome game is any game, no matter the genre, targeted for girls, usually teens and young adults, of whose plot and gameplay both romance and hot guys are an important component, if not the main one. Most Otome games are either pure visual novels, meaning you do nothing but picking choices, though they can also be dating sims, meaning you must not only pick choices but also raise your stats and pass skill checks, or hybrids of visual novels and some other genre popular in the far east, like turn based strategy, kingdom sim, dungeon crawlers, etc. However, some games from other genres can be actually considered Otome games, two easy examples being Avalon Code and P3P.
Yo Jin Bo, however, is naught but a pure visual novel. It is also quite short, and quite weird. And maybe even quite retarded, but that just adds to the fun and the charm. It never takes itself seriously, though, so it is all in good fun: One moment a Samurai is making Star Wars references or doing Mickey Mouse Impersonations, the next they are killing evil ninjas and using ridiculously named secret techniques, and the next they are spouting some ridiculously quotable lines. Do not expect cerebral fun, though.
Its plot is the same plot of, maybe, one of every three Otome games I have ever played: A teen girl somehow ends in another world, or maybe another time, and finds herself both mixed in some dangerous plot and surrounded by hot protectors who will all somehow fall in love with her and stuffies. Like, yeah, the plot is completely retarded but let's be honest about this: Every single girl you know has had that fantasy at least two dozen times in her life, and even that's before leaving highschool. No matter whether you ask me, Miss Bee, Sub, or even Mahou Shoujo Tsundere Lesi... If a girl says she didn't, she's lying. And that's how it is.
More importantly, however, is that I will not be the one making the choices this time. Instead of that, I will give Teh KKKodex the chance to fulfill its true fantasies by leaving our heroine in its hands: I will stop the Let's Play thingie at every single choice and will let democracy show the way forward. Who will KKKodexhime fall in love with? Will KKKodexhime win his heart? Will He and KKKodexhime marry and live happily ever after? Stay, swoon, and find out!
So, without further ado, let's watch the opening and then start the game. Yay.
Chrrrip, chrrip...
Just listening to those cicadas was enough to make me sweat. It looked like today was going to be another hot day.
Well, everybody said it would be a hot summer... But I just couldn't stand this heat every day. And they didn't talk about anything except the nation-wide water shortage on the news.
It was the same here as it was everywhere else. You could actually see how much the water level had fallen in the lake. Everybody was worried, so I guess it was natural that they were making a fuss...
But the water still came out when you turned the fauced, so the whole thing didn't feel real.
Anyway...
I had something more important to worry about.
The level of the lake had fallen enough that archaelogical ruins that were supposed to be hidden underwater had started to appear.
There was supposed to be some romantic legend about those ruins, wasn't there? A story about a princess or something. Let's see... how did it end?
(Not well.)
I'd heard the story when I was little, but now I'd completely forgotten it.
But still, it would be exciting to stand in the same place where a legend began...
Which is how I ended up deciding to join the excavation in the ruins, even in this heat.
I had joined the history club because a friend invited me. I liked reading books, so it was fun to look stuff up. But I was usually shut up indoors, so I wasn't used to this terrible heat - it was just too much.
I wished our club president had been considerate enough to schedule this in the early morning or the evening, when it would at least have been a bit cooler.
(The president, Kaori, and Nami do not get character protraits, so we already know they will be forgotten in about three lines.)
Gotta hurry, gotta hurry. This place had been underwater for so long that it was really difficult to walk. My shoes were getting all muddy; I should have worn some shoes I didn't mind getting dirty...
I started to run as fast as I could. And then it happened, I tripped on something under my feet and stumbled wildly.
I waved my arms around, but it was too late. There was nothing for me to grab hold of.
The view in front of me spun before my eyes...
Thud!
Not only was I covered in mud, I had landed hard on my rear end.
(With friends like those...
)I was going to get left behind!
Sparkle...
Did I just see something glittering on the ground? Maybe it was a shard of glass. That was close - I was lucky I didn't get cut.
For some reason, my interest had been piqued, and I looked more closely at the place under my feet where I had tripped.
(Like, that perspective in a game with a target market composed entirely of teen girls is completely WTF.
)It was half-buried in the mud, but had somehow caught the strong high-noon sun.
It glinted a strange green. Had I seen this stone before? This feeling... Somehow, it was as if my heart were hurting.
The chosen one must choose! What will KKKodexhime do? Will she pick it up? Will she leave it alone? Is this choice anything but cosmetic? Do not miss the next chapter, for this, and more, will be then revealed!
Nya.
, but...
:sisfist:
I think it's quite obvious ...yet let's not. Because it's not. 
