Heart de Roommate. It's by Angelsmile. It's an H-Game. A pretty mediocre one. Even the box art is pretty bland, with just 3 average looking anime girls sitting around in school uniform. Hell, from the cover of the box, you probably wouldn't even know it was an H-Game (no panty or bras showing, no 3 inch nipples sticking out from under shirts, etc.) In fact, after the first 30-40 minutes, I started to wonder if this really was an H-game at all. This review contains spoilers all over the place, but you don't care 'cause you're not gonna play the game anyway.

The gameplay is nothing unique. You watch a situation unfold (and in the case of Heart de Roommate, it can take a good 15-30 minutes to go through all the dialog), and then you're presented with 2 or 3 choices. You pick one, and then watch more story unfold. Repeat until you've beat the game, or got bored and decided to stop playing. For me, it was the latter.

The problem with this games is that I didn't really "want" any of the girls. There's 5 girls you can "get with", though 2 of them are "secret" endings, so really you're supposed to pick among one of the 3 main girls. They all suck. Asumi Hirota is the to HdR as Naru is to Love Hina: She gets pissed at you when it's obviously not your fault, beats you up, and generally mistreats you. Also, she's the "main" girl, in that when you beat the game with all the normal endings, you can unlock the "real" ending, in which you become her boyfriend. Oops, a spoiler. But seriously, it's obvious she's "the one".

Then there's Tomoe Katsuragi, who's the one with the biggest breasts, but also the shy one. That's like anime character design mistake number one. WHENEVER you make a character "the one with the biggest breast", she has to be flirty if not outright slutty (see Kitsune from Love Hina, for example). So this one was a turn off for me too. By the way, although she's "the one with the biggest breast", her chest is only slightly above normal for an anime girl, so you can imagine how unimpressive the other characters are.

The third main girl is Marumu Ogamayama, who's "the weird one". I liked her a lot as a friend, 'cause she's funny. But I don't want her to become my lover. While fun to goof off with, I didn't want to pick her as my final girlfriend either.

The two secret girls are Yoshiko Yagami, your teacher, and Namiki Honjo, your cousin. Yoshiko is not the typical hot slutty teacher you'd envision when a teacher to be in an H-Game. Rather, she's like the teacher-next-door type of thing. Again, not for me. That leaves Namiki, who's persona I like, though it meant going for a bit incest.

The basic plot is you're going to this university, but the male dorm was full, so you end up secretly sleeping in the female dorm. Why? Uh, 'cause Asumi was your childhood friend, and you caught her pissing her pants back in kindergarden, but you didn't make fun of her, so she owes you a favor and lets you sleep in her room. At first they make you crossdress, which I thought meant this was gonna be another X-Change style plot (I liked X-Change) meaning you'd spend time in the girl's locker room, showers, perhaps take female gym classes and have what your partners would think were lesbian encounters, but no. Once you leave the dorm and get to school, you go into a bathroom and change back into male clothing.

And then nothing happens for about 6 months game time, which translates to an hour or two real time. That's right, Asumi basically bitches at you and forces you to cook her breakfast and then a you find out Tomoe has a pet cat, and then your cousin comes to visit (what a sweet relief that is, 'cause she talks the other girls into flashing their tits), but then she leaves and it's back to doing chores again. Seriously, unless you're one of those submissive masochistic guys who liked My Sassy Girlfriend, you'll probably hate Asumi and by transitive property, this game.

Now here's the biggest piss-off for me. At the end of the 6 months, your buddy reads your horoscope to you "The girl you kiss is the one you'll fall in love with" and sure enough, you kiss the 3 main girls. Then on the last day of school, the game asks you "Which girl do you love?" and in addition to the 3 girls, the last option is "none of them", which I selected because I wanted to get it on with Namiki. Well, when you pick that, the game ends. And I haven't saved. So I had to start the whole fucking game over and this time pick Asumi ('cause I really couldn't give a fuck anymore at that point).

So if you actually pick a girl, you get to play the second semester of school. Some new girl shows up, whom I heard you can have sex with, but she can't be the girl you end up with at the end of the game. At that point, I was just so bored with this game I decided to uninstall it.

The one thing I liked about this game is that they made it feel like you were watching an anime. That is, the game is divided into 26 episodes (the first 13 episodes are called "season 1" and the last 13 are "season 2"), and at the end of every episode, there's the traditional preview of the next episode in which you see random seens narrated by one of the female characters whose speaking insanely fast as only the Japanese seem to be capable of doing.

Having to suddenly live with a boy under the same roof; what is Asumi thinking? No way! What am I going to do...? Wait! I just came up with a great idea. The next episode of Heart de Roommate: "Transformation" Yusuke, you look good in those clothes. Tee-hee.

Also, half way through the episode there's a poster style portrait of one of the female characters, and she says "heart de roommate" as if there were going to be a commercial break (though thankfully aren't any commercials).

Music. Well, it's there. The thing is there's a lot of design issues with the timing of the music. As is typical for these type of games, they're using MIDI to play the music, and they use WAV for sound effects and voice acting and such. Well, occasionally, someone will say something shockingly horrible and then you'll hear gothic church music play for a few seconds. This music was encoded as a WAV file, which means while the "This is horrible!" music is playing, you still hear the cheery "Hooray, I'm sleeping in an all girl's dormitory" MIDI music playing in the background. Blame the designers/programmers for that one. The songs themselves are not bad though. The short tune that plays the role of "title theme music" at the beginning of every episode is somewhat catchy, so kudos to the composers.

I think if you're going to play this game, you should approach it as an interactive Bishoujo type game, that just incidentally happens to have some sex/nudity/fanservice in it. That means this is actually more of a "girly game" in which the goal isn't to kill things but to make relationships, that would otherwise be doomed to fail, work. Really, it's more about making the guy suffer doing cooking and cleaning and shit just to make the girl (Asumi) happy. I give it a 2 out of 10.