Did you enjoy anime like Kakuriyo no Yadomeshi and Kamisama Kiss where the main character finds herself in a sort of reverse harem of ayakashi bishounen? Or maybe you enjoyed manga like Love Monster and Black Bird, and you want a bit of that action for yourself? If you loved any of these supernatural shoujo series, you may be pleased to find out you can immerse yourself in such a scenario in the otome game Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku - Forbidden Romance with Mysterious Spirit! What ayakashi is going to capture your heart? Play on and see where your fate lies!

Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku - Forbidden Romance with Mysterious Spirit boasts an impressive cast of professional seiyuu including Miyano Mamoru, Kimura Ryohei, Tachibana Shinnosuke, Natsuki Hanae, and Hirakawa Daisuke, which seems to be major selling points for DIGIMERCE games. Along with the great seiyuu, you can expect to read a decent amount of text as this is a visual novel. Unlike some otome games, there’s quite a few chances to make choices, so you can expect a little bit more gameplay so the ratio is better between gameplay and text reading. Read on to find out more.

You play Suzuno, a young girl who has been invited to attend a concert featuring a Visual Kei band known as “Fox Ear.” The band consists of 5 members who wear fox ears along with their Visual Kei style. At the concert, you precious magatama―which has been passed down in your family for generations―shines a bright light interrupting the concert. Suzuno passes out only to find herself backstage where the members of Fox Ear greet her well aware of the magatama. They want to take it from you, but the magatama is protecting you. Thus Suzuno’s story begin.

First off, Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku - Forbidden Romance with Mysterious Spirit is a visual novel so expect to do a lot of reading. We can’t help but stress this for every visual novel review as people tend to assume that there’ll be more interaction and complain about getting bored. That’s why we like to set up your expectations to be more realistic!

Unlike most visual novel games, we think there were a few more interactions than most visual novels. This takes it up a step compared to games like Nekopara that have absolutely no gameplay whatsoever. This will at least keep you from getting too bored as you will have to pay a little attention.

The story of Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku - Forbidden Romance with Mysterious Spirit is the biggest part of the game―as it is any other visual novel―but it’s hard to talk about the story without discussing the translation at the same time. Yeah yeah, you’re sick of hearing about how Japanese to English may not translate well, but the translation for Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku - Forbidden Romance with Mysterious Spirit is absolutely horrendous. It’s so bad that it detracts from the story making it difficult to get into the story or even understand what is going on a lot of the time.

We started playing Kosei’s route and honestly, a lot of the details of the story were lost on us as we played as they got lost in translation, but everything else was fine if you listened to the Japanese audio, which thank goodness is still available for the game. The translation felt very lazy as if it were machine translated and not even reviewed prior to publishing the game, which is disappointing considering how much they ask for the game. From what we grasped, the magatama has something to do with the boys being foxes and they need it because there’s a fox trapped inside, so they’ll try to figure out a way to take it from you while you don’t want to give it up. However, you still hang around the boys and in Kosei’s route, you try to help him with his job as an idol. Apparently he was traumatized by a past relationship, but that’s not explained very well and struck us by surprise when Suzuno apparently was aware of it when we weren’t towards the middle of the story. Clearly, a lot of things were lost in translation.

The graphics are a tad gaudy. The boys are shiny more so than your typical shoujo manga, but this is in stark contrast to other visuals in the game. Meanwhile, some characters are brought in that don’t have sprites like your cousin―who isn’t even given a name despite having dialogue and referenced variously in the game―or the other Visual Kei band rivaling Fox Ear.

Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku - Forbidden Romance with Mysterious Spirit is one of the latest otome games to join the Nintendo Switch lineup this year. While we love DIGIMERCE’s attempts to localize otome games in the west, it’s hard to recommend Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku - Forbidden Romance with Mysterious Spirit to western audiences thanks to the terrible translation, which absolutely ruins the game’s attempts at storytelling, which is essentially the only reason people play visual novels. Sure, you can play to just collect CGs, but for $24.99, it’s clearly not worth it especially considering the quality of the graphics and the inability to immerse yourself in the gameplay. We really want DIGIMERCE to excel in the otome market, but for now, we just cannot recommend buying Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku - Forbidden Romance with Mysterious Spirit as it is now.

We appreciate getting the chance to play Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku - Forbidden Romance with Mysterious Spirit, but our opinions may not be as favorable as the favor granted to us. Are there any readers out there who are interested in this game? What do you think? Have you been hesitating to buy the game and read this for an opinion? Share all of your thoughts below.