[PC] Hoshi no Oujo – Summary & Review

Title: 星の王女
Developer:  Mirai
Release Date: 25th August 2003
Age Rating: 18+
Length: < 10 Hours
Links: Official Site, VNDB

Note: This review is a bit different than my usual style & I’ve written a summary because I figured this game is so old that no one else wants to play it (lol). Therefore, there’s obviously spoilers!

The general gist of the story is that our heroine Mirai was abandoned under a cherry blossom tree as a baby and spent most of her childhood alone before being adopted by the Tachibana family. She spends her days happily with them and is especially close to her older brother Kazuki as their parents are often overseas for business. The story begins in the spring when Mirai first starts university and her parents die tragically in a car accident.

If things couldn’t get worse, she begins to notice Kazuki getting weaker and eventually finds him collapsed at home. They go to the hospital where it transpires that he has a terminal illness that he’s been hiding as he didn’t want to worry Mirai. She goes to visit him regularly but he eventually dies in her arms under the cherry blossom tree. However, she sees him occasionally in her dreams ever since… There’s also this side story about her having a mysterious friend who sends her sweet letters and money to help her survive on her own.

From L-R: Kouhei, Nozomu & Shuuji

 

First BS route is Kouhei, aka, the typical childhood friend who has been ~secretly~ in love with Mirai for years. In his 10 min long route that actually branches off before most of the actual game, he confesses his love to her but Mirai doesn’t really know how to respond. To prove his feelings to her, he decides to rape her on the living room floor and for some reason this totally helps Mirai see him as an actual potential relationship partner (please don’t do this in real life, I can assure you that it won’t work!). In his bad ending he tries to confess but ends up going studying abroad in Italy for a year to become a pro footballer. I preferred the bad ending – the further he stays away the better.

Shouma

The first character with an “actual” route is Shouma, the Yakuza underling whom is introduced when it transpires that Mirai’s family home is blocking his group’s new development. He has an interest in Mirai from the start of the game but she makes it pretty clear that she wants nothing to do with him because clearly threatening her family home is the way to her heart uwu. But will that stop him? No. Of course the answer is no. One day, out of the blue he kisses her on the beach in some half-assed confession – to which Mirai isn’t exactly impressed.

Later that day, she sees him playing with a cute dog outside his shoddy apartment & is lowkey shocked because apparently being a dog person means you’re nice? Anyways, Shouma sees this as fate and decides to test her feelings by taking her inside his apartment and raping her. To try and make you feel less gross about it, he then tells his ever so tragic backstory about being brought up poor afterwards. If this isn’t bad enough, one of his Yakuza friends comes round and tells him that he needs to make more money so he decides to prostitute out Mirai. She reluctantly goes along with it but freaks out upon going into a hotel room with a weird man and runs away after sustaining some light injuries. Shouma sees this and goes to beat the weirdo up for hurting “his girl” – wow what a HERO *bleh*.

The pair make up but soon after Shouma’s Yakuza friend comes round again and gets Shouma to go on a dangerous mission. He accepts, to Mirai’s dismay, and disappears for the day. The Yakuza friend comes back around and tries to rape Mirai but *luckily* Shouma arrives home at the right moment and saves her. He decides then tht he wants to leave the Yakuza and live a peaceful life together with Mirai. In the good ending he gets his wish but in the bad ending he gets stabbed by his friend and dies (is that really such a bad ending?).

There are two characters with endings that branch from Shouma’s route. The first of which is Nozomu (who doesn’t have any more SFW CGs – I’m sorry!). He was Mirai’s kouhai in high school and shares her love of reading & his favourite author just happens to be her teacher at university. Anyways, his ending basically involves him coming round to her house one day (this is like in the middle of Shouma’s route btw) and waffles on about how worried he is about her “dating” a Yakuza member because they did some mean things to his dad years ago. He tells Mirai that he’s loved her forever and could look after her better than Shouma. If you choose the choice that’s along the lines of “Oh yeah, maybe I have made a mistake” then you get Nozomu’s ending. This consist of Mirai kissing him, taking him up to her room & popping his cherry. That’s it. Bonus points for actually having a consentual sex scene but was there any point including this?

Aoi

The other character ending branching from Shouma’s is Aoi – a well-known actor whom Mirai has supported ever since he was starting out. His route literally consists of him giving Mirai a ticket to one of his performances, where she stands outside and gets mothfulls of abuse from his fangirls over being too friendly with him. She then watches the play, where he sings a heartfelt love song for the ending. After the performance, Aoi tells her that he put his feeling for her into the song while he was singing and asks if she wants to go to his room. Mirai accepts and the game ends. Yes, you read that right. It ends before any of the juicy stuff. Seems a bit cruel to me!

Masaya

Next main route is Masaya, a lawyer and friend of Kazuki whom helps the Tachibana family out when the Yakuza come knocking. He appears to be a pretty cold person but is a hard working and has a kinder side, for example, helping Mirai get her part-time job. His route actually starts with Kou (yes, that piece of trash from above…) actually confessing to Mirai & the pair end up going out. It later turns out that Masaya is a previous graduate from their university and is was the best striker the soccer club ever had. So Mirai organises for Kou and Masaya to go for dinner with her where Kou fangirls for a while & Mirai realises that she lowkey has feelings for Masaya (weird place but okay).

A few days later on the night of the town’s annual fireworks festival Masaya picks Mirai up from work and asks her if she’d like to have dinner & watch the fireworks with her. If you choose to take him up on his offer then he takes Mirai to a super fancy hotel where they watch the fireworks whilst enjoying their evening meal. Masaya then proceeds to have sex with her – wow is this NTR in an otome game, that’s a new one. Mirai does actually break up with Kou pretty soon afterwords (who takes it surprisingly well, honestly surprised he didn’t have a bad ending there).

Anyways, after this Mirai thinks that Masaya is interested in her so goes to his work the whole time, often helping out with simple tasks. She then annoys some random woman (Kaoru) who proclaims her to be a rival (I thought this side character was meant to be interested in Kazuki?). Mirai decides that she wants to know more about Masaya so asks her boss at work (who is an old friend of Masaya) about his past. It turns out that the reason he’s so distant is that his ex-girlfriend, whom he was madly in love with, cheated on him with his best friend and ended up getting pregnant with his kid. Apparently Masaya tried to get her to stay with him anyway but after the baby was born she ran off to the US and hasn’t been seen since. After a chance meeting at the restraunt she works, Masaya tells her the above story and adds that the man who stole his woman was Mirai’s University lecturer Shuuji.

The game proceeds with Mirai basically trying to get Masaya to love her back, including making him lunches. He ends up screwing her again after taking her to a hotel after the Yakuza attack her house but manages to get them to back off after talking to the boss of the construction company. There’s some more bitchy drama with Kaoru who claims that Masaya is trying to forget the past by screwing them (wow Kaoru where have you been that’s been obvious the whole damn route). Masaya takes Mirai out for a super fancy dinner for her birthday but she ends up kinda drunk & they end up (again) having sex in the hotel room. He does finally confess his love to her but highkey ruins it by talking about sex 3 lines later (it was so terrible I actually burst out laughing, honestly this game is something else).

Some time later, Mirai invites Masaya and Kaoru (who accepted their relationship and is now their friend? idk man seems suspect) to Sou’s fashion show. Afterwords, Masaya takes Mirai out to dinner and admits that seeing Sou pursue his dreams made him realise that he can’t keep living in the past so he wants to go to America, meet the woman that left him all those years ago, and put that whole episode to rest. Mirai is obviously worried but he promises to come back for her in 3 years & asks her to marry him. She actually says no because she’s still troubled by the loss of her brother & the mysterious man helping her with money.

A few days later, Kaoru phones out of the blue to let Mirai know that Masaya is leaving for America the next day. In his good ending, Mirai wakes up the next morning to find a letter from him stating that he loves her but he has to go and deal with his past (and some bs about how he’s jealous of how much Mirai cares for Kazuki). Because of the way he signs off the letter, Mirai figures out that he’s the mysterious man who’s been helping her out financially all this time (W O W what a shocker!) and zooms to the airport to meet him before he leaves for good. Of course she finds him standing in line at immigration and leaps into his open arms. The end. (Not even joking, the game ends there). In his bad ending, Mirai misses him at the airport but not to worry because Kaoru is still around to treat her like a little sister!

Shuuji

Because this game is a piece of trash, shortly after Masaya’s confession of his past, you’re given the option to visit Shuuji alone in his office at university. Clearly the smart choice would be to stay away but (for completion’s sake) I did it. Basically, he moans about how he isn’t the evil guy Masaya views him to be before (you guessed it) raping Mirai at knifepoint and laughing that she surely can’t go back and face Masaya after this.

Hayato

The doctor that treated Kazuki when he was ill, called Hayato, has an ending that branches off of this route and it’s really ~something~. Basically, one day Mirai thinks that she might be coming down with something and decides to get checked out at the hospital. Everything goes fine but on the way to her part-time job she realises that she must’ve left her hankerchief back at the hospital. When she goes to get it back, she ends up catching Hayato and some random nurse doing the nasty and makes awkward eye contact with him before running away. She manages to put the incident to the back of her mind but then Hayato calls her one evening asking her to come into the hospital in order to discuss something important. Mirai, worried for her health, agrees to go and meet Hayato.

Before getting down to business, he offers to make her some coffee and tells her to calm down. While drinking the coffee, Mirai notices that she feels strange to which Hayato announces that as a doctor he gets access to lots of interesting drugs, including the one she’s drinking. He then proceeds to rape her and tell her drugged mind that this is all a dream but to remember that he loves her very much and that he wanted to see her having sex with the nurse to make her jealous(?). The game then ends. Why couldn’t it have ended earlier. Seriously, Aoi doesn’t get any smut but instead we get this blantantly gross scene that ruined any opinion that I may have had of this character. Honestly, I can’t…

Sou

The last of the “main” routes is Sou, a man whom Mirai is initially interested in because he looks similar to her (newly dead) brother Kazuki. Sou is a fashion designer who moved to the city recently in order to pursue his passion & falls head over heels for Mirai whom he finds inspiring to his work. After spending some time together, he confesses his feelings under the cherry blossom tree and Mirai accepts. They also end up going to see the fireworks together (which annoys Kouhei but who cares). Mirai also helps him get more work through her connections with a famous actor (she used to make outfits for him back in the day).

A while after they start dating, Sou let’s Mirai know about his oh-so tragic past, whereby it turns out that he’s actually from a very well-off family. However, his father was very strict and wanted him to follow in his footsteps to inherit the family business. Sou went along with this until the year before he graduated from University, when he discovered his passion for design so dropped out and attended a fashion school instead. Obviously his dad wasn’t best pleased so kicked him out, which explains why he ended up moving.

There’s also this drama about Sou entering a fashion competition and winning so his designs are going to be featured in a fashion show. However, while the pair are preparing for this, the Yakuza really ramp up their efforts to get Mirai out of her family home, including driving a car into her porch wall. She refuses to back down to their demands though, even though Sou is so worried about her that he sleeps outside her house one night.

Eventually the night of the fashion show arrives and everything is going swimmingly but the model that should be wearing the final outfit of the night gets into an accident and can’t make it in time. Oh no! But luckily Sou asks Mirai to step in since he just so happens to have the dress in her size. But, of course, the game can’t let them be happy for long so the Yakuza light Mirai’s house on fire. The day after, Mirai and Sou go to see what the damage is and meet Shouma, who tells them that since the Yakuza now have the backing of the prestigious Iwasaki Group, that there’s no point in resisiting any more…

That night, Sou shows Mirai a beautiful dress that he designed for her and proposes. In his True ending, she accepts his proposal and the two finally sleep together. The next morning he announces that he has some important business to take care of that will take around a week but he’s booked a hotel room for Mirai in order to keep her safe from the Yakuza. This “business” actually takes more like two and a half weeks but he eventually sends a letter telling Mirai that he’s sending someone to take her to him.

When Mirai arrives at the promised location, an even fancier hotel, Sou tells her that it’s their wedding day so helps her get ready & meet his parent. If you couldn’t guess, Sou is actually the son of the chair of the Iwasaki Group and decided to take over the company in order to clean it up and prevent other people going through the same horrors as Mirai. He’s the only character with an epilogue, which is literally the two of them sitting under the cherry blossom tree talking about how happy they are. The end.

His good ending is that he gets offered a job by some top fashion designers in Italy but promises to return for Mirai once she’s graduated. Which he does & they meet again under the cherry tree.

Sou’s bad endings are something else though… Basically, Mirai has been feeling ill & finds out that she has the same terminal illness as her older brother Kazuki. She decides not to be admitted to hospital until after the fashion show and not to tell Sou. In the first bad ending, he finds out about her illness from Hayato (so much about patient – doctor confidentiality) and spends every last moment he can with her, until she dies in his arms under the cherry tree. In the other bad ending, she doesn’t tell Sou and instead breaks up with him to avoid him being broken by her death. She ends up dying in the hospital.

Kazuki / Onii-Chan

The final route in the game is onii-chan, Kazuki, who’s route is only unlocked once you’ve finished Sou, Masaya & Shouma’s endings. So basically all of the main ones. Therefore, you could be forgiven for thinking it would be a proper route. Sadly, no. Basically, near the start of the game Kouhei confesses to Mirai but she turns him down and realises that the only man she loves is Kazuki. On their way home from having dinner out one night, they end up kissing. That night, Mirai is crying in her room over her feelings, Kazuki comes in and they both figure out that they love each other. They then have sex and talk about how glad they are that they aren’t actual blood-related siblings before Kazuki promises that he’ll become her real family in the future.

 

My Thoughts

I feel like I should preface this by saying that I only bought this game because I got it as part of the “Mirai Memorial Pack” that was on sale for like 1.5k yen. That being said, there are some games that aren’t even worth 500 yen and unfortunately this is one of them. At first, I thought that maybe it was the age of the game that was putting me off, with the tiny screen and poorly aged artwork. However, after having a think to myself about the other “old” visual novels that I’ve played in the past I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just a poor game overall and probably wasn’t that great at the time. We complain about otoge now but imagine paying 9k for this back in the day!

Despite the game initially seeming as though it has 9 main characters, there’s actually only 3 with proper routes which was HUGELY disappointing, especially considering that the 6 characters with shorter routes (essentially only endings lol) really could’ve been cut out. Shuuji & Hayato’s endings were both very gross to me so I wish they hadn’t bothered there. Kouhei’s route was handled terribly and should’ve been a branch off of Masaya’s route because I don’t believe him to be as terrible as his route was. Nozomu’s route was literally just a H-scene so what was the point. Aoi’s route felt like the prologue to an actual route so again, why???

Finally, Kazuki’s route was just a waste of time. They make a big deal out of it by having it locked until you’ve pretty much finished the whole game and then literally just give us a H-scene. On one hand, I’m glad he had a route but I really just wish it was longer since he was one of the characters that I did actually like.

As far as the longer routes go, Sou’s route was that only one that I can even call of “decent” quality. Despite some generic scenes, it was quite cute and by far the most enjoyable thing in this pile of trash. Masaya’s route was kinda ~meh~ to me but he’s not my type to begin with so that probably hurt him. Shouma’s route was terrible. I have no idea how I was meant to feel pity for a guy who was trying to pimp out his girlfriend?

The actual writing itself was pretty dull too, with the H-scenes definitely being skip-worthy. There’s a *ridiculous* amount of choices in this game too, especially considering how short it is for a “full price” title.

As you can probably tell, the artwork is dated at best, plain bad at worst. The in-game backgrounds were probably the nicest art. The placement of CGs was pretty off in all the routes, with some important scenes (imo) missing CGs completely. I will say that there was a lot of CGs though.

Since this game is old, the screen size is 640 x 480 which makes it hard to read but surprisingly the game worked on my windows 10 laptop with no difficulties. There is a slight glitch when you put the text speed on max though (on run-on lines it doesn’t clear the bottom line which makes it hard to read sometimes) so I wouldn’t recommend that.

Final Thoughts

My Score: 2/10

If you made it through this 3.5k word monster review then you honestly deserve a pat on the back! My opinion on this game is that it’s a relic and should be left in the past where it belongs, unfortunately I bought the set so I have the next 2 games in the series to play. Yay me? Sou’s route is the only enjoyable thing about this game but I’d honestly rather recommend everyone to save their money for something better.

The only reason I wrote a summary post is because the game wouldn’t let me skip the ending movie & I really needed people to understand how trash this is – just the “my thoughts” section wouldn’t cut it for this monstrosity! I tried to keep it mostly factual but ended up inserting my own opinions in some places (whoops~), I don’t know if I’ll keep this up for other games since I assume more people have played them but let me know your thoughts!

Thanks for reading!