Prologue (Rika)
IN the spring marking the beginning of my second year of high school, I encountered the game that changed my life. People may say I’m over-exaggerating, but it’s true. That game started it all.
It was a love simulation game marketed toward women, making it part of the genre popularly referred to as “otome games.” In the vast catalogue of otome games, there was a game particularly infamous for being called, “The most difficult, crappiest game for sale. Anyone who manages to get a single ending is a gaming god.”
And that’s the game I became totally obsessed with.
My sister, who’s older by a year, didn’t think highly of my newly acquired addiction. In any other situation, I would’ve obediently taken her advice with how close we were. But not this time. Maybe I was being juvenile, but I couldn’t help myself. She was concerned about me gaming all the time, and took every opportunity to tell me to quit.
On that fateful day, I was browsing a bookstore with the fashion magazine and new romance novel my sister had asked me to pick up tucked under my arm. It felt too pitiful to leave the store without buying something for myself. For that simple reason, I stopped to browse the magazine rack. An oddly shiny, illustrated book printed to resemble a magazine leapt out at me.
“Let me hear your sound.”
Sound? Curiosity piqued by the line printed on the book’s wrapper, I approached the rack. On the cover was an enlarged illustration of a handsome young man with light-blue hair, standing shoulder to shoulder with another handsome young man sporting flaming red hair, their hands extended toward the viewer. I furtively reached out and snatched the glossy book. My heart raced.
A perfectly shaped nose sat between almond-shaped indigo eyes, leading to sexy lips; his build was slender and toned. Perhaps it would be easier to understand how I felt if I said this character was the pure embodiment of my ideal man. This dashing red-haired young man on the cover checked every mark on my must-have list and then some.
I fell in love for the second time in my life with a two-dimensional man made from paper and ink. I should note that my first love ended in heartbreak last year. A troublesome love marked by bitterness and pain. The sooner I forget the experience, the better.
I scanned through the book and learned his name—Kou Narita. Even his name was wonderful. From the looks of it, he was the main character of a dating simulation game.
…Wait a minute. A dating game?! I can date this hot guy?!
Tightly clasping the book to my chest, I hurried to the store’s game section.
It’s not here! I can’t find it! The game where Kou Narita moves and speaks isn’t here!
Heart set ablaze, I purchased my books at the register and promptly searched the four game stores in the area. I pedaled my bicycle like a madwoman, wearing an expression too ghastly for a maiden in love.
Finally, at the fourth store, I found the game.
Let Me Hear Your Sound ~Melody to My Heart~
I ogled Kou’s portrait on the game package and lined up at the register in high spirits. A nice lady who looked like a college student rang me up. She frowned when she saw the game I put on the counter.
“…Um, I don’t know how to put this, but I own this game too.” Concerned about what others might think if they overheard, the part-timer lowered her voice and leaned toward me. “This game is super hardcore. Are you sure you want it?”
The game caused her enough strife to go out of her way to warn a customer not to buy it. That must be some difficulty level.
But I’m still going to buy it. I’ve come this far. I’ll do whatever it takes to see Kou move and speak with my own eyes! I have experience playing games. I foolishly dismissed her warnings. I’ve only played puzzle games, but aren’t all games the same when it comes down to it? My cousins just bought a new system and gave me their old portable game console. I’m sure I’ll be able to handle it.
“I’m sure. I can handle it,” I declared, and got my hands on Hear My Heart—the shorter name fans call the game.
Who was I kidding? I wasn’t able to handle it at all. No wonder the shop clerk felt the need to warn me. From what I looked up online, almost every major otome game company has released several different types of popular game series in the music genre. In order to break into the intensely competitive otome game market, the new company behind Hear My Heart filled the game with a lot of experimental elements.
One such experiment was decreasing the typical number of romanceable characters to develop a longer, unique scenario for each character, rather than having repetitive scenes across multiple characters. The industry bare minimum of five romanceable characters had been reduced to only two—Kou Narita, who had captured my heart, and the blue-haired Sou Shiroyama.
Kou is a sexy oresama type who exudes pheromones at all times, while Sou is a tsundere oresama. What’s an oresama and tsundere? They’re popular character archetypes often found in otome games and Japanese media. Oresama characters are generally pompous, overconfident, and narcissistic. Meanwhile, a tsundere acts coldly toward the heroine until she melts his frozen heart to reveal his soft side.
Otome game fans threw a huge fit when it was announced that the game only had two romanceable characters, both of which were oresamas. Of course they’d be upset. No matter how much you like the oresama archetype, it’s off-putting for every dateable character to be pompous.
To add insult to injury, there are as many as twelve endings. What’s so bad about that? Only one ending is actually happy. Of the remaining eleven endings, six are considered Friend Ends and five are Bad Ends. The Friend Ends are broken into: Best Friends End; Good Friends End; Friends who Occasionally Text Message End; Friends who Chat when They Bump into Each Other End; Friends who Know Each Other’s Name End; and Friends who Recognize Each Other’s Face End. I strongly believe more than half of those can’t even be called friends anymore.
The game takes place at a music school, but all the bad ends revolve around failing tests. Yup, you guessed it, Hear My Heart wasn’t your typical visual novel otome game where you simply read the story and make choices, but a full-on simulation game.
You have to pass a total of four tests. If the various requirements aren’t met, the heroine will be kicked out of school. What standards are those four tests conducted on? This is exactly why players have cursed Hear My Heart as Break My Heart. Put briefly, the parameters displayed on the in-game menu are just decorations and have absolutely no effect on the tests whatsoever! To pass the test, the player has to run the heroine all around the campus collecting music notes, scales, and musical notations and compose a song with them.
The player faces the screen and earnestly composes a song on the in-game keyboard. If you want to see any of the sweet, romantic, or enjoyable scenes, you must compose and compose and compose away. What the heck kind of game is this? The first test is within the realms of playable. After all, the song’s melody only needs to be sixteen bars. On the other hand, the nightmarish final test requires the player to compose a string quartet’s whole first movement. How is that even possible?
As the player is graded on the musical intervals, scale, rhythm, harmony, and even the counterpoint, randomly lining up music notes and failing will make the principal appear on screen and coldly declare, “I can no longer allow you to remain at this school.”
Game over. People on the Internet went crazy, raging that the game system had gone far beyond the bounds of a simulation game. Rumors say only university music students could clear the game and for some reason, near the end of the game’s life, large music stores started selling it alongside instruments.
How do you capture the two romanceable characters then? By chance. If one of the characters happen to enter the area where the heroine is composing music, his affection for her increases. Whether they show up or not is random. This system is ridiculously, pathetically painful. The sheer pitifulness of the heroine, wholeheartedly composing music while nobody appears, brings the player to tears. Even if someone set out to make a game as crappy as this one on purpose, they wouldn’t be able to do it.
This is a game that even I never reached an ending to. Even so, my love for Kou continued to grow. People would refer to my obsession as escaping reality. True by all accounts, but I couldn’t give up. I desperately needed it at the time.
Kou occasionally wandered onto the screen and murmured some sweet, confusing lines like, “Hi there. Looks like you’re working hard. I’d give you a reward, but you’d have to beg for it first.”
You wouldn’t believe how hard I fell for him each time he showed up, said those lines, and strutted off the screen. Looks, voice, and way of speaking—everything about him was what I wanted and had me squirming in my chair.
Now that I think about it, I’ve played the game over a hundred times and never once encountered Sou. What kind of mechanics does this game run on? I looked it up online and found out that Kou appears when you’re composing songs in the major key, while Sou appears for songs in the minor key. Whenever I lined up the musical notes, it always became a merry and carefree melody. No wonder I never saw Sou.
The shiny magazine book I bought at the beginning of my obsession wasn’t a guidebook, but a fanbook with illustrations and data on the romanceable characters. In other words, it was worthless when it came to gameplay.
Foreseeing that very few fans would ever reach the endings, every CG and image in the game filled the pages of the fanbook. Players who despised spoilers avoided it like the plague. But I was extremely grateful for it. I only ever managed to unlock three CGs during my gameplay. I ogled Kou’s CGs enough to wear holes in the images as I indulged in my fantasies.
To someday reach Kou’s Love End was my greatest aspiration.