Summary
A potentially good game ruined by disgusting moments
The Good
This review will be short. I just finished "Three Sister's Story", and a certain scene made me so furious I don't even feel like writing much about this game. What a pity, since it has so many things going for it.
First, of course, the story, which is very good - better than in many "real" adventures, and decidedly better than in most hentai titles. This is a revenge thriller with an excellent idea of moral ambiguity: you see your brother ruining three innocent girls, driven by his insane vengeance, and you are torn between the brother whom you love and who gave you everything, and the girls whose only fault is being daughters to a man who has ruined your family. A very good concept, which is also very well executed. There are some genuinely suspenseful moments in the game, and Koichi's inner torments and hesitations are presented quite convincingly.
The gameplay is better than in other hentai games I know, since you don't just follow the story and make decisions, but actually control your hero, tell him where to go and what to do (talk, think, look, ask, etc.) There is even some challenge in the game - nothing compared to mainstream adventures, of course, but still more than just reading text, occasionally making a choice.
There are six endings in the game, all based on your moral decisions - an interesting feature that should have been used more frequently in "real" adventures, and not only in hentai games.
The Bad
Okay. I'm the last one to demand censorship for video games. But
this is gone too far. Erotics is one thing - dirty, cheap porno is another. And what is worse than dirty, cheap porno? Did you guess it? Torture. Sadism. Deliberately inflicting severe physical pain on another being. And what's the worst kind of torture? A torture combined with rape. So, you can torture and rape in this game? No. You
must torture and rape in this game. And I don't care that it happens only one time and that the person you must do this to is your enemy who was ready to kill you. I'm not preaching morals here. If somebody really likes such kind of things, he is free to go and to buy this game. But for me, this game was
killed, annihilated, ceased to exist the moment I realized what it demanded from me. It happens very late in the game, and until then I was ready to accept its so-called "erotic" scenes. But this - this was too much. Did you really expect me to take a heavy, thick baton, to rape a woman with it in order to get necessary information, and then to watch how "crazed with agony, Akiko falls unconscious"?!! This is your idea of entertainment? Do you hear me, yes you, the sick pervert who designed this game?!!
What's even worse - if I had known from the beginning that I had to become a sadist in this game, I would have never started playing it. But with all the dirt of its porno scenes, it never went to this direction. Koichi was a gentle boy until some sick mind decided to turn him into a monster.
As for usual sex scenes, they are grotesquely bad. They are so ugly that I can't imagine somebody playing this game for them. It would be a sheer blasphemy even to
compare this filth with the passionate and tender scenes of
Kana - Little Sister. I tried to avoid them as much as I could, but the game throws them at you, one after the other, regardless of your ambition to stay at least faithful to one girl. But as I said - for the sake of the story, I would have tolerated those scenes. It was this terrible rape scene - no, not the scene itself, but the fact the rape was caused by the player character, and was obligatory to finish the game! - that made me decide firmly: I can find other good stories, but torture and rape are not welcome in my game world.
The Bottom Line
It could have been a great game if it didn't have the sex scenes. It could have been a good game if it had the sex scenes, but not the torture scene. Having this scene, the game crosses the last border of good taste and humiliates itself, sinking many levels below the one it could have been at.
What,
one scene that ruins the whole game?! Well, if you don't mind those things - go ahead, get the game and enjoy whatever is enjoyable in it. But if you have high demands to you games and want them to be
good, good in every sense of this word - then perhaps you should look somewhere else.
