Summary
Typical hentai trash
The Good
Well, the story could have been worse. The premise is not bad: you witness your brother ruin three innocent girls, driven by his insane vengeance, and you are torn between the brother whom you love, and the girls whose only fault is being daughters of a man who had ruined your family. As usually in Japanese adventures, the protagonist comments on everything he sees and shares his feelings with the audience; but sometimes, Koichi's inner torments and hesitations are nicely presented.
There are six endings in the game, all based on your moral decisions - a feature taken straight from visual novels. However,
Three Sisters' Story is not a visual novel; it is a "regular" Japanese adventure with verb/object commands and rudimentary interaction. At some points you can even die in the game, which somehow makes you forget for a while that there is no real gameplay here.
The Bad
As in most Japanese adventures, the "gameplay" consists of choosing commands from a menu until something happens. It basically forces you to test how quickly your fingers can move between the arrow keys and Enter. There is zero challenge, no contact with the game world, and the "triggering" of events is maddening.
The writing is bad, but worse than it are the boring, predictable, and stereotypical "adult" situation the hero is dragged into. Seriously, the game just throws at you one sexual encounter after another, and alas, I don't recall even one of them that was
sexy, let alone justified by the narrative or explicable from a psychological point of view.
Whoever says this is the "law" of hentai games simply hasn't played the good ones: the fact is that there are many hentai games with much more exciting and believable sexual scenes out there. And some of them even manage to be good games: check out
Guren for example. But even if we don't count RPGs, games like
Eve Burst Error or
Yu-No are head and shoulders above this one.
Typically for
JAST, the drawings are crude and unappealing; distorted proportions, ridiculous angles, lifeless expressions make the supposedly "hot" girls of the game to pitiful mannequins waiting to be abused.
I thought at least the designers would have enough decency not to include a rape scene in this game. But I guess they thought their Japanese customers wouldn't buy it otherwise. So, you can torture and rape in this game? No. You
must torture and rape in this game. There is just one scene like that, and again, it just destroys the little sense the narrative might have had left: the gentle, timid Koichi, who is easily bullied by his own brother and can't even gather enough courage to have sex with his own girlfriend, suddenly takes a heavy, thick baton, and rapes a woman with it in order to get necessary information, and then watches how "crazed with agony, Akiko falls unconscious"!..
Man... I've seen even worse things in hentai games. But then again, I have seen hentai games that did
not include this kind of crap. Again, whoever says I can't expect that from hentai games really doesn't know the genre well enough.
The Bottom Line
The fact
JAST opened a US office and started translating its cheap and unattractive porn doesn't miraculously turn their games into good adult entertainment. Yes, 90% of hentai adventure games are crap, but that doesn't mean there can't be an occasional work that elevates itself above the crowd. It's just that
Three Sisters' Story is not such a work.
