True Love (PC) review "The most important part comes when your childhood friend and the snotty rich girl find themselves in a clothes-tearing catfight over who gets first crack at your bodacious bod. You need some way to cool things down but there isn’t a bucket of water handy, so you spray them with whipped cream."

[Warning: this review contains strong language and explicit scenes of sexual congress. Please stop reading it immediately.]

“She undid the zip and my excited penis popped up”

It may lack all the gratuitous features that you’ve come to expect from modern-day wankathons, things like animated insertions, yelping Chihuahua girls, and running in Windows without being spat out like a mouthful of manseed – but True Love is universally hailed by perverts across the globe as a bona fide classic.

A stunning departure from the norm!

A masturbatory masterpiece!

What I’m trying to say is that someone actually thought to toss a few chunks of actual gameplay in between all the squelching and squealing. Just take an awesome game like Princess Maker 2, strip it down in every sense possible, replace your cute little daughter who wants to live in a palace with some Japanese nerd who wishes he had the Eiffel Tower jutting out of his pants, and TADAH! – all the cheesy sex and ridiculous dialogue of a regular hentai game, but now there’s pointless stat-building!

“My penis is already big and throbbing, wanting a place to settle”

And it’s only natural that Daisuke (said nerd) should be hung like a French landmark, because he’s a college student in his senior year. Of college. There’s nothing he’d enjoy more than a quick roll in the hay with his fellow college students, because when you’re in college it’s okay to do wacky college things. Things like studying for exams so you can get into a good . . . university. It certainly is reassuring to know that they’re not teenagers in high school because that would be morally WRONG, especially since Daisuke’s principal hobbies seem to consist of hiding dirty magazines under his bed, peeking into the girls’ changing rooms, and getting hot for teacher. All we really need to know about our hero’s education is that he has Miss Yumi for Biology, but he’s more interested in the topography of those rocky mountains. I’m talking about her breasts.

“I stimulated the berry and glided my finger into the opening below it, which was filled with love juice and expectation”

But don’t let go of your pencil just yet, because there’s still nine more stereotypes to satisfy your depraved needs including:

• the jealous childhood friend who longs to confess her true feelings!
  
• the boyish athlete who needs someone to unleash her inner woman!
  
• the rich, brainy, oh-so-perfect student council president who likes it in the boot!
  
• and of course your best mate’s younger sister. She’s about “16 or 17” and attends a nearby “junior college,” and we all know what THAT means.

“That part was a beautiful pink color and the honey flowing from inside gave it a shine”

Even if the girls might seem pretty familiar, worming your way into their hearts and pants plays like an explicit dating sim rather than the standard “click through walls of text like a zombie until reaching an ultimately meaningless plot branch” school of hentai gameplay. With only a few short months to work with, every morning you’ll have to choose your daily schedule from a large pool of activities that boost things like physical strength, academics, and rugged sex appeal. And though they peak fairly quickly, these stats start dropping rapidly if you neglect them. Naturally this is interspersed with more traditional hentai activities like checking out bikini babes at the beach, carefully inspecting your classmates’ white cotton knickers, and getting slapped around a lot.

“I slid my hand down to her forest and searched for the secret place”

Unfortunately while each girl is interested in certain attributes, a large portion of this setup is essentially dumb luck. Time and time again you’ll also have to choose a certain activity at a certain time of day within a certain time frame to trigger various run-ins with that special someone; and not only is your success rate seemingly random even if you meet these requirements, there aren’t any clues to help you out either. That said, with a FAQ you could manage to squeeze virtually every one of these ladies into a single playthrough, so it’s not like this game is complex or anything – but I did appreciate the secret reward for loafing around all day:
“I’m the patron saint of lazy bums. Who gives a shit about being serious? Do your best to be as lazy as ever! Don’t make an effort to live a life, just relax and take things as they come. I’m gonna give you a special power! Keep up the good work.”

“From the rolling hills down to her valley, her secret place was already wet”

The most hilarious feature, though, is the foppish translation courtesy of uncontrollably horny Britons. Just in case the ridiculously oversexed narrations above weren’t enough of a clue, let’s take a moment to examine a typical exchange of dialogue:

“Oi luv, how’s about coming down to the flat for a bit of the old hump’n’bump on me creamstick?”
“Wanker! Do us a favour and jump in front of a lorry, cheers. (Oi oi oi, we are in college!”)

No no, wait. I have a confession to make; the above isn’t a very accurate depiction of in-game social intercourse at all. I used punctuation in it.


“From inside the throbbing flesh coloured peach a spring was flowing
(suck suck) (lick lick)”

Of course just because it’s actually playable and called “true love” doesn’t mean that the perversion merely extends to the text – the whole game is filled with tasteless degenerate 640x400 FILTH. Our hero’s dates always suffer from low self-esteem and feelings of “dirtiness”, so obviously he has to lift their spirits by extending his “alien object” into their “glistening pearls.” All these tawdry encounters follow pretty much the same script: sucking on a dainty pair of nipples, inserting his tongue into her “honeypot”, introducing her “perfumed well” to his “well grown part” after she takes a few paragraphs to admire it, and then onto the MONEY SHOT. Oh, and despite all this flowery prose about forests and valleys, everyone is completely hairless down there.

I do have to give them credit, though – there’s absolutely no rape, sadist humiliation or shadowy alternate personalities that love enemas, just good old-fashioned splurting cockmonsters like Mom used to make. Too bad that slacker’s never up to finishing the job; he’s always pulling out at the last second to spray steaming hot manchowder all over his partner’s face and chest. That’s just impolite.


“I still want to feel you all over me”

In conclusion this is probably one of the best hentai games ever released in English, unless you prefer sitting through non-interactive visual novels (with porn) for some reason. Of course it’s still rubbish compared to a real game, so it gets a five. But take a bow, perverted Japanese developers – you’ve EARNED that five.

Staff review by Sho (January 30, 2007) Sho enjoys classic video games, black comedy, and poking people until they explode -- figuratively or otherwise. He also writes a bit.