Love Hina Advance: Shukufuku no Kane wa Harukana

"Desperate attempt, there"

Have you ever meet a game so desperately in need of a worthy value that its presence in the videogaming world doesn't even meet the requirements of anything resembling ''gameplay''? A game that make you weep one night long after somehow giving it a shot? Love Hina Advance is sort of like that.

Nay, before you get me the wrong impression, I'll admit that I'm a fan of Love Hina manga. Even though Akamatsu Ken, the maker of this series, ruins all the story and adds so many ludicrous events and plot holes from issue #10 onwards, the manga was earlier developed with nicely weaved storytelling and interesting character. Fine, so I find myself within that idiot Urashima Keitarou, the star of this story, but who doesn't? If someone is so helpless that he needs to run off of the real world and goes into the escapism world of manga (or gaming or anything), sooner or later he'll find himself within most thing he finds interesting. That's the universal constant of otakudom, it's how everything works.

And me, I find myself in Love Hina. Sadly, though, not in Love Hina Advance.

Gameplay
If you're somehow new to this very world of digital love experience, a.k.a. Love-Sim, this is the sort of game where you are an anonymous guy surrounded by ladies with various personalities. These ladies, being the sole purpose of the genre, will randomly appear in front of you for some chat and whatnot, until eventually you've got them fall for you and there goes one ending, out of the blazilion endings available.

However, Love Hina Advance surely cannot let the anonymous guy plot stay. It is a game based on the anime, and the anime was based on manga. So there's story to follow and characters to include. The hero is, like I have mentioned before, Urashima Keitarou. He is your common loser-hero that's been revived from so many other manga and anything related with Japanese imagination. Big, dumb, with nothing else to offer but kindness. 9 out of 10 Japanese heroes start with this characteristic template. It's like, a law or something.

Being a loser that he is, Urashima failed to get into Tokyo University. For the third time. And then he somehow struck into Hinata-Inn, a girl dormitory run by his grandma. Ladies, obviously, live inside the Inn. And from there the story rolls and the love-sim genre found a reason. You, Urashima Keitarou, are to live inside the dormitory and try to impress the girls there before you're running out of time.

I know, there are lots of characters (especially the girls) to be told, but that's what fansites are for. And, you know what, I somehow got this feeling that you guys reading this review actually knows Love Hina better than me, or else you'll just be in any other game section. Heh, so all the prologue I've made up for this piece of crap is... well, dull and pointless.

Anyway. Love Hina Advance is broken down into some chapters, with different substory within each. You'll have talks (obviously, duh) with the girls and have to decide what to say. That of course is the very backbone of love simulation game, but here in Love Hina Advance you also got the chance to determine to which girl you want to talk about something, out of the options available. So if there's option like a) ''Kitsune, what's up?!'' or b) ''Naru, what's up?!'', it's important and you need to decide which girl you're going to impress. I remember this sort of thing once from an event in Thousand Arms, but unlike in that favorite RPG of mine, here in Love Hina Advance the feature goes more serious and has more effect for your whole game later on.

And now, here's the fun part. You have some sort of HP meter for Urashima Keitarou. Somehow, this little thing symbolized by little yellow dots on the lower-right corner has things to do with what happened with Urashima during his life. Specifically, when girls hit you (literally), you lose one HP. And uh, this boy Urashima get punched A LOT, you hear me. Because he's dumb and use to get into coincidental matters. Some girl, especially Narusegawa, also has this tendency to do combo; that is, multiple unavoidable hits that decreases your HP consecutively. Interestingly, it doesn't always take a punch to damage Urashima; a small, sardonic talk towards him will also cause the same thing.

The girl, in other side, also have some kind of Love Meter. This appears on the leftmost screen when the corresponding girl is talking with you. The events and your choice of conversation will eventually fill the meter up with Hearts symbol, reflecting their affection towards you. However, girls can also lose heart if you take the wrong way. And yes, some certain mistake will lead a double problem at once: Urashima losing HP (got whacked) and girl losing Heart towards Urashima (got pissed-off to some certain degree in which it is necessary to whack Urashima into the nearest wall).

The lost HP are to be filled up again with not one, not three, but two piece of circles at once, usually in the end of a chapter where Urashima goes down a nice bath. There's also HP level-up, where you can have more empty slot in which you can restore more HP later. Some certain event also restores HP. Just remember that once you lost all your HP, it's about time to shove off and kiss Hinata-Inn goodbye; the worst Game Over ending awaits by the end of the chapter.

There's also another challenge. Each time you get the chance for optional talks (that is, multiple speech available for you), there will be this Speech o' Meter (or whatever they name this feature). This Meter looks like a circle made up of smaller circles. The small circles will lit one by one clockwise in some certain speed. Once you got them all lit (making a full circle) BEFORE you make any decision for your talk, girls will get angry at you for being an airhead.

Uh, okay, so that feature simply is a timer. One more thing is that the speed of the timer varies between events. When it is not necessarily lead to important decision (like when Narusegawa asks whether you passed the exam for Todai or not), the timer went slow. But after some time, you'll witness the real challenge as the timer goes REALLY fast, while you still need to take some time to read the whole scribbled Kanji before you choose them. This often happens in crucial situations, and it takes reflexes to read, understand and choose before the timer goes off, before Narusegawa punches you again down to the throat.

But you can just reload as always. This game lets you save your game once you finish a chapter. Not that it's something awesome, just so you know that you'll always depend heavily on save data when playing Love-Simulation. You can have my word at that.

Graphics
There are two points I should include here when we're about to talk about graphics. First, while I'm a fan of the manga's artwork and all, I truly dislike the character design for the anime port and thus never ever commit some effort to watch them onscreen. Second, the whole graphics from this game was lifted off of the anime.

In other words, I'm going to be biased. See, there's this certain degree of details and even comic tone awesomeness down the original artwork in the manga, but as always you should delete them all if you're making a TV series. And, since manga artist basically have different approach towards what and how they work and thus can't be anime artist at the same time, the characters for the anime aren't designed by Akamatsu Ken himself.

Of course, only some jaded, pretentious fanboys will complain to that sort of change, but that's simply how I am. I liked Love Hina from my point of view, and when its maker can't bring me things that are the reason for me to like them, I rant. It's sort of disappointing to see just so much difference between the faces. Urashima doesn't look like he did in the manga. Narusegawa is fat (not that much literally), Kitsune is often misproportioned, Motoko seems too old and Shinobu... is just as sad as Kaolla is friggin' weird.

But let me also include the bright side: animation exist in this game. Of course, it's just something a wee bit better than your usual encounter of GIF animation all over whatever your favorite sites are, but as of a Gameboy Advance game this is some refreshing change. Think of it as a primitive FMV prototype, just that FMVs were already made before. These animations were made out of the anime scenes, and some of them are used repeatedly (you'll notice them easily). Learn to love them. If you feel like needing something to be proud of, this animation maybe it.

Some of the still graphics will also be displayed more than once. It's usually the image to show: a) Keitaro gets pasted or b) the trite, background epilogue where little Urashima made a promise with some girl to go to Tokyo University together and live happily ever after. I personally find myself annoyed with this whole mess. They made the game looks less lively, but then again I'm biased. So I don't know about you.

Anyway, I almost forgot that while I didn't enjoy the image, I admit the quality they have here in this game. It's colorful and quite nice to the eye. Even more, I understand how it is not an easy task to port an anime captured image into Gameboy friendly file that needs to get their color reduced and size altered. Eh, unless they have some sort of software that automatically do the works for them. If that so, then ignore this whole paragraph just as you should if you didn't catch what I'm talking about.

Audio
I don't find anything special that catch my ears. It's the usual merry music and snazzy sound effects all over the game. Most love-simulation games got more of its audio aspect covered when it has voice-overs, but heck, you cannot cram such monstrous voice files into the tiny GBA cartridge. So eh, I find myself convenient with lesser thing to consider in mind. Thanks for nothing, Nintendo.

Not that I blame them and all. By the way, like in most Japanese games, you'll get to hear some voice clips like ''EEEEkkkk'' or ''Kyaaaa~!'' or whatever they intended for it to sound like, so just try to get used to it. Sometimes I find these atrocious screams out of nowhere, for no reason or rhyme (unless maybe I pressed the wrong button and all), and I can't find it interesting.

Difficulty
The ever classic difficulty for Love-sim games is not how you beat the game. It also isn't how you achieve the whole secret endings or omake. It simply is about how you decipher those scribbles known as Kanji writings to make the story make sense to you. Yeah, this is a Japanese game. It shows Japanese language. It's not for us dumb outsiders. So if we play hardcore fanboy style, we've got to get through this matter.

Unless you know Japanese, then it's all trial-and-error through and through. You'll have to resort on translation somebody put on his fanpage. Or maybe your dictionary. Or, to make matters short, just play the heck out of the game for hours and you'll get satisfied if all you want is pretty pictures.
In the stead of the quicky-quicky timer that appears once in a while, nothing else in this game ever reflects the hard ways of videogaming.

Replayability
This game has 9 different endings. Each with different girl you choose from earlier of the game. Think of it, you need to play the game 9 times to get them all. While the point of getting them all is all grey, we all know Love-Sim is one of the genre with big replay value. If you think reading huge text doesn't bother you and your time, then you'll love Love Hina Advance. There's also this picture collection or some sort, because every single love simulation on Earth is entitled with omake feature: where little tidbits (usually pictures from special events) are gathered and saved for quick review. Or whatever.

Overall
Had this been a simple love-simulation without the Love Hina license all over it, this game should be nothing than a stupid game not worthy of your time. But it's Love Hina, it rounds-up some of the anime stories and it has things not even there in the manga. If you're a dedicated, big fan of the series, then go ahead do some import.

But if you're one of the many lonely gamers that simply need to find something interesting, don't even bother renting. Yeah, not only you'll find it hard to rent such game, the first ten minutes into the game will blatantly tell you that this is some sort of private game where all fans are invited but nobody else: you'll learn nothing about Love Hina from this game, I promise.

All in all, Love Hina Advance is nothing but a way for those Japanese to grin evilly and say, ''heh, we even have the Love Hina in GameBoy Advance. Now we have a reason to say we're working hard instead of admitting we're slacking off the way we actually are. Fanboys will buy anything with Naru on the cover anyway...''

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/13/02, Updated 10/13/02