Hanako Games

For discussion of one of my favorite game-creators, Hanako Games.

Why are they so awesome? Let me count the ways! First, the games are almost always clever, well-written, and funny. They avoid the common pitfalls of otome protagonists and have intelligent and witty female characters. They're also very GLTBQ friendly, and almost all the games have a same-sex romance option.

Cute Knight: You're a girl who's lived in an orphanage her entire life, and now that you're 18 they're kicking you out. As you despair, your fairy godmother comes to you and tells you that you have a destiny waiting for you, and you've got 3 years to discover it. You head off to a small town, where you can romance a guy, crawl through some dungeons, take up a profession, or find your true origins

Cute Knight Kingdoms: Cute Knight, but with more kingdoms. This time you're a girl with loving parents, who tell you on your 18 birthday that they found you on your doorstep under mysterious circumstances. Determined to find your destiny (and not end up a candle-maker, as nice as your parents are) you set off across the many kingdoms where you can fight monsters, romance people, and settle down in a well-paying job if that's your thing. Also features one of the more interesting sin systems I've seen in a game.

Long Live The Queen: You are a princess whose mother has just died, leaving you partially in charge of the kingdom until you turn 15 and your coronation takes place. Your main objective? Don't die. Everyone and everything is trying to kill you, and you have to carefully develop your skills to make sure you live to see your 15th birthday. Now has adorable death chibis.

Science Girls: Absolutely adorable RPG where you assemble a team of schoolgirls, each specializing in a certain field of science, to ward off the tentacled aliens attacking their school.

Date Warp: Janet is an average college girl, out on a date with Brad, who's known for taking girls out on a first date and then immediately dumping them. After a storm breaks out right after the car shuts down, you're forced to take shelter in a mysterious old house with even more mysterious inhabitants, and basically anything after this is a spoiler. Play it. It's great.

Magical Diary Horse Hall: Harry Potter fanfic: the game. You get to be an American with magical powers who gets sent to a special magical high school on her 16th birthday. You can romance a hot demon guy, your roommates, a lovable prankster, or Snape your icy teacher. Also has dungeons you can solve with your spells, and a yearbook feature so you can share your badass witch with the world.

They also made Fatal Hearts, and some of their affiliate games are Spirited Heart, the Heileen series, and Lucky Rabbit Reflex; since none of their makers have their own threads you can discuss them here as well.

Magical Diary! How could you forget Magical Diary? It's one of their best games!

On that note, Hanako Games is currently working on a pure visual novel with a female protagonist called The Royal Trap. You can follow its WIP thread here at Lemmasoft Forums.

Because I missed it on the front page! :P I knew I was forgetting something.

Hanako Games often has alpha-build sales, where you get to buy the alpha of the game for about half the price, help beta-test it, and then receive free updates until you eventually have the full game. That's how I got both Magical Diary and Long Live The Queen (you think it's hard now, I remember when half the characters didn't even have sprites!) and it's a great value.

Haha, I think I played everything Hanako ever made XD The games are always deceptively simple and scarily addictive. Cute Knight and Cute Knight Kingdom made me lost so much sleep/meals/birthdays. It's a good thing Hanako publishes secrets and walkthroughs, otherwise I'd still be stuck trying to get that one ending in CKK. Also I wanted to cheat so at Long Live the Queen, but I resisted (I've let my younger sister use the cheats and watched her, that was amusing enough~)

It's so nice to see stats-sim with so much content, usually these type of games are really dry. Long Live The Queen was so hard it reminded me of Academagia ~_~

The hardest thing about LTTQ for me was accepting that I couldn't play perfectly. If I wanted her to be a military expert, I was just going to accept that she wouldn't also be simultaneously a perfect dancer, a trade and commerce expert, and a history genius, and that I was going to have to pick my battles checkpoints. And that's not even factoring in the "You must pass this checkpoint OR DIE" points that can throw a spanner in the works of the best study plans.

I adored Magical Diary, which surprised me a lot. I played the demo, but I wasn't blown away and I meant to pass it over. Not quite sure why I ended up buying it, but I'm so glad I did. It's a lovely combination of funny and heartwarming, and I love that it has actual worldbuilding in it. A lot of Dating Sims set in a fantastical setting just plunk you down, explain the rules, and then put the dateable people front and centre for the rest of the story, but that approach always leaves me unsatisfied.

Other than that, I haven't played a whole lot of Hanako games. I bought Date Warp but I didn't get very far.

So for Christmas, I got myself (along with Cinders a few weeks back) Long Live the Queen, Science Girls and Magical Diary. I can say goodbye to free time for awhi- Oh cool! I can continue LLTQ from where I left off in the demo! Granted, since I knew it was a demo, I kinda just messed around like an idiot, but who knows! Maybe I'll make something amazing out of it.

*giggle* *snort* Make sure to report back when you die :D

It didn't register while I was playing the game but now that you've pointed it out, yeah, I really liked this too. Ellen's attempts at

were totally adorable and totally badass and, yes, went a good way toward fleshing out the world. The game certainly conveyed the impression that the devs had a reasonable amount of work done that they weren't explicitly sharing because it wasn't relevant to the game they made. Which is good, because "Now class, AS YOU KNOW Grand Magus Killbane of the Luchadores founded our school in 1957 in order to train disposable henchmen, but it wasn't long before the Butcher of Stilwater murdered him and set in motion the reforms that transformed this place into the exemplary institue of learning you see today." wouldn't exactly have enriched the experience.

Anyway, yes, that was well done.

Hey hey! Guess what!?

Someone didn't pay attention in accounting. Or play with enough doggies. And had very bad manners.

This probably isn't the place to ask this, but I really wanted to go on a Forest Adventure with Briony, but I ended having to either send her home or hold her hostage. Any tips to get around that?

Also, chopping a guy's head off with a magic sword was awesome.



EDIT: Nevermind, got killed by a tentacle monster.

Does anyone know how to unlock the true end in Date Warp? I thought you just had to get all the other endings, but I have and that dialogue option is still locked.

*deep breaths*
So after beating the game once (and dying once!), I decided to spent a good 4 hours trying to get all the death scenes. Which I have succeeded! I kinda needed to consult the Hanako Games forums for two of them though. I'm also missing two things on the checklist but I don't care as much about that

unlocking the ends is all it needs as far as I know, but if you used an old savegame to go back to that dialog point it might be still locked in the save?

I didn't, but I did get some of the ends by going back to an earlier save rather than starting from the beginning. I'll go through from the start when I get a chance and see if it makes a difference.

I got Magical Diary and Date Warp today! Romanced Damien, then got all the endings for Date Warp, then romanced Damien again. After that, I romanced Damien, and I just got back from romancing Damien.
I should probably curb my masochism some time.

Long Live the Queen is...interesting. I'm a bit conflicted. I like the writing, I like the theme, I like the mechanics of managing mood to maximize learning* (though my initial reaction to the stats screen was incredulous laughter, because seriously?), and I like that it's unforgiving. It's just I don't like the way in which it's unforgiving.

The unexpected death checks grew tiresome fairly quickly, because they don't feel especially fair. I don't want to savescum or wiki my way through, but I also don't want to perform recon by death. I'll let it sit for a week or two and come back to it, I suppose.

Yeah, I think an easy way to improve LLTQ's mechanics would be to provide even more alternates routes through which you can escape death.

Eventually I decided "FUCK THIS" and went through the game several times painstakingly taking notes on conditional events and stat checks and how one fails them and what events do to your emotions.

Some of the minor events in later weeks seem to be randomized, though - like one might take place on week 26 in one playthrough and on week 25 in another one. Nothing too extravagant, but it did throw me off.

Other than that, I wish there were more achievements. Once I filled out the screen, it felt like everything was over even when there was so much more under the surface.

LLtQ is money I consider...well-spent, for the interesting experience. But it's definitely not a game that I go back to, very often. It was an interesting experiment (how many bad ends can there possibly be?) but the focus is a bit more on the stats than I really prefer. There wasn't enough time or space to deepen some of the character work and relationships - we get a good sense of some players, but not enough. Like, until I got the cheat codes so that I could be UBER QUEEN, I could not figure out why that one person kept trying to kill me no matter what I did.

I finished a playthrough of Magical Diary yesterday and was pleasantly surprised by the depth and nuance of Damien's route. Not sure how I felt about it by the end; I'd have to go back and try different choices to see what changes things.

I thought the length was good, too, since there's so much content and options packed into it. Keeping everything confined to just one year kept the pace up, and the spells and dungeons kept the stat raising from becoming too tedious.

And then I played through Grabiner's route in one sitting and WHAT. Seriously, this is like my new favorite game now. Everything about it is so unexpected, but in a way that somehow makes sense.

O wow, I just realized today because of Steam's Linux Celebration Sale that Magical Diary actually has been available through Steam.

For all their talk of curation and discoverability it's still next to impossible to find/search for the few VN and Stat Sims they have there.

Grabiner's route will do that to you. ;)

For all of the WTF, I think it might be my favourite route because I was laughing through the whole thing. It was just so...unexpected. But it worked. I don't know how, but it did.

I think it worked because

I landed myself in the Grabiner route on my first playthrough by accident and I was just floored throughout the whole thing. It's probably my favorite Teacher route that I've ever come across. The Thing at the end with the wall was probably a bit too much though, but that was my only gripe.

I impulse bought their new game, The Royal Trap, and I feel a bit.... I don't know.... underwhelmed? I've gotten Oscar and Callum's happy ends, and Oscar's was okay for what it was, but for Callum

These are just my initial thoughts, anyway.

Hopefully no one minds if I make a second post...

Now I've gotten Gaston and Nazagi Happy Ends. Gaston's route is Grade A Adorable, but calling it *his* route is a bit misleading. I didn't mind though, I loved it! It was really sweet.

Nazagi.... hm. His route felt really short to me, in a game where I felt all the routes were kind of short. And I was less than thrilled at the conclusion. I don't mean that it was badly written, but I found it uncomfortable.

I still have other endings to get, but all in all it was a good game. The setting was well thought out, and I really liked all of the characters. I would say that my favorite route was Gaston's. The art was really pretty, especially the CG's, but the sprite art looked a bit different? And some looked kind of wonk, like Dolores. But they were all realistically expressive. The music was really, really good too.

But for me, it was perhaps not my most favorite out of Hanako (that would be Magical Diary). It was a bit on the short side for the price, and the romance felt really rushed for certain characters. Really rushed.

I haven't played all of Hanako's games, but I get the feeling that abrupt endings are kind of a Thing. I thought it worked in Magical Diary because of the situation: you're only 16 and in your first relationship, so I liked that things were open-ended. Date Warp could have stood to have more fleshed-out endings, though. I haven't fully completed The Royal Trap, so I don't know if it's comparable.

Perhaps. I haven't played a lot of Hanako games either, so I couldn't say. I would say that the only "abrupt" ending, as you put it, that worked for me would be

Maybe that's why Gaston's is my favorite, because it is the most open-ended (for Madeline, anyway).

OK, I bought The Royal Trap last night (was going to wait, but decided the husband could wait for his Amazon order instead, lol) and played through to most of the endings. I have to say Nazagi was my favorite route. I like his character, and the ending was unexpected. It wasn't romantic, but I liked that what romance there is was Maddie initiating it rather than just reacting to the LI's advances (which is what Callum and Oscar's routes felt like), and the way it touched on the themes of romance vs. politics was more interesting for me than Oscar's route.

Callum's route felt really rushed, particularly in how it dealt with the romance conflict between Callum and Oscar. I liked the story and resolution of Gaston's route, but the lack of romance in it disappointed me.

I'm OK with the price, though. It's got a lot of nice art in it (except the backgrounds, which are kinda fugly), and I agree with you that the music is just great. I'm also a big fan of the protagonist, and would love to see more of the setting in a future game.

EDIT: Aaaand it's time for a new icon already, clearly.

I think I'm playing Long Live the Queen wrong, because what I'm really interested in is finding out as much as I can about the supporting cast and determining who Elodie will get married to and what sort of Queen she'll be.

But this means I'm having a hard time getting the stats to survive and still be able to glean the juicy bits of info I crave. So even though it'll make me a cheater-cheater-pumpkin-eater I think I'm going to use those codes, if only so I can actually have options.

I'm really curious about that orange-haired guy who supposedly goes completely dere if you actually complete all of his family-related side quests.

On the Royal Trap.

And moved

I guess; it's just kind of cheap to call that two endings, when there's like two lines of text different between them.

More like 2 paragraphs :P but yeah I suppose it is cheap.

So I FINALLY got around to playing Magical Diary Horse Hall and went through a whole playthrough at once in six hours straight.
It's been awhile since I played a stat-building game. I get this strange appeal from the progression of time, how it goes from the first day of school after summer to a mid-year ball. Can't help but really like that.
I didn't really have a plan on who to romance at first, I was kinda focused on raising my stats first... too bad I didn't realize that if you left any magic stats at 0 by the first exam, you can't take it... I thought I was gonna go after Damien at first, but after awhile, I instead leaned towards Ellen (By the way I love her "narrowed-eye/snarky" sprite so much, I see it and I hear a raaaawr in my mind) so me and demon boy instead had a lot of these kinda-cute friendship moments.

All around, it was pretty fun, the exams were cool, the ending (at least the one I got) was sweet and gosh, I'm probably gonna be spending a lot more time with it. So many achievements...