Casual Romance Club

Every Casual Romance Club has its slut.Game Concept: It's hard to imagine a game that's more of a mess than Casual Romance Club. The game has no installation, you just insert the disc and several windows containing a confusion of random info related to the game are vomited across your desktop all at once. It took me several seconds of staring before I realized that I was already playing the game. Part of this might be the number of windows floating on my desktop, but I think the majority is owed to the positively insane choice of fonts the game uses. Roughly half of the text in the game is borderline illegible thanks to the font being some mixture of the alphabet and a river. It's not just hard to judge where one letter ends and the next begins, they actually fucking overlap, making reading the words in this text-heavy game a tedious struggle. If the government ever wants the national literacy rate lowered here they could just hand out copies of Casual Romance Club; the only game I have ever played that makes me think the alphabet is made out of hatred.

The concept of Casual Romance Club is that you're the popular kid at school and are asked by your unpopular friend to join a club where 16 girls want to date you. Sounds like a pretty good club, right? Incorrect. The club actually consists of you going to a café six days a week and talking endlessly to the girls about flower arrangements, how much they like you, and a variety of topics so inane and difficult to read that you'll be reaching for a loaded pistol ten minutes after you put the disc in. Assuming you suppress your suicidal urges you will be given the opportunity to ask out the girls you chat with in one of two ways. The first way is a more casual "let's go do something now" where you stroll around doing something stupid and get to battle your way through reading a whole new conversation on a whole new inane topic. The other way is to give them a "date coupon".

There are five weeks in the club, and although you will wish there were negative ten weeks in the club you have a coupon to hand out each week. You don't have to give it out, but if you want to advance your relationship with one of the girls you'd better woo and then hope she accepts your invitation. Spend too much time chatting with the other ladies and they will turn you down. More confusingly, some of them will seemingly turn you down for not chatting ENOUGH with the other ladies. I would call it a Catch 22 but since it turned out most of the hot action in the special dates was just more inane chatter I guess I should be thankful that they have difficult standards.

And it also has a "nice one".During the first few days of Casual Romance Club, the club is still attracting new ladies, so you'll only be able to chat with a handful of the total during that time. Since she was there from the outset I selected a redhead by the name of Charlotte as the woman I intended to romance. I chatted her up day after day, finding out that she enjoyed such things as flower arrangement and learning tennis. We spent many an afternoon shopping, walking around the park, or just hanging out. Some days she was preoccupied with other tasks and I was forced to the growing collection of other women. Finally the time came that I had to give someone a date coupon. Naturally I offered it to Charlotte, but she mystifyingly refused my affections and suggested I chat more with her chipper and irritating friend.

The sadness welled inside me like a volcano full of mournful lava, threatening to burst and reduce the town built on my romantic desires into a monument of shadows and dust frozen forever in time. Once again my hand drifted towards the loaded revolver I always keep on my desk in case of emergencies and once again I managed to quell the civil war raging within my brain.

Instead of ending my hideous existence on this cursed and blackened earth, I opted to change my selection of lady to woo. Trading in the friendly but apparently mercurial Charlotte I decided to win the affections of Amy. My formative relationship with Amy quickly introduced me to another of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of the game. Amy liked to talk about the other girls in the club, because she constantly worried that one of them would steal me away from her. Rather than referring to them by their name she referred to them by their hidden Japanese name which is only viewable in small text in their profiles. Combine this with the fact that their vowel-laden Japanese names looked like a compressed barcode and you've got a delicious recipe for conversational apathy. Oh, who are you jealous of Amy, ||||||||||? I am SO not talking to her!

And who could forget the girl who is crazy about you and likes to be groped in the park.Things seemed to be progressing quite well for Amy and myself in our new casual romance. She repeatedly begged me to ask her out on a date, chatted about subjects that caused me eyestrain, and ultimately accepted my first date coupon after only a few days talking together. For our first date we went out together and then I low-level groped her in the park. Ahhhhh, young love! Our romance heated up quickly and before I knew it she was eating date coupons like Pac Man at the scene of a power pellet tanker truck accident.

Casual Romance Club is the first hentai game I have played with an English dub track of any relevance to the game. There have been a couple that included a few English words here and there, but CRC has big chunks of dialogue recorded in English including ALL of the dialogue during the sex scenes. The English audio acting is performed by Japanese women who are phonetically reading English dialogue to predictably hilarious effect. The women are bad at pronouncing words and they have no idea about how to act in a foreign language other than to recite the dialogue that they don't even comprehend. Worse (or better) still, the dialogue is pretty poorly translated, which means that everything is in half-broken English and often doesn't make sense at all. If you've ever seen the movie "The 5th Element", just imagine Milla Jovovich's character acting like a robot and trying to pronounce "please cum for me" and "fill my hole up, oh yes".

Meanwhile, back in the budding romance between myself and Amy, the duration of the Casual Romance Club was nearly up and I was told that I would have one final ticket to give to a girl of my choosing. It was a way of continuing our incredibly rich relationship of love hotel mosaics and conversations about how much she worships me beyond the bounds of the CRC. On the final day of the club I handed Amy the ticket fully expecting her to swoon since all she did was talk about how much she liked me. Much to my surprise she did not accept my ticket and insisted that I had spent too much time cavorting with the other girls in the club. Heartbroken by the sudden dissolution of what I had assumed was an undying relationship between myself and Amy, I slunk from girl to girl offering them the ticket and getting rejected. Eventually the game decided that time was up and with a whimper my experience with Casual Romance Club came to an end.

Difficulty: Casual Romance Club is not particularly difficult, but it has an extremely steep learning curve thanks to the large number of mostly useless interface windows it throws at you when you first load the game. Hooray, a map of the city that I can't navigate by any means! Information about where I am including snack ideas! Once you manage to get your rapin' sea legs and steady yourself on the deck of the SS "Thank You Please Cum In Towards My Pussy Ohhhhh", you'll find that the gameplay does not differ very much from most hentai games. The difficulty you will face is mostly a case of the usual tedium of hentai games compounded by the retarded font the game uses.

As an added reward you can actually read the text during the ending!Defining Moment: I'm going to have to declare a tie. One half of the defining moment of Casual Romance Club goes to the moment I stuck the game in my DVD drive and it loaded, without an installation, and started shooting windows full of garbled text at me like a shotgun blast. This moment is tied with the first sex scene with Amy, which took the scattered Engrish audio from earlier scenes and condensed it into an awkward and hilarious radio play from crazytown. Even the audio was not without its share of problems though, and it frequently cut out mid-sentence which made for a disappointing and unfulfilling chuckle fest.

Final Thoughts: Casual Romance Club scores points - or at least reduces its negative score - on two counts; they tried to have English audio and their no-nonsense "pick from the harem and woo" system almost worked. While it isn't buggy to the annoying extent that say Brave Soul was, it features so many bad technical decisions and weird little glitches that it seems like even more of a mess. The fact that it has so many windows providing you with totally useless information is a prime example of how the game just feels cobbled together like a bunch of people just briefly discussed what might be a good idea to include in a hentai game and then never bothered to refine their choices beyond that. In a game that relies so heavily on text the choice of fonts is inexcusable. One last detail worth mentioning is that the game had fantastic packaging. These days the packaging for PC games has gotten so anemic that it's not really a surprise when you open a game box and find the CDs in paper envelopes, a registration card, and a tiny manual with everything else stored in PDFs on disc. With Casual Romance club you get a full jewel case inside of an oversized box along with a large full color manual that is hardcover.