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Review
This game really shows to me how close the relationship is between westerns and samurai movies (and how much they consciously imitated each other), because it has so much in common with older western films: the old, bitter gunslinger hired to escort the city slicker, always running into outlaws who tested his quickdraw, making acquaintances with local prostitutes and having the one friend from a race that's persecuted, with a lot of bar scenes and the sense of unwashed clothing.
This game focuses mostly on the story and the setting, leaving choices to vary what is written in that set storyline rather than having significant branches that are left unplayed on each route. You are a samurai escorting a young scholar as a bodyguard while simultaneously stepping in to help when called. Partway through the game, you get a big mission you're asked to take care of which I believe extends through the entire series of books (the sixth is coming out soon).
It's a gritty game. It's listed as having mature themes; you kill tons of people and an animal or two in the book, and one of your stats is 'perverted'; it doesn't go into sexual detail or close details (that I found), and doesn't go into huge detail about the blood, so in some ways I found games like Evertree Inn (a fantasy tavern mystery) more mature than this game, but gore and detailed sex aren't my preference in games, so I was happy with that.
I had heard controversy before about the game sexualizing minors, and that is true to a certain extent and definitely feels unnecessary. The minor you're accompanying is set to the gender you like to romance, and, when a girl, is described as being barely over 4 ft tall and having some baby fat. Depending on your choices, your character can be described as teasing her and making her blush by discussing your escapades with older women, and there's a part of the book where your character ogles what turns out to be an (Spoiler - click to show)older version of her. So it kind of skirts around the issue, but it's unpleasant. It's like playing a game where a character keeps thinking about eating his boogers or has the option to pretend to eat a booger. Even if there's no booger eating in the game, why have it at all? It's so small that just 3 or 4 paragraphs would need to be changed to take it out of the book as a whole. It reminds me of reading David Edding's books as a kid where a 40 yr old guy marries a girl he protected her whole life once she hits 18; as a kid I thought, 'huh, I guess that's something that happens in books for adults' but later found out that David Edding locked adopted kids in cages in the basement and beat them so maybe that was just the author being weird.
The other characters are pretty interesting. There's some fantasy racism baked in (your character is racist by default, part of the 'gritty' aspect) and the character of the unfavored race (called 'kondos') is a well-written and interesting nuanced character with a balance of danger and vulnerability. Your companion, when they're allowed to be a kid, has a real fun blend of being obnoxious and helpful, powerful and clumsy.
Overall, the game is like red onions, a very strong flavor that is overpowering but can enhance the flavor of the rest of the dish (being the Choicescript stat system and setting) as a whole.
On a side note, the Japanese is a bit better than life of a sensei, but even as a weak japanese learner I can tell a little bit is off. A mountain pass is called 'pasu' in katakana, and I knew there is no way Japan, a mountain country, wouldn't have a native word for it, and I was right, they're called 'toge' 峠. Similarly, the lion temple was just called 'laion/raion', the romanization for lion, which is the right word for the actual animal, but as a mythological temple I figured it would borrow from the chinese word for lion shi, and looking it up it seems like 獅子 (shishi) would probably be more appropriate.
Anyway, long story short, if you want to play as a greasy drifter with ambiguous morals and a penchant for trouble, this is the game for you.
