Casual Romance Club

The Good
The first thing you'll notice about Casual Romance Club, apart from its rather high $70 price tag (at the time of this writing), is its no-expenses-spared packaging. From the oversized box to the full-color hardcover (!) manual, this is a title that wants to be noticed.

CRC is the first bishoujo game to feature dialogue recorded in English, and to my knowledge is also the first to feature an English translation done by the developers themselves. In that respect, the game could be considered a huge experiment. Over 50 bishoujo games are released every month in Japan, but very few of them are picked up by Western publishers and translated. If more publishers pick up on the idea of translating games in-house, we may see more bishoujo games overseas. This would be a good thing for fans. While many (perhaps most) bishoujo games are staggeringly mediocre, some are excellent - and I'm sure that all of the excellent ones don't make it over here.

CRC's strong points are its graphics and character designs, and innovative gameplay mechanic.

The concept is fairly simple: The Casual Romance club meets in a cafe every day after school. It is a place where young men and women can meet each other and explore romance casually, without fear of rejection. You look through a roster book containing pictures of and information about each girl. Once you have picked someone, you can invite her to have a short private chat in which you get to know each other a little. If you like her, you can ask her to go on an "instant date" with you after the club meeting is over. If you really like her, you can ask her to reserve a Saturday or Sunday to go out on a real date. The CRC ends in four weeks. If you play your cards right, maybe your romance will become something more than just casual. And that's basically it. The game is essentially meant to be a "dating simulator".

As previously mentioned, the graphics and character designs are beautiful. With twelve girls to choose from, you are certain to find someone who appeals. While the "typical schoolgirl" types tended to bleed together a little, there are still six or seven characters that are truly unique and avoid the usual bishoujo game stereotypes. My personal favorite was Sophie, the soon-to-be college grad. While the main in-game illustrations are pretty run of the mill, the beginning and ending illustrations are gorgeous. They look like pencil sketches with airbrushed color. You might want to see each girl's ending just to get a look at the wonderful illustrations, although I don't think I've seen half of the endings yet.

The Bad
If the idea of English voice acting sounds good to you, don't get too excited. It's not good. That may be a turnoff for some, but I personally didn't care as I play bishoujo games with the sound turned off anyway.

Also, some may dislike the fact that that the game retains mosaics on certain body parts during the sex scenes. I didn't mind, and thought the mosaics were tastefully done. For me, they didn't take away from the game. The artwork for these scenes is excellent, although the dialogue is humorously lacking.

With 12 girls, each with her own back story, illustrations, and bilingual dialogue, you can probably imagine that this game doesn't have a lot to offer story-wise. I probably would have preferred to narrow down the game's cast a bit in favor of a more interesting story. The girls have interesting personalities, but they come off seeming very two-dimensional because you don't really get to know any of them. This makes the game feel like it has a lot of breadth, but very little depth. The game features an extremely high level of interactivity, but you never get the feeling that your choices mean very much.

Also, the game save system doesn't seem to work right. The game autoplays as soon as you insert the DVD-ROM, and obviously something is written to your registry, because it remembers your name. However, as soon as the game ends, the gallery saving all of your scenes with a particular girl is erased. Each girl has several hidden scenes which can only be unlocked if you make a particular choice on a particular day, but you will never know if you've seen each scene unless you use a walkthrough, killing would should have been excellent replay value. Also, the game has no text skipping function aside from holding down the space bar, meaning that you'll have to watch the long and boring opening each time you play the game.

The Bottom Line
As a bishoujo game, Casual Romance Club is better than average, but not great. As a dating simulator, I think the game falls short because you end up feeling like you are hunting and pecking for the right choice in a dialogue tree in order to see the next cut scene rather than actually getting to know any of the characters. That's too bad, because some of the characters are more interesting than in most bishoujo games.

Casual Romance Club is recommended, but I would wait until the price comes down some more. For the current price, you could get two great bishoujo games instead of one pretty good one.