Glory of the Self-Styled Diehard Girl Review

Inglorious self-destructive pseudo-erotic trite.

Glory of the Self-Styled Diehard Girl Review
Platform: PC
Developer: Pin-Point
Publisher: LilyGame

So, I don’t know if this was made obvious based on my reviews of games like Press-Switch, Student Transfer, Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme, and Max’s Big Bust, but I am something of a fan of TG fiction. For those unaware, TG fiction is a colloquially defined term that basically refers to a moderately large group of media centered around the alteration of a person’s sex without dilly dallying about the lengthy and arduous procedures that are required to achieve such a thing in the real world.

It can easily be taken into a wide variety of directions, such as for comical effect, to provide introspective discoveries, or be used in stories that question the concept of identity, self, and so forth. But I’ll be honest and say that most of it is geared towards the fetishistic. Glorifying the idea, sexualizing it, and using it as a basis to allow people to get off.  Since it is so common, I am unsuspectingly very familiar with these more fetishistic examples, and despite being able to admit that the majority of this kind of fiction is, well, bad, yet I regularly follow it, specifically in the field of independent doujin manga.

Why do I do this? Because for every 5 single-chapter stories about a dude getting turned into a woman before he is raped on a train, there is usually something decent. And for every 30 stories, there is usually something like Turned into a Breast Milk Fountain, Trans Venus, Oh! Parallel School, the mostly progressive Change-H series, or the 600 page erotic literary epics of Michael Keikaku and Seitenkango Shinyuu to. Stuff that is at the very least entertaining and memorable, if not genuinely good.

Anyways, I bring this up because Glory of a Self-Style Direhard Girl is basically one of these fetishistic hentai doujins if it was turned into a visual novel that randomly popped up on Steam because Valve does not believe in reviewing the games on their service. Seeing as how the game did not so much as work with English PCs at launch, and the provided screenshots read like a loggerzed story given how poorly translated they were, I knew this game was going to be some breed of a trashy H-game. Though, even I did not expect it would be quite this bad.

Kaoru Kunizawa is a young man who desires to become “the man in man” and prides himself as a masculine yet virtuous “self-styled” individual who makes his living doing midnight oddjobs and defends his school from the negative influences of drug dealers and gang rapists. That is until one day when he, in a very Yusuke Urameshi move, defends a ball chasing child from getting hit by a car. But instead of becoming a spirit detective and buddying up with a witch girl, he becomes an experiment for Professor Moriyama, who saves his life, and somehow gives him a completely biologically female body… somehow.

With this comes a series of growing pains for Kaoru as he tries to maintain his masculinity despite how openly feminine his body is . This results in roughly an hour of typical, yet reasonable, antics surrounding him getting teased by his friends and being taken under the wings of some of the girls in his class to learn how to better present himself as female. However, just as I was starting to think that this visual novel might be somewhat worthwhile, it pulls and X-Change Alternative and quickly devolves into a carousel of rape scenes wherein Kaoru is unable to fight back against his rapists.

This is partially due to Kaoru’s reduced strength, something he never tries to remedy or improve upon. Ergo, he’s an idiot. The morals that Kaoru follows, which he blatantly misinterprets in order to justify a flimsy reason for him to provide his friends with fellatio. Ergo, he’s an idiot.  Along with an internally explicit and narratively extreme example of what I dub the Tiresias effect, in reference to the Greek mythological figure who experienced sex as both a man and a women, and said that the female orgasm is ten times better. Ergo, he’s the protagonist of a rubbish TG fetish story.

Throughout the game, Karou’s successive rapings by the hands of his incredibly cruel and greedy malcontents that he dubs friends, he transforms into a masochistic nymphomaniac who needs to fill his orifices with penises several times a day in order to continue functioning. Which ultimately leads Kaoru to pursue a love hotel trip with a random stranger, who chokes him as they have sex until they both cum a certain number of times. Kaoru pees on the bed, the man takes pictures of it so he can sell them online, and then credits.

Yeah, the game does not even have the audacity to end properly, and instead cuts things off at what appears to have been the halfway point, and upon looking through the Steam forums, they literally cut out the ending from the original Japanese release of this game so they could sell it as part of a sequel. If all of this sounds like poorly constructed tripe being shoveled by people who barely know what they’re doing, that is only because it is. But wait, that’s not all! In addition to being a disgusting display of horribly justified rape driven fetish fuel that likely would not even please the sorts of people who like this genre, the game also features a very poor translation full of minor, occasionally funny errors, and was obviously not proofread.

I genuinely do not understand how makers of 3 hour long kinetic visual novels like this and Crystal City can justify not proofreading or editing their English versions before they are shipped. It is a sign of inconsistent laziness that is best exemplified by how the game has an issue with text wrapping, where words trail off between lines of the textbox, except for half of a chapter wherein the lines are properly broken up and spread apart to prevent this from happening. I do not like throwing around rhetoric about lazy devs, but the only other explanation I have here is some of the most glaring incompetence I have ever seen.

Oh, and as for the writing of the game, particularly the sex scenes? It is about as terrible as one can expect.  Rather than focusing on deeper and contemplative descriptions that try to make things seem erotic, showing care and consideration and things play out like a believable fashion, the translator’s grasp of English is too loose to compose anything approaching prose, and the script involves a back and forward that reads like the following:

“I am going to have the rough nasty sex with you, you whore!”
“Huh ah un ♥ Do me harder!”
Boff boff….. boff!
“You like my penis, dontcha?”
“Ah uh ♥ uhhh ♥ I like putting your penis in my vagina!”

As for the presentation, it runs the spectrum of quality. The game uses blurred photo backgrounds. The only character sprites are those of male and female Kaoru, who each only have one pose, both of which look about average. The CGs, which originally depicted sexual acts of some sort, have been cropped to free the game of all nudity in an attempt to sell it on Steam, as it presumably is too hard to pixelate the naughty bits (it really isn’t).

Much to my surprise, the music used throughout the game, while often absent, is fairly nice and a step above from what I would have anticipated, and the game also contains partial voice acting for female Kaoru.  The voice actress for, Misonoo Mei, is an experienced adult visual novel VA who brings in far more effort and quality to this game than it really deserves, and is clearly well versed in auditorily peddling this type of content.  But then there are the sec scenes, where the script tells her to constantly moan and… boy does that get old fast.

Glory of the Self-Style Diehard Girl is a visual novel that I went into expecting for it to effectively be a game adaptation of a bad TG doujin manga, and it is, but it’s somehow worse than that.  The translation, abrupt ending, and often abysmal storytelling make for a title that is genuinely hard to enjoy, or even focus on.  Having completed it, I am left feeling that the contents of this game are genuinely devoid of anything of worth, and that it deserves the obscurity it currently possesses thank to how thoroughly buried it is on Steam.

Also, while I used him as a negative example in the intro, the work of loggerzed is actually delightfully dark and twisted. I would genuinely recommend checking it out if you have a stomach for Russian to English machine translations.

Edit: Since posting this review, this game has been removed from Steam, probably because somebody reported the developers for advertising the game with screenshots not included in the released version, and called the game Glory of the Self-Styled Diehard Bitch on its store banner.

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