Scorching hot days, scorching hot babes~!
Doukyuusei: Bangin’ Summer Review
Platform: PC(Reviewed), Nintendo Switch, PS4
Developer: Elf Co., Ltd., Fanza Games, DiGination, and Silky’s Plus
Publisher: Shiravune
This review is based on the Steam version of Doukyuusei: Bangin’ Summer with the official 18+ patch installed.
Bangin’ Background
In the lineage of dating sims, visual novels, and Japanese adventure games, there are few titles that warrant as much recognition as Doukyuusei. Released for the PC-98 at the tail-end of 1992 by burgeoning adult game developer ELF Corporation, the title was a trailblazer in its era. Featuring developed character-specific storylines complete with arcs and key events. Delving into a deluge of different subject matter across a staggering fourteen pursuable heroines. And featuring a frothing deluge of adventure game and life sim elements with its explorable town map and ticking clock. The title went on to inspire and influence a countless number of developers, and its impact on swaths of the Japanese games industry cannot be understated.
Like many successful games of its era Doukyuusei, received a deluge of ports, alterations, and enhancements over the years. From FM Towns to PC Engine to Saturn and even a 1999 Windows port with new artwork and an updated script. All before receiving another remake for Windows in 2021, which in 2022 would become the first version of Doukyuusei available in English. A full recreation complete with, entirely new artwork, new music, new UX, and an easy mode to make the game more palatable to modern audiences. It’s not as historically pertinent as a port or fan translation of the original, but the core’s still there, and from what I have gathered, the 2021 remake is considered the best way to play the game.
I would love to highlight some of the changes and alterations these successive versions brought, but I cannot find any truly comprehensive source for most of these changes. Similarly, I lack a detailed source for what the 2021 remake changed compared to prior versions, though I have seen multiple sources say that the 2021 version is based on the script of the 1999 remake, with some further changes. With said 1999 remake having altered some overtly perverted scenes in the original and adding to existing themes.
This lack of comprehensive comparison is partially because Doukyuusei (1992)‘s nature as an adult game has limited the realms It’s allowed to exist within— thanks to cowardly and power-lusting corporations. And because the game was largely known by reputation in the Anglosphere prior to its 2021 remake. …Which I say as if the game made a splash with its English release, when I don’t really think it did. There are surprisingly few reviews, articles, or videos on the title across the English internet. Heck, I could only find one full English playthrough of the title, and searching for Doukyuusei is more likely to bring up a boy’s love anime film of the same name.
This state of affairs only gives me further reason to talk about the game, as the people need to know about Doukyuusei.
Hot Days, Hotter Babes
Doukyuusei follows Takurou, a high school student enjoying the last summer break of his life. After working his butt off at the start of his break, he has three weeks with nothing else to do but chase after girls, make summer memories, and maybe find the love of his life along the way. A goal that sees him bop across his hometown of Sakimake, getting into various flavors of trouble as his relationship to his classmates and acquaintances blossoms into something more.
The game is highly open-ended, lacking the linear structure of most modern Japanese romance games. The player can freely pursue or ignore characters as they go about town and the days trickle by as dozens of events fill up each day. Character stories intersect and cross, with secretive variables influencing them in an opaque web, while still giving the player enough leeway to juggle several romances between fourteen unique heroines. An idea that sounds ambitious in the modern day, let alone in 1992, but an idea like this sinks or flies based on its writing and characterization. Two areas where Doukyuusei not only succeeds, but thrives.
Let’s start with the protagonist. Takurou is an irreverent horndog who kicks off the summer only caring about babes and bangin’. He’s a prototypical pervert protagonists in many senses, but one who teeters on the more comedic sort, using his occasional bumbling nature and knack for humor to defuse situations and endear himself to both the player and characters around him. It’s a fine line to walk, but Takurou is written with enough grace to prevent him from becoming a sex pest, and as the story goes on, as he forms more meaningful relationships with the women around him, his desires shift. Going from a character hungry for sex and good times into someone who expresses genuine care and compassion for those around him. …Well, depending on your choices.
Despite looking the part to be a blank slate protagonist, this level of characterization makes Takurou a key part of the Doukyuusei experience, and I really appreciated his presence. He brings appreciated levity to tense moments, generally knows where to stop, and his quips made me audibly laugh dozens of times during my playthrough. Broadly speaking, he’s the sort of guy I would have liked to be friends with back in high school.
This level of characterization and consideration is carried over to the expansive cast of fourteen heroines Takurou can pursue. Characters who are all based in some pre-existing archetype, but have enough going for them— enough backstory, spice, or broader characterization— to make them all interesting in their own right. Take, for example, the cover girl of Doukyuusei, Mai.
Mai is an idyllic, demure, rich beauty who seems perfect in every way and is the only girl Takurou holds in high enough regard to not perv out on her. (For the most part.) However, she is denied the freedom to be her own person, or be treated as just a regular girl by those around her. Everybody at school presents her as a school idol, when she just wants to be treated like a regular person, not just some precious princess or doll meant to live up to someone else’s ideal. A reality she’s routinely subjected to by her controlling father, who dictates her schedule and interests, even during summer vacation. And her self-imposed fiancé, the rich asshole Kenji, who is a major character in his own right. She wants to be around someone who cuts loose, embodies the freedom and carefree youth she desires. Someone like Takurou. And the more time she spends with Takurou, the more willing she is to break free from the rigid rules that have defined her life for as long as she can remember.
Or Kurumi, a reserved young woman who starts as the girlfriend of Takurou’s less charismatic and funny best friend, Kazuya. But as she fails to live up to Kazuya’s expectations, refusing to progress at his pace, their relationship falls apart, Kazuya pursues the bizarrely maternal Natsuko, leaving Kurumi dejected. She’s desperate to attain the maturity that she is told she should have, to become a woman, and pursues a radical solution. This not only leads her to rapidly mature, but she become a powerful, perhaps even dominant, sexual figure while still retaining her good girl looks. She starts as a reserved daddy’s girl, but ends the summer as a tease who is more than open to sex after something broke inside her.
Though, there are also some more straightforward characters to balance out the cast. Such as the elusive Reiko, a ‘classic J-babe’ lonely housewife-next-door whose traditional marriage to her distant, constantly traveling, husband has left her feeling isolated from the world. She’s desperate for genuine affection from someone who recognizes her needs. So when this strapping young lad comes by to help and chat with her, offering her kindness she had not felt in so long, all it takes is an erotic tumble for her to let him inside.
Then there’s the enigmatic, secondary, sexy nurse, Yayoi, who is a puzzle to encounter, requiring all sorts of encounter manipulation and an elaborate lie about being impotent before she is willing to become friends with Takurou. A friendship that starts as an offshoot of a storyline where Takurou needs to get checked for an STD after a fling with another character. Then, the story pivots into one about the need to accept real women’s flaws, acknowledge their beauty for what it is, and not hold them up to an impossible ideal. …Only to then conclude with an epilogue capturing the universal desire to become an acclaimed game designer with a hot wife. This game just goes places like that.
I can see every heroine being someone’s favorite— a mighty accomplishment for any game of this scope— and all offer a satisfying storyline, complete with at least one enjoyable sex scene to commemorate their relationship with a satisfying climax. Everybody has an arc, everybody has a daily life, everybody has troubles, and everybody is given adequate screen presences. This presence is split between key events that allow Takurou and the women to share heartfelt moments, and oodles of smaller supplemental scenes that further their character. Their personality, desires, and background. For as trite as I might make this sound, you truly get to know these characters, and there is reason to love every one of them.
This same care and attention is also offered to the three male characters who the player will find bopping about in their journey, and all of them embed themselves in at least one heroine’s route. There’s Takurou’s best friend Kazuya, who wants to be as much as a lady’s man as his bro, but lacks the same charisma and restraint, turning him into a comedic yet tragic figure. Kenji, a platonic ideal of a rich asshole who gets into routine verbal sparring matches with Takurou throughout the game, propping himself up for his wealth and good looks, while having wafer-thin defenses to any disrespectful comment. And Tarou, an overly studious stick-in-the-mud who begins as a character for Takurou to mercilessly dunk on. Yet even this fat jawed dweebenheimer is given his own crisis of fate as after he gets stung by the love bug.
In trying to describe what I most like about Doukyuusei, I keep going back to the word sincerity. It very well could have just been an eroge focused on cheap thrills and sex. The fantasy of being a big-dick baller in a town full of bombshell babes who are fixin’ to fuck. But that’s not what the game ultimately is. It is a game about connections, about getting to know these people, trying to help them, and finding love along the way. It’s a teenage boy fantasy, full of crass comments, cheesecake moments, sexist snippets, and ample opportunities to ogle hot anime babes, sure. But it never forgets that these characters are people, and treats them as such.
It’s a careful balance that the game does not always maintain— I’m not going to bat for the Miho movie theater scene. (It has a greater purpose, but if somebody nopes out of the game then and there, I get it.) But for something this old, something that would have every reason to feature flat, blasé characters and bland storylines, this is impressive. Hell, I think it has more nuance and character depth than some modern romance games. At the very least, it has more edge.
Uttering this praise, I also need to share some with the uncredited English localization team, who did a wonderful job, making Doukyuusei such a funny, engaging, and carefully composed work. Just from reading the script and listening to the voice acting, I can tell it is not the most literal translation, yet I can read between the lines enough to see this as a respectful adaptation. One that understand the goal of localizing a work is not to copy the literal meanings of the word, but to capture the voice of the writer. The careful word choices, use of slang, and high characterization of the dialogue make the game a delight to read through, and turn every new encounter into a reward in and of itself. Because I want to see what conversational shenanigans and wordplay the characters will get up to next. Admittedly, it’s not a perfect localization— I saw more than a few awkward lines and errors in the script— but that’s just something that just happens when localizing niche games like this.
In terms of its story aspects, I have nothing but love for a lot of what Doukyuusei does. I love how it lets the player juggle relationships in a single playthrough, even if that necessitates lying to girls with only occasional consequences. I love how every ending offers a substantial look into the characters’ future, seeing the wildly varying directions Takurou’s life can go as he decides the girl he wants to spend the rest of his life with.
I even love how all of this is supposed with peripheral weirdness. Like the quiz houses that unlock random H-scenes you can stumble across if you know where and when to look. The fairies who are scattered about the town and reward eagle-eyed players with bonus cash. The old weirdos peppered across town who offer to manipulate time or intuit advice based on Takurou’s semen. And how Takurou will just sometimes break the fourth wall. It is a game with no shame, no reservations, and is confident in being itself, with all that entails.
This Ain’t No Visual Novel! (But I Wish It Was…)
If Doukyuusei were a visual novel, it would be gunning for an all-timer verified classic status. But Doukyuusei is not a visual novel. Instead, it is an adventure game, proto dating sim, and life sim. One with a particular flavor and cryptic structure that has earned it a fair share of criticism, and that is not undeserved. For historical context, Doukyuusei was created before the idea of a visual novel, and the term, was established. Chunsoft just released Otogirisou (1992) a few months beforehand, and what an adventure game could or should be was a field full of rampant experimentation. There were no rules, no standards, and this game was a trailblazer in many ways, including gameplay.
The core gameplay of Doukyuusei has the player move Takurou across Sakimake, the nightlife district of Yabuki, and the innards of the academy via an overhead perspective. Whenever the player enters one of two-dozen-ish structures, time progresses by 15 minutes, and applicable events play out. If a character is in that location at that time, a scene will play out, flags will be set, and the perspective will shift to a first-person Japanese adventure game. Complete with a cursor to interact with the environment for flavor text and story progression. Some events will eat up extra time, will trigger subsequent events across the map, or will make way for new events to occur in these locations.
Managing where and when these events take place is the core gamey aspect of Doukyuusei, and it’s kind of a pain in the ass. The game requires scheduling, intuiting, and guessing where characters are, wandering around, and learning when and where certain characters might show up. You need to check the school, parks, coffee house, love hotel, train station, stores, and the exterior of homes in order to trigger certain encounters. And, unless these triggers are met, then you could be locked out of certain storylines.
If one were to play through the game this way, with no external resources, the game would qualify as a prison game in my book. But it is important to recognize that the game was not made for this context. Adventure games were always designed around players sharing information to get through. Magazines shared tips and tricks for a cheap price. Friend groups and computer shop regulars would talk about games to share insights. Players were expected to take notes and solve these games like the puzzles they are. These games were meant to last weeks, perhaps months, rather than hours.
These are the reason why adventure games of the 80s and 90s were so damn cryptic. Because they were meant to last a long-time and wanted you to explore them, not just chew through them. This design became less desirable with the rise of the internet, the influx of user created walkthroughs, and is part of the reason why classic adventure games ‘died’ in the late 90s, replaced with more direct story-focused affairs.
That all being said, I do not like this design methodology. I think it is frustrating, makes a walkthrough mandatory for most modern players, and encourages blind experimentation, rather than hypothesis forging.
The 2021 remake attempts to address this criticism with the introduction of an easy/casual mode that tells you when the next key event for each of the heroines will happen, even letting you warp to them. This is a great accessibility feature, as is the tagging of dialogue options so you know what will increase or decrease character affection. However, it is far from a perfect solution, and drove me insane when I tried playing the game at first. This is because of how certain events are locked behind other events, something the easy mode does not make clear. This mechanical confusion, combined with how day one is the busiest day of the game, by far, makes for a rocky first impression. It was so bad that I thought the Steam version of the game, or the 18+ patch I installed, was broken. I had to buy a second version on JAST to prove that I was not insane.
Instead, it turned out that I needed to leave the school to meet Tarou before I could go to the school pool to meet with Mai. …Even though Mai is the cover girl and first encounter on the relationship calendar added in the 2021 remake.
Cryptic malarkey like this led me to seek out a step-by-step walkthrough I could follow, and I ultimately came across one from a site named GameGill. This walkthrough was monumentally helpful, but it has some formatting, grammar, and sequence issues that made it harder to use, and unreliable at times. So I decided that I would be part of the solution by modifying the GameGill walkthrough and create a 100% walkthrough for Doukyuusei: Bangin’ Summer. A walkthrough that I have also uploaded to Steam. Use it, redistribute it, and do whatever you want with it, and hopefully you will be able to get through the game, seeing the lion’s share of what it has to offer, following, like, 1,200 steps to get there. It sounds daunting, but as someone who spent a good 15 hours editing, testing, and updating this walkthrough, I firmly believe the story and writing are compelling enough to warrant this not-so-fun navigation.
Were they good enough to warrant making this walkthrough? Eh, I’d argue that creating a walkthrough— not to be confused with a flowchart— for any game is a good way to sap your love of it. But somebody’s gotta do it!
I have created a solution, though I still want to criticize the game for a few odd choices it makes. The easy mode only tells the player when a heroine is in a certain location. For characters in a static position, like the school nurse Mako or her drugstore owning sister, Ako, they spend 80% of their work hours at one location, but the game always displays their icon with two exclamation marks. Like there is a new event to see, even when there isn’t. Furthermore, encounters with the girls can be blocked if there is a requite encounter with Kazuya, Kenji, or Tarou, who lack any map markers. This would be understandable if they had only a few events, but no, these guys all have at least 25 events each, as many as the heroines, more than certain heroines. I get that people would not play the game to get to know these guys— even though I like these losers— but this is just a design oversight.
The remake team should have known better. …And I think they might have learned their lesson when they remade Doukyuusei 2 last year. At least based on this video that shows a male character on the map… and ends by featuring some scans of a step-by-step walkthrough. (I just find the strangest things sometimes.)
Going back to the original version’s design quirks, Doukyuusei positions itself as a full-on life sim by including a 24 hour clock and character schedule system, but it gives the player nothing much to do at night. They can wander the streets, ring doorbells for hints and flavor text, interact with a few otherwise useless locations for pocket change, and find some secret HCG events involving non-characters, but that’s about it. Sleep and restfulness are not mechanics one needs to worry about, and Takurou can just stay up for 400+ hours straight if you want him to.
The money mechanic was a deliberate design decision, and there is a story reason why Takurou starts with 50,000 yen in his pocket, but the game does not give the player much to spend on. Besides date specific amusement park tickets, movie tickets, or love hotel fare, and routine train fees, there is not anything you can buy. Well, aside from paying to move the clock forward, but why do that when sleeping is free? The quiz houses and fairies give the player about 35,000 extra yen to play with, and a conspicuous Easter egg gives then another 10,000 yen, but you don’t actually need that to get through the game either. It’s just a weirdly balanced mechanic that never becomes an issue, yet remains a consistent part of the HUD.
Anything else— oh, right. Doukyuusei has the worst walking I have ever seen in a video game.
What the hell does that mean? Well, you know that when playing an overhead, top-down view game, up, right, left, and down all move the character in those directions? Yeah, Doukyuusei does not always do that. The map is largely divided into narrow corridors, but pressing the wrong direction will move you in another direction. When you hold right can’t move right, Takurou will move up. When you hold up and can’t move up, Takurou will move right. When you hold down and can’t move down, Takurou will move right. And when you hold left and can’t move left, Takurou will move up. WHY? Why have it work this way? It makes is soooo easy to accidentally walk to the wrong location, and does against a decade of established game design wisdom circa 1992. Don’t have the right key make you go up!
Furthermore, the overworld map makes the, frankly wrong, decision to reprise the screen jittering of the the PC-98 in the 2021 remake and… no. It makes movement feel awkward, makes the game look immediately dated, and just makes navigation harder. It feels like something behind the scenes is wrong. There’s good retro flavor, and then there’s whatever this is.
Admittedly, navigation is not a deal breaker. You can just have little Takurou run across the map to a destination once it’s registered, and if you accidentally go into the wrong place at the wrong time, you can time travel by opening up the log menu and clicking the J icon to jump back in time. It’s like turning every line of dialogue into a quicksave that’s lost upon returning to the main menu. That is a great quality of life feature added in this remake. …But why does movement work like this? Somebody had to shake the director over this decision!
Classic Composition with Modern Methods
The original Doukyuusei (1992) captures the immaculate vibes that were prevalent across the PC-98 systems. They capture the aesthetic height of early 90s anime, the slight jankiness of early computer graphics, and feature some absolutely inspired framing. I love the outfits, love the styles, love the way the image manages to shine with a limited color palette, and am still befuddled why the indie scene has not run with this aesthetic. It’s only mildly harder than drawing normal anime images.
However, Bangin’ Summer sadly does not let you toggle between the old art, not for the PC-98, or the pretty good looking 1999 Windows version (this was the best gameplay video I could find). Instead, all the artwork was redrawn, and the results are… good. The illustrious, shading, revised poses, and updated character designs are all high quality. The CGs are gorgeously detailed. And the game is thoroughly faithful to the composition of the original or subsequent releases. It lacks a certain edge found in those releases, and some of the color changes don’t quite do it for me, but that’s the worst I could say about the new character art.
Though, the backgrounds are a bit murkier, often looking as if they were upscaled, rather than being illustrated around a 1080×1920 resolution. Certain details are blurred, background NPCs were designed to match the PC-98 original a bit too much that they look more like wax figurines than people. I think the intention might be to make the backgrounds look more painterly, but I’ve become sensitive to this murkiness over recent years as it became emblematic to a recent ‘art’ trend that I hope dies down soon.
As for the music, the remake features a newly arranged score, without the option to use the 1992 PC-98 soundtrack or 1999 Windows soundtrack, which I feel is a less questionable choice. You don’t have the same interactive or aspect ratio issues you have with the older artwork. Having listened to all three of the soundtracks a fair bit, I think I like the 1999 the most. It was taking advantage of CD quality sound fonts, and while it still sounds a bit MIDI, it also has a lot more range in its score, capturing more sounds and lacking the same harsh transition between higher and lower notes.
The remake lacks the same variety, instead taking inspiration from the PC-98 version, creating this remastered retro soundtrack that… I think is a bit too upbeat and high-pitched for my liking. Maybe I just listened to the town theme of the remake too much. (I absolutely did.) It’s not bad, but not something I would listen to outside of the game, where it is paired with some top notch voice work. It’s all in Japanese, so I cannot judge it too much, but all the actors bring a lot to their roles, bring the characters to life, and display a wide range of emotions that adds to their character. I just wish that Takurou was voiced, because I can only imagine how much bravado a good actor could give to some of his zingers.
However, one area where I feel the remake is an undisputed winner is with the overworld itself. It is this lovingly detailed pixelated rendition of Japanese city and suburban life, with color choices, dithering, and details that inspired my inner sprite artist. It strikes an elusive balance and, well, just looks adorable. …As for the 2000s Flash animation looking character sprites on the overworld, I don’t know decided they were the best fit, but they’re still cute in their own way.
Overall, I would say this is a sufficient rewrapping of the original game. However, as is always the case with visually transformative revision like this, I think it’s best if you try to include everything, rather than only give people the new stuff, regardless of its quality.
Conclusion: Check It Out!
Despite some mechanical frustrations and mild presentational gripes, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Doukyuusei. It’s a classic, feels like a classic, and has such strong writing and characters that it deserves to be a classic. It was an enormous help in furthering my understanding of the Japanese adventure game genre, and I would say its narrative holds up to any modern standard I could impose. I would encourage anybody interested in visual novels as a whole, and more specifically dating sims, to check it out. You’ll learn a lot and should have a swell time!
…Just make sure you check out my walkthrough, because otherwise, you might have a bad time.