Hajimete no Kanojo thoughts

October 9, 2023 by awesomecurry 1 Comment

This is a game that I’m not sure if I can recommend to other people without knowing exactly what they’re looking for, since it’s very far from what I’m normally into. But it’s cool that it got made. I certainly would not have picked it up if I just looked at its promotional material or description, since I don’t have much of an interest in the NTR genre as far as eroge goes (I got interested through the writer’s upcoming incest game). But it’s hard to think of Hajimete no Kanojo’s appeal solely as an NTR game, since it only plays up the netorare plot beats in the first route and by the end of the game one would have spent far more time in the mind of the heroine as she spirals into depression from poverty and the guilt of doing sex work.

The first route is from the point of view of the protagonist, Noriaki, who can’t forget his first love Akino and meets her again at the soapland. He confesses to her and surprisingly, she accepts but suggests that they don’t go “official” until she’s done paying back her debt. This route is set up with typical netorare plot beats but with the catch that Akino is a prostitute and Noriaki is a regular 19 year old college guy who works at the cafe. Him being giddy about getting his first girlfriend (whom he crushed on for 6 years) goes from sweet to painful to watch as he starts falling behind at school and his social life in order to put in more hours at his part time job to get money to order Akino at the soapland. From Noriaki’s POV you experience the process of Akino becoming more distant from him and seemingly regard him less as her bf and more like a customer while getting extremely good at sex (and also changing her look from 清楚 girl to obviously a 水商売 girl)…until the grand NTR reveal where Akino is fucking his boss from the cafe on their birthday. Noriaki’s narration here is fun to read, as he is on max cope and trying to deny that this slutty woman in front of him is the same person as his pure seiso gf…oh but wait she’s literally a prostitute! Was it all his fault for knowingly falling for a prostitute??

After the first route, the next route is from the beginning again but from Akino’s perspective where you can immediately see why she took on sex work despite looking like a seiso ojousama — she’s poor and in debt. She is exhausted and stressed, lives in an apartment complex that loves gossip, and is generally in a mental state that takes damage whenever she sees regular college students her age talk about going on a trip or boomer coworkers trying to make conversation with her while calling her a good girl for working so hard. It’s easy to see the monetary allure of prostitution, but at the same time Akino has been instilled with very traditionalist values as a result of being raised by a single mother who is toxic in ways that are difficult to recognize or actively break out of by yourself–-namely that you shouldn’t be relying on and causing meiwaku to others. If she could survive as a single mother working multiple “normal” jobs without relying on anyone, Akino should too. Akino is thus afflicted with the curse of having to stay an いい子, which torments her for the entire game.

The way the NTR happens is handled pretty carefully. The cafe owner is obviously good at sex, but he also has a perfect understanding of how to break down Akino by telling her that things he’s making her do is just what everyone does, and fully takes advantage of the fact that she’s young and too inexperienced to have a good grasp on the boundaries she should be setting as a prostitute. “Everyone else is doing it” from an older person is an effective spell on someone raised on being an obedient daughter who cares about social stigma and what is normal and acceptable. It’s also not surprising that the main relationship wavers, as Akino is poor, stressed, and lonely while Noriaki is a regular dude who doesn’t have a lot of money and still needs to focus on school work when he falls behind. It’s understandable for Akino to desire his companionship given what she’s going through, but also highly understandable for a regular college guy to have to put a hold on dating activities to try and get a paper done for school and study for exams. The cracks in their relationships are naturally caused by being youngsters in different classes of wealth and life priorities, and it’s difficult to blame either of them. In this route you not only have to go through all of the first route’s eroscenes again from Akino’s POV but also new eroscenes with the cafe owner and also some clients at the soapland, which makes it quite a drag for me since the scenes are quite long. At times it feels like prostitution simulator where she just wakes up, goes to work to blow two dudes, and goes home which is intentional I guess. The narration in the eroscenes are very important to Akino’s character–you see her internal turmoil as she struggles between the concept of being a “good girl” and a “bad girl”, and also get a glimpse of how she slowly realizes that she too holds power over the various men who visit her and pay for her services through being good at sex.

I particularly liked the scene in this route where Akino is looking at a ring at the jewelry store. While from Noriaki’s perspective you might be thinking that she just wants an expensive ring, her internal narration is her ridiculing the rich while thinking about the class divide and how something that seemed to belong to a world she could never reach is now easily buyable with her prostitution money if she wanted to. I liked the framing of this as a concept of getting revenge via defiling something “for the rich” by buying it as a lowly peasant.

After going through Akino’s POV, the game gives you a choice as Noriaki to spend more time with Akino instead of prioritizing schoolwork. It baits you into thinking you have some sort of power to make her happy maybe, and gives you a rather cute lovey dovey sequence of them living together temporarily. Rather than showing the process of NTR happening via an external force, it puts on emphasis on the contrast between a normal life and that of a socially stigmatized one. While her relationship with Noriaki was founded on a shaky ground where she would have clung on to anyone who confessed to her in the same way, in this route they actually spend more time together to the point where it felt like a real relationship. It gives Akino a taste of the conventional normal person happiness of living with a loving bf and making college-aged friends. This trial of a normal happy life pushes Akino into taking more desperate measures into attaining the status of a clean, debt-free normal person as quickly as possible. The dream of going to college with friends of your age is a time-sensitive one, after all. The desperate measures involve doing sex work so degrading that she makes what one can call the Agni (Fire Punch) face when the ossan tells her to smile during an eroscene.

The game refuses to give her anything resembling a proper happy ending as almost every socially cursed thing that could happen to a sex worker does happen (including family destruction and pregnancy), and Akino knows the stigma of being a prostitute well enough to make the decision to stay away from Noriaki and their friends because she can’t defile their normal lives with hers. The values she was brought up with already prevented her from relying on her friends before, and she certainly wouldn’t be burdening them now.

It ends on a rather depressing note where Akino fully takes on the title of a prostitute, distancing herself from the kind of conventional happiness reserved for a normal, “clean” person while sucking off dudes in a pregnancy porno filming…or does it? On paper the outcome is as bad as the previous route where she mindbreaks while making being a prostitute her entire identity, but the difference is that Akino doesn’t lose her mind. Having had a taste of love and friendship, she stays mentally strong and always has the upper hand and sanity in sex which she treats like a job to squeeze the money out of horny men. There was a nice moment in which she talks with an old lady who assures her that it was normal for women to do sex work post-WWII in order to support their families and survive, and that even now there are tons of people who have to do sex work to get by even if no one talks about them. Akino regrets plenty of her actions but not the one of becoming a prostitute, for she met her friends and learned what it’s like to love someone only after becoming a prostitute and meeting Noriaki again. I read this scene as a turning point in which she accepts that her “normal” is to do sex work instead of heading back to being in college with her friends at the right age for the typical college seishun experience. It’s not a realistically attainable ideal given her situation. She accepts that she doesn’t have to become a clean member of society and go after the kind of seishun-esque, time-sensitive form of happiness that’s exclusive to people who can freely go to college and chase after their dream job without knowing a taste of the underworld. Giving up on this form of happiness is a kind of liberation for Akino who wouldn’t be able to bear with the potential unhappiness that she would be causing to loved ones by chasing after this particular ideal at this point. This is maybe an optimistic interpretation given the feelsbad ending, but I believe normalization of this kind of path is what the scene with the old lady was going for.

Perhaps this is too depressing of a note to end the game on, for there were definitely several points in the story where if Akino was even a bit less self-loathing or more willing to rely on others she could have led a more balanced life. Both endings are basically bad endings when I think there was room for something less suffocating. But I suppose this is the outcome of Akino having to wrestle with being raised on traditionalist values of not rely on others while having to do work that puts one socially at the bottom of society. Plus her luck was real bad. The game simply describes results of poverty combined with society’s stigma on sex work taking a toll on a heroine with values that doesn’t let her easily ignore the latter, leading to a spiral of desperation and decisions with unfortunate consequences. On a side note, I like how the some of the opinions after reading this route is that it’s too depressing to nut to Akino now (eroscene count and density-wise it’s what you’d expect from a WAFFLE nukige.)

It was kind of painful seeing Noriaki chase her down with efforts that I would have definitely cheered for in a pure love work, only to be met with rejection and Akino’s pregnancy revelation. I was immediately reminded that no matter how good of a guy you are under normal dating circumstances, no average 20 year old college guy getting half his rent paid for by his parents is going to be ready to deal with a prostitute gf being pregnant with a random ossan’s child. Most games I’ve played with a depressing ending also had a happier, more convenient ending to balance it out but this game only gives you the choice between mindbroken in a shitty situation and not mindbroken but still in a shitty situation. It stays true to the concept that your first love rarely works out due to unclear expectations and circumstances, but affirms that knowing love gives one a mental support pillar. The choice given to the player doesn’t actually save Akino from her circumstances but it does give her the strength to power through her situation instead of giving in to mindbreak. It’s hard to recommend this kind game to just anyone since looking at it as a whole there is no smooth salvation for all the suffering Akino has gone through, and I’m not sure if this is the type of game I actually enjoy reading, but I do think it’s worth experiencing for its careful depiction of Akino’s mental state. My main complain is that starting it off in Noriaki’s POV and trying to have a first route framed like an NTR story rather than going straight to Akino’s POV made the game drag far more than I would have liked, especially since you have to go through a bunch of eroscenes again. But I’m just not into NTR so maybe this is on me.

A cool part of the game for me is how the supporting characters feel legit. The characters who aren’t Akino’s clients are generally depicted with a level of care and facets I wouldn’t have expected from an NTR nukige, like Noriaki’s friend who has some extremely good bro moments despite initially coming off as the kind of dude who hates women and brothels, or Akira who has become a source of healing when reading Akino’s POV because you know he’s just a chill nursing school student working as the ボーイ for hobby money and has a pretty healthy relationship with his job. Akino’s mom, the cursed gossiping landlord, and the various people Akino encounters around the apartment complex are depicted with a level of believability that is hard to dismiss.