• Price: $34.99 USD (currently on sale for $29.74 until May 11th)
• Developer: HASE IM HAUS
• Publisher: PLiCy
• Release Date: April 28, 2023

A review code was kindly provided by PLiCy on behalf of HASE IM HAUS. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Some of you may have stayed in a dorm as part of your college experience. It takes some getting used to for sure, but if you manage to find people who share your interests there it helps a lot. But imagine living in a dorm in another country – parts of the experience will be the same, but add in the culture shock and it may feel like a different world! (When I studied abroad, we had a McDonald’s inside our building. Yes, please!)

Dormitory Love has you play as Jun Minase, who manages a dorm for international students. This visual novel will expose you to Japanese culture, but also give you the chance to see what it’s like as an international student. And perhaps you, as Jun, may find love along the way!

You can choose to keep the name Jun Minase, or you can decide to change the first and/or last names. There’s also an option for you to decide if Jun, as the “heroine,” should be voiced or not – there’s full Japanese voice acting, which I think is especially impressive coming from an indie developer.

How I Met Your Dorm Mother

Once you’ve made those decisions, the story can begin. Jun’s well-meaning but meddlesome grandmother decided to arrange a new part-time job for her, talking to the manager of the izakaya Jun was working at (without telling her) to smooth things over. Because an izakaya “[isn’t] a place for young women like [Jun]” according to dear Granny.

Jun’s new job is working at an international student dorm called Shirakaba House. When Jun finds out that they’re international students, she panics a little and graciously tries to use her limited English to greet them. Thankfully for her, all of the students are there on scholarship – and they’re all fluent in Japanese. They earned some of the limited spots in the foreign exchange program, which had vigorous requirements to make the cut.

As this is an otome game, naturally all of the dorm residents Jun interacts with are guys. There are 6 of them, each from a different country and with different interests. After the brief prologue introduces the basis of the plot and the love interests, a fantastic animated opening plays with its theme song. Again, I was so amazed by this indie otome including something that I usually only see in otome from larger companies. The video lasts nearly 2 minutes! 😮

After the prologue, the game takes you to a menu where you get to choose which love interest’s story you want to experience. I decided to go in the order shown on that screen, so I started with Felix from Germany. I like it when visual novels give you a straightforward way to go through each character’s route like this, and when they seem to indicate which order you should go in.

Felix

Felix is a German who majored in Japanese culture back in Germany, and he is now working on his master’s degree in Tokyo. He is described as gentle and kind, and most of the guys call him “Mother” due to his mother-henning and the way he frequently prepares them boxed lunches.

There are some jokes here and there about everyone marrying Felix for his culinary abilities, which I thought were pretty amusing. He has a lot of different and interesting hobbies – one of which is learning about tea ceremonies. The brief discussion of tea ceremonies was really interesting to me. Although there were some fascinating cultural tidbits in Felix’s routes, and I didn’t mind him too much, he did come off as a little bland; it seemed like everything he did was perfect.

I didn’t feel like I got a chance to know him, or that a romance was even warranted with him. Felix tells Jun some variation of “I’m not who you think I am” without opening up about much of anything. His mentor tells her more about his past than Felix does himself.

Ling Wei

Ling Wei is a student from China; he is very quiet but can be a little abrasive and quite socially awkward. He plays go, which is neat, and I liked a certain scene in the rain, but his storyline felt kind of immature and underdeveloped to me with the conflict. It seemed like I got more personality from Ling Wei in the brief extra portion than in the entire plot.

Josh

Josh is a senior in high school from California who enjoys playing basketball. He was probably my least favorite for a variety of reasons. I don’t have a problem with people that go out with more than one person – provided that everyone involved knows about it and is fully on board.

Josh is a womanizer, but when his ex-girlfriend comes around she mentions that he cheated on her “constantly.” That’s an instant disqualification for me. The ex is still somehow friends with him – I liked that Josh brought friends around, but not so much what they had to say about him. Jun also has a really awkward, antagonistic relationship with Josh for most of the story, and I just couldn’t bring myself to like him.

Guillaume

Guillaume is a super cute student from France. I was a bit uncomfortable with him as a love interest when I found out he was a high school sophomore compared to Jun at age 20… If he had been older, I would have been completely okay with him being a romantic option.

Guillaume prefers to wear what society has deemed women’s clothing, and he’s really into gothic Lolita. He’s got other interesting hobbies, but he does seem childish, which is appropriate given his age. The poor guy talks about how he lost all his friends due to the way he dresses, and emphasizes that he likes “dressing up as a girl and [he] likes girls too.”As a younger love interest, he wasn’t for me, but I’d be okay with him being Jun’s friend. I really liked that the other guys – and even Jun – don’t make a big deal out of Guillaume’s choice of clothing.

Sasha

Now, Sasha was definitely my favorite love interest. He’s a photographer from Russia, and is apparently the only working adult in the dorms. I thought his personality was the most well-developed, as he seemed pretty silly sometimes. There’s also an interesting subplot related to his heritage. I really liked his route but like the others, I wish it was longer for additional character and romantic development.

Sean

Last up: Sean from England, who is my second favorite. I liked how he seemed protective of Jun in some of the other routes. In one route he acts as a confident/cheerleader yet also lightheartedly teases Jun about her crush. Sean likes manga and games, and calls himself a “Japanese subculture enthusiast” in lieu of an otaku. He tutors Jun to improve her (self-confessed) horrendous English. He seems pretty nice and I really like the way he confesses to Jun. Sasha was my favorite overall, but for me Sean’s confession was the best.

Endings & Extras

I really enjoyed the ending theme that plays during the credits. The Extras section is unlocked after you finish playing once. It contains a gallery, a list of the endings (I believe 2 per character), a trailer section, and a fun bonus that has Jun texting the characters. You can also unlock a bonus scene that appears in the Extras section for clearing all characters’ routes.

Overall Otome Opinion

I think there’s a lot to like in Dormitory Love. Personally, the art style for the characters worked for me, and I thought the backgrounds were pretty. As is always the case with otome, my feelings really varied when it came to the love interests. I wanted more time with the ones I liked; it was nice that there were only about 5 dialogue choices per character, but for the most part the romance was perhaps too subtle and shallow for my tastes.

I jot down notes as I play the games I review, and four out of six routes had either Jun or the love interest say that the other was like X or Y family member to them at first, or that their personalities were at least similar to a relative they knew. This kind of confused me as the reader because I didn’t understand how Jun’s feelings changed from “family” to “love interest,” especially given the shorter time period. It also seemed like there were too many situations where either Jun or the guy didn’t realize their own feelings until the final hour/didn’t think the other liked them.

The romance felt a little awkward to me sometimes, but the “common route” scenes that occur across each route were fun. Jun accompanies the guys to enjoy hanami, and also arranges a trip to an onsen. The group participates in several Japanese cultural activities together, but they also hang out in the dorm during some down time. I honestly wanted to see the group together more too! (Jun’s granny is also super cute, so it may have been fun to have her show up more.)

Technical Difficulties

I would like to note that there were some technical issues when I played. First of all, if you go to the Switch home screen to check your screenshots or look at an eShop page real quick while playing Dormitory Love, it will boot you back to the game’s main menu when you return.

The major problem for me was that the transitions between scenes were really slow; text boxes and their content took some time to load. I feel like this may be some kind of timer issue or something? Or perhaps it’s related to the voice files loading?

There are also no manual saves, so if you stop playing in the middle of a scene you can’t go right back to where you were. You can select the exact chapter you were in when you hit “continue” on the main menu, and each one is fairly short so it’s not a huge deal, but it’s another odd design choice in my opinion.

The text in the boxes for dialogue choices was also too light for the background. (Sometimes the font would completely change on me as well.) Another interesting choice was that instead of an option to skip read text, you can instead skip the entire scene (at least in the common route scenes for each character). I actually kind of liked being able to immediately jump to the next scene, so that was a plus for me.

In Conclusion

If you want a more casual otome with multicultural elements and nice details from a creative indie developer, you may really enjoy this. Dormitory Love doesn’t have grand romances, and leans more towards the slice-of-life category. It’s not bad at all; I simply could have used more character development and a smoother experience with scene transitions. I think it would be great if they came out with a fandisk at some point that adds more depth to the characters, because I do like where they were going with this.