Visual Novel Spotlight: Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~
When Go! Go! Nippon! not-so-recently made it through the Steam Greenlight process, it was inevitable that it would make it onto these visual novel spotlights. While the game is more tourist-centred than the usual title, Go! Go! Nippon! incorporates a few VN and dating sim aspects to give it that extra appeal.
After spending the past year or so talking to anonymous Japanese people over the internet, you (the namable protagonist) decide to finally take the plunge and fly to Japan, leaving your accommodation to these same internet strangers. To your surprise, your best internet buddies are a pair of attractive young sisters and now that you’re living alone with them, all they want to do is… show you around popular tourist destinations. Whether you prefer boobs over butts, nothing changes the core “plot” of Go! Go! Nippon!, but you do get some quick self-insert romance with your brief interactive guide to the great and glorious land of Nippon.
One of the most useful aspects of the game is its bilingual textbox, breaking the dialogue into a space for English and a space for Japanese, which is great if you’re learning the language. There’s no furigana though, so this learning aide is better with some kanji knowledge. It isn’t voiced either, so you can’t fall back on hearing. Together with this, the game offers some history and trivia of the various places you choose to visit, not really telling you anything new but building your general knowledge anyway. You also get to experience the Japanese train pass system, Japanese Western-style toilets, okonomiyaki, sushi, convenience stores and the shinkansen.
The game allows you to explore most of the major stops on the Yamanote line, with a two day trip to Kyoto towards the end and a day trip to either Yokohama or Kamakura, depending on which route you take. Each playthrough gives you three chances to choose where you’d like to go, allowing you to see everything in two neat sessions if you’re careful. Each trip, you are accompanied by one of your hosts who gives you various trivia of the area while secretly adding to your dating sim choices – if you choose to go to areas that are hosted by one of the girls more than the other, you end up in a relationship with her. It can be fairly arbitrary until you realise the sisters are divided by old/new and traditional/Westernised.
As you’d expect of an interactive travel guide-slash-dating sim, the background art is a solid mix of well-drawn interiors and well touched-up photos of real places. Only food gets the blurry photo treatment, but is so fleeting that it’s fine. The sprites are as shiny and as soft as your usual dating sim fare and the main character even gets the Dating Sim No-Face treatment. The rest of the interface graphics are clean, bright and simplified, reflecting on what the whole game is like itself.
If you’re hoping for a touching story of a man’s dreams of visiting Japan, I hope you cash your reality check soon. Even with routes, the game’s focus is its tourist guide, and romance is forced in both love and drama. I’m sure the game is meant to be short, with enough butt flashing to keep your interest for another 20 minutes, so there are no huge realisations or serious developments. In all, it’s light-hearted, sometimes comedic and in the end part of a visiting Japan fantasy that does an okay job in fulfilling this wish if all you want is to be a part of a brief dating sim.
Go! Go! Nippon! delivers exactly what it promises: a week-long simplified trip to Japan that is both educational and somewhat entertaining. With a bilingual interface and a fair amount of trivia about various places in Japan, it’s a fine educational aide if you’re learning the language or considering a trip to the country. On a story level, you get exactly what you expect, and perhaps a few more CGs of your hosts than you expected. Of course, it omits any negative aspects and does surround you with cute girls, so if you want incentive to pick up some general knowledge about Japan, it’s there.
Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~ is available from MangaGamer for £6 / $9.95 (download) and JBox for £9 / $14.95 (package). The game is also on Desura and Steam.
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