i really wanted to like this game and to some extent i do but man the main character feels like someones OP naruto OC, literally everyone is jealous of him or is in love with him. Not sure how far I am through this game but its getting weird i dont want to hear about his "alpha male scent" bruh 😭😭 i will say the art is really pretty and I enjoy how expressive the sprites are, it just feels weird combining what could be interesting commentary on how women are treated as heir-creators who are more like trophies with some horror but the saegusas are written so goofily and over-the-top along with the rich family whose last name im forgetting. Maybe itll have a turn around but I highly doubt it

What an atrociously bad visual novel. At least, at the beginning, I felt lukewarm about the story—it could possibly go somewhere interesting, but moment-to-moment, I wasn't engaged. However, Nie no Hakoniwa only got worse with each hour I invested into it. For nearly the whole runtime, I was wondering when it would finally become interesting, only for it to never do that. Even worse, it ended up going down one of the most nonsensical routes it could have taken from its setup.

The novel ostensibly tries to present a story in which all the characters are morally grey. "Sure, the protagonist isn't the best person, but his enemies are bad, too, so I want to root for him," the scenario director seems to want you to think. However, what Nie no Hakoniwa actually does is fail at telling a morally grey story. Rather, it's closer to morally black: every character is such a horrible person that I don't care to root for either the protagonist or the antagonists. In fact, I ended up not really caring what happened at all. The ending seems to present the protagonist and main heroine in a sympathetic light—the tone of the writing wants you to feel bad for what happens to them—but they were so irredeemably disgusting for the majority of the story that this presentation seems completely unjustified.

Additionally, the protagonist is supposed to be this ripped, badass assassin who can kill anyone without making a sound, but in reality he comes across as weak-willed because he simply goes along with whatever the main heroine wants. And it's a miracle he falls in love with her (although he himself is not even sure that he is because, again, he's supposed to be an emotionless badass), because from the first second she shows up, she comes off as incredibly irritating, incessantly begging the protagonist to get her pregnant.

At the very least, Nie no Hakoniwa does have some themes about how, under a patriarchy, the only value women are thought to have is as childrearers, but those themes are so infrequently explored and so painfully unrealized that it in no way is worth trudging through the slop that is the remaining 99.9% of the story to get to them. Nie no Hakoniwa is, at this point in time, the worst visual novel I have ever read.

2/10

Disgusting eroguro fest.