Kitty Love -Way to look for love- Visual Novel Review [Spoiler‑Free]

In Kitty Love -Way to look for love-, Honoka was looking for an easy life. She didn’t mean she wanted to be turned into a cat.

Story

While feeding the cats in the park near her work, Honoka starts to muse about how her four-legged friends have an easy life. Unfortunately for her, she spoke these musings aloud. A black cat with two different colored eyes grants her wish, and now every night she turns into a cat. The only way to break the curse? True love’s kiss, of course! But Honoka has been too busy working to even think of dating. How is she going to find someone meow when her nights are covered in cat fur?

Gameplay

Kitty Love -Way to look for love- is the most simplistic Otome I’ve played to date. When you load up the game, the title screen gives you a handful of options, two of which are “Prologue” and “Main Part.” The first option takes you straight into the common route of the game. This introduces Honoka and her five potential love interests: Takuma Suguri, Kohei Natsume, Shogo Fujimoto, Kyosuke Kawahara, and Narumi Saijo. The story gets the ball rolling very quickly–like, five minutes of reading quickly–then spits you back out to the title screen.

After you’ve done the prologue once, there’s really no reason to do it again, since this game handles each boy’s route in an uncomplicated way. Simply click on the “Main Part” tab, and voilà! You can select which boy’s story you want to do without having the hassle of an overly long common route where you have to worry about hitting all of the right flags. All the boys are unlocked from the beginning, so you don’t have to fret about completing certain ones to get to others.

The Good

The game has a very clean and cute art style that drew me to it immediately. (Plus, you know, cats.) The flow from scene to scene is well done, and the story moves at a fast and steady pace. Since the game is very short, the gameplay style they chose works out very well. I felt like I spent enough time with each character to really get a feel for them and see the romance progress in a decently believable way.

Since the mechanics are simple and the story is fairly short with an easy to understand plotline, I would label this game as a good one to use when introducing people to the Otome genre.

The Bad

Kitty Love is far from being a finely polished game. The grammatical errors are so frequent, it’s almost like they were meant to be there. I honestly started questioning Nintendo’s bar for entry to their digital store. It was so prevalent and so bad, I had to start skimming all the text instead of reading it word-by-word to avoid getting confused and frustrated.

That, combined with the fact the game was probably a third of the length or less of typical games in the genre really made it not worth the $25 price point for me.

Some other minor complaints involve the UI elements that cluttered the screen and some interesting menu choices, but neither of these things felt like that big of a deal, especially when compared to the grammar issues.

The Verdict

At the end of the day, I still really like Kitty Love. The art and plot drew me in and were enough to keep me playing until the end. While I may not recommend it at normal price, if you see it on a good sale, I’d say it’s worth it.