Orion Heart Review

Title: Orion Heart ~Injoku no Suku Mizu Sailor Senshi~
Original title: オリオンハート～淫辱のスク水セーラー戦士～
Alias: Orion Heart
Release date: 2009-03-27
English release date: 2013-05-24
Developer: Portion
English publisher: MangaGamer

Strangely “Orion Heart” was one of the MG nukiges that I expected to like. After all, it’s made by “Portion” – a sister company of “Liquid”, and previously I really enjoyed the latter's visual novel “Conquering the Queen”. Alas, it wasn’t destined to be so…

What is immediately wrong with this game is that it is a sequel… to a light novel that was never published in English. Da fak?! Could someone explain how that even works from a commercial standpoint? On one hand, OH does manage to stand on its own, as all the main plot points up to the present are passingly mentioned. On the other one, it still looks like a Gaiden story instead of a fully fledged sequel. Taking a quick look at the "Portion" lineup I can see that all of their titles suffer from sequelitis to a larger or smaller amount. That is so laaame.

Introducing victim No. 1.

So, two mahou shoujos Sailor Moon Orion Moon and Orion Suns defeated evil lord of demons Gilbert Gildart and saved the world. That of course happened in the prequel; as of this story Gildart is back and ready to exact his revenge. To that end he possesses a sickly schoolboy Osama Osamu who is friends with both magical girls and proceeds to humiliate, rape them, and eventually turns them into willing sex slaves.

Well, this cheerful “plot” sounds like a most typical cliché dark nukige, but the execution is seriously lacking. There is way too little plot to uphold the direction the game is going in, and it most closely resembles “Slave Witch April” with introduction followed by poorly stringed sex scenes. Sadly, “April” had a much better H-content. The game doesn’t take any time to develop the characters and thus I couldn’t care less about Gildart’s agenda or our heroines’ plight.

Looks like a comfy bed.

I absolutely felt nothing about Gildart and had a hard time putting myself in his shoes. Not that we are supposed to do that. In a very unusual twist the game is narrated by the girl whose path you are on and even then it is done in third person. At the same time the girls are not based on personality, but on archetypes. Asagiri Yuka (Orion Suns) is a tsunderish tomboy with short hair and Uzumiya Aoi (Orion Moon) is a shy and composed long-haired bishoujo. That is all that we know about them – now let the rape begin!

Many things could be forgiven if the sex was good, but sadly it’s lacking too. I mean, this is a game about a demon raping schoolgirls. If anything, I expected to see some outrageous sex scenes with tentacles and hard BDSM and ahageo. Imagine my surprise when the sex was proven to be quite… vanilla. The most outrageous scene was a wasp putting eggs into Yuka’s womb. But that was only a one-hit wonder. The game is also dreadfully short and I mean “Softhouse-Seal” short. Compare it to “Conquering the Queen” which was easily a 20 hour title. There are only two endings and they are picked during the very first choice. All the other choices are there purely in order to see different H-scenes.

No hole left unplugged.

Now that I think, the game so obviously screams “low budget” that I have to wonder if “Portion” didn’t make it with spare assets from "Liquid's" table. The backgrounds are dull and so generic that I have to wonder if they were not taken from public domain… they probably were. Only Yuka and Aoi have their paper-dolls. It’s not surprising that Gildart doesn’t have one, but no other character, even among those that the girls fuck, has one. And we don’t see their fucking partners even during HCG – the disembodied penises keep their company! The CGs themselves are not particularly bad and the art is easy to look at, but… they are so undetailed. The girls are the sole focus and there is no place for the partners or the background. Moreover, every scene is comprised of only one CG that has variations. There are no position changes or elements of surprise.

At the very least, “Liquid/Portion” does a good decensoring job. I can only guess that “Softhouse-Seal” doesn’t have any genitals beneath those mosaics and has to promptly draw some ridiculous looking shit for the Western market; at the same time “Liquid” probably has all the dangly stuff properly drawn and then mosaiced. That, or they are better at impromptu exercises.

Exercising is healthy.

On the whole, the graphics are pretty mediocre and only get a bit better during the H-scenes. The sound is atrocious and reminds me of the aforementioned S-S group. For that matter, the game, at least for me, stands on the exactly same tier as all the S-S games I have already played.

There is one more thing left that I want to mention regarding this game - the translation. It's seriously good! I mean, I cannot tell if the translator is accurate, but he is such a good writer, that a generic nukige reads like a sophisticated piece of literature. Seriously, his efforts are wasted on such a title.

Would that I could say anything cheerful and encouraging about this game, but sadly I cannot. “Orion Heart” is mediocrity incarnate and, considering its price tag, not worth buying. It’s not even worth pirating, unless you are a hard M like me :-D

Links of Interest

Visual Novel Database
Official Japanese site
Buy the official English digital release at MangaGamer

Final Verdict: 48%