Netorare Imouto Misaki Review

Title: Netorare Imouto Misaki ~Nagasare Kei Imouto no H na Arbeit Seikatsu~
Original title: 寝取られ妹美咲～流され系妹のHなアルバイト生活～
Aliases: Netorare Imouto Misaki ~Ecchi Arubaito Sex Life~

Netorare Imouto Misaki ~My Drifting Stepsister's Part-time H Life~

Release date: 2015-06-26
English release date: 2016-03-17
Developer: acerola
English publisher: m1zuki (as a fan-patch)

If the title hasn't already clued you in, then surely the fact that the game was translated by m1zuki, the god of netorare, will make it obvious to you, what the story is all about. Yeah, it's another netorare game, and considering netorare is one of those erotica genres, which is loved by everyone, I feel obliged to introduce and review the game to the pleasure of all you, dear readers.

"Netorare Imouto Misaki" (or NIM, from now on) stars the eponymous Misaki, whose parents recently died in an accident. She harbours unsisterly feelings towards her brother Kazuo, and the story is kickstarted, when the fate throws the sibling pair a bone in the shape of official documentation that proves they are not blood related. The brother and the sister promptly shed their inhibitions and start living as a guy and his girlfriend, including having hot sweaty sex. It's so sweet I almost feel the approaching diabetes. Luckily the idyll doesn't last for long, as the brother makes a mistake at his company, gets fired and incurs the debt of 1 million yen. Now it's time for Misaki to show her worth, get a part-time job and somehow scrounge the required money in 60 days.

Yet another male character without eyes.

It's actually funny that the game doesn't tell you about the time limit and it's a nasty surprise that 60 days later you have to suddenly turn in the money... or fail to do it and face the consequences. The German loanword "arbeit" means "part time job" in Japan, and it's no surprise that Misaki can only work in the evenings during the workdays, as she is still a school student. There are lots of places where she can get a job, but as the fate (and Murphy) has it, every single one of the people hiring a part-time worker are deranged perverts. In order to experience as much of the game's content as possible you'll want to fully complete each and every job encounter (not to mention the job-unrelated encounters).

All the jobs follow the same tried and true formula. At first, Misaki experiences some mild molestation and sexual harassing, but each time she works a specific job, the encounters get more and more heated, until Misaki comes to love her treatment. While each job has a different number of encounters, you can always recognize the last encounter of a specific job, by the fact it doesn't show CGs anymore, instead presenting you with a sprite-only sex.

Higurashi mitten hands.

The gameplay is easy to learn and easy to master. Unlike many other simulation games, NIM has only three stats you have to track, thus the learning curve is pretty mild. The first stat is "Stamina", and it's a self explanatory one. Working at a job lowers your stamina, and when it hits 0 you are forced to rest and skip a day. You can buy energy drinks to artificially increase stamina, or you can just choose to skip a day at the time of your choosing by going home instead of working. Skipping a few days won't really matter, unless you are doing really badly on the money front.

The second stat is "Desire" and it's a more complicated one. Basically, any sexual action that doesn't result in an orgasm increases your desire, while orgasms decrease it. Moreover, "Desire" increases naturally by just walking around the map, but that happens very slowly, and naturally you can buy items that increase or decrease the stat. You really want to keep "Desire" high all the time, as there are almost no drawbacks to a high stat, but a low one will prevent you from taking the most lucrative jobs. Note that every evening you have an option to have sex with your onii-chan, but engaging in that activity removes all your "Desire". As there are only three different sex scenes with your brother, you shouldn't ever have sex more than thrice with him, due to it being very detrimental to your jobs. Admittedly, I think a maxed out "Desire" results in a "Frustrated" state, which closes all the jobs, but opens new encounters you wouldn't be able to experience otherwise.

First world problems.

The third stat is "Guilt", and it's the most important one, as it determines one of the five endings you get. In short, any lewd action will lower your guilt permanently. Additionally, every evening you'll get a chance to talk with Kazuo about your day, and your guilt will decrease further, if you did anything naughty. There do exist items to manipulate "Guilt" (BL Magazine), but they are fairly expensive. If you seek to collect the required 1 mil yen, you should quickly lower the guilt as much as possible, as that will open venues for the most lucrative jobs.

The game is actually quite long and requires a few playthroughs to see all the sex scenes: I personally finished the first playthrough in 6 hours 40 minutes, but required about 15 hours over three playthroughs to reach 100% completion. There is a certain strategy that helps for this game. You see, at first I didn't realize that all the outfits and items you have bought are transferred between the games. This means that the smartest solution is to aim towards the failure endings during the first playthrough and spend your money on buying all the outfits and as many of Boys Love Magazines as you can. Trust me, you'll thank me for that last item later. During the second playthrough you can select to start with half a mil yen already in your account, which you should obviously do, and spend all your money exceeding 1 mil yen towards purchasing BL Magazines again. Quickly lower your guilt, take the most paying jobs (prostitute, gravure idol, porn actress, hostess) and then exchange the magazines for "guilt" on the 60th day, in order to experience different endings... Profit!!! As for how to get different endings, it's pretty simple, really:

» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «

Ending 1: Collect 1 million yen on day 61 with guilt between 81-100
Ending 2: Collect 1 million yen on day 61 with guilt between 11-80
Ending 3: Fail to collect 1 million yen on day 61 with guilt between 11-100
Ending 4: Fail to collect 1 million yen on day 61 with guilt between 0-10
Ending 5: Collect 1 million yen on day 61 with guilt between 0-10

Final day on the job.

Anyway, the gameplay in NIM is pretty uncomplicated, but fun and rewarding. What about the other aspects of the game?... "Misaki' obviously didn't have a large budget, so the graphics are pretty simplistic. Our protagonist is pretty much the only character given any kind of representation, while all the others are are part of a faceless (literally) mass. On the other hand, the positions are fairly varied, and even the same poses have variations for different costumes. Graphical output quickly loses the sense of novelty, but retains competent portrayal, until you start to notice large problems in other departments. For example, the free movement sections are coded in such a way that remind me of the first "Dragon Warrior" game, namely the protagonist's sprite frequently doesn't even look in the direction she is walking to. The sprite looks very static, like it is floating along the ground rather than walking. That's some obvious laziness on the developer's side.

The weirdness of Japanese porn.

Initially, it's really endearing to watch Misaki be corrupted and slowly becoming enamored with having sex and cheating on her boyfriend/brother. She starts as an innocent, almost virginal character and gradually becomes a slut who gets off on cuckolding her significant other and lambasting his sexual prowess. That is, until you realize that every job follows the same formula. Now, tell me what do you imagine happens if Misaki is handling two jobs at the same time, one already pretty advanced in its encounters and just starting the second one? She will act like a total slut while performing the advanced job, but still act like an innocent girl during her second one. I do realize it's almost impossible to solve this inconsistency to anyone's satisfaction, but it does showcase the limitations of a pseudo open-world game like NIM.

Fucking tease!

On the other hand, I absolutely cannot forgive the greatest sin the developers of the game committed - there is no payoff!!! Once Misaki becomes sufficiently corrupted at any of her jobs, she spouts the same kind of dialogue, just worded differently - she says how she hopes she will become pregnant while cheating on her onii-chan and then she'll convince him that the child is his. This kind of dialogue is repeated constantly throughout the game, to the point that it becomes somewhat stale. Now, pregnancy is one of my major fetishes, and mixing it with netorare is just godly. Guess if anything comes out of it. Nada. None of the endings result in Misaki having a bastard child. Actually, only two of the five endings (the worst ones) even have H-CGs and those are just gang-bang scenes. The true ending does result in our protagonist being pregnant, but the father is Kazuo, and who the fuck wants to watch a good ending with the female main character happily awaiting a child of her loved one?! Definitely not me!

There is only one thing I can say after playing through the game and getting all the endings: "Netorare Imouto Misaki" is one huge cock tease. It constantly promises a certain payoff and never delivers. The endings are abrupt and unsatisfactory. For fucks sake, even the true ending doesn't have any CGs. Hell, even the netorare itself is kinda meh, as Misaki's onii-chan has such a small role in the game, that it's hard to feel any deliciously evil emotions associated with this particular subgenre of erotica.

Ideal relationship.

Nonetheless, the graphics are somewhere between decent and good, though no one cares about that one shitty BGM track looping all the time. Moreover, the game has an adequate length and gameplay, and the sex scenes, each taken separately, are pretty well written, however, once you read more than ten of them, the repetition becomes grating on one's nerves.

All in all, "Netorare Imouto Misaki" is a pretty mediocre game and definitely no highlight of the netorare genre, but it's a decent time-waster, as long as you can overlook some glaring problems.

Links of Interest

Official Japanese site
Buy the digital edition of the game at DLsite
Download English patch
Patching tutorial (arc_conv link is dead, so you can download it from this site)
100% Save File
M1zuki's Patreon
Game thread at ULMF forums
Translation thread at ULMF forums

Final Verdict: 60 %