Platform: Switch
Release: 2022
Variable Barricade is one of those games I learned about prior to its Japanese release and despaired of it ever being translated into English. It came out on the PS Vita at the end of its life cycle, and it wasn't the sort of romance game that Aksys usually chose for localization. Aksys was (and still is) the primary purveyor of console otome games in the west, and in those early days, the focus was more on romance games with a crossover appeal.
And I get that. I gravitate toward games that are in a fantasy, science fiction, or historical setting, just because I want that extra zing of escapism. Sticking exclusively to romance in a mundane real world setting could have been limiting at a time when otome needed to find as many fans as possible. The more checkboxes a game offered beyond being a romance, the wider a net it could cast, so the early titles tended to be more action-based with a sense of adventure.
But the otome market has matured since then, and Variable Barricade was ported to the Switch, giving it another shot at localization at a time when it's no longer a risk to release a straight-up romantic comedy.
So, you might wonder why I wanted to play this game so much when I just said I seldom play games that aren't fantasy, science fiction, or historical, and the reason has to do with Variable Barricade's premise. Hibari Tojo is a wealthy heiress who gets coerced by her grandfather, the family patriarch, into choosing one of four suitors to be her fiancé, but she isn't down for this type of manipulation and resolves not to fall in love with any of them!
It was Hibari's defiance that sold me on the game. This being a romance game, she obviously falls in love eventually, but she has to be encouraged to do so. She's dumped into a pretty weird situation where she's forced to cohabitate with her suitors (though her butler is there to chaperone and make sure nothing untoward happens) and she has all the rage one might expect a seventeen-year-old girl to have about this.
Variable Barricade is a fairly new release, having come in February of this year, so please be aware that there will be spoilers here. There's nothing major in the next few paragraphs so don't be afraid that accidentally glancing down will ruin everything, but they'll be unmarked once I get to them, so right here before the four-man marriage proposal is a good place to stop.
Despite what Hibari thinks though, her grandfather isn't a domineering loon. He has a reason for choosing such odd men, and despite the poor impression he gives at the start of the game, he really does care about Hibari. It's just he has an odd way of helping his recalcitrant granddaughter grow.
You see, Hibari has led a fairly isolated life. She didn't get to know her parents before they died, and was mostly raised by servants, who treated her with deference and/or as a meal ticket. At her all girls private school, her status as the Tojo family heir was well known, so other students wouldn't speak to her the same way they would anyone else because she was clearly so far above them.
Hibari knows how to behave as a properly groomed young lady. She projects the expected confidence when she has to, but in all honesty, she's really an awkward girl who doesn't know how to make friends and she's terribly afraid of rejection.
Her grandfather tells her that he chose her suitors because she would otherwise never meet one since the only man she's remotely close to is her butler. He also tells her that each of her suitors, despite their flaws, has something she does not, which piques her interest and is perhaps the only reason she attempts to get to know them, since as the Tojo heir she can't imagine what they could possibly have that she does not. After all, she's worked her ass off in preparation for running the family conglomerate and trained all her life to be worthy.
For me, Hibari made the game. Because of her anger and initial feelings of superiority, she does things most otome protagonists wouldn't dream of attempting. Her narration about living her ridiculous day to day life with her suitors is hilarious. When one of her suitors, Ichiya, greets her with some corny flirts after she comes back home from school she just shuts the door in his face, and quite frankly I could have watched her shut that door over and over again. This game just wouldn't work without a protagonist as willing to upset someone as Hibari.
The fact she's still in high school is potentially a squicky issue since her suitors are all adults, but this is a fairly common trope in anime and manga (for daughters of wealthy families to have to worry about engagements and future marriage partners while still in school), so it's not particularly unusual for the target audience. And the game only covers her selecting her suitor. The various endings that mention a marriage date always set it for years into the future, with Ichiya's specifically saying after she graduates college.
Hibari is so wrapped up in her position as the Tojo family heir that she's actually baffled when she learns that the reason Takamune, her grandfather, set up the suitors is to deflect a different marriage proposal. Initially she assumes that this fifth suitor must be truly horrible if her grandfather doesn't want her to marry him, but Takamune informs her that no, he wouldn't not be cruel to her. In fact he's a brilliant businessman and would likely do great things with the merger of their families and their associated businesses.
This is quite brilliant because at this point in the story Hibari knows her suitors are more or less decent people, but not well enough to say she wants to marry any one of them, resulting in routes where Hibari suddenly has to make a serious effort to get to know her chosen suitor and decide whether she really could fall in love with him. And to the game's credit, she can also decline to choose any of them and go through the arranged marriage with the unnamed fifth suitor (who unsurprisingly does not remain unnamed forever, though his name is only revealed on Ichiya's route).
Takamune makes it clear this is a deflection tactic so if Hibari ends up not liking her chosen suitor, she's free to swap for one of the other men she's currently living with, but she needs to choose someone eventually. (This is only a narrative concession though. As the player you're stuck with whoever you chose.) And though he doesn't come out and say it, it's sweet being able to read between the lines and realize that he wants Hibari to have the chance to marry for love before expectations of tradition and their extended family squash any possibility of that happening.
As she gets to know her suitors, Hibari is forced to reevaluate her preconceptions and realize that she's misjudged and misunderstood them. On each of their routes, they're able to fill different roles in her life that had been lacking.
But the common route is really good about doing a deep dive into each suitor and their problems, letting Hibari and the player see them in a new light, and you know, they really work! It's not enough to say "I'll marry that man!" by the time Takamune demands a choice, but by the time I finished, I was ready to play the route for any one of them, even Ichiya of the shutting door in face.
My only issue with these deep dives is that they're just about as long as the common route itself. Each one, both deep dive and common route, is a single barricade board (essentially a flowchart), making common route progression feel arbitrarily long since you have to repeatedly stop and clear another board before coming back to the "main" story.
Narratively it usually doesn't cause a problem. This is not a plot heavy game. But occasionally there are small errors like Ichiya finally figures out what to cook for Hibari at the end of his first barricade board (after constantly pissing her off by making things she didn't like), only to go back to making the western breakfasts that she doesn't care for.
That said, one of the things I really liked about those early boards is that we get the guys' point of view of each other. Despite being rivals for Hibari's affection, they actually get along really well (though Ichiya complains about how everybody just wants him to cook for them), and if the eventual winner of their competition becomes clear, they band together to either help Hibari or the winning suitor depending on who needs it most.
In fact, no one in the game is truly a bad person, even the fifth suitor, who is either disappointed he missed his chance to win Hibari's heart, or more than happy to woo her on her terms, depending on the ending. And given that he's not a bad guy, I'm a little disappointed that the fifth route is not his, but a non-romantic true route.
I'd also be remiss if I did not bring up Hibari's classmates. Despite the fact that Hibari is terrible at making friends, she actually has two of them, and they serve as wonderful foils and contrasts to Hibari's woes. Tsumugi is a romantic and reimagines Hibari's situation as a real life shoujo manga. But the interesting thing is that Tsumugi already has an arranged marriage in her future, one that she entered voluntarily in order to pursue her hobbies and attend her school of choice as part of a bargain with her parents. Since she does not expect to fall in love herself (she's already known her fiancé for some time), she lives vicariously through Hibari.
Noa, on the other hand, isn't thinking about marriage at all, and for being a side character in a romance game, she feels like a breath of fresh air. She's the one who brings actual dating experience to the table, and she has no qualms about dating a lot of guys in order to see who clicks. Surprisingly, her advice is often really good, and when it's not, she acknowledges it will probably backfire. Noa has no plans for an arranged marriage of any kind (being "new money" compared to Hibari and Tsumugi) and plans to go abroad after graduation. She thinks it would be nice to meet someone to spend her life with in the future, but even then she never says it would be predicated on marriage, which is pretty mind-boggling for a game out of Japan.
As a result, I only felt really satisfied with Nayuta's route. Though I liked aspects of the others, they didn't feel like I was playing the same game I started. I think it only works as well as it does because of the cast, and if the cast doesn't click, then the rest of the game won't.
I prefer to role-play my first time through an otome, so when Hibari was asked to choose a fiancé I decided to select the person who would probably do the least damage to her position as Tojo heir, and to that end I picked Nayuta for my first route. So I'll cover Nayuta's route next week!
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