Recently, a demo for a Mob Pyscho-related otome game was released on Itch.io (a site that hosts indie games) by a developer and artist named Ash (also known as FunkyGlasses). The game centres, of course, on none other than The Greatest Pscyhic of the 21st Century, Reigen Arataka.

For anyone unfamiliar, Reigen is one of the main characters from the popular anime and manga series Mob Psycho 100.

The visual novel begins with the player discovering that they are suffering from a curse which has started to affect their performance at work. After being told off by their boss, the player happens to walk past Reigen and Mob whilst they are advertising for Spirits and Such Consultation on the street, and Reigen hands the player his business card. The player goes to Spirits and Such Consultation office the next day, and this is where the choices the player makes begins to have an affect on the story.

I really enjoy the game’s art style. Characters are instantly recognisable whilst also being unique to Ash’s style. The bubble writing and use of pinks and oranges suggests that the game will be light-hearted.

In the demo you encounter three characters from Mob Psycho – Reigen, Mob and Banshomaru Shinra (one of Reigen’s business rivals). All of them felt perfectly in-character and their speech mimicked the characters from the manga/anime really well. There were a few grammatical errors, but as this is only a demo, this is not a problem for now and it did not prevent me from being able to enjoy the demo at all.

The demo is rather short but I still managed to run into a Bad End before completing it, which I take as a good sign that the game will not be too easy, and will hopefully instead strike a good balance between challenging and enjoyable.

Something else that I really liked was that, instead of assigning players a gender or even asking players to choose their gender from a drop-down list, players instead input their own first and second pronouns, allowing them to choose whatever they like. Although I am cisgender myself, I thought this was a lovely and welcome addition to an otome game. I can’t actually think of a time I’ve been asked to input my gender for an otome game before; usually the game simply presumes that you are a female using she/her pronouns. I hope that this choice by Ash makes the game more accessible for queer players.

Overall, this looks like a really promising start and I wish Ash the best of luck! It’s been a long time since I’ve played an otome game, as so many are geared towards teenagers, so I look forward to seeing more developments in future and hope we get to see more from this game!

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You can download the Reigen Date Game at the following link: https://funkyglasses.itch.io/reigen-date-game

All pictures used in this blog post are screenshots taken from the Reigen Date Game.