The Men of Yoshiwara: Kikuya is a visual novel that is described as ‘otome’. For those unfamiliar, otome is a subgenre of romantic games that are targeted primarily towards women, and involve finding a male suitor for the female main character. The Switch version is a port of the earlier released Android/iOS version.

The Men of Yoshiwara: Kikuya takes place on an isolated island where very few boys are born. Those that are, are sold into slavery to the Yoshiwara house of courtesans in the red light district. You assume the role of the daughter of a local shipping agent and are tasked with delivering a package somewhere in the Yoshiwara district. As you approach the destination, you run across a woman and her courtesan, who both have snuck out of Yoshiwara to escape the island and live out their lives together. They are worried that you will sell them out, but you let them go, not wanting to stand in the way of what could be true love. As a gesture of appreciation, the couple gives you a large sum of money and a high-quality kimono. You then continue on your errand with the package in hand and are dragged into the depths of the pleasure district. Here you meet several bachelors and experience emotions and events your character would never have dreamed of.

No story development

The story starts out with an interesting premise that has the potential to explore several heavy topics, like male sex slavery and the difference between love and lust. However, the story doesn’t develop enough to give these topics any exploration. At the end of any route you’ve chosen, the only message this game has is ‘sex slavery bad, love good’. It also doesn’t help that the male courtesans themselves don’t have any character development throughout the entire story. Each courtesan is a trope character, like Kagura being the silent type or Hayabusa being the token ‘childhood friend’. Every potential love interest’s character is exactly the same at the end of the story as it was at the start.

Another problem that the story has, is that each character’s route is not intertwined with the others. You pick a courtesan, follow through his story and, depending on your dialogue choices, watch his happy or super happy ending. Once you’ve done all that, you go back to the main menu and pick another courtesan and start over. An intertwined storyline could have given us some interesting dialogue between the different characters, but the writer(s) clearly took the easy route.

Mistranslations

While the story has enough problems on its own, The Men of Yoshiwara also suffers from some unfortunate mistranslations. It’s easy to follow the main storyline, but the dialogue during some intimate scenes comes off as childish or even uncomfortable. To further elaborate on the latter, I’ll give an example. During an intimate moment with courtesan Kagerou, your character is constantly thinking “Don’t do this”. Kagerou continues with his advances, making his actions come off as rapey, yet the story never addresses this as an act of sexual assault. I highly doubt this was the intent of the writer(s), so something must have gone wrong during the translation progress.

Tone-clashing art style

The art style of The Men of Yoshiwara is pretty good. It utilizes lots of colors, sharp edges and details that make every character easy to differentiate from each other. I especially loved the care that went into the designs of all the kimonos that the characters wear. Sadly, the artwork can sometimes be unpleasant to look at, due to some off-looking limb movement from certain characters and utilizing the wrong emotional expressions during certain scenes. When a character is supposed to look like he’s seducing, the artwork instead makes him look threatening, which ruins that scene in a narrative point of view. These tone-clashes don’t happen that much throughout the entire story, but a decent visual novel should have none of these.

Conclusion

I think it’s obvious by now that I did not enjoy my time with The Men of Yoshiwara. A visual novel’s main selling point is always its story, which is not the case with this one. The visuals are good on their own (with some flaws, however) but some of the artwork ruins the narrative aspect of the game. In short, I cannot recommend this to anyone.

4/10

Tested on Nintendo Switch