https://vndb.org/v6482

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Ever since I watched the hentai adaptation of Black Gate -Kan'in no Gakuen- that has been discontinued, I always wonder what happens next after the second episode. That is why I took the liberty to play the visual novel. Black Gate -Kan'in no Gakuen- is an eroge that was developed by Image-Works and released back in 2004. The story features a boy named Narufumi Hosokawa but the visual novel allows to name him anything you want as long as it contains Japanese characters. He is a student at Kadomori academy who is considered to be a pretty average guy. He is also friends with Shizuku Kadomori and Kasumi Kadomori who are twins that have different personalities. Shizuku is more calm and reserved while Kasumi is more proactive and a bit clumsy. They are also known to have a distinct birth mark on their chest.

In Kadomori Academy, the story also introduces other characters that play key roles in the visual novel. Amane Izumi is another student at the school who is quite reserved, shy and nervous around certain situations. Fuu Katsuragi is the student council president who takes things very seriously and is inept with martial arts. Koyuki Hasegawa is a member of the student council and she is very attached towards Fuu. Nanami Ebizuka is Narufumi's homeroom teacher who doesn't take her job seriously and tends to be laid back. Haruko Fujisaki was the previous student council president in Kadamori academy before Fuu until she graduated and she is very skilled with a bow and arrow. And finally, Mizuki Komiyama is the class representative of Narufumi's classroom who also takes things seriously, especially for the school festival.

Narufumi Hosokawa (Main Protagonist)

The visual novel starts off with the students at Kadomori academy preparing for the upcoming school festival. At one point, Shizuku and Kasumi are seen arguing to each other about something before Shizuku stormed out of the classroom. After some time when Narufumi was alone in the classroom, Shizuku came and confessed her feelings towards him before having sex. After a few days, the school got terrorized by two humanoid earth monsters from a different world that were attempting to capture Kasumi. Kasumi, Nanami and Haruko would then open a portal inside the school that leads to a different world in order to get rid of the monsters. As a result, Narufumi along with his friends got transported to the alternate world. From this point onwards, everyone aimed to find out how to get back home and and Shizuku. This game has multiple endings that correspond to each character, and they are obtained based on the choices you make.

As I played through the visual novel, the story was very mediocre and not that interesting. Its just a bunch of highschool students that traveled to a different world where they are fighting off monsters that are native to this alternate world (very similar to the isekai genre). Each character has their own route which reveals information about their past life, providing you insight on what kind of person they are and what hardships they dealt with in the past.

CG Collection

The story of the visual novel was also very inconsistent to its hentai adaptation. One example would be that in the hentai, the entire school got teleported to the other world along with Narufumi and his friends. This was not the case in the visual novel where only the characters got teleported. Another example would be that Nanami Ebizuku died in the hentai adaptation after getting stabbed by Shizuku which also didn't happen in the visual novel. I honestly thought that the visual novel would complement the story from the hentai adaptation, but I was completely wrong. I was very disappointed on the fact that the plot in the visual novel doesn't match with its hentai adaptation.

In terms of the technical features of the game, there are quite a lot of flaws relative to the other visual novels I played. First off, while the UI has a save, load and backlog button, it doesn't have a skip button. The way to skip dialogue in the game would be to hold down Ctrl, and this includes dialogue that you haven't read before which makes it very difficult to navigate which routes you already have been through and which ones you haven't. You also can't fast forward through an elongated CG that is automatically scrolling during the game. In addition, the UI doesn't have the option to quick save your progress. You can only save normally which can be a bit time consuming if you want to grind on obtaining all the CGs and endings for each character. One flaw that I find to be the most annoying would be that the UI disappears whenever the character faces multiple multiple that you have to select in the game. You can't save your progress during these instances, making it very frustrating and time consuming if you're aiming to navigate yourself between different character routes.

Settings

You may think that this visual novel is trash, but for me personally, I don't think its inherently bad. Despite the flaws present, I was able to tolerate them and manage to get all the endings for all the characters, which includes the bad ones. I also enjoyed some of the background music, the background art and the voice acting was alright, especially for the two humanoid earth monsters. In addition, unlike most of the other eroges, the H-scenes are pretty short so I was able to get by through them without falling asleep. What makes this visual novel unique is that it contains these animated H-scenes for each of the heroines which looks pretty similar to the hentai adaptation. Unfortunately though, I was not able to obtain all of them, let alone the CGs because there was a programming error in the visual novel that prevents me from reading more in a particular route. Not sure if there is a problem within the files or its not perfectly compatible with my laptop. Needless to say, I was very frustrated especially after the fact that I went through a lot of trail and error just to get the H-scenes that I missed. I was however able to get all the endings of Black Gate so that's a win right there (I'll make a post for that soon).

Overall, this visual novel isn't anything special. It just features a mediocre story with mediocre characters that are somewhat relatable. If you wanna play this visual novel all because of the discontinued hentai adaptation, I wouldn't recommend it. While the general premise is the same, there are many parts in the visual novel that don't match with the hentai. As for the company Image-Works who developed Black Gate, this was their most recent visual novel they made and released to the public. For some reason, they haven't made anymore visual novels ever since. So far they've only made three games and one of them is exclusive to the PS1. Since they haven't made a new game since 2004, and their most recent game being pretty mediocre, I can only assume that the developers have ceased operations. Since the developers put their hard work and effort into the games they've made for Image-Works its kind of sad to see that things are ending this way for them. I'm not sure what the developers are up to now, but I wish them all the best!

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