Hanamachi Monogatari

Beautiful, bright and clear art with vivid colours indeed and as another fan said, there are a lot more sex scenes than Silver Chaos. Soundtrack is unremarkable but it's fully voiced. It's set in Meiji Japan and I love how the designer tried to make everything look old-fashioned and Japanese. The Japanese seems to be slightly archaic too.

Hanamachi (literally flower town) is a term meaning the pleasure quarter so I immediately guessed that "Pleasure quarter story" must be about prostitutes, in this case, male ones called kagema.

Our uke hero Suri has a English father and Japanese mother so he has blond hair and blue eyes which he gets bullied for. His parents died so at the beginning he is working as a servant at a brothel(the female kind) where he is beaten, starved and overworked. He catches the eye of Tatsumi, the owner of a infamous male brothel called Hanabishi who buys him over.Talk about melodrama. Memoirs of a Gay Prostitute?

Once he gets to the brothel, (at first he was too dumb to realize he was sold into prostitution), he gets a nice kimono, a nice room of his own and nice food for the first time in his life. Wow, this game makes me wish I'm a male prostitute! *insert sarcasm* He meets various other characters and that's when the real story(and sex) starts.

A rundown of characters:
Suri- Parents died when he was very young. Illiterate and in general an innocent uke. (Ok, he was seme with Izumi) Looks better grown-up. Doesn't appreciate his own Eurasian looks. Fortunately, his lovers convince him otherwise.

Tatsumi-brothel owner, severe, cold, wears glasses. Kichiku seme type.
---
Came from a good family but his father was too perfectionistic, controlling and demanding...papa also favoured older brother and beats him so Tatsumi decides to run away, change his surname and start a brothel instead of becoming a respectable soldier like the obedient older brother. Plus he hated his brother for not taking his side. Under the cold exterior is a messed-up little boy! He can only show his soft side when Shuri is asleep.
---

Kajiyama- big hulking brothel servant.
---
Has a dark past connected with Suri's parents.
---

Izumi- pretty young boy from poor rural family who was sold to a kimono store to settle family debts. Store went bust and he ended up in the brothel to settle the store's debts. Brought in by Kagami.
--
There's nice Izumi and slutty,mean Izumi. Think Vallewida from Enzai. Split personality from being sold and abandoned by parents and gang-raped. A masochist who tries to shore himself up emotionally by having sex with as many men as possible to forget his trauma.
---

Sakuya-elegant young man with long black hair. Most requested and popular prositute. Luckily he's not *****y at all despite being No. 1.
---
He sold himself to the brothel to give his lover money. The ass never showed up to redeem poor Sakuya.
---


Masato- Tatsumi's older brother. He's a career soldier and looks exactly like Tatsumi, only without glasses. Tatsumi hates him.
---
Look out for the 3 p bad ending. lol You will see they look exactly alike when Tatsumi takes his glasses off except for the hairstyle.
---
Kagami- Masato and Tatsumi's uncle. Middle-aged successful businessman who travels overseas for business. Loves Western things. He helped out financially with the setting up of the brothel so Tatsumi owes him a favour.

Igarashi- famous shunga (Japanese erotic paintings) artist. He's using a hut on the brothel grounds as his atelier.

My only real complaint about the game is that I wish there aren't so many older male semes. It's a bit icky to see Suri having sex with Kagami who looks so much older.

Tip: by the time you get to Suri's mizuage, you will have a good idea which storyline you are following by seeing who shows up so you can backtrack if it's someone you don't want. "Mizuage" is an interesting Japanese term and in this context it means Suri's first customer who will get to (paying extra I assume) *cough* deflower him. After that he will be a ichininmae no kagema (full-fledged kagema). *sweatdrops* Another interesting term is hanadai (flower fee). Nope, it doesn't refer to the money you pay for flowers but a euphemism for the fee paid for Suri's "services" lol

I can't decide which characters I like best, I like Izumi, Sakuya, Igarashi and Tatsumi!

This game also made me cry ;_:

---SPOILER---
One of the endings in this game made me cry. This was the one in which Izumi regresses permanently to childhood after being confronted with the truth about his past and Shuri takes on the burden of supporting both of them by doing double work both as servant and prostitute. He's doomed to an early death from STDs and overwork.
---SPOILER---