Tayutama -kiss on my deity- review

Note: This is for the eroge by Lump of Sugar in 2008, not the anime or its fandisc, Tayutama -it’s happy days-

Well…there’s 20 hours of my life I’m never going to get back…

Premise:

Yuuri’s an average guy whose family owns a shrine. One day, he and some friends accidentally break a seal on a bunch of Taiyutai, mystical beings that has existed for countless eons. Of course, that includes the “3 big bads” and a young girl who proclaims herself to be Yuuri’s wife. He names her Mashiro and they begin to live together.

Characters:

Yuuri Mito

Just your average protagonist who’s not nondescript in every way other than his love for motorcycles. Except he’s the first eroge protag in a fluffy story that has actually shown any malice towards a heroine. Oh, he’s also inherited some really strong spiritual powers, which he uses (kind of) to defeat the 3 big bads.

Mashiro

The reincarnation (of sorts) of one of the strongest Tayutai to ever exist, Mashiro is nice, well-mannered, and very, VERY wife-like . Of course, she falls in love with Yuuri instantly and quickly proclaims herself to be his wife. She can be very assertive, gives Yuri training from hell, turns into a loli when she’s running low on energy, has the goal of making humans and tayutai live in harmony, and is the one and only reason for playing this game.

Seriously, her route is the one with any real conflict, and also the only one that elicited any emotion from me other than annoyance. All you need to know about the other heroines is pretty much shown in her path. I don’t like the deus ex machina ending, but by that point I wasn’t expecting much from the game anyway.

The 3 big bads:

The one in the suit is Ouryuu, a tsundere dragon.

The 2 birds are a pair of phoenixes.

The blobby stuff is Nue, more on that later.

Ameri Kawai

The genki childhood friend who loves the protagonist but won’t admit it.

I generally don’t like these types of characters unless they’re supporting the main character. And that doesn’t change here. I sympathized with her during her route, but only because Yuuri was being a complete ass with her.

Mifuyu Kisaragi

An ojou-sama from an elite all girl’s school. She’s very serious and good at what she does, and also moonlights as a tsundere on occasion.

Her story’s the best after Mashiro’s, and some of her interactions with Nue was pretty amusing.

That loli is nue. Yes, the same nue as that blue blobby thing. She’s childishly hostile and the only character that didn’t get on my nerves at one point or another.

Yumina Takanashi is Yuuri’s cousin. She’s sweet but shy, and of course, she calls him Onii-chan.

There was even less substance in her route than Ameri’s.  Although maybe it’s just because I’m biased against her. I mean, she cries and wallows in self pity about how flat she is, and I can’t agree with that (I know it’s comedic, but still).

Story:

What story?

Just kidding, but there really isn’t much to Tayutama. The main branch of the story is the introduction, ending with a proposal from Mashiro. From there, Yuuri, with a focus on the chosen girl, defeat the 3 big bads (the order changes, depending on the character). As you can imagine, this means a lot of skipping. This is made worse by the fact that there simply isn’t much content besides the events involving the big bads and ero (other than in Mashiro’s story).

Yes, that IS pantsu raining down from the sky

As you can probably tell, there’s not much character development, or interesting battles (I can’t being myself to say that the battles were good in any respect). On the other hand, if you don’t mind the bad pacing, enjoy mindless fluff, and only go for the Mashiro route, it might actually be pretty good.

And that’s the worst part too, Tayutama had potential. There has been instances where pantsu rained from the sky and the plot was still fantastic (like Mai-hime), but Tayutama isn’t going in that direction. Kikuramikami no Hime’s story, which is unlocked after all paths are completed (I think), could have been an emotional roller-coaster. Instead, it felt like a soggy peanut. There could have been enough development to give all the heroines the emotional impact that was in Mashiro’s path. But nope, they threw all that away.

Art: …well… there’s good points and there’s bad points. First of all, the backgrounds are pretty nice. And I can’t say that the girls don’t look good head on, but the best friend looks like a monkey, the fathers look like sexual offenders, and I don’t like the clothes.

As you can see, Moekibara Fumitake isn’t the greatest at drawing characters from the side. Not to mention the coloring is generic, the sense of lighting is mediocre, and the taiyutai doesn’t quite blend with the rest of the images.

Little windows like this pop up all the time, along with !s and things like that on character’s heads. They’re cute, but they feel weird when the situation seems to be a bit serious.

I really liked the ink-like drawings though. Truth to be told, this one image (which was just a half second flash in a flashback) conveyed more emotion than some of the heroine paths combined.

Sound:

That black haired woman sounds like a man trying to squeak out a woman’s voice. But other than that I have no complaints with the voices, even if none of them really stood out to me.

The music…oh, the music…

The vocal songs are good, even if the balance isn’t that great. All the ending themes of the heroines are sang by their seiyuus, and they’re quite nice, especially Mifuyu’s. Some of the BGM isn’t bad. But this is the first time that BGM has gotten on my nerves so much.一つきりの祈り, T.S.H.E.,  sudden disaster, and  the worst of them all, 唯我独尊… They are like some kind of never ending torture, seamlessly combining mindless repetition and genericness. I felt like my ears were dying with each note.

Programming:

The only place in this game where I can sing praises. There’s a lot animation, and the tayutai are quite cute, bouncing around all over the place. The menus are nice, although they’re REALLY pink. Every time you right-click, stats for the heroines (such as above) show up before you get to the menu screen. Although, I’d have to say that that’s a negative because it gets annoying after a while. Another thing I liked is that you can skip scenes you’ve already seen before (a system also used in Da capo and F/SN). However, the 3 big bad battles (which is the biggest chunk in the stories) all have small differences, depending on the path, which means this is next to useless. There’s also the option to go back the previous option, although I didn’t really use that either, since there are only a handful of choices in the entire game. The little eyecatches are also really cute, and their subjects range from back gorund images to character art to relationship charts to little blurbs about the taiyutai. There’s also one which I think is a parody of Gurren Lagann.

Story:2.5×5=12.5/50

Art:7×3=21/30

Music: 5/10

Programming: 9/10

Total: 47.5/100 F

This eroge isn’t for me. It is for people who enjoy fluff and loves Mashiro enough to overlook everything else. If you’re looking for something mindless, this might be one of the better ones, and it definitely accomplished what it set out to do, but I really wouldn’t recommend it.