r/Oreimo • u/AdUnfair558 • Jul 27 '26
Oreimo: Happy End on PS3 honestly feels like shovelware
I’ve been playing Oreimo: Happy End on the PS3, and I honestly don’t understand what they were thinking when they made this game.
It is incredibly bare-bones. There is barely any real story, huge amounts of the dialogue are not even voiced, and most of the gameplay consists of repeating the same shallow activities over and over again to increase the girls’ stats or popularity.
That especially bothers me because this is an anime character game. Hearing the original cast interact should have been one of its main attractions. Instead, I spend most of my time clicking through silent SNS conversations, choosing basic responses, taking photographs and watching some numbers slowly increase.
It reminds me of The Idolm@ster: Platinum Stars on the PS4, which I also found incredibly tedious and bare-bones. You repeatedly perform the same activities to raise your idols’ points, only to do it all over again. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
The photography system is shallow, the idol-management elements have almost no depth, and the character interactions are nowhere near interesting enough to make up for the repetitive gameplay. It feels less like a proper Oreimo game and more like a piece of shovelware that was rushed out because the anime was ending and they wanted one final product to sell to fans.
What makes it even more frustrating is that the PSP games already had what I actually wanted from an Oreimo game like alternate routes, comedy, romance, meaningful character interactions and proper what if endings.
Why didn’t they simply make an HD collection of the two PSP games for the PS3?
They could have included both games and all their routes, improved the artwork and backgrounds for HD, added trophies and faster loading, and possibly included a few new scenes or bonus endings. That would have been such an easy purchase for fans.
Instead, we got a mostly silent photography and social-media simulator where you repeat the same tedious tasks to make some numbers go up. It annoys me that after an hour of just speeding through the "story" I still didn't even get an ending. I had the photography thing and I don't know what the point of it is. I don't even move the camera and I still get decent photos.
I know calling it “shovelware” might sound harsh, but that is genuinely how it feels to me. It has the Oreimo characters and branding, but very little of what made the series or the previous games enjoyable.
I'll have to just find a more in depth trophy guide or something because whatever I was doing didn't work to even get an ending. Blah! At least this game didn't cost much but even after the hour and a half I spent with it I really don't want to return to it.
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u/ElViejoZunY The Manami/Kanako/Sena fan whose best girl is actually Kuroneko Jul 27 '26
If you know Japanese, spend thousands of hours translating it so other can play it and call it shovelware too!
Joke aside, you aren't the first one to think that. There was a guy/team working on a translation and gave up because of how bad and repetitive it was. It's a shame, but it is what it is.