Shirotsume Souwa - 白詰草話

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:30:42 +0200

Title: 白詰草話
Developer: Littlewitch
vndb: https://vndb.org/v572

Absolute gem of a game, I’ve always loved what I’ve seen of Ooyari’s art through the years, so it was about time to give a try to one of his games. So I randomly decided for Little Witch’s debut title Shirotsume Souwa, went full blind into it and pretty much loved everything about it.

Reading some EGs reviews people generally seemed kinda mixed with the story, but I thought it was pretty nice for the length. The game is basically 6 hour long structured around ~10 episodes of 30-40m that feel like an anime with how it ends and starts the episodes. The protagonist is a scientific that genetically created the biggest massive destruction weapon in the world: super powerful lolis.

Most of the game revolves around hanging out with the girls while worrying about how to get them to live a normal life instead of being fated to be weapons for the army, basically the classic peak sekai-kei feeling from the turn of the century. Honestly it also gave me some mahoyo vibes since it’s mostly just chilling around while there is a big setting and stuff going in the background. Most of the characters are good, it has tons of them and they are mostly good for their role with Arayama and Shinafuji taking the spotlight, the antagonist is kinda meme and something that could’ve been better easily. Given the length I’d say all the characters have their good moments and it’s good enough, not every character needs to have an arc anyway. I also don’t have any major issues with the story, the last 1/4 of the game is pretty rushed, but all the plot points mostly makes sense. So yeah in general it is the weird scifi with good 雰囲気 and 純粋 love and emotions I like it, and given how good the presentation is I didn’t have much of an issue getting into it.

This game is from 2002 and in a 5-6h frame it has more art assets and cool scripting than basically anything out there, and of course the art itself is also godlike. You could easily release this game now with bumped resolution and nobody would notice it’s more than 20 years old. If the story progression feels like an anime, the presentation is like a motion manga, every scene is manually crafted and does something unique. If there is a big reason to go out of your way and play it it’s no doubt how good it looks and you won’t be disappointed.

The OST also doesn’t fall behind, an all timer op + ed songs, like 40+ bgm tracks, and some really good vocal songs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JEZXAqDtcA). I think most people that found this game was for the OP since the song was featured later in fripside, but for me it was the Energy Field song, and funnily enough after playing the game I still could not find where it plays. I even went for an hour after getting the first ending to skip around the other endings with a walkthrough and still couldn’t find it, it’s in the extra menu so it must play somewhere… And speaking of routes, all three girls routes are basically the game where it follows the exact same storyline just changing the h scenes and not much more, it has a million choices so skipping around is kind of a pain, so I’d probably just rec to do Ema since she feels like the “main” of the girls and has a nice scene that gives some needed context into Graham’s past. There is a second “harem” ending where he just runs away but probably not worth the hassle. And lastly, speaking of the system, I did play it with the voice patch since I wasn’t trying to set up a new emulator, but the patch does have some issues with the engine. The game is basically auto read except at the end of the panel where you press enter to go into the next panel, and the game doesn’t stop to wait for the voices so most of the voice clips just get chopped halfway. To be honest this isn’t a big issue since when I read VNs normally i also press enter midway through voices anyway, but it feels off with how cinema and auto read the presentation is, it makes you want to read it along with the voices.

I haven’t look into it, but I’m going to assume the Dreamcast port doesn’t have this issue so probably worth a check if you are reading this and planning to play it, you will miss in the Ooyari h scenes, but they are completly irrelevant to the plot, and they aren’t even mentioned as ever happening within the story… The presentation in them is also just normal NVL sadly so pretty disappointing in that front. The quality of the voices is also pretty low, but sadly thats probably a thing everywhere, kind of a shame since the cast is godly.

Anyways turbo soulful game, can play it in the time it takes to watch a cour of a random anime and probably get a lot more from it, so big rec.

Littlewitch on Unikansou

Shirotsume Souwa - 白詰草話