Destiny Star Girlfriend 3 (Shukusei no Girlfriend 3 -The Destiny Star of Girlfriend-) is a single-heroine visual novel developed by mirai and published by Shiravune. This romance comedy focuses on a stoic magical girl with a tragic past.
While this is technically a standalone release, I’d suggest reading the initial Destiny Star Girlfriend and Destiny Star Girlfriend 2 first. Destiny Star Girlfriend 3 does include a summary of some of the lore and it briefly mentions the pasts of the other characters, but you’ll miss out on some of the references and details.
Time Goes On
Destiny Star Girlfriend 3 is set approximately a year later than the first two titles in an alternate timeline. Seiji remains unaware of magic and still has a crush on Yuuri that he hasn’t acted on and events played out differently. However, Maja–the dark magical girl and heroine of Destiny Star Girlfriend 2–still ends up joining the class, Petra still follows Maja, and Kanoko still fawns excessively over Yuuri. This allows for a clean slate while immediately including all of the characters built up over the previous games, but focusing on them in different ways.
Seiji is convinced to make an effort to actually get closer to Yuuri, but events play out to push him closer to Kanoko instead. Between having to spend time together, an incident that leads to him dreaming of her, and perhaps being influenced by a surprising amount of him lucking into perverted situations with her, he begins to like her and she at least begins to soften her aloof attitude towards him.
I enjoyed seeing how this played out, with her becoming a bit nicer and opening up a little, but only truly letting down her walls after a certain incident. This gave Seiji a chance to show Kanoko his good side, and this made the reasons why she’d start to like him more believable.
Bond of Magic
The circumstances are a little different than in Destiny Star Girlfriend 1 or 2, but it uses the same idea that Kanoko and Seiji get stuck needing to remain within one meter of each other. This means living together in Kanoko’s apartment. The logic of the explanation and actions around this did seem to have a major hole, but I felt it was forgivable.
Leading up to this, something bad happens to Kanoko. This creates another issue that she has to struggle with throughout the story, and one I felt they handled well. Instead of just focusing on the relationship between Kanoko and Seiji, it highlighted her friendship with Yuuri, Maja, and Petra too as they helped her to handle her feelings around it. This becomes even more important toward the end.
There are quite a lot of scenes here with a fun group dynamic. Sometimes it’s transforming and fighting demons, sometimes it’s more casual moments like going to the beach or camping. Either way, it ends up with lots of laughs.
While Yuuri is Kanoko’s obsession and I enjoyed the story exploring why and how it ties into their pasts, her relationship with Petra was a highlight for me. Obnoxious, annoying, and extremely outgoing, you can imagine why Petra would clash with a somewhat anti-social character like Kanoko. They have a great dynamic where they fight but quietly care about each other.
Closet Pervert
One new thing we learn about Kanoko in Destiny Star Girlfriend 3 is that she’s secretly quite a pervert. This results in some comedic accidents like her vast collection of adult manga falling down in front of Seiji or being caught in compromising positions. One major one did get a bit of an eye roll though, as it felt like an overused method to lead to a realization of feelings.
A significant amount of the comedy revolves around Kanoko’s perverted tendencies, whether it’s directly jokes about it, or seeing her deny it and make excuses that are obvious lies. She’s not fooling anyone when she pretends to not be interested or that it’s a demon’s fault that something happened.
This soon escalates into H-scenes, even before an actual romance officially starts. That said, romantic moments soon start occurring between the two, including during these scenes. Some of these are quite touching and it’s supported both by comments from the others around them about how Kanoko usually acts and how we’ve seen her act in the previous titles.
On the topic of the H-scenes, they’re relatively standard for this type of visual novel. Anal and a mention of anilingus appear, along with a scene with multiple partners, but that’s far away from vanilla as it strays.
Toward the end, an important twist happens which ramps things up significantly and leads to a shift in the relationships with the group. It was a surprise, but perhaps the best part of Destiny Star Girlfriend 3, not just for the intensified adult elements (and how it leads to one of the best H scenes), but how this part of the plot was handled generally.
Systems and Localization
There are no major changes to Destiny Star Girlfriend 3 when compared with the previous two, other than a lack of choices (aside from one with an optional summary of some of the lore). These are all kinetic visual novels, so this isn’t much of a change.
For better or worse, the user interface is again the very minimal one which looks incredibly clean but only allows using keyboard shortcuts for most features. There also isn’t a feature to jump back to previous points.
As always, I can’t comment on translation accuracy other than not noticing anything unusual, but the English version reads well and editing appears to have been done well too. That the comedic moments come across well is particularly impressive.
Sparkling Stars
Destiny Star Girlfriend 3 contains 25 high-quality CGs, most of which are from adult scenes (and include mosaics). Two are panty shots, both of which are used several times but with four different variations of panties.
Magical battles are less of a focus here than in the first Destiny Star Girlfriend, but they’re suitably impressive in terms of transformations and effects used. This was a complaint I had about Destiny Star Girlfriend 2, so I was glad to once again see plenty of beams of light and magical glyphs being thrown around.
The voice acting is great too, similar to the past titles. Kanoko is more soft-spoken than some of the other characters, but her quiet voice fits the more gentle and romantic moments well.
Verdict
Destiny Star Girlfriend 3 is my favorite of the three titles. It has plenty of comedic moments, but what makes it special is how it handles the plot, especially in how the characters grow closer and the events toward the end. Adding this to plenty of sweet romantic moments and shows of friendship made this quiet heroine’s story stand out even more than the over-the-top Yuuri from the first title, at least to me.
DESTINY STAR GIRLFRIEND 3 IS RECOMMENDED
Want to check out more visual novels? Why not check out our review of Angelic☆Chaos RE-BOOT!? We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Many thanks go to Shiravune for a PC review code for this title.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
