Hello Lady! – Complete Edition – Review

Mysterious organizations, special powers, and sinister plots. Hello Lady! – Complete Edition puts you in a world where the absurd is taken to craft a dark and serious tale, though not without moments of comedy and lightness. NekoNyan have brought Akatsuki Works’ first officially localized title to us and it’s certainly an interesting one.

Secrets and Spears

Hello Lady! sets the tone from the first scenes. Two young women get out of a helicopter to confront a humanoid acting like a wild beast. They soon put it down, throwing around powers like invisible spears. With the job done, they relax. But then one is attacked by terrorists who hate people who have powers with a religious fervor.

Enter the star of the show. Shinri Narita sweeps in and saves the day by taking out the terrorists with ease. We learn that he’s on the way to an academy that caters to HMIs – those with special powers. The same one that those young women attend.

Shinri is a power fantasy and fits the ‘chuunige’ type of visual novel to a tee. He’s overly competent to the point that it feels he can do anything. This is shown by how he saves the most powerful HMI and defeats two of the other top-tier HMI – all without using his own powers. On top of this he’s extremely confident, the only high-powered male HMI, speaks in an incredibly grandiose way, and has a mysterious dark past. He even knows multiple mythical-seeming martial arts and can go on at length about the details of weaponry that he can use.

Many visual novels with heroine routes like this one focus on the interactions and the build-up of romance. Hello Lady! is Shinri’s show though. One that focuses on his desire for revenge and the mystery behind the events seven years ago that lead up to now.

Become Noble

The academy’s goal is to teach students to use their talents to lead humanity toward a brighter future. It wants to mold them into future ‘nobles’ who will be able to change the world. Beyond that, it’s a safe harbor for the HMIs who have experienced horrible things outside the walls of the academy.

Shinri doesn’t approve of just the elite leading and on the face of it openly disapproves of the academy’s goals because of this. We soon learn that there’s a far deeper reason why he disapproves of the academy and that there are even more secrets that weren’t yet known to discover.

Disapproving of the academy’s goals puts him at odds with the most powerful HMIs at the academy – the heroines. Beyond that, the other students and staff aren’t a fan of him either. His odd personality doesn’t help him there.

The Sin of Flatness

While Hello Lady! is a serious story and Shinri is a hyper-competent protagonist, he does have a weakness. He’s obsessed with large breasts – at one point he’s even referred to as ‘Big Tiddy Hunter N’. He purposely gropes the chest of several women in the common route and even judges them. This makes it even more surprising that there’s a route with a flat heroine, despite his claim that ‘the flatlands aren’t his area of expertise’.

While Shinri does tend to be grandiose in his speech normally, it can come out more when he talks about breasts. “The outline of your chest surpasses even the moon” is just one of the shorter examples.

This is all done for comedic effect. Despite the frequent groping, for the most part, he gets away with it without any serious damage or anger.

The Etoile

Hello Lady! – Complete Edition contains the main story with four routes, a few bad endings, two fandiscs, a ‘true ending’, and then some additional adult scenes. The way this is structured is a little unusual, but it works well. With that said, choices aren’t always obvious, so a walkthrough may help.

First, the player needs to complete Sorako’s and Tamao’s routes. Sorako seems like the picture of a considerate and sweet young lady, aside from the fact that she wears the boy’s uniform. Tamao is quite different, being quick to a fight and speaking like a delinquent. Despite this, both routes mirror each other in a way, both focusing on Shinri’s revenge, revealing a surprising secret about the heroine and having other similar elements.

Eru is next. She’s a sometimes expressionless otaku, who references eroge and loves anime. Eru’s route builds on the understanding gained in the previous routes and focuses more on the mystery behind the academy, rather than revenge. It’s still full of interesting twists, including one of the most surprising so far. It’s my personal favorite route.

Finishing Eru’s route unlocks Saku’s. She’s the prideful heroine who holds the academy’s ideal higher than anyone, which makes it particularly interesting as she gets involved in unveiling the secrets behind it. Again her route builds on the elements learned in the ones that came before it.

Saku’s route brings Hello Lady! to a surprising, dramatic, and rather fitting conclusion. If this is where Hello Lady! finished, it would be a wonderful ending. Until this point, each route has built on the previous ones, been incredibly engaging, and brilliantly revealed new elements of the story with great pacing.

Bigger Isn’t Always Better

After completing Saku’s route, it unlocks two fandiscs. One for Hishia the maid and one for Mitori who is the only female HMI shown that didn’t get a route.

Hishia’s fandisc is mostly a cut-down version of Saku’s route from her point of view and a few differences. It includes some extra scenes showing Hishia’s past, how she encountered Shinri, and a few scenes where she talks with the heroines. I enjoyed it, but as much of it used Saku’s story, it didn’t feel too new.

Mitori’s fandisc was a lot more interesting. It was completely new content, acting as a ‘What If’ story. Unlike the other routes before it, it took place mostly away from the academy and explored a concept that was often talked about but not shown in the main story. It didn’t help to build the overall narrative like the main routes, but I enjoyed it as much as one.

This unlocks the true route, which is where it goes downhill. It goes back slightly before the end of the common route and puts Shinri and Saku in an event that seems far too sudden and forced. From there it kept shoving one new special power, secret, character, or idea after another at the reader without exploring them or taking a break. There wasn’t much in the way of mystery or building up of tension either, with the action scenes that had been occasional until now taking over. Beyond that, some events seemed inconsistent with the character’s previous actions – this happened occasionally in previous routes too but was more frequent here.

Hello Lady! – Complete Edition is worth getting, but it might benefit a reader to consider Saku’s route as the ‘true ending’ and everything else as extra content.

Literature

I’ve mentioned that Shinri speaks in a rather elaborate way, but it is worth noting that much of Hello Lady! – Complete Edition is rather wordy and indirect. Lines like “The extreme thickness of your head blocks out all sarcasm, and it often makes me quite irritated” aren’t uncommon. It might be difficult for people who aren’t confident in the English language ability and the translation staff definitely deserves praise for how they’ve localized it.

With that noted, it could use another editing pass. Perhaps due to the level of writing, while there weren’t many errors in terms of typos or grammar, there did seem to be a few more than normal. After all, with lines like “The ignoble beast of man knows not of restraint”, it’s not basic English. It isn’t enough that it bothered me, but it might affect some people. A few parts just felt oddly phrased too.

I should note here that it does contain multiple languages. Hello Lady! Complete Edition contains English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese as options. A feature language learners may appreciate is that you can display two of these at the same time.

Faith in the Voluptuous

If you buy Hello Lady! – Complete Edition on one of the adult visual novel stores such as Denpasoft, each route other than the true one will include adult scenes. You can also buy it on Steam and apply a free patch.

The adult scenes are primarily vanilla, though one route does include a heroine who takes charge in a slightly dominating way and some players may be uncomfortable with a flat heroine. There are also nude sprites that occasionally appear for most characters.

Unlike many other titles released by NekoNyan, Hello Lady! – Complete Edition has mosaic censorship. Some examples of this can be found on the store page. This was a last-minute change due to requirements beyond NekoNyan’s control.

While Hello Lady! is an adult title, it’s mostly story-focused and the adult scenes aren’t particularly relevant to the plot. According to a representative from the publisher, aside from the removal of the adult scenes, only minimal changes were made to the Steam version for approval on the store. Players who aren’t interested in these can buy on Steam without issue.

Art and Audio

The art is of a high level throughout and there are some particularly beautiful CGs. Animation is often used to good effect, with moving sprites, panning, spins of the background, and more to show the action.

There are 36 pieces of music and they’re used well to set the mood of the scene. All main characters are voiced with fitting voices, including the protagonist.

Verdict

Hello Lady! – Complete Edition contains an excellent mystery. It unfolds slowly, builds up, and comes to a great ending – if we ignore the ‘true end’. The protagonist is a big personality who can overshadow other elements though, so whether a reader enjoys Hello Lady! may depend on whether they like him, rather than how much they enjoy the heroines as in some other visual novels or the mystery itself.

HELLO LADY! – COMPLETE EDITION IS RECOMMENDED

If you are looking for another visual novel with darker content, perhaps Dohna Dohna ~ Let’s Do Bad Things Together would be worth checking out. 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 the publisher NekoNyan for a review code for this title.