IxShe Tell – Review | The Ban on Romance Has Ended

IxShe Tell is a visual novel by developed Hooksoft and localized by NekoNyan. It takes you into what feels like a typical harem anime high school setting and dials it up to eleven. 

This visual novel could be described as a moege. It’s full of cute girls and has a focus on romance. You won’t find much in the way of serious plot here, but you will certainly laugh at some of the over the top situations.

IxShe Tell can be bought via Steam, but this will be a version without all of the mature content. I should note that it really does cut it back. Even an early panty shot CG was removed in the Steam version. This can be restored by a patch that is free from the NekoNyan Shop. It can also be bought from other retailers such as Denpasoft / JAST USA without any censorship.

The sexual content itself is standard without any uncommon fetishes represented. Each character has a few sex scenes in their route. There are no mosaics. I would not consider any of the scenes overly important to the plot, so readers can skip them if desired.

Story

I mentioned that IxShe Tell feels like a typical harem anime in a way. You play as Hajime Ninomiya, the student council president of a school with a tradition where they ban romance between students. A ban that you have just overturned. 

Within the first minutes of the story opening, four unnamed girls have confessed their feelings to you. You’ve been absolutely mobbed by excited students. You have a secret fan club and there are even underground auctions where some of your discarded chopsticks have been sold off. There’s another secret club of perverted guys hidden away too.

Over the prologue, we get introduced to our five heroines. This also feels both typical but to the extreme. We have not one, but two childhood friends. A student council president of a different and a vice president. And finally, a school idol. 

They confess their feelings to you. Back to back, each one of them tells them that they like you. They all have their own reasons and some of them seem purer than others, but each one wants to date you.

As the common route moves on, you do all you can to dodge a nosey student body who seemingly all want to know who you will choose, along with a contingent of girls who want you to choose them instead. There are a few events such as a fireworks night, a Halloween party, and just the smaller scenes like watching how the boys smuggle porn and sex toys into the dorms. It never gets too serious but does discuss issues such as people being rejected and hurt feelings coming from it with the ban being lifted. There is also the concept of issues happening after the ban is released and the teachers putting it back into place.

One interesting thing here was seeing all the girls competing and being clear that they want to be with you, but being friendly about it. They might tease each other or even act in less than pure ways at times, but they support and help each other too.

One uncommon feature in IxShe Tell is that it occasionally lets you switch perspectives to other characters. At a few points, you could see from the view of not only the heroines but side characters and some unnamed students. This didn’t happen often, but it was appreciated.

Overall I felt like the common route did not provide much in the way of story, but it provided a lot of laughs. It never really stopped with the humor and it showed the characters interesting points well. It was mostly a string of events rather than a strong plot, but some of the best moments were the heroines playing off each other.

About six hours on and the common route comes to an end. A choice is made which sets you into a character route. These last about three hours each.

I personally felt that the character routes were weaker. Before I explain why I’ll go into how you choose a route.

Systems

IxShe Tell plays like a standard visual novel, with a few exceptions. The main one is how you choose the character you want to pursue.

Each day you have ten points to distribute between the heroines. The character who has the most at the end of the common route is chosen. In addition, there are no real dialogue choices, but you can choose who you want to spend time at four points with and get an extra scene with that character. There are also a few points where you can choose to complete an action or not by clicking before a timer expires.

On the night of the dance where the common route ends, you automatically choose that character. Unless you decide not to. Essentially the points are meaningless because it gives you a final choice to choose between the winning character, any other character, or even no-one.

I did feel this was a pity as while freedom of choice is good, it felt like a waste of an interesting system. I’d put the time into using it and then it turned out not to matter.

Character Routes

There are five heroines, a number of side characters, and some reoccurring unnamed students. Some of the side characters were particularly strong, with the crude little sister Aoba taking the award for some of the funniest moments. 

I started off by choosing Shiori – the archetypical childhood friend in some ways, but not in others. She knows your likes and dislikes. Your families are close to each other. She loves you without any ulterior motive. She’s not perfect though. She’s awkward with people she doesn’t know. She’s happy to use her advantage of knowing you best to be the winner. She even mentions being available if you want to cheat or have a second girlfriend if you don’t choose her – that may or may not be a joke.

I did find her character charming and she showed some growth through her route. Growing out of her shell was a theme and it was nice to see. Nothing really stood out though and the comedy dropped off.

Kasumi is childhood friend number two. She represents the reunited childhood friend trope, where she comes back into your life after a long time. She acts very straightforward and loving, being the one to trigger the confessions of love after transferring schools to be with you. She even says that she prioritizes your happiness over being the one chosen and is very direct about offering you her body.

There were some fun scenes in her route, but nothing too new aside from a few serious scenes near the end. While not too important, I recommend leaving Kasumi’s route until last as it’s the only one that actually has an interesting plot point, though that part was only covered briefly.

Ayaka is the school idol. She is extremely proud of both her appearance and her popularity, turning down boys constantly since the end of the ban. Her main concern seems to be maintaining and growing that popularity. Her reason for dating you was because it would look good rather than a genuine interest in you. This caused me to dislike her at first.

I grew to like her more during her route. She’s assertive and doesn’t ever give up, even if not chosen. She does show growth too and has her own issues which she works on overcoming.

Yui was initially my first choice. She’s the student president of her own school and comes across as younger but mature in most ways. Unsurprisingly there are still cute scenes like one showing her being scared of storms. She’s always very supportive of you.

Her route explored some of her background and character, but she didn’t really change as a character. It showed her family and it had her go through a dilemma, but it could have been a lot more interesting than it was.

Finally Yoshino – your own vice president. She’s the only one who doesn’t seem to outright always act sweetly to you. She’s a bit dishonest about her feelings, but it adds to the comedy quite a lot since she constantly lets things slip and acts a bit jealous. She’s stubborn and takes herself too seriously at times.

She was amusing in the common route of IxShe Tell, but after the whole act of not liking you was over, a lot of the comedy was lost.

Overall a common thread was that not a whole lot happened in the character routes. A lot of the humor was toned down too and there weren’t as many interactions with wider groups of characters. The minimal conflict that there was had been removed too. Other characters still appeared occasionally, but they mostly had given up. I enjoyed all the character routes still, just not to the same level as the common route. Each of the heroines had some sort of conflict or story in the background, but it felt like they could have been focused on more.

Writing and Reading

I felt that the writing in IxShe Tell was engaging and well done overall. There were very few typos or the like, so the editor deserves praise there too.

Graphics, Sound, and Options

NekoNyan has managed to include the higher quality 1440p version of the assets instead of the 720p ones from the original release. It is very noticeable and appreciated. One thing visual novels often do is zooming in on a background or CG and it can often look low quality and is a personal dislike. Here it uses the same technique, but continues to look great, avoiding jagged lines and pixelization.

Overall the artwork was great with a reasonably wide variety of CGs and some detailed backgrounds. They had a lot of sprites too, including ones for back views, characters in costume for one-off events, secondary characters, and even sprites for some unnamed characters. They came with quite a few interesting expressions too, animated eyes, and some limited movement. I did notice a few CGs looked a bit odd though, with certain angles or proportions looking off. Most were great though.

In terms of visuals, the production quality of IxShe Tell just stood out as particularly high compared to many other visual novels I’ve played. It feels like they certainly had plenty of budget to use on art.

The background music variety fit the scenes, though did not stand out as amazing. The voices were high quality with characters aside from the main one being fully voiced.

As far as options go, there were some basic options around text, audio, and the user interface. Each character had an individual volume control. It’s certainly competent, but nothing stood out.

Verdict

Between the quality of the comedy, the scenes shown in the common route and the overall production quality, I’m happy to recommend IxShe Tell. I do feel like it could have been better at developing the characters or exploring their issues further in the character routes, which is what holds it back from a higher score.

IxSHE TELL IS RECOMMENDED

If you would like to see more comedy Visual Novels, you may be interested in our review of Sankaku Renai.

Many thanks go to NekoNyan for a PC review code for this title.