Love, Elections, and Chocolate (Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate, or KoiChoco as it is often referred to by shorthand) was the first visual novel created and developed by sprite back in 2010. Although their later works of Aokana and Everlasting Flowers have already been released in English, their first title remained conspicuously without an official English translation despite receiving an anime adaptation more than a decade ago. Until 2025, that is. I’ve said in the past I was quite a fan of their work on Aokana, so I was interested to see how well sprite’s debut visual novel holds up.
The Dirty Stuff
As an 18+ eroge, you’re probably going to want to download NekoNyan’s adult patch for Love, Elections, and Chocolate to get the full experience if you downloaded the Steam version and not the uncensored version from storefront such as JAST USA. Most of the story is otherwise removed without the patch, and thus it’s rather incomplete. You can check out our guide for more information about that, as well as information about how to access each route, which you can find here.
The content of the various H-scenes is pretty vanilla with mosaics intact, and there are three scenes per character. Sex is not an especially integral part of the story if you truly feel like hitting the fast-forward button, though it’s worth mentioning there are some instances where the H-Scenes plays somewhat into the drama of the story of a given route beyond just romantic consummation.
Run For Your Life
Our protagonist for Love, Elections, and Chocolate is one Yuuki Oojima, a 2nd-year student at the massive and prestigious Takafuji Academy. He regularly meets with several of his friends in what is ostensibly called the Culinary Research Club (CRC), which is more or less just a thinly veiled afterschool meetup spot to eat snacks and hang out. However, upon being visited by the frontrunner of the upcoming student council presidential election, Satsuki Shinonome, the club is soon threatened with termination due to its lack of merits being considered a misappropriation of school club funds.
In order to save their club, they come up with the ludicrous idea to nominate Yuuki to become the student council president, a task which he eventually accepts. Despite being more or less a boarding school, Takafuji features a gratuitously powerful student council that carries an oversized portion of influence over the school itself, almost to the point of parody even by anime/manga standards. And so, Yuuki and his club seek to try to win this rigged election using his unaffiliated status as a sort of X-factor over the existing three-party system that ordinarily controls the elections.
And of course, it’s an eroge with the word “Love” in the title, so there’s naturally plenty of options for romance along the way.
Campaign Trail
A decent amount of the intrigue to Love, Elections, and Chocolate is driven by the election that serves as the narrative’s backdrop. The campaign itself is a rather busy affair, and while Yuuki initially runs for the sake of his club, developments across several different routes have him and his team explore a broad array of issues concerning their school in the process. There’s a lot at play behind the scenes and often more at stake than just the fate of a few fringe clubs. This becomes more apparent deeper into several of the routes, as several of KoiChoco’s heroines have direct connections to the election or a personal stake in it beyond just the closure of the CRC.
At the end of the day, it’s a visual novel about a school election, so there’s naturally going to be some reductiveness and idealism, but I found it to cover a broad spectrum of intriguing angles. There are moments of contemplation over the lesser of two evils, making allies with people you might not want to, the costs of running a campaign (particularly for an unaffiliated candidate), and of course, good old-fashioned corruption. There are surprising bits of nuance to it all, and while it doesn’t always click with the direction of the story on any given route, I found the internal political aspects of the story interesting enough.
A Club of Do-Nothings
Part of the appeal to Love, Elections, and Chocolate is the nature of the group of friends at the heart of it all, the CRC. The main trio of the club is Yuuki and his friends Chisato Sumiyoshi and Mifuyu Kiba who have known each other for years prior. They are joined by a supporting cast of Nozomi, Ai, Kii, and Yume, who make up quite a silly crew of characters but enjoy the club all the same. At the start of the story, the CRC gets a new club member named Michiru Morishita, a quiet freshman who can be a bit difficult to read, and later gain a supporter and unofficial member in the upbeat Isara Aomi (who cannot join officially as she is on the school’s financial aid program, its own complicated subject matter). Their obligatory teacher/club advisor is Hazuki Shinonome, a booze-loving goofball of a sensei who happens to be the older sister of the biggest threat to the club.
The overwhelming majority of the story’s focus is on the CRC, especially given that they feature four of the title’s five main heroines. There’s a sense of camaraderie behind the team, and they can be generally fun. Still, there are notes of internal strife that shake things up in several routes even among the more distant support characters, so it’s not some ironclad thick-as-thieves group. There are also admittedly a couple of fairly one-dimensional characters in the supporting cast (Yume especially just feels like a tiresome yaoi tease joke), so I can’t say I consider them to be super appealing, but they have their moments.
Love, Elections, and Chocolate has a fairly lengthy common route, one which has its decent moments but can drag on at times. After that, your choices will set you down the routes of one of KoiChoco’s heroines.
The Defense of Chisato Sumiyoshi
Perhaps the most discussed and polarizing heroine of the set found in Love, Elections, and Chocolate is Chisato, Yuuki’s childhood friend. How much you like KoiChoco or not will likely hinge most on how you feel about this character. Her reputation wasn’t helped by its original release requiring you to clear her route before you could get to any of the others, no matter how much you tried to choose someone else or how much you didn’t want to go down her route. Thankfully, this version of KoiChoco is based on the High-Resolution re-release which gives you the option to start with any of its heroines. Still, the story at times noticeably feels like Chisato was meant to be your first route.
I’ll start by saying I don’t think Chisato is a downright bad character. When you remove her relation to Yuuki from the equation, she’s often nice to most people and willing to defend victims of bullying, while filling a vital role in managing the campaign. She is, however, extremely overbearing, and teases Yuuki in a way that comes off as downright mean at times. It is very hard to make it through the entirety of this visual novel without getting annoyed by her actions or possessive personality at some point.
All of KoiChoco’s heroines have some amount of personal trauma to their backstory, but Chisato’s is definitely where it’s most apparent. It’s clear there are plenty of emotional burdens on both of their minds that they struggle to truly come to terms with regarding how they feel about each other, and I do think it’s interesting in how it handles moving through trauma in a rather jagged way rather than a “this person is troubled but can do no wrong” sort of way. That said, while there are aspects of Chisato’s route and her relationship with Yuuki I found interesting, there’s also a share of melodrama with it that doesn’t always click. Her route ends up being one of the weaker ones of KoiChoco.
While many heroines of galge and moege in particular are often very friendly regardless of route and don’t offer much more than romantic teasing, you pretty much know that any route besides Chisato’s is going to break her heart and make her upset. How this manifests depends on route; sometimes she responds in a way that’s remarkably mature, sometimes it plays a major part of the story itself, and sometimes it’s just plain hard to watch (and not in a good way). I don’t find it unbelievable that a character of her sort would come off as too sour for many people’s liking, particularly those who enjoy bubblier visual novels. The drama around her is not always especially sympathizable or compelling either, though she does show growth and self-awareness about it at points. I do think there are some interesting aspects to her route still. Ultimately I have more conflicted feelings on Chisato than anything, but not outright disdain.
Isara
Isara stands in stark contrast to Chisato as easily the most immediately likable heroine as a person. She’s incredibly nice with an absolutely infectious smile, and she’s hardworking and very much loyal to the cause despite not technically being a member of the CRC.
She is also something of a pauper given her status as a student admitted via the financial aid program. Students admitted to Takafuji this way are often treated as of a lower class. This sort of discrimination plotline gives some additional trajectory to Yuuki’s campaign, and of course matters of discrimination provide unique hurdles to deal with when running a campaign trying to get votes from a school that includes both the bullies and their targets.
While Isara herself is a sweetheart, her route is just…fine. The character does have some intrigue in recognizing how the bullying she’s faced has sort of led her to accept being a doormat from time to time in order to not risk shaking the tree and making things worse. However, a decent amount of the friction in her route pertains to her presence itself; there are moments where members of the CRC see her as something of an outsider for several different reasons, especially with how Yuuki getting closer to her affects his campaign, despite her not taking any particularly consequential actions herself. There’s also not a ton of standout character moments to this route. It also uses an annoying contrivance of a situation that borders on deus ex machina to get things to turn around, which I wasn’t a fan of. So the route’s narrative just ends up being an okay but unspectacular experience.
Michiru
Michiru is a rather reserved, taciturn freshman who joins the club early on in the common route. While she is a shy character, it makes for a somewhat refreshing change of pace that her route isn’t heavily about her trying to overcome her shyness, though it is still sweet seeing her gradually open up emotionally. She’s a bit odd at times, giving terse responses to people’s questions and rarely opening up, but she means well and is accepted as one of the group all the same.
Michiru’s route is definitely the most spoiler-heavy of the five, because there’s a lot of stuff behind the character that isn’t really fully explored until the back half of her route. There are aspects of her route I liked quite a bit, but her route does feel a bit backloaded, making certain resolutions feel somewhat abrupt and less satisfying than they could have been if they were better spaced out more. Her route is a bit better than Isara’s, but not by leaps and bounds.
Mifuyu
As a longtime friend of Yuuki and Chisato, Mifuyu’s route naturally entails one of the most classic archetypes of romantic fiction: the love triangle. There are some running gags across the common route and occasionally elsewhere involving Mifuyu trying to ship Yuuki and Chisato together while Yuuki professes his love to Mifuyu, which they typically play off as a joke…until we get to this route and things get more complicated.
There are a couple of cute scenes when it comes to the way they go about Mifuyu’s own personal baggage. Still, this route feels like something of an emotional downer for much of its runtime due to the enduring sense of betrayal Yuuki and especially Mifuyu feel about their budding romance behind their friend’s back. On one hand, it’s a love triangle that actually reckons with the hard feelings that often come with such a situation. On the other, there isn’t really much else to it. Mifuyu is narratively very attached to Chisato, and she ends up feeling like something of a satellite character who orbits around her while feeling underdeveloped in the common route or any of the other routes, in spite of her history with Yuuki. I was left underwhelmed with Mifuyu’s route on the whole, despite it having some good scenes here and there.
Satsuki
The final heroine to talk about (and the final route I personally went through) is Satsuki. She has the best route in the visual novel, and it isn’t especially close.
The obvious intrigue going into her route is in how she is Yuuki’s direct competition for student council president. While she comes off as some beautiful, idealized young woman with both presence and strong values, her route presents her more vulnerable side as well as a fairly funny side. She starts a running gag with Yuuki by giving him nicknames on his (already often mispronounced) last name relating to a given character flaw she perceives of his, but this slowly becomes more affectionate and eventually an enjoyable form of banter between the two. She shows more on-screen chemistry with Yuuki than the other heroines and this creates scenes that can be heartwarming or even just plain funny, making this route noticeably more fun than most of the others.
Of course, there’s all sorts of weird optics that come from two opposing candidates dating each other, to say nothing of her being a girl running for a political position in a high school. For instance, some conflict comes from her hang-ups about her campaign being run on how pretty and attractive much of the school perceives her to be instead of her actual positions. There’s also her own family drama in the mix keeping things interesting, given she is largely estranged from her sister, a conflict which comes up at several points throughout her route.
This route still has some flaws, as a couple aspects of the route’s later portions didn’t really sit right with me in what I felt they might be trying to say. Still, this was my favorite route. While far from my favorite character from sprite’s work altogether, Satsuki’s route had the most interesting things to offer during my readthrough of Love, Elections, and Chocolate, making me glad that it was the route I ended on.
Presentation: Visuals & Text
This release of Love, Elections, and Chocolate features nearly 100 unique CGs, not counting the slight variations of each. I generally like its visual style and character designs. At times the upscaled art in the High Resolution release could be off-putting compared to their counterparts in the original release, though this was infrequent. Much of the UI of this release is shared with Aokana’s, which is nice and sleek. There are also loads of options for higher-resolution monitors.
At times the way the images fit into the 16:9 frame can make for some awkward cropping, where it feels like part of the CG is cut off and further obscured by the text box. This is especially noticeable in the H-scenes given what tends to go at the bottom of the screen in those, though you can at least raise the opacity on the text boxes to somewhat work around this while reading those.
Finally, the translation and editing of the text itself. The script is pretty readable and consistent, flowing well without many typographical errors. My biggest hang-ups with the text were in the form of anachronisms and odd references. Some references to Japanese events and TV shows were replaced with ones familiar to westerners, which I understand given these references are less likely to require context to make work in English. However, I felt it odd when I’d see highly American phrases like “I plead the fifth”, references to events that happened in 2012 or 2015, or more recent slang idioms like “living rent-free in my head” in a story clearly still set in 2010 based on the technology the characters are using. It reads fine overall, but there are some noticeable oddities that occasionally had me tilting my head.
Presentation: Sound
As usual for sprite’s visual novels, music is handled by Elements Garden. Their soundtracks are typically varied and easy enough to listen to. I wouldn’t say it’s as consistently solid as the music found in sprite’s later work, but it gets the job done.
Each character is fully voiced except for Yuuki, as is typical for visual novel protagonists. The voice cast features many visual novel mainstays who you’ve likely heard if you read through any voiced Japanese visual novels around the era. I thought the voice actors did a pretty good job with each of their characters, although the more one note characters tend to be made a touch more annoying.
Verdict
I felt like Love, Elections, and Chocolate was overall better than the sum of its parts. It’s imperfect, but it has enough good moments and handles enough sections in interesting ways even in those imperfections. The phrase that kept coming to my mind throughout my time with this visual novel was “rough around the edges”. I could definitely feel that this was sprite’s debut into full fledged visual novels, as there are some aspects (pacing, handling conflict) that felt rough at times. Its heroines all have rough spots in their respective routes if not their personalities and character, and the melodrama can come off as overdone. Things don’t always happen the cleanest in this story, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
I can’t say I expect it to work for everyone, but there was enough here that worked for me. It’s not a story I expect fans of this genre to all agree on thanks to the rougher aspects of some of its characters, and there’s plenty which I felt could have been done better with its narrative and character dynamics. Even with its weaker aspects, however, I enjoyed my time with it enough to give it just enough of a thumbs up.
LOVE, ELECTIONS, AND CHOCOLATE IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy 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 NekoNyan for a PC review code for this title.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
