Enjoyed Making Lovers and want to see what happens a year later? Making Lovers After Stories gives you a brief glimpse at the protagonist’s potential lives with each of the five heroines.
Not read Making Lovers yet? It’s one of the few moege visual novels that takes place after graduation from college and one that we recommend. Check it out here. Making Lovers After Stories is a fandisc and I’d strongly suggest playing the original first.
Five Stories
Starting up Making Lovers After Stories, you’ll be presented with a choice of five heroines. Click onto one and it’ll start the story for her. Other than that initial decision and some in the 18+ scenes, there are no choices.
It’s worth pointing out that this is a rather short experience. The original Making Lovers took me about 17 hours to complete. Making Lovers After Story took about 3.5 hours, with each route taking around 40 minutes. It is priced lower, but don’t go in expecting a more extensive fandisc such as Kinkoi: Golden Time.
One Year Later
All routes take place over a day or two and are set a year after Making Lovers ends and focus on some cute slice of life and comedic moments. I found myself laughing at quite a lot of the absurd humor and character interactions throughout.
They all start in a similar way, by summarising briefly where the protagonist and his lover are in life now. Otherwise, each story is fairly different.
Ako
Ako’s story was the most absurd in a way. It started off with their family getting annoyed at how they are always flirting at home and then escalates in an extremely odd way.
Seeing Ako switch personalities here was hilarious, particularly with the voicing in these scenes. She treats the protagonist extremely sweetly but acts cold to her parents. It dives into the family history a little and has a rather sweet scene about it.
Saki
Saki’s route started with some strange humor but turned into more of a focus on family. There was still plenty of humor though and an odd twist.
A lot of this route felt like it was spent laughing at Saki’s expense, but it had some sweet moments between the two as well.
Reina
Reina met the protagonist after him being abroad for a year, so there was a different dynamic in this route. We get to see her jealous and clingy side right off. Those who played the original may remember her as the girl who threatened to murder the protagonist if he ‘rubbed one out’ to someone else’s photo.
This is another somewhat absurd route, with a ton of tropes thrown out in weird ways as a joke. It seems that Reina and several other girls in the dorm picked up an unexpected hobby while he was away.
Karen
I felt like Karen’s route was more focused on cute moments, even if there were plenty of jokes and funny reactions still. The theme for this one was domestic living and Karen was hinting at wanting a child in the future throughout.
Despite not standing out due to events, I enjoyed spending more time with what’s probably the most popular heroine of the game. It’s good just for those relationship scenes, though I did appreciate seeing Karen’s dark side too.
Mashiro
My favorite heroine in Making Lovers — Mashiro’s scenes are just as absurd as you might expect after playing the first game. It involves strange personality changes, a diseased lobster, and an intense love for gaming.
This route was essentially just Mashiro being Mashiro. She does whatever seems fun and comes up with offbeat ideas.
Along with Mashiro, one of the side characters Akari had quite a few good lines here, reminding me how much I wish she had a route of her own. She appears in Reina’s route too.
Sexual Content
If you buy the complete game, it includes 18+ content. That’s two 18+ scenes per character, with two CGs per scene. There’s one additional CG for Karen on top of that and nude sprites are also included. The Steam version has all of this content cut out. It can restore these by using a patch found on the NekoNyan website.
CGs are completely uncensored without mosaics and it fairly vanilla, with some minor exceptions. Each heroine has a blowjob scene and other topics include masturbation, being mildly aggressive, school swimsuits, and ageplay.
Display, Sound, and Text
The artwork and sound are of high quality, with plenty of animation used. The music is great and well used too. It re-uses many of the same assets, so the new 18+ scenes are the only notable addition here. If you’ve played the original, you know what to expect for the most part.
There are comprehensive options around text, sound, and display.
The writing felt well done, reading easily and bringing across the humor well. The editing was good too, with few typos.
Verdict
If you enjoyed the original Making Lovers, you’ll enjoy Making Lovers After Stories. While it often focuses even more than the original on the comedy, there are still romantic moments here. In the end, it’s just a short collection of follow-up scenes and as long as you go in expecting that, you won’t be disappointed.
MAKING LOVERS AFTER STORIES IS RECOMMENDED
Want to see more Visual Novels? How about our review of Renai Karichaimashita: Koikari – Love For Hire?
Many thanks go to NekoNyan 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.
