Published by Sekai Project/Denpasoft, My Girlfriend’s Special Place (Kanojo no Seiiki) is a strong start to feng’s trilogy of ‘Special Place’ visual novels. Each title is standalone but focuses on a different heroine. The first in the limelight is Fuyuka Akiyoshi, an old childhood friend.
Meeting The Ojou-sama Once More
My Girlfriend’s Special Place starts with a chance encounter where the protagonist Youhei runs into his childhood friend whom he hasn’t seen in years. It’s not exactly the most touching reunion though… or rather it is, but not in the way you might expect.
Youhei accidentally touches Fuyuka’s butt on a crowded train. She isn’t exactly pleased about this, pulling him off the train and threatening to report him to the police as a train molester. On top of this, whilst it’s fairly blatant that she’s lying, she pretends not to know who Youhei is or to have any history of attending school and playing in Akihabara with him.
In return for not reporting him to the police, she orders Youhei to act as her butler, though this only extends to escorting her to her prestigious school and acting deferential. She seems fairly devious about it, acknowledging that she has him over a barrel even if innocent. The police don’t tend to believe accused molesters professing their innocence.
From Youhei’s perspective, Fuyuka is set up as someone acting in a rather unfair and underhanded way. She’s nothing like the girl he knew all those years back who stood out as the ‘rich girl’, but was friendly with him. When switching to Fuyuka’s perspective though, we get a hint that there’s something more to it. That she’s doing this to see Youhei and there’s more going on in the background. It’s an interesting premise and Youhei seems happy to go along for the ride while figuring out the reasons behind Fuyuka’s behavior.
The Rude Butler
There’s a fun dynamic between Youhei and Fuyuka. He sometimes takes sarcastic potshots at her and acts overly formal while saying some ridiculous things. He can push her too far though, at which point she snaps and threatens to drill through various body parts, including one that’s particularly precious to him.
Beyond the amusing back and forth though is a genuine interest in each other. Despite Fuyuka finding it difficult to be honest about her feelings and acting haughty, she’s making excuses to spend time with Youhei and Youhei enjoys spending time with her and wants to discover the truth.
With that said, I didn’t find Fuyuka to be a great heroine at first. At first, we just see her dragging Youhei around without really knowing why.
As I found out more about her over the three-and-a-half-hour playtime, I grew to like her and became more invested in finding out what was behind her odd behavior. We see her showing different personalities whether at school, at work, or with Youhei, and discovering why is one of the mysteries of My Girlfriend’s Special Place.
Meet Family and Friends
My Girlfriend’s Special Place doesn’t just introduce us to Fuyuka, but also Youhei’s older sister, younger sister, and half-Russian otaku friend. These are the heroines of the two following titles in the trilogy, My Little Sister’s Special Place and My Academy’s Special Place.
The little sister Yukana stands out the most here, both by getting the most screen time after Fuyuka and by being involved in most of the laugh-out-loud moments. She’s clearly interested in Youhei and adds her ‘little sister’ character into everything, from throwing insults like ‘little sister virgin’ to wanting to fit the little sister character template and wake him up. She even makes statements like “My boobs exist to be seen by my onii-chan!”.
The half-Russian friend Maika gets a few good moments with Youhei, but the older sister Yaeka only appears a couple of times in the initial title of the trilogy.
A Twisted Relationship
As the story progresses, it gives some fairly clear hints of what’s going on. This nicely builds up to an emotional climax. But along the way, the focus turns more toward their relationship and how it grows after their reunion in an unusual way.
My Girlfriend’s Special Place is an adult title and, considering the themes, I’d certainly recommend getting the adult version directly from Denpasoft or using the patch to enable it.
Many of the H-scenes are related to control, humiliation, and some elements of S&M. With that said, Fuyuka is rather naive about the topic and thinks that certain things that Youhei actually enjoys will embarrass him.
It does go somewhat into fetish territory for a few scenes, including ones with feet and those that lean more into the mild S&M area. Some of the scenes are in public too. It was a little immersion-breaking that some took place in crowded areas with other people very nearby, yet no one noticed.
This ties into the story and relationship-building, which I did appreciate. The direction their relationship is heading and how sex links into it is narratively relevant. The characters aren’t always sensible and there are definitely some leaps of logic here to enable the story to go in this more adult direction. Whilst this is certainly more than just a visual novel about adult content, it does feature heavily here.
On that topic, the 14 H-scenes are uncensored with no mosaics and have particularly good art. A couple are hidden behind different endings, which you can read about in our brief guide for My Girlfriend’s Special Place.
Art, Sound and Languages
Speaking of art, there are 25 CGs included, so about half of them are of the adult variety. Sprites are fairly limited with only the four characters who are heroines in this series having sprites. A few other characters make limited voice-only appearances. My Girlfriend’s Special Place runs at 1920×1080, so doesn’t have any issues running on modern monitors.
The music only stood out once to me, which was during the emotional climax of the story. Otherwise, it’s fitting enough, but not too notable. The voicing worked well for the characters. Fuyuka’s voice actress has quite a long list of characters played, including Reina from Kinkoi: Golden Loveriche and Meguru from Sabbat of the Witch. She even sang the opening of Angelic☆Chaos RE-BOOT!
This visual novel supports multilanguage display. English, Japanese, and Chinese are all available and two languages can be displayed at once.
Verdict
Whilst My Girlfriend’s Special Place certainly leans in a very adult direction, it manages to include fun character dynamics and an interesting enough heroine to keep me invested beyond that. It’s short, but budget-priced to match and certainly doesn’t waste the reader’s time.
MY GIRLFRIEND’S SPECIAL PLACE IS RECOMMENDED
Want to check out more visual novels? Why not check out our review of Destiny Star Girlfriend or the rest of the Special Place Trilogy? 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 Sekai Project for a PC review code for My Girlfriend’s Special Place.
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.
