Imasugu | Imaimo | I wanna say that I’m not your brother right now

So I read this mouthful of a title recently and it’s fine. It’s done by a sister company of sprite, who did another title I liked called Koichoco. Technically sprite made Aokana too but that was a different writer. Iamasugu doesn’t really hold up compared to either of the other two titles, mainly because on how it’s written and that there’s no overall plot thread or concept between the routes. I’ll go over it more in the spoilers but I’ll go over the basic stuff first.

So the whole concept is that the protagonist’s(Rikuto) dad is remarrying and she has a daughter(Ayumu) that’s pretending to be a guy until they move to the new apartment. And that’s mainly because the protag would be against being in the same room. At the same time, they’re all going to a new prestigious school with Matsuri, Rikuto’s best friend. Alongside some new friends: Mao, Kimika and Shousuke. And just to be more convoluted, they convince Rikuto that Ayumu is going to school as a girl. So it’s a girl pretending to be a guy pretending to be a girl. And that’s pretty much just a dig on a different genre concerning people going to a gender specific school in disguise. I don’t think I’ve read one of those yet, it’s not something I really care about and that’s already piled on top of me being tired of the school setting. Anyways, the school has way too many events and a large chunk of the vn is their class competing to win it all. Each route kind of covers one event more than the others and I’ll cover those in the spoilers.

A weird thing in here is that you can pick whatever route you want, but any route outside of Ayumu had sections that were shortened. So it just feels like a weird experience if you don’t pick Ayumu first. They have the scenes for these pretty well split between what’s new and what’s not in some of these events but they’re always considered new and you can’t just skip them. So I thought maybe it’s only shown completely the first time, so I loaded a previous slot before the routes happened and they’re still there for Ayumu.

The quality of their mics are kind of shit. I first thought it was something on my end but everything else sounds find, there’s just a lot of peaking all over the place once they hit certain thresholds. It’s generally when they’re excited, so you’re going to notice it more on Matsuri but it’s even worse when the main character is angry or doing some battle cry. Funny enough, I don’t think I’ve heard any from Mao until her route started. I think Kimika and Ayumu don’t have this problem. A title I remember having this issue was Christmas Tina, where most of the cast was fine outside of Jing.
They’re kind of punny at the beginning and they drop it for the most part, it was just kind of weird for it to be there. They point out that Shousuke should lose some weight but he looks as fit as the other guys outside of maybe one cg so I don’t know why he didn’t look chubby outside of his face. Like at first they just made him look different/older, I didn’t see it as heavier.
One of my favorite parts of the vn isn’t even about the vn itself. They introduce a side character and from the first line I can tell it was the voice actor in Dengeki Stryker and it gave me a wave of nostalgia.

All in all, the vn is fine. There’s nothing badly done outside of the occasional mic shitting itself but that’s kind of its own issue because everything is played too safe. Not a problem if you’re new but even for people that haven’t read much but consumed a decent amount of SoL anime will see everything is pretty much by the books anyway. This could be a decent vn for people starting out but I’d personally wouldn’t recommend anything over 20~25 hours either but that’s for a different time. So I gave it a 6.5, I’m leaning towards a 6 just for the reasons said above where I could get this in a lot of other titles but I can understand if someone gives it a 7 or maybe even an 8 but that’s pushing it. I took a look at what I gave Koichoco; I gave it an 8 and I still kind of stand by that. There were two routes that I wasn’t keen on to the point where I’d put it as a 7 but the focal point of Chisato showing up in every route is what sold it to me. It’s not unique but it doesn’t happen that often and I kind of wish they did. It’s not going to happen since it’s not great for marketing broad appeal. Though technically, I guess you can push the idea of making a brand of just having titles on making the player feel like shit or guilty for your choices.

Spoilers

So each character generally has one event that’s more tuned for them. Ayumu was more on the first event where the protag plays futsol. There was a fair bit about soccer and you’d assume it’d be more relevant and tie in with Ryuugo since there’s a whole thing that Rikuto is progidy level considering how little time he trained for it. Honestly a lot of Ayumu was done well but it fell flat in the last quarter. Not like there was anything amazing but nothing that I’d look at and say it’s shit. It’s just proper SoL. Her route covers pretty much anything concerning his mom and overall family.
Another thing is that Ayumu is only really important in her own route. So it’s kind of odd that the vn is named after her. Especially considering Koichoco focused on Chisato but the title only points out the basic scenario. Sure, it gets revealed in Matsuri’s route, but it’s just kind of revealed so Matsuri has something to be worried about in one scene.

Matsuri kind of covers a little in every event. And that’s also because it covers his and her past together and what they were going through. It was more just about having scenes to revisit old feelings. Her ending is also kind of random but it was cute. She’s basically proto Misaki from Aokana. It’s also probably the largest reason why Miku was put into the common plot.

Kimika covered more on the third and the performance event. It was kind of funny that I thought they were doing something cool but then just fell back to the standard. They were leading up to the cliche outcome of the main performer getting injured and that Kimika’d have to take over, but actually the performer was fine. Only to then really injure the performer and follow up on the cliche. I liked her route but I can see if somebody comes over and says it was whatever. It’s been done a lot, there’s just nothing outright wrong with it. At the most you can say a lot of the problems just get solved rather easily but that’s also a vn trope anyway.

Mao covers volleyball and the second event. Really if you’re not doing Ayumu’s route, Rikuto is always doing volleyball but there’s more in Mao’s route. She has the more moe route out of the bunch and it might be my favorite since nothing was really off about it. It’s just cute. It’s kind of funny that Kimika apparently wasn’t planned to have a route at first but is still connected better to Rikuto’s issues than not at all like Mao’s route.