REVIEW: Sympathy Kiss


Title	Sympathy Kiss
Developer	Idea Factory / Design Factory
Publisher	Idea Factory International
Release Date	February 27th, 2024
Genre	Otome, Visual Novel
Platform	Nintendo Switch
Age Rating	Teen
Official Website

Typically, I don’t take on otome reviews. They tend to be games I have a hard time stepping away from once I’ve gotten into one. Plus, doing all those paths back to back to back can be a lot. I tend to play otome very sparingly and these days I’m pretty particular about which ones I’m interested enough in to pick-up. However, Sympathy Kiss is one I was at least somewhat curious about and we ended up with a copy for review. Thus, when I was asked to do this review I figured why not, I was looking forward to distracting some men at the office.

Sympathy Kiss is a modern slice-of-life otome, rather than a fantasy or historic one. The main character, Akari Amasawa, has been working as a designer at Estario, a mobile app company, for the past year. Recently, Estario’s first app, Estarci, hasn’t been doing so great. Estario decides to transfer some employees to a new team to try to revive the app. Estarci is somewhat of a social news app.

Throughout Sympathy Kiss, you’ll go through day-to-day life getting to know your colleagues on the new Estarci team and coming up with ways to improve and save the app. The game splits into numerous routes pretty early on. You can either take home some guy, Nori Tainaka, who regularly lives with random people; or, you can leave him and choose one of a few different colleagues at work to help out and get to know. As you play through the various routes, a few other paths can be unlocked. At the start of the game, you have about five guys to choose from.

There are a lot of different guys to get to know. Nori Tainaka, who I mentioned earlier, is described in the game as a nice very puppy-like guy. He’s sweet and helps out around the house for anyone who takes him in. There’s also Yoji Kobase, who takes on the director role of the Estarci team and keeps everyone on task and everything running smoothly. He seems stern and intimidating in the beginning, but deep down he’s a caring guy. Honestly, I think Kobase was my favorite among all the choices. Not only is he supportive and good to you in his route specifically, but he’s always reliable and helps out the others on the team in their routes as well. Another option is Rokuro Yoshioka, who works at Tempesty, a tech company Estario will collaborate with on Estarci. Rokuro is described as seeming like a prince in that he’s very attractive and acts princely. Yoshioka is the son of Tempesty’s president and is supposed to eventually take over the company. These are just a few of the men you can choose to hang out with and attempt to seduce. Another member of the Estarci team, a woman named Nanami Oe, takes on the role of your loyal work friend who gives you advice and gossips with you about the guys you choose to hang out with.

As far as interactive features are concerned, Sympathy Kiss is pretty basic. Periodically you get choices to make, some of which will raise either your work or love stat in each guy’s route. You’ll get one of numerous endings depending on which routes you take and where your work and love stats are at by the end. You can also sometimes choose between two different emotions, such as when someone asks if you like something or not, or based on how you want to react to something they do. And there’s this RiNG app which characters will periodically call or text you through at different occasions during the story. The game allows you to go back in a story log and change choices whenever you like, you can save in one of numerous save slots and you can also skip parts of the game in replays to jump over story parts you’ve already read, or to skip ahead quickly to each choice. One feature of Sympathy Kiss I really appreciated was how at the end of each chapter you’ll switch to the perspective of whichever character’s route you’re on and find out what they were thinking when something happened earlier on in that chapter.

I do believe I’ve played through every single possible route in Sympathy Kiss. I dated each guy and saw a variety of endings, I also went back and speedily skipped through some previously played routes to see alternate endings. I am mysteriously missing one prologue gallery image though, so I may have missed something. But I played as many routes as I could possibly find and dated every guy. Overall, I had a lot of fun with the story of this otome. However, I felt like there weren’t a ton of extras to enjoy. You have a gallery, a music player, there are interesting profile info pages you can unlock for each guy and you can revisit any specific chapter you want to adjust the work and love stats and see different endings. But other than that, there wasn’t anything else. I know some otome have little additional postgame chapters to unlock and similar features like that, which Sympathy Kiss unfortunately doesn’t.

Oh one other thing I would like to discuss real quick are the amount of grammar mistakes and errors. I’ve realized these last few years that very often these localized otome are loaded with a ton of grammar errors throughout. When I first went through Kobase’s route, the first guy I chose, I can only recall a single mistake. However, as I went through more routes, there were significantly more errors. Nonetheless, it isn’t the worst otome ever in this aspect. I’ve seen grammar mistakes far more often in some other otome. So it’s not as bad as it could be and I did appreciate that there was at least some effort put in there.

In the end, I quite enjoyed my time with Sympathy Kiss. I found that despite being a T-rated otome, it wasn’t overly cheesy and I had fun dating…well almost everyone. Not only that, but the music and overall atmopshere was very enjoyable as well. If you’re otome obsessed, you have no reason not to pick this one up. If you’re new to otome and have wanted to try them out, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t start with Sympathy Kiss. I do hope in the future though, that this game gets a sequel or fandisc of some kind. There wasn’t really any postgame story content to enjoy and there are a few guys I would like to see more of.