Girls! Girls! Girls!? review – The Cafe Where You Get What You See

We’ve got maid dresses, crossdressers, and h-scenes all wrapped up in live-2d animation. That’s all you need to know about the eroge Girls! Girls! Girls!?  But allow me to indulge you in every other aspect you may or may not want to know about this soft and fluffy visual novel title.

Developed by indie group MYOSUKI, Girls! Girls! Girls!?, stars four maid cafe workers at the cross-dressing maid cafe. You, however, take the viewpoint of a nameable protagonist who is the new manager hired because the owner wants someone else to be managing the cafe when it falls. Oh yeah, the place is going bust so fast it’s hemorrhaging money. So, some things are going to have to be changed to stay in business.

Now in charge of the store and its employees, INSERTNAMEHERE is going to have to try and save the company. Luckily for him, there’s not too much he has to do since this is a kinetic visual novel with a focus on fluff and doing cute things with cute maids…Wait, doesn’t this mean that maids are not inherently cute? That can’t be right. Anyway, there’s about as much stress and tension here as a puddle of slime.

The visual style is fairly standard in terms of presentation. It has a distinct design and your obligatory visual novel furnishings, with auto text, skipping, backlogs, etc. Its main selling point is the Live 2D engine, bringing animated movement to the four maids and other side characters. This is for both their regular maid outfit and their casual outfit, which makes the sixth character who shows up for a very minimal role feel distressingly out of place being represented by a couple of .png files.

Additionally, the spacing is off within the text. When there are only one or two characters on the screen, it’s cleanly laid out. But when three or four are on screen, it becomes tight and messy. Each ‘breathing’ animation occurs simultaneously, and besides that, one animation upon each change in speaker. To prevent you from having to double-take who is speaking, the text box contains an additional portrait of said speaker. It’s a cute little UI choice too, as the name label is also a speech bubble.

It does feel a bit lackluster, though, as I feel this could have been used to some sort of effect to sell the actual scene. The speech bubble text box could have been taken advantage of to display a character not in the current scene, another worker off to the side, adding their own bit into the conversation. This feels like a real missed opportunity.

This restaurant has four associated CGs: outside the front, the main area, the kitchen, and the office. The characters rarely ever shift in terms of actual location on the screen, making each of these backgrounds feel rather stationary in spite of the live2D. Most of the story takes place in the cafe, so it’s vital for this location to really shine. Shots from multiple angles within the same room really do a lot. I mean, it’s why so many high school VNs have backgrounds of both the front and back ends of a classroom. You get to flip and rotate the scenery around instead of just going to a different screen. Background silhouette characters changing in total depending on the scene can be a huge help to feeling active. Unfortunately, Girls! Girls! Girls!? doesn’t really have any variety. It ends up feeling simultaneously visually cramped and repetitive because of it.

Once you strip away the visuals, there’s still a novel there, but Girls! Girls! Girls!? Is…. short. In that time, though, it manages to be cute and sweet, with skits for each character and a route system that will let you romance your favorite. It’s no mystery what happens at the end of these routes, but the scenes can be turned on and off through the settings.

They also save the cafe. The solution was silly and ridiculous, and as someone who has worked in the restaurant industry, I was beating my head into a wall repeatedly after the “We’ll work for free so you can afford to pay the debt. We’re a family” speech. But honestly, if you’re playing this title, you’re not here for a story in which the gang heroically fights the constraints of capitalism. You’re here for the part where you get to romance the cross-dressing maids.

Girls! Girls! Girls!? can be summed up as a crossdressing maid H-experience, and that’s all you need to know to know if it’s for you or not. If I had to expand on this, I’d add that it’s a fluffy eroge with animated characters and nothing really more. It could use some work on the consistency of its visuals and narrative, but it wasn’t advertising to be anything other than what it is.