Dateless Japanese high school students create their own anime-style dating simulator

[Huang Ling Yin]

Debut work by teen creators smashes crowdfunding goal in less than two hours, aims to be better than made-by-adults titles.

A huge proportion of Japan’s romance video games take place in a high school setting, which ostensibly is to help them feel relatable to teen gamers and nostalgic to older fans. But even if the majority of the industry’s characters are teenagers, the people making the games, of course, are adults.

But one noticeable exception is upcoming PC indie game Borderline of the Heaven. The game is being developed by Noer Works, a creative club at Tokyo’s Azabu Gakuen middle and high schools.

Noer Works describes itself with:

“Our members are boys who aren’t popular during puberty. We have put the romance we wanted to experience into this romance game. We want to be popular, but have no chance to do so, and we dedicate our youth to romance games.”

The group seems to have plenty of talent and passion for the medium, but what they don’t have is access to traditional adult-oriented financing. So to help get Borderline of the Heaven made, they launched a crowdfunding campaign on Japanese website Campfire, hoping to raise 300,000 yen (US$2,680). They reached that goal in roughly one hour, and have been blowing past stretch goals ever since.

Despite the self-introduction’s reference to “boys,” there are two female members of Noer Works, who’re shown on Borderline of the Heaven’s crowdfunding page

Noer Works’ members are all fans of romance games, but they have a shared complaint about recent releases in the genre: romance games made by adults don’t feel like they really capture the emotional quality of teen romance, Noer Works asserts. 

“We, who are right in the midst of puberty, are best equipped to make a romance game!” the group boldly proclaims.

Borderline of the Heaven is centered on protagonist Haruto, a highschooler who, because of a bad experience in the past, doesn’t like getting too close to others, except for his childhood friend Kotone and buddy Take (Take being the only male character for whom any artwork has been shown).

Kotone (left) and Take (right)

But after a chance encounter with his similarly withdrawn classmate Ciel outside the town church, Haruto finds a connection forming between himself and the blond, twintailed girl.

Borderline of the Heaven’s crowdfunding campaign is still ongoing. Reward tiers including a physical copy of the game starting at 3,000 yen, and Noer Works says that since it’s not a for-profit group, it has set pricing on its reward tiers to align as closely as possible with production costs.

Noer Works even seems to be taking the international market into consideration. Its Campfire page includes a notice, in English, that “International shipping is available. Please send us an e-mail for more information.” So if you’d like to support the project, regardless of where you are in the world, the Borderline of the Heavencrowdfunding page can be found here.

official website: http://noelworks.net 
source: SoreNews24

 

[exaccuss]

This actually looks pretty decent. I like the artwork. Would definitely love to see this translated some day. 

[Stormwolf]

Written by virgins. I don't think that's too unusual with vn's tbh. Especially h scenes 

Well, i'll avoid this like the plague.

Edited December 17, 2017 by Stormwolf

[Dergonu]

This looks pretty nice. Kinda makes me want to pledge for it. 

[Ranzo]

Well I hope they have a more successful college life romantically that is

 

[Nier]

It's Noel Works though, not Noer Works.

[Yuuko]

smh 中学生エロゲーマー

Talking big when all they all are same moebuta as me. Especially the artist is a big fan of Senren Banka's Mako.

[PapaRabbi]

The premise sounds a little cliched, but I do like the idea of actual  high school students writing about high school students 

[Infernoplex]

A potential kamige in the making, I say... Or maybe not, who knows?

[xToki]

It looks nice, I tend to like these type of stuffs..

[littleshogun]

Well it might be challanging for the students to pull off this thing, and while there's potential to have realistic love story as long as they keep in line with reality, it'll be quite hard to approach the bigger market because most people would like to play VN as sort of escapism. So perhaps it'll be interesting to see of how romance was supposed to see from the teenager perspective, although then again it could be have some sort of Wish Fulfillment for the team. Regardless of that, good luck to the team there.

8 hours ago, Ranzo said:

Well I hope they have a more successful college life romantically that is

I won't be so sure that they would be have a successful romantic life there, because from what I'd read in one of magazine article is that even the kissing expert was have a hard time to do the real kiss, so there's that.

[Narcosis]

Interesting and bold undertaking, but it takes a bit more than just passion and money to create something outstanding. Age has nothing to do with it and they probably have yet to experience it, to truly understand why people make these games.

That aside, I wish them all the best.

[ChaosRaven]

11 hours ago, Huang Ling Yin said:

Debut work by teen creators smashes crowdfunding goal in less than two hours, aims to be better than made-by-adults titles.

A huge proportion of Japan’s romance video games take place in a high school setting, which ostensibly is to help them feel relatable to teen gamers and nostalgic to older fans.

When I had read so far, I thought: Jay, they are so sick of school life romance VN's that they decided to make something more interesting themselves.

And then I read this...

11 hours ago, Huang Ling Yin said:

Borderline of the Heaven is centered on protagonist Haruto, a highschooler who, because of a bad experience in the past, doesn’t like getting too close to others, except for his childhood friend Kotone and buddy Take (Take being the only male character for whom any artwork has been shown). But after a chance encounter with his similarly withdrawn classmate Ciel outside the town church, Haruto finds a connection forming between himself and the blond, twintailed girl.

[Narcosis]

1 minute ago, ChaosRaven said:

When I had read so far, I thought: Jay, they are so sick of school life romance VN's that they decided to make something more interesting themselves.

And then I read this...

Hey, at least they are starting young! Who knows what they might be up to in the next five or ten years

[Nier]

41 minutes ago, ChaosRaven said:

When I had read so far, I thought: Jay, they are so sick of school life romance VN's that they decided to make something more interesting themselves.

And then I read this...

Oh, sounds familiar, isn't it that Saku Saku game that just came out?

Edited December 17, 2017 by Nier

[Huang Ling Yin]

19 hours ago, Stormwolf said:

Especially h scenes 

i'm affraid there wont be any h scene, but idk...

9 hours ago, ChaosRaven said:

When I had read so far, I thought: Jay, they are so sick of school life romance VN's that they decided to make something more interesting themselves.

And then I read this...

i thought so... but well, who knows, maybe they can do better since i think there's different point of view between adult and actual high school students, lets see when their game comes out