Diamond Girl ~An Earnest Education in Love~

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

Diamond Girl is a Visual Novel released on Nintendo Switch and mobile devices in 2020. This game casts you in the role of a woman whose new employer suddenly declares that she’s his heir and has her brought to his estate, where she finds herself surrounded by a group of attractive men who she discovers to be her suitors. Yeah, so this is one of those “reverse harem” sorta’ things.

The presentation here has one bright spot, and that’s the artwork for the characters and backgrounds, which is nice, albeit somewhat forgettable. However, the music is repetitive and annoying, and overall there’s not much here to really draw the player in and entice their interest.

However, while other elements of the presentation here are sub-par, it’s the story that really kills this game. Jeez, where do I even start with this one… The localization here is absurdly bad, with really stilted and awkward English. However, even if that wasn’t the case, I still think the plot would make absolutely no sense. Seriously, imagine you’re hired as a secretary at a new job, and the president immediately calls you into his office and says you’re his heir, and has you brought to his estate without even an explanation. Do you think you’re just gonna’ go with that? A guy who claims he’s your fiance starts obsessing over your choice of clothing, the gardener starts hitting on you, a guy who claims he’s your cousin has you feeding him by hand… what in the heck is even going on here?

I can put up with a lot of absurdity in my anime and videogame plots. I get that different cultures have different standards and storytelling tropes. But there gets to be a point where even the cultural divide and a heaping dollop of suspension of disbelief fail to account for a story’s ridiculousness, and this game tramples over that line. Oh, and that’s before I even mention the bugginess of the game, which also seems to have failed bits of code that made it into the game, such as $LAST appearing in place of your name.

When it comes to the gameplay, there’s very little in the way of choice that seems to matter all that much. At the very least I can say this game makes good use of touchscreen controls, though it works perfectly fine with normal gamepad controls too, save for one issue – the way menu options are highlighted by darkening them is unnecessarily confusing.

In the end… okay, look. I’m not necessarily opposed to the “harem” subgenre of anime-themed media, but even within the absurdity of that genre, there needs to be some semblance of sanity to be found, and that hint of sanity simply isn’t present here. But even beyond that, the terrible localization and lacking presentation make this a game that even fans of “harem”-style stories or those who don’t even care about the actual stories will want to avoid this one.

tl;dr – Diamond Girl ~An Earnest Education in Love~ is a Visual Novel that has players in the role of a woman whose new employer suddenly declares her to be his heir and brings her to live in his estate, where she encounters numerous potential suitors in an anime-style “reverse harem” situation. Unfortunately, the story is extremely poorly-localized and fails to have even the slightest bit of believability, and the presentation is sub-par. At the very least, the artwork here is decent, but that can’t save this horrible mess of a game.

Grade: F

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