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Five Hearts Under One Roof Review

This is an okay FMV dating game but maybe wait for a sale. While most games of this type seem to be Chinese, Five Hearts Under One Roof is South Korean. The differences are relatively minor, to me, but it has better translation than average and the interface works properly.

Release Date: 03 Oct, 2024

The story felt too short. It will take just over 2 hours to get through one run (to an end finale), but that includes rewinding to meet silly chapter requirements, but more on that later. There is not a great deal to the narrative either. The player character, Yuman, lives with his parents, but they leave on a business trip and ask him to get some boarders. So you meet various women and they come to live with you and sort of fight over you while you earn their affection. That’s pretty much the whole story. Admittedly this feels like a reversal of the standard poor protagonist, but don’t expect much.

The five women are nice and different enough. Three are tropes, but there are two surprises. The predictable three include two old school friends (sisters) and your work boss. The surprises include one from a failed girl group member and a Hikikomori (shut-in) although this last one is super icky since she acts like a 5 year-old. The good news is that these characters have ample personality. The bad news is that their make-up is crazy overdone sometimes, making their faces look like wax or porcelain.

One annoyance is that all of the voice work is ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement). Every character has recorded their lines separately. So lip-syncing is sometimes slightly out, which is annoying, but the biggest problem is that every location sounds exactly the same. There is no change to the reverberation when you go to an Arcade and background noise is usually absent, which diminishes the experience.

Chapter progression is annoying too. Chapters require reaching a certain overall affection, which means being nice to most women, even if you have no desire to romance them. 2 out of 6 chapters required me to go back and achieve better results, and when replaying the game there were many times when affection was below what was needed to progress, which makes exploring side paths super tedious.

There are quite a lot of branching paths at least. It will probably take 4+ hours to see all the extra scenes. Unfortunately it has too many hidden endings and many alternate scenes are actually quite short. One good feature is being able to unlock extra story videos, which just show one admirer doing something when the player-character is not there. There are only a few of these but they’re actually a really cool addition. If you like these games then Five Hearts Under One Roof will likely suffice, but there are better options out there.

Rating: Adequate

Length: 2.1 hrs

100%: 7 hrs

Positives +

Extra scenes, Paths

Negatives –

ADR, Make-up, Chapter requirements, Story

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