Summer Sweetheart Switch Game Review

The Dating Simulator is a genre popular in Japan, where you, ahem, woo anime babes(or dudes). It is not so popular in the United States, though they do exist(Eroblast). Summer Sweetheart is a dating simulation where you interact with women played by real models. And the whole thing is really, really creepy. I can’t put my finger onto why, but I just feel dirty after putting a few hours into this, even more than playing a porn game. The guy in the digitally downloaded review of Summer Sweetheart sums it up thusly:

The other problem is that Summer Sweetheart itself also plays out very much like anime, but those upskirting and down-shirt shots that are such a part of fanservicey anime are considerably less entertaining in the real world.

And yes, Summer Sweetheart has some really creepy scenes, like when the police woman sends you a pervy video of her all tied up:

When its anime girls, you can disassociate yourself from reality and immerse yourself in the world. When its real women in Summer Sweetheart, you can’t disassociate yourself from reality and things just get exploitative. I’m wondering how much these women got paid and are they porn actresses(their voices are not, however)? The kicker is that some of the voice actresses do anime, so you’ll recognize the voices being spoke by the real women. It all feels dirty and just so wrong!

Further cementing problems is that the ten women in Summer Sweetheart you all have similar personalities. This becomes a problem when you are offered dialog choices that will affect her intimacy score. Like the police woman above, you’ll meet her in an ice cream parlor where she gushes about ice cream, so I picked the response that said(paraphrased), “Let’s have ice cream” And then I lost thirty points because her dead father used to take her for ice cream. How was I supposed to know that? Or you’ll take then women to a specific place, like the Temple, and are offered three choices on what to do, that are the same for each. It is a literal crap shoot what they like.

In the end, I could continue on, and talk about the game play itself more, but I don’t really feel like it because Summer Sweetheart is so dirty and exploitative, I just cannot recommend it. Its not particularly broken. It is 100% playable, I just don’t think anyone should play this, unless they like uncomfortable scenes of real women trying to act like anime babes. This will get a Not Recommended with a five back-end score.

I’ll leave with a video demonstrating just how uncomfortable Summer Sweetheart is. In it, she’s trying a make a cute anime pout, but it just does not work at all:

Overall: Because Summer Sweetheart uses real actresses in a dating sim, the whole game feels too creepy to play.

Verdict: Not Recommended

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