Ore no Shita de Agake (Struggling Beneath Me)

Meet Kurosaki Ichiya, a young entrepreneur who owns the growing consumer credit company, "Kurosaki Financial." He decides on a whim to have a new branch office built, with the intention of bringing his company to rise to the top, but was carefully inspecting a location for this investment.

He ends up returning to his hometown after nine years, and ends up meeting three individuals who catch his attention: his former classmate Higuchi Takafumi, a poor working boy, Shimizu Arata, and a widowed father, Yamaguchi Yukio. Deciding he likes these three, he plans to stay in town with his secretary, Yoshioka Keiichiro, and start construction of his new building.

But expanding his company is not Kurosaki's only plans. He starts causing one misfortune after another on his three interests, who have no idea, driving them into an enormous debt. And by offering to pay off this debt, Kurosaki has set the trap to make them repay with their bodies, turning them into his personal playthings.

Kurosaki Ichiya - Kurosaki is the 25-year-old president of Kurosaki Financial who also has other financial investments. His hobby: driving young men into horrible debts to trap them into making them his personal sex slaves. Seiyuu: Midorikawa Hikaru.

Yoshioka Kei'ichiro - Yoshioka is the 31-year-old private secretary to Kurosaki, who supports him in any of his ventures without fail: including those ventures that involve bringing misfortune on innocent men for Kurosaki's pleasure. Despite the closeness between him and Kurosaki, they have never had sexual relations with each other. Seiyuu: Morikawa Toshiyuki.

Higuchi Takafumi - Higuchi is a 25-year-old who used to be Kurosaki's classmate in junior high school. He runs a flower shop that he inherited from his father, but ended up losing the land rights and now faces his shop being cleared out, unless he can buy back the rights from the landowner. Seiyuu: Ishikawa Hideo.

Shimizu Arata - Shimizu is a poor boy who spends all day and night working parttime jobs. He lives alone in an apartment away from his family, who have their own financial problems regarding taking out loans they couldn't pay back. He has a general hatred of rich people. Seiyuu: Hashiguchi Daisuke.

Yamaguchi Yukio - Yamaguchi is 29-years-old, working as a standard business company employee. He lost his wife to illness, and now raises his son Kazuya, who is also ill, by himself. He declined a promotion from his job when his wife passed away to be with Kazuya more, but now finds himself in a bad economical situation, as he can't afford to give Kazuya the healthcare he needs. Seiyuu: Tobita Tatsuo.

The playability in Ore no Shita de Agake is very different than your typical boys' love game, which is usually in a visual novel format. In Ore no Shita de Agake, the play style is much more involving, more like a mini game that just have visual novel aspects included.

The game runs for thirty days. In that time, the object is to create misfortunes for the three targets to run them into debt. With enough debt, you can then *coughs* purchase them for your amusement.

This is achieved by sending your four agents out to a total of seven different locations. They report back any findings: a target, a card dealer, or no one at all. Then Kurosaki and his secretary Yoshioka may be placed at any location. When they are at a location with a target, you then try to create misfortune for them through a card system. You hold four cards of different disasters, such as falling objects, damage, fire, flooding, shopping, and sexual harassment. You chose a card to play on a character, and are given a moving gauge bar that has different levels for the disaster on it: Level 1, 2, and 3, and failure. Your object is to try to stop the moving gauge on one of the three levels: the higher the level, the more debt you inflict on your target.

As you collect debt on the characters, at certain points you are given visual novel-like events, where you are presented with options. There are no right or wrong answers: rather, one option will make you more seme toward a character, and one will make you more uke toward a character. Whether you are more seme or uke toward a target effects the CGs and endings you can get.

When you have inflicted 100 million yen on a target, you can purchase them, and it is pretty self-explanatory what happens then. When you have inflicted 200 million yen on a target, you have option to have a good ending with them, as opposed to a sex-slave ending.

It is a fast play, but very engaging because of the play style. It's more envolving than clicking through text and options, so it is easy to get sucked in and addicted. Even after several plays through, I never got bored with it.

I had no trouble installing and playing Ore no Shita de Agake on Windows XP with the default for non-unicode programs set to Japanese.

However, be advised that this game (as well as other games by Alice Blue), absolutely must have native Japanese language support to work. Because the filenames themselves include Japanese characters, a system without native Japanese language support will not be able to install the game. You will need either Windows 2000/XP with the default for non-unicode programs set to Japanese, or a Japanese version of Windows. Windows 98/Me using third party Japanese-support software, like NJStar Communicator or AsianSuite, will not work.

AGTH Compatibility - Ore no Shita de Agake is partially compatible with Anime Games Text Hooker. You must add the /kf3 parameter. This will allow it to extract the script correctly, but each line in the dialogue box is split to a new line in the AGTH window, so only the last line in the dialogue box gets sent to Atlas. Therefore, you'd have to manually copy the lines out of the AGTH window, paste them into JWPce, fix the line break, and re-copy them to send to Atlas, which is a large amount of work.

Ore no Shita de Agake Walkthrough (Outside Source) - An excellent English-language walkthrough for the game by Alicia Thiele.

Ore no Shita de Agake Full CG Capture Save File - A save file that unlocks all the CGs in the game.

Ore no Shita de Agake is, simply put, a very unique game, turning its back on full-game visual novels and fluffy high school love, which are so prominent of the genre. Those looking for something different are probably going to find an interest in this game.

The game is really great in that it has such a fun gameplay style. As opposed to click-click-click-damn-my-wrist-hurts games, you get to do something engaging: searching for targets and creating disasters through a card playing system. This means every play through the game will be unique: you never know where you will find targets, what kind of cards you will get, how well you will play them, ect. It's also a very quick play, but since the playability is so addicting, you won't find any problem playing through a few times in a row without losing interest. There is also a skip feature for the visual novel events to also quicken your playtime.

It is also unique in that the main character is a seme, as most games I've seen have had an uke-ish character (that is maybe seme to just a few characters in the game that somehow manage to be even more uke that the protagonist). And not only are you playing a seme, but a rather mean one at that. I suppose some people would be turned off of the idea of playing a rather assholish protagonist, but it is definitely something different, and I'm sure some would appreciate the change.

The art style is a little more on the male-yaoi side, but is done in such a way that it really borders nicely between the yaoi-for-girls and yaoi-for-guys art styles. There are fifty-five CGs, and the game has a built-in screencap feature, which I absolutely adore, making it easy to save them. However, several CGs are more on the S&M side: fans of S&M should be delighted, since there aren't that many games that have that kind of content, but those that feel uncomfortable by S&M should probably avoid this game, as they are fairly graphic.

A lot of the CGs are also very hard to get, which is quite an annoyance to someone like me, who isn't satisfied until I get full capture: since the play style of the game is random, that means getting some of the CGs are random as well, since some are based on playing the Sexual Harassment card a few times, which doesn't come up that often, or receiving pieces of a CG where four must be collected to complete the image, and those, as well, are based on random visits. This means you may have to play /a lot/ in order to get them all. My suggestion, though some might consider it a bit of a cheat: save and load a lot. It helps so you don't have to play the entire game through so many times if you just go back to a certain save where you have cards you need, or can change just a few options to get a different ending, ect.

If you are looking for something different from the standard path of boys' love games, I highly recommend this game. It has a very fun style of play, is more seme-oriented, and involves the S&M master/slave themes that aren't in a lot of games. However, if those kind of themes bother you, you will probably want to stay away from this game, as the yaoi scenes would be a bit much for the faint of heart.

Alice Soft's Official Ore no Shita de Agake Site (Japanese) - The company's site with information on the game.

Ore no Shita de Agake Walkthrough (English) - An excellent English-language walkthrough for the game by Alicia Thiele.

Wa ni Natte Agake (Japanese) - Official Japanese webring dedicated to Ore no Shita de Agake.

Alice Blue Ring (Japanese) - Official Japanese webring dedicated to Alice Blue's games.

Disclaimer: All written text and capture guides © Boys' Love Games Headquarters. All pictures and downloads are copyright of their respective companies and artists and are for promotional use only. I am in no way claiming the art as my own, nor am I trying to infringe upon the company's rights. I am trying to promote these games by allowing a foreign audience to see some artwork from the game.