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holyscream
Last week I finished the main story of Sensei! I Like You So Much!, or SenSuki, an Early Access business sim/visual novel about shipping fandom otaku. HowLongToBeat says the game’s story mode is 15 hours long, but it took me 34 because I spent a lot of time on optional minigames and itabeya decorating.
Whenever I acquire a new obsession, I look for blogposts about it, but with new and niche stuff, there’s often not a lot to read. I couldn’t find a lot of talk about the game online, so I want to add my two cents with this little—or not so little—ramble here, since it’s (at least tangentially) related to my interest in figure collecting and oshikatsu.
I’d seen mentions of this game pop up in some of my online hangouts and eventually decided to give it a try despite its Early Access state and the fact that I’m not really a fan of visual novels or business sims. I was mainly curious to see how it would tackle some of my Greatest Passions™, fandom and shipping, and the discount during the Steam Storyteller sale sealed the deal.
Almost 70 hours later, my main takeaway is that the developers’ passion for the subject matter clearly shines through. It very much felt like a game made by a peer rather than an outside observer, and I appreciate the unabashed sincerity throughout.
Now, I can’t tell you whether the game is a good example of its genres, because they’re just not my cup of tea. The fact that I didn’t have much trouble with the mechanics is probably indicative of it not being a particularly challenging game. I also started enjoying the game a lot more once the very long tutorial portion was over and the dialogue became mostly optional, so you’re not gonna get any epic storylines or complex character interaction either.
Hilariously, the game’s main story ends with a slideshow of your character’s achievements, and it demonstrated beautifully how little I cared about interacting with any of the characters.
No gifts for you, ladies, sorry; you gotta pull your own weight around here. I kind of wish I had stuck with my plan to not interact with Nora any more than necessary because it would have been amazing to see my genuine dislike for her displayed so proudly with a double goose-egg, haha.
My other favorite part of the slideshow was this:
![Next to a player-made graphic, the game says, “I made 11 types of freebies and gave away 1 copies[sic]. It cost 428. Do you remember this…? This is the one you’ve printed the most copies of, 2 in total. It must be one of your proudest.”](https://images2.imgbox.com/1b/a9/xJN1hrQ7_o.jpg)
Being the completionist I am, I did level up my friendship with all the characters to Besties eventually. Yes, even with Nora, whom I would have preferred to hand a restraining order instead of dedicated fanfics. Ah, the things we do for Steam achievements…
I am tempted to see if there is a max relationship romance ending for Cordelia, the only one I could see the MC realistically ending up with, but I don’t know if I want that to be in my main save. The only romance my MC cares about is her ship’s, thank you very much. 🫡
Overall, I had a ton of fun with SenSuki—I would not have spent over 60 hours of the past two weeks on it if I hadn’t—but the game does have a ton of bugs and other Early Access issues, some of which are game breaking. The English translation also seems to have been penned by Google Translate, which is not great for a game about writing, and I had to have my phone on standby to use its image translator to bypass more than a few untranslated UI elements. The game needs a lot of work and TLC before I could fully recommend it in good conscience, is what I’m saying.
What keeps me coming back nonetheless: As mentioned before, the game is authentically enthusiastic about shipping fandom and provides you with thematically appropriate game mechanics, such as writing fanfiction, collecting character goods, decorating ita rooms, bags and your convention booth, taking commissions, and various optional minigames.
There’s no real fail state (outside of the minigames) and if you don’t get to do everything you want to before the storyline finale, like leveling relationships or unlocking all zines to sell at your booth, you can just do that afterwards.
It makes sense for the theme as well; you can’t really fail at being a fan (unless you spend all your time harassing people).
While I am an avid shipper with a huge fleet, so to speak, I’m a stickler for in-character behavior and specific dynamics, which the game even warns you it won’t be able to provide. The game also focuses on Asian fandom etiquette where ship configuration matters a lot, and as someone who is mainly a verse- and multishipper in my own fandoms and doesn’t treat them a separate niches, that just wasn’t going to work for me. Plus, I dislike playing as myself in games anyways, so I wanted the main character (whom I named Aoi; username ObedientSloth) to have her own OTP.
The characters I ended up picking for her are two of my tweenage era OCs, Fukita and Kazu, with Aoi shipping FukiKazu.
This was honestly the best decision I could have made, as it has been incredibly fun to see these fictional characters gush over and write goofy fic about my OCs the way I do about my favorite characters. The chibi illustrations the game generates from presets (you even get to swap the characters around per illustration) are also adorable and grew on me surprisingly quickly.
A great detail during the character creation is being able to define multiple names for the character; their real name, the name their shipped partner calls them, the name other people call them, and the name the player character calls them. Even for a language with fewer honorifics, this is a great tool. Like me, Aoi affectionately referres to her ship as Zuzu and Fuki-chan.
It’s also funny, knowing that back when I first came up with these OCs, KazuFuki was the “canon” configuration. Fukita only came into existence because I wanted to give Kazu an uke who was visually distinct from him.
You go, FukiKazu shippers! You have much better taste than 12yo me, haha.
There are background gags in the game about the ship being canon and I almost felt bad about Fukita and Kazu ultimately ending up with other people in my OC continuity. Hopefully FukiKazu nation took that plot twist well. 🙏🏽
Then again, I never draw anything else anymore, either. 😑
The illustrations also play a role in the merch collection and DIY mechanic. Once you finish certain fanfics, you unlock thematically related illustrations and their goods, which you can acquire on “Ebuy” (set price), the secondhand merch market (fluctuating price), at the mall’s gacha machine, or as rewards. You can then use these goods to decorate your room(s) and bag(s). Every item has an associated size and rarity score, and you have to try to maximize the ita points of a given room or bag’s limited item slots to get bigger boosts for your fanfic writing scores and convention booth visitor numbers. Again, makes sense: Being surrounded by the things you love can definitely give you a morale boost in real life, too.
I love the idea of the decorating features, but in the early- to mid-game stages I found myself just using as much rare stuff as possible to progress and unlock more slots and options, which felt uncreative and even tedious at times. Now, with almost all merch unlocked and my character at max level, I can focus on creating set-ups I actually like the look of.
There is also what I assume is a bug that lets you reuse items between rooms and bags if you reset them fully before decorating, and I abused it liberally to load up copies of the 1000¤ ita bag with film-style photo cards.
Another amazing bug is that in my late-game save, the discounts in the Merch Market sometimes exceed 100%, making the merch not just free but actually earning me money when I buy it. The concept of someone wanting to get rid of their 800¤ tamagochi shaker charm so badly that they will pay me 72¤ to take it off their hands is hilarious and I desperately hope they never fix it.
Decoration related tangent: The bags and decorations you can buy also accurately reflect the struggle of finding a nice oshikatsu stuff if you’re not super into Girly kei and similar frilly cute fashion. Except for the Bmoe Uwaa style bag of the MC’s face, all the bags I find appealing are rated one star while the frilly monstrosities get the good scores. Same with the rosettes and the décor options for your booth.
Before I end this ramble/review, I have to mention the Freebie/DIY goods feature. The ability to use your unlocked illustrations to make your own freebie goods is one of my favorite parts of the game, but some of the bugs really discourage use of this feature. For example, the editor’s interface is very buggy and clunky to use, some of the illustrations aren’t tagged with the right character once you swap them, and the interfaces for accessing your creations in gameplay, e.g. to finish commissions, are just full-on broken. Plus, half the stickers you unlock never seem to show up in the editor.
The game lets you export your creations, which is cool, but the output is still pretty messy looking (and uncropped). Here are some of my FukiKazu freebies, cropped to how they appear in-game:
For me, DIY and eschewing profit is a central part of fandom and my being a fan, so I really appreciate the inclusion of it as a mechanic besides the fanfic writing, allowing you to be creative yourself.
The game even used to have a toolkit editor with which you could design your own merch and even create fanfic templates, but they discontinued it recently. I do hope it makes a return as part of the full release because I love the idea of it.
If you’ve made it this far, wow, and thank you for reading.
So, have you played SenSuki? What did you think of it? And most importantly, what’s the ship you used and your favorite illustration of them? :D