Re:BIRTHDAY SONG Demo – Review & Thoughts

So Honeybee released the trial for their game Re:BIRTHDAY SONG or Shinigami Kareshi. I started it yesterday and didn’t finish it until later today. It’s still fairly short though.

A girl wakes up in the middle of a strange city with no memory of who she was or is. An owl then confronts her and tells her about a school for Shinigami. He takes her there and tells her that she is already dead and is just a soul that wandered into this place called the “Netherworld”. A person’s soul is supposed to go to either heaven or hell but there’s an exception in which a soul has strong “regret” before they die. So the Netherworld is a place where lost souls gather. And the castle they’re in is a school in which souls take a class to become a Shinigami. She signs her name on a sign-up sheet to attend the school and the owl gives her the name Cocoro.

So Cocoro attends the school for about a month and learns that apparently in order to become a Shinigami you have to take a test to find a pair suitable to you (because I guess the shinigami work in pairs). Unfortunately, she struggles on her exams and scores a mere 2 and finds herself unable to be paired with anyone. So she’s taken to this supplementary class (which she heard was awful according to Zen) but apparently it’s just a normal class with a lot of special duties. So there she meets Kairi, Ame, Yoru, and Syun.

Kairi is more or less the enegetic one of the bunch. He’s always trying to cheer up the group’s morale and keep everyone with a good attitude.

Ame is kind of like the smart/mysterious type who likes to point out the little things. Syun is very carefree and slacks off a lot; making him very lazy. (Cocoro calls him a yankee which is no surprise lol) And Yoru is serious and strict and gets easily annoyed by Syun’s carefree attitude and Kairi’s smoke bombs he throws in the classroom. He also has a strange attitude towards Cocoro (which leads me to believe he has some sort of connection to her in regards to their human past).

Apparently finding out about their past lives is taboo since when people die they had “regrets” in their past life and they’re better off not knowing them.

Anyways, everyone has different duties each day like cooking and cleaning. And every morning they get up at 4:00 AM to take care of animals and then go to class to learn of Shinigami’s and their origin, ect. They also end up cleaning up a lot too around the school. Syun usually tries to slack off and not do any of them but sometimes Yoru gets on his ass and makes him do it.

The trial basically ends after Cocoro goes to sleep one night and wonders if she can get along with everyone.

Story:  I’m very interested in how this story will play out. This feels like a very new type of concept to explore. The whole attending school part may seem a bit cliche but the interactions with the characters make up for it in my opinion.

Music: Honeybee never really has amazing soundtracks but I do like what I heard so far. There’s one track that I feel they re-use for every game (I’m not even kidding) but aside from that I did think the music was pretty.

Art: I admire Satoi’s art a lot. This is coming from someone who doesn’t even like Diabolik Lovers anymore. Aside from Ozmafia!! It’s refreshing to see her art not related to Dialovers since we get to see a completely different personality etched into each of her characters. The background visuals are really nice too.

Overall Thoughts:

This demo was really fun to play and I personally enjoy all the interactions with Syun the most. And he’d be my favorite so far since he strikes me as a yankee tsundere. A big mean guy with a big heart (very cheesy). I’m excited to play the full game since I already have a liking to the characters and story. Plus I wanna know what the heck is up with Yoru and his attitude towards Cocoro. I have a feeling everyone is gonna have some sort of tragic backstory //sobs