Bad Apple Wars strands its heroine at a school for the dead, then asks her to pick a side

Bad Apple Wars strands its heroine at a school for the dead, then asks her to pick a side. Rinka dies on her way to her first day of high school, hit by a car at a crosswalk while she bends to grab a shoe that slipped off her foot. She wakes in front of NEVAEH Academy, a purgatory built to look like the school she never reached. Otomate developed the visual novel. Idea Factory published it for the PlayStation Vita in Japan in 2015, and Aksys Games brought it to North America and Europe in 2017. It lands at 7.4 of 10.

Trailer, via オトメイト.

A Rabbit-Masked Teacher at the Gate

A teacher in a rabbit mask greets Rinka at the entrance. Mr. Rabbit runs the academy’s rules, and the rules are the point: every faculty member and every student wears masked headgear. He walks her to the opening ceremony. That ceremony gets attacked.

The attackers call themselves the Bad Apples. They oppose the strict, authoritative way the school is run. On the other side sit the good apples, students who abide by the administration’s rules, including the prefects who enforce them. Rinka chooses between the two.

That choice splits the game. Each pathway carries its own branching paths and multiple endings, and those endings depend on what the player decides along the way. Bad Apple Wars is an otome visual novel, so the drama, mystery and romance run through a first-person, text-driven frame. You read. You pick. The story bends.

Tapping the Vita Screen

The mechanical hook is the soul touch feature. During select romance scenes, the player taps the Vita screen to advance the story. Certain tap selections influence later outcomes, which means the touch screen is not decoration. It is another branch point, folded into the romance scenes rather than bolted on beside them.

The game is also compatible with the PlayStation TV microconsole, so the Vita is not the only way in. That is a small mercy for a library this narrow.

Two Sides of a Purgatory

Here is where Bad Apple Wars earns its keep. The premise is a death-and-rebirth cycle dressed as a high school, and the high school is a prison with a dress code. The Bad Apples reject that authority. The good apples uphold it. Neither side is offered as the obvious right answer, and the game does not appear to grade Rinka for picking one.

That is a sharper setup than the genre usually gets. An otome romance that opens with its heroine dead at a crosswalk, then hands her a masked administration and a rebellion, is working with real material. The masked headgear does the heavy lifting. It makes every adult and every classmate a blank face, which is exactly what a purgatory should be.

The soul touch sits oddly against that severity. Tapping a screen during a romance scene is a thin mechanic, and its influence on later outcomes reads more like a hidden flag than a system. It is the weakest piece of the design.

What the 7.4 Buys

The favorable Western reception makes sense. The story is the strongest thing here, and the branching structure gives it room to breathe. Five outlets aggregated to a 7.4, and that number sits about right.

The cost is that Bad Apple Wars leans on its premise harder than its play. A visual novel lives on text and decisions, and the decisions here are the standard kind: side with the Bad Apples or the good apples, then live with the branch. The soul touch gestures at something more physical without committing to it.

What matters most is the setting. NEVAEH Academy is a purgatory with an attendance policy, and the game treats death as the first day of school. That image carries the whole thing. The masked faculty, the rabbit teacher, the ceremony interrupted by rebels are the details worth remembering. The romance scenes and the tapping are noise around them.

Bad Apple Wars is not a great visual novel. It is a strange, well-built one, and strange is rarer. The Vita exclusivity kept it small, and the 2017 Aksys release kept it reachable for players outside Japan. If the premise grabs you, the branching will hold you through more than one ending.

Release Schedule

• Title: Bad Apple Wars
• Developer: Otomate
• Publishers: Idea Factory (Japan, 2015); Aksys Games (North America and Europe, 2017)
• Platform: PlayStation Vita; compatible with PlayStation TV
• Genre: Otome visual novel
• Themes: Drama, mystery, romance
• Modes: Single player; first-person, text perspective
• Critic aggregate: 7.4/10 (IGDB, 5 outlets)

Aksys Games · Bad Apple Wars · Otomate · otome visual novel · PS Vita · visual novel review