A big piece of technology that redefined the world has issues attached to it. Huh? No, I’m not talking about AI crap, but good god am I waiting for something beautiful to happen. No, in this fictional world, everyone has BitPhones, an advanced technology that people integrated in themselves. Unfortunately, there are hackers going around causing people to act out of sorts. Wow, intrusive technology opening the way for people to do fucked up things, never could have expected that.

While the world churns on, an agoraphobic socially awkward boy named Nanashi rooms with Mikado, the major head behind the technology’s servers. He’s fine with just living life indoors, but things suddenly change when a woman named Misane shows up in his room. With her claiming to be amnesic, Nanashi feels driven to help her. In turn, Misane encourages him to properly make friends while he’s out, and the quest to make friends finds itself entangled with the growing BitPhone hacking kerfuffle…

1bitHeart is a game by Miwashiba. I played some of Miwashiba’s games in the early days of this blog, and I particulartly look back fondly on LiEat because it was an inspiration for Slimes. I’ve had this buried in my backlog for a looooong time, but now, I finally checked this out. The original freeware release was given the translation treatment by the RPG Maker/WolfRPG maverick vgperson and you can check the game out over here, but I played the commercial 2017 Steam re-release for this.

The first thing that comes to mind with this game are the aesthetics. The game steps away from top-down exploration to a simple 2D system of stylish dolled up sprites. Everyone’s got a nice design that feels pretty evocative of stuff like The World Ends with You; in fact, with certain story elements in mind, the whole game feels like it follows the vein of TWEWY when it isn’t walking in Danganronpa’s footsteps or Vocaloid character design.

The music is also pretty good! It really paints the mood of a vibrant city life and made conversations feel engaging. There are a few vocal songs, and honestly my only criticism is that vocal songs shouldn’t be used during the investigation conversations. It’s kinda distracting when you’re trying to think, even if the vibes are good.

Hm? Investigations? Well, let’s talk about the story first, and let’s start with our protagonist.

Nanashi is an awkward character. He’s not exactly shy about making friends, and in fact, he’s eager to do so with Misane’s prompting. A bit too eager, actually. His attitude is a bit alienating, with a lot of characters finding him weird – at least initially. He’s upfront about having stopped going to school because his classmates hated and insulted him. He doesn’t consider it a bad thing though, because he makes it clear that he’s willing to die if it’d make other people happy. Combined with his tendency to read people and ascribe numbers to them, Nanashi feels like a bit of a neurodivergent character.

…Which kinda makes the occasional bits of him being an anime pervert character feel weird. Why would a character built up to be a selfless guy eager to please comment on a woman’s appearance in her face like that? …Well, he does that with some of the guys too, so Happy Pride Month to a bisexual neurodivergent anime pervert, I guess.

Outside of the friends Nanashi makes in the course of the story, he’s encouraged to make friends with various bit characters before the end of each chapter. The method of making friends is just showering people with gifts of their favorite things that Nanashi can surmise. It’s a pretty shallow way of making friends in my opinion, but as somebody who has low social batteries because of health reasons, I suppose I shouldn’t judge too much; besides, it somewhat makes sense given how awkward of a guy he is. You make money for these gifts through playing minigames… but let’s be real, unless you want to spend a lot of time playing WolfRPG Tetris and Puyo Puyo, just interact with the bottom right wall after going online if you’re serious about making friends.

…And also, instead of giving everyone their favored gifts, you can just shower them in Love Chocolates, which advances their fondness for Nanashi as much as their most liked gifts. Like, you’d think that Love Chocolates would be expensive to balance this out, but no, they’re actually dirt cheap. The game even explicitly draws attention to the power of these chocolates with all the characters having their own dialogue for it and an achievement for handing chocolate off. Like, combined with the easy money drop, it just feels like Miwashiba didn’t want to fully commit to this system of the game. Like, I dunno, maybe make the best personalized gifts give way more affection and/or make that chocolate expensive.

The friends Nanashi can make is a mixed bag of strangers. I like some of them like Moroku – the handsome selective mute man that speaks through a robotic third party, Misato – a creepy cute woman whose story delves into RPG horror-esque territory, and Sora – a bitter disabled man who you can imagine I heavily vibe with. And then there’s a lot of more boring ones, like Sekiyu just being a woman married to her job and Saaya just being an extremely standard yandere character.

In general, it feels like the characters are a mix of character archetypes. Here’s a mad scientist anime guy. There’s the big brother delinquent that has a heart of gold. There’s that yandere. There’s “we have Sho Minamimoto at home.” Some of these archetypes are built on, while some just feel like they stop at being written as that archetype. For some characters, it really depends on how much you enjoy the bit.

(Also, it’s definitely a Choice to make the focus of Shitara ‘s story – an explicit trans woman character – be on her hooking her straight friends together than be about herself in any way. Happy Pride Month I guess.)

However, one thing I’m definitely positive on with the friend making system is that everyone’s undeniably distinct from each other. Everyone’s got a unique character design, and they offer different stories from each other. Even the more mundane non-weirdos are distinct, like Enri’s plot being about overcoming his fear of dogs while his direct bandmate Asuto’s obsessed with trying to get merch from his fandom from a bastard crane game. While the quality of all these stories is a mixed bag for me, I do admire that they’re all different.

Some of the character stories features other characters getting involved. Because of the set-up of the stories, the game just kinda treats Nanashi to already be friends with them too, which ends up feeling weird. I honestly think the game should have you making friends with those other people first as an event flag to continue the character story they show up in. Besides keeping things from feeling weird, it would have been a good showcase of Nanashi properly building up a web of relationships that feels more meaningful. Also, it would have been nice to have a way of making friends beyond the shallow method of just showering people with gifts.

Going back to how the characters all feel distinct from each other, it feels meaningful for the story. The ultimate antagonist in 1bitHeart wants to make a system where the BitPhones will unite everyone’s minds as one so that they could easily be understood. To right the countless wrongs of our day, we shine this light of true redemption and whatnot. But in the meantime, Nanashi’s been building up his own understanding of people through making friends, understanding that everyone is different and there are different ways to make people happy.

Well. That might hit more if you didn’t have the option to just dump the unanimously loved Love Chocolate on people. Like, seriously, the existence of the Love Chocolate kinda undermines the point 1bitHeart tries to make. I dunno, I’m just sorta sensitive to this stuff with how the “themes and such” of my own work can get undermined by min-maxxing that I didn’t account for.

Anyway. That antagonist later alludes to higher ups wanting to use their system for evil. While those higher ups aren’t shown, the potential for abuse is shown through the minor antagonist hackers, who are out committing petty crime through their own hackings of BitPhones. They’re not HUGE threats, but they expose the problems that the technology presents. Give fringe jerks an inch, they’ll take it for a mile, you know.

Dealing with the antics caused by those minor antagonists are the subjects of each chapter of the game. In investigating these incidents with Misane and Mikado’s aid, Nanashi builds up some guaranteed friends and foils crime. How are these investigations conducted?

1bitHeart has segments where Nanashi grills somebody for information and looks for contradictions to cross reference with evidence he collected that chapter. It’s pretty in line with stuff like Danganronpa and Ace Attorney. Have to say though: the game is insanely generous with its hit points. It’s fitting that there’s an achievement for failing one of these segments because you have to be going out of your way to fail, as I honestly feel that you could clear these segments through just guessing with little pushback.

There are segments where Nanashi fights off a virus and you have to input button combinations. These… are also not a threat because you aren’t timed or anything. The only actual difficulty is the bit where you have to time a button press. It’s… certainly a Thing.

Despite not having any RPG elements, 1bitHeart somehow manages to be like the average RPG Maker game where gameplay is an afterthought. The systems are kinda ???, but that may be fine with the target audience of Miwashiba’s works. The clear main attraction is the story, and while I’m mixed on some of the friends, I actually liked what the main story’s going for.

While there’s a bunch of things I’m mixed on (besides the systems, I’m still bothered by Shitara’s story), I overall liked 1bitHeart. When it comes to stylish looking narrative games that I felt mixed on that I checked for this site, this is the strongest out of that batch. It’s not fully up to my tastes, but I think 1bitHeart’s enjoyable enough. As I said before, it’s a freeware thing you can check on, but if you do like the game, I invite you to throw Miwashiba a few bucks with the commercial re-release. It’s normally just 3 bucks too, so (shrug).