CharaBration - Do not trust anyone! Himeme was so cute while working!
CharaBration! - Otome wa Koi shite Charabureru (きゃらぶれーしょん！ ～乙女は恋してキャラぶれる～) is a visual novel developed by AKABEiSOFT3 and released in 2018. It follows the now traditional "boy infiltrates an all-girls school by dressing as a girl" trope that is popular in many visual novels.
The story focuses on Ibuki Rikka, a boy whose dream is to become the servant of his sickly cousin, Sakuragi Hai. The issue is that his cousin is not the same person he remembered from childhood. Instead, she has grown up to be energetic and far less refined, to the point that she was confined to a special correctional dormitory known as "The Prison."
In order to investigate the situation, Rikka dresses as a maid and infiltrates the dormitory under the alias Yuki, with the help of the student council president, Ichinose Yukia. There, he discovers that Hai has become a tomboy who only pretends to be the girl he knew from childhood when he is around.
Alongside Hai, there are many other girls who share the same problem of having a "double face," whether they are just hiding their true selves or, in one specific case, possessing an actual split personality. Will Yuki be able to help the girls escape the facility and return to a normal school life?
As you can imagine from this synopsis, the story is a chara-ge with a light-hearted theme, featuring plenty of jokes and ecchi moments throughout. It uses SD (super deformed) art for maximum comedic effect, as seen in some of the screenshots attached to this article.
The game features one ending for each of the five main heroines and a small after-story segment for each of them. The choices are extremely straightforward and easy to understand. Since there are only four choices, a walkthrough is not really needed to see all the content.
The heroines are:
Sakuragi Hai: The main heroine and the protagonist's cousin. She tries hard to look like the perfect ojou-sama to him, but she is secretly a violent and arrogant tomboy with other people. She is absolutely deredere for Rikka but does not realize that Yuki is actually him.
Ichinose Yukia: The student council president. She is gentle and caring with everyone but has very low self-esteem. She seems perfect from the outside, but like all heroines in this game, she is pretending and hiding her real personality behind a persona.
Tenhouin Himeme: She is essentially the opposite of Yuki, as she willingly cross-dresses as a male and acts as a stereotypical gentleman from an anime to conquer other girls. She has very girlish tastes and is simply too shy to show her real self, so she hides behind her persona. She also works part-time at a cafe.
Tsukigase Korona: A "gal" who works as a manga artist. She is cheerful and very friendly with almost everyone. She has an actual split personality disorder that activates under specific conditions, causing her personality to become much more perverted and forward than usual.
Yumeno Arisu: She looks like a small girl but is an extremely talented engineer and coder. She is moody and often wears an elementary school backpack, even though she is not in elementary school.
My favorite character was definitely Himeme because of the huge gap between her male persona and her true self. She changes drastically after she starts dating Yuki and becomes ultra-sweet. It is also quite funny to see the comedic scenes where Hai punches or suplexes her.
CharaBration! was a very fun read, and I can safely suggest it if you are looking for something light-hearted. It is of average length, taking around 30 hours, and is generally quite easy to read.
