Loser Named Hana is a visual novel that attempts to have you bond with a timid girl named Hana, only to fall on its face with its poor characterization and missteps at story telling.

Introduction

When I read the two-sentence summary of this game on Steam, I was immediately concerned. “Loser Named Hana is a friendship-building visual novel. You respond to an ad advertising $100 a week to be the lonely college student, Hana, friend.” An error before even making it to the game? Still, I went in with as optimistic of an outlook as I could. I enjoy visual novels, and with this one being free, I figured it was worth giving a try. Unfortunately, Loser Named Hana had flaws that went just beyond its technical writing. Its characterization and story left me wanting at best and disgusted at worst.

Graphics

One aspect of this visual novel that I sincerely enjoyed was Hana’s design. She’s cute in a dorky fashion, just as I would hope from someone like her. Her outfits are colorful and unique without being outlandish, the bandages and missing tooth give a good portrayal of her klutzy nature, and she has a large variety of great expressions. Also, the cartoonish art style used for all the characters is appealing to me. The characters outside of Hana do not show up for very long, but for what little time they are present, they have memorable designs.

The backgrounds are more of a mixed bag. Some of them work, such as the art used for legally-distinct Minecraft and at the beach. Others were not as good, like the convention backgrounds and at the party. The latter was especially bad; apparently the frat party with cheap alcohol had a conductor for their band, along with a blender that towered over their coffee machine and crumpled construction paper in their shopping bags.

A missed opportunity came in the form of the social media site the player character (who I will call PC for convenience’s sake) and Hana chat on. That site shows you several comments from other people, such as promoting bitcoins and asserting that you need Jesus in your life. These comments never change, even though you visit your computer on four different dates. It would’ve helped to give the impression of time passing and the liveliness of the internet by having differences in your feed. Getting to choose your profile picture is nice though, and you can upload one from your computer if you desire.

Sound

Whoo boy. Let’s talk about the voice acting. Hana is specifically described in-game as having an obnoxious voice. They succeeded in this by giving her a high-pitched voice that sounds completely unnatural. In terms of being accurate to what they want for the character, the dev struck gold. In terms of my enjoyment, I struck bedrock. I would have much preferred if there was no voice acting at all. That way I would be left to imagine just how bad it might be without my ears having to suffer for it. Oddly, outside the first conversation with Hana, she has no voice acting. It’s fortunate for me, but it also makes me question even more why they have her talking at first.

As for the other characters, I’m not sure why two were given voices while the rest were not. There’s nothing wrong with these two voices, but they feel pointless to add at best. At worst, it’s jarring to suddenly have dialogue being voiced when it rarely is otherwise. The good news is that you can skip all of this by simply turning off the voices from the menu. The bad news is that if you actually want the voice acting, you’re in for a rough ride.

The music is forgettable. None of the tracks are going to stick with me, though they at least were fine as background tunes. The exception is the overly-sad music box-like theme that plays during Hana’s infodumping about her tragic backstory. It felt like that track was trying to carry the emotions of that scene to such an extent that it was comical.

Gameplay

As a visual novel without gameplay beyond picking choices, one might think this category is superfluous. Yet I have issues with the system as it’s implemented here. Loser Named Hana loves to give the impression that you have lots of choices. This is shown by how your character can be customized. Getting to type in your name and username is good, no complaints there. The problem comes with how your character identifies themselves and their job. You get tons of options, from cisgender to agender to transgender, and you can pick pronouns. Yet all it does is give you the ability to feel more like you’re stepping into the PC’s shoes. Hana will briefly comment on your choice and then it never comes up again. If you say you’re working, you get 25 different choices for your job, and once again, they get a single acknowledgement at max before not mattering. I would much rather have a few choices that lead to different story branches than a ton that do barely anything. I tried all of the options, and when the biggest difference is asking to follow your channel with two of them, then you can tell this is a pointless endeavour.

What about the choices on how to treat Hana? The game tells you outright that your personality types can be: Kind, Mean, Neutral, or Playful. Depending on which you pick, your character will have some lines change. However, this is inconsistent, and it makes for a heck of a tonal whiplash in a lot of scenes. This was especially weird in my first playthrough where I chose mostly Kind options. I got to the beach scene, and in the non-choice section with Hana’s backstory, my character was giving Hana compassionate words and trying to comfort her. A few minutes later, the PC has gotten ice cream along with her. She drops hers, and you can choose whether to give her yours or get another one for her. Not wanting to inflict Hana with my saliva or a possibly-suboptimal flavor of ice cream for her, I decided the nicer option was to get her a new one. This led to my PC ranting at her about how this was more like a babysitting job and she’d have to pay double the amount of the ice cream to get a new one. I was left mouth agape. What the bloody heck happened to make the PC suddenly become so vicious, especially at a seemingly-innocent choice? I admit that I already have issues with the beach scene (more on that in the story section), but even if I didn’t, this absolutely would have killed the mood for me.

Related to this, I feel some of the choices could have been more clear. For instance, when Hana tripped and fell at the con panel, two options were “Sad” and “Funny”. I thought “Sad” would make the PC think she was pathetic and “Funny” would be for helping her laugh off the incident. Instead, “Sad” means you feel bad for her, and “Funny” means you think she’s a hapless fool. If the tone is not properly conveyed in a choice-based game, misunderstandings like this can crop up. Loser Named Hana has a handful of moments like this, which can be frustrating.

Something else that stood out is how the game told me that Hana would not leave you. Even if you’re the meanest you can be, she will stick around. I dislike this for multiple reasons. One, it’s telling me that my choices ultimately don’t matter much in the long run. Two, it’s giving away how the ending will play out. Three, whether the dev meant for this or not, it feels as if I’m being given permission to abuse Hana because, hey, she’s so desperate for a friend that she’s fine with this! If a game gives me options to be a jerk, I want to have guilt for choosing those options. Instead, I don’t have to care, and that breaks immersion.

On the technical side, the summary was indeed a forewarning of typos being in this game. I checked the credits and didn’t see a proofreader listed. There were eight playtesters, so I’m guessing they caught some errors, but there were several others. Visual novels are one of the most important genres to proofread carefully, so this stood out like a sore thumb. There were also two glitches that I ran into. One was that if you pick the Nurse job option, the game acts as if you chose that and then the Data Entry option. The other, which is far more glaring, is that if you pick your convention activities in certain orders, then the scene with the actress will play twice. The game seems to continue without issue after that, but it is a bizarre thing to witness.

Story

The game has five ‘acts’ that make up the plot: the PC meeting Hana, playing a game, going to a convention, going to the beach, and going to a frat party. Some of this is fine in theory. I don’t expect a world-shaking story from a game focused on befriending a single character. The strengths should be in the characterization more than the plot. In execution, it could have been far better.

Starting with a meet-up online and then playing legally-distinct Minecraft is a decent start. It works with getting to know Hana, and with her being more comfortable online, those are fitting activities. The convention also makes sense as a first meet-up location. It’s a public area that has a lot of people with similar interests to Hana. The beach, however, is where things go from fine to baffling, and the frat party is utterly absurd. I will get back to the beach later in a spoilers section. For now, I want to discuss Hana, as she should be the main attraction point of this game.

Hana feels more like a caricature than a character. She’s got an overly high-pitched voice, she trips over nothing, she drools over all the mainstream nerd culture hits, she constantly self-loathes herself out loud, and she’s got her ‘quirky’ love for dead animals. Those should be character traits, not the character themself. I don’t feel like I know Hana well enough to bond with her. Part of this is also from odd writing choices. For instance, Hana says she had to look up a bunch of fan wikis for the video game you play. Then she later says that she’s in the top ten of a speedrunning leaderboard for killing an enemy in that game. Is she experienced or not? She says she loves dinosaur bones and palaeontology, but it only comes up twice. Heck, the textbox has a stegosaurus skeleton since it’s her favorite dinosaur, and bones are used for game options (which looked more like dog bones to me, so I went into this game thinking she was a dog lover at first). For how important this seems to her character, it’s not showcased much, and I don’t get why she’s so into them.

I think this could have been strengthened by having some different activities. Perhaps instead of going to the beach, Hana asks the PC to come with her to pick up an animal carcass from the road and debones it. As gruesome as this sounds, there are taxidermy communities out there who see it as giving an animal new life, or to respect its body by reforming it. Maybe she could ask to look for fossils, similar to searching for shells on the beach but with more focus on her greatest passion. Maybe a visit to the museum would let her show off that triceratops skull she talks about in one of the choices. I would much rather have had one of those over the frat party, which made no sense to me. Why would someone as cowardly around people as Hana want to head out and drink among a bunch of strangers? She goes to the party even if you tell her you won’t, so it isn’t her being emboldened by the PC. It felt like the entire point was to have Hana do drunk things and go, “Haha look at her doing drunk things, that’s so funny.” It’s not funny, it’s just random.

Spoilers (click here) about the party and beach, because I can’t express my disdain for the story without touching on two main factors.

One is that at the party, there is a scene where some jocks try to get Hana even more drunk. If you intervene, you’ll save her from them. If not, you get an ending where she dies from overdosing on alcohol. The choice to abandon Hana would be shockingly inappropriate to the PC’s characterization on most routes, and that’s all you have to do to get that ending, so I don’t understand the point from a narrative perspective. If the idea is to have the PC save Hana’s life, it’s a sloppy way to do it and is an unnecessary plot point in the first place. If the idea is to make you feel bad for letting her die, then it fails because there’s no way you wouldn’t see an awful event coming from this decision. On top of that, if you do save her, you confess after that you either like Hana platonically or romantically. Once again, no matter how rude you are to her, you somehow either become her best friend or her spouse. This is a sweet outcome in routes where you take the nicer options. If you take the more horrible ones, then I want to see consequences for those actions. Hana’s character would be so much more interesting if you could see her give up on you, or if the storyline dove into how messed up it is that she would stick around. The narrative shouldn’t act like this is cute; it should show how damaged she is.

Unfortunately, I now have to talk about the beach scene. I loathed this story beat. Hana starts to talk about how she ‘killed her mother’ since her mother died in childbirth, and how her father never talks to her, and she doesn’t care about her mother because she never met her, except no she does care when she shouldn’t, and the universe hates her and will never let her be happy, and on and on and on. The reason I hate this is that it is completely unearned. The only hints we have about this is that Hana has self-loathing. If you want to properly portray someone with this broken of a worldview, the story has to lead into it. Foreshadow that her mother died and her father doesn’t talk to her. Have moments where she reflects on the universe seemingly being out to get her. Some examples that could work include: having her be awkward if you compliment her appearance (since she thinks she looks like her mother and that drives her father away), making it so that she enjoys palaeontology because that was something she bonded over with her father, having the PC ask if they can visit her parents (and getting a slight idea of the situation from it, but not all the pieces), making her fascination with death be from how fleeting life is and wanting to come to terms with her mother’s passing, or showing subtle poetry before her traumadumping rather than after. Note that for the final part, I said subtle poetry, because her poetry not only hits you over the head, it lets loose a dump truck of anvils on it. I am giving the benefit of the doubt that the poetry is supposed to be abysmal, but whether it was or not, it hurt my soul to read (and not in the probably intended way).

To summarize, there are a lot of better ways this could have been handled. Instead, Hana’s overly-dramatic backstory felt like a cheap way to pull at the your heartstrings. It left me disgusted due to the abuse of a tired and gross trope. It also was completely out of left field. Until this point, it was a cutesy bonding story. This kind of subject matter doesn’t belong unless the level of writing is appropriate in dealing with it, and Loser Named Hana does not possess that level of tact. It either needs to be better handled or not be there at all.

That leaves one more section, and I can’t believe I even have to discuss this, but here we go.

“Woke”

The way this game advertises itself seems more to push being ‘inclusive, rather than being a visual novel that happens to include these features. There are hints to this as early as the Steam page. If you look at the features, this is the first (making it supposedly the most important) item listed: “Ability to play as cis, trans, or various other genders (She/Her, They/Them, He/Him).” That’s a fine thing to include on the store page, but is it more vital to know that than the word count, time played, and ending amount? I might not have given that much thought, but with what happened when I first started playing, it stands out to me.

You see, when you are asked for your character’s gender, there is another option: “I don’t want woke content!” This bemused me to see. As someone who likes experiencing what every option in a visual novel does, I decided to select that first. My curiosity was ‘rewarded’ with the developer telling me I was a loser and closing out the game automatically.

First of all, if your game is closing itself automatically, it’d better have a good reason for it. This is not a good reason; it’s simply obnoxious. Second, why does this option even exist? Your ‘anti-woke’ targets aren’t even going to bother downloading this game unless they want to troll. Telling trolls that they’re losers is just going to make them laugh. Third of all, if ‘anti-woke’ people are losers, does that mean Hana is ‘anti-woke’ as well? Because even the PC keeps calling her a loser. Funny how that lines up.

For a game that seems to want to appeal to the “woke” crowd, it has some questionable decisions. That scene where Hana can be left alone with the jocks? I’d hope that someone writing a story like this would be more self-aware of situations like this. If your PC is on the Mean path, they outright say that, “And if ANYONE is going to have their way with a drunk stupid Hana it’s going to be me!” That is such a gross sentence and makes your PC go from rude to psychotic. Why does this exist?

I guess putting in trigger warnings would have been “too woke” though, seeing as there is no mention of the game containing elements of death (by childbirth and alcohol), suicidal idealization, and abuse. That surprised me since writers who try to appeal to a niche like this tend to include them. Given how the game is advertised on Steam, it honestly could have used some warnings. I say this as someone who doesn’t have an aversion to any of this sort of stuff as long as it’s well written, so I can only imagine how some players might react.

Conclusion

Loser Named Hana had the potential to be a cute story about befriending a shy and self-conscious girl with many wholesome moments. Instead, it is a shallow experience that stretches itself thin. There are too many issues with its gameplay and story for me to be appeased by its adorable-looking protagonist. I suggest saving your time and skipping this one.

Review also posted on Steam ➞

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