Loca-Love: My Pure Priestess Review – To Complete the Trifecta

When you see a visual novel titled “My Pure Priestess,” what do you expect it to be about? Some sort of romance-like title, where the heroine is a… pure priestess. These titles may leave nothing to the imagination, but the Loca-Love series has been building this trilogy over quite some time, and we get to finally complete the trifecta. Like the previous entries, though, what you see is what you get.

Loca-Love: My Pure Priestess takes the perspective of an ordinary high school student, Aoi Ichitaro, a boy who runs into a lovely spot of trouble when a burst pipe renders his apartment unavailable due to flooding. Whilst the landlord gets to work on building repairs, Ichitaro is left looking for some temporary accommodation. Luckily for him, his co-worker, Kojika Hiwa, offers him a place to- hang on. Wait, that’s not right; I mean, his parents work him into some temporary accommodation with other family members forcing him to take the train with the school beauty, Nio Aritagawa. Hold on, I’m sorry, those are the plots of the first two titles, My Cute Roommate and My Commuting Crush, which both have a similar prologue.

Loca-Love: My Pure Priestess actually takes place in a parallel universe where the first thing Aoi did was call his parents, who called the Head Priest of the local shrine and asked if they could get Aoi a place to crash. The head priest was more than okay with this, especially since Aoi already works there part-time, so he can get our protagonist to work more often. Aoi’s childhood friend, Shizuki Yachiyo, is the head priest’s daughter and is the shrine priestess. Thanks to some whirlwind superstitions about the shrine’s charms, she’s become the shrine poster girl for various magazines and the like for her cute and pure looks, which gives us the title of the game, Pure Priestess.

The previous entry in this series was banned from steam, so they didn’t seem to try to get this one on there. So if you wanted to pick this up, you’d need to go through JAST USA or Fakku, which means no hunting through extra links for R18 patches.

During the game, Yachiyo has a little gimmick to set herself apart from the previous heroines, in that her arc has extra recurring characters. A wild feat in comparison. Aside from her faceless father, the story of My Pure Priestess actually involves the god of the shrine, who of course is in a bunny costume because of course she is, and the charms that the shrine produces, which have had a small amount of relevance in the two previous titles. The goddess’ role in the story is to push Yachiyo and Aoi together because she wants to make up for any damages she’s caused the shrine by mistake. After all, she’s new to this whole goddess thing, but having another active character does wonders for making the story feel more interesting and compelling.

While the story is still relatively shallow, in classic Frontwing style, the UI fails to disappoint as it’s full of options. We’ve got the whole ensemble of chapter skips, text log customization modifiers, individual sound modifiers, touch controls for tablet support, more options than you thought possible crammed within a perfect and pastel selection of menus. Yachiyo taking the place of the system voice, is also a nice touch. The way the title shifts between its scenes with a collection of transitions and title cards does also create a satisfying feeling of completion after each sequence, which I always like. It will also zoom into background CGs, mess with the focus, or pan across them, which is a great little tactic for pulling in the player’s focus.

Of course, the game’s main selling point is the waifu factor as the CGs and character art is fantastically drawn. Any lack of fluffiness in My Commuting Crush is certainly made up for here as Yachiyo is incredibly cute, and they play into that during the albeit minimal story.
On the other hand, as always, Aoi is almost completely unseen and is rather bland, doing no more than what is necessary to fulfill his role as player wish fulfillment. I really do feel he could have at least expressed some sort of interest in, literally, any topic, but he’s less of a pervert this time, so that’s a plus. And he has some cute chibi portraits for extra cute shenanigans.

Loca-Love: My Pure Priestess is a short yet pleasing title to play alone on Friday night. It expands on the moments of storytelling the previous entries presented and has many fluffy moments to match. Regardless of whatever motives you have for playing such a title, you’re sure to get some satisfaction out of it.