KONOSUBA - God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World! Love For These Clothes Of Desire! Review

KONOSUBA - God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World! is an incredibly funny light novel series about Kazuma, a guy who dies and reincarnates into a fantasy world with the goal of defeating the wretched Devil King. By his side is a party made up of Aqua, the goddess of water whom Kazuma somewhat forced to incarnate alongside him; Megumin, a fearsome arch wizard with a truly awesome hat who wields the all-powerful Explosion spell… and nothing else; and Darkness, a brave crusader whose knightly virtues call her to protect her allies from all harm and whose masochistic perversions call her to take as much punishment and embarrassment as possible. All four have their strange aspects and all four can be huge jerks to each other (especially Kazuma and Aqua), but they also grow deeply attached over time and can feel like real friends.

Over time, this very successful series has been adapted into many forms, most notably a widely praised anime series that will be airing its third season this coming April. As part of this franchise, several videogames have been developed, though most of them have remained exclusive to Japan. The first to make it over, KonoSuba: Fantastic Days, is a mobile gacha game that’s enjoyable enough, but I’ll admit that I struggle to enjoy most gacha titles; I played it for about a week and then dropped it. The second to be officially translated, a visual novel by the name of KONOSUBA - God's Blessing on this Wonderful World! Love For These Clothes Of Desire!, is much more to my liking.

KONOSUBA - God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World! Love For These Clothes Of Desire! was originally developed by MAGES. Inc. in 2020, but it has now received an English translation. The comedic visual novel follows Kazuma’s party as they find an expensive gemstone and also a mysterious stone slab on the side of the road with the amazing magical power to… make clothes! Specifically, to make clothes using various resources procured throughout the world. Sadly, producing clothing comes at a terrible cost: whosoever dares use this ultimate power shall bear a wretched curse that inverts their strongest desires! Masochists become sadists! The selfish become selfless! Some third thing becomes some other third thing!

Now, once our fair heroes learn this (notably after already using the very expensive gem with the slab to make some pyjamas), one might expect them to attempt to remove the curse and move on with their lives. However, a nearby noble accuses them of stealing his precious gemstone and demands that they make him a special set of clothing or be executed for theft. This then leads the party on a new adventure: work their butts off at part-time jobs to acquire materials and money, make magic clothing to satisfy this clothing-obsessed noble, cure themselves of curses along the way, and figure out who has set them up.

The gameplay is fairly simple; in addition to being able to click through fully voiced dialogue (in Japanese) and make decisions as Kazuma that primarily impact how much affection the rest of the cast has toward him, there’s also the actual crafting process. For each of the noble’s demands, Kazuma’s party has some amount of days to make the clothing. This is then split into repeating sets of five days; the first three days see the party completing odd jobs on their own or quests all together for money and materials, the fourth day is a rest day, and the fifth day is when they can actually make the clothes. In addition, they must also make another set of clothes in order to remove the existing curse upon a member of the group and they can also take on a variety of optional clothing assignments, where making a given outfit will reward them with more money, a special scene where one of the major characters will wear the outfit and either silly or PG-13-sexy things happen, and sometimes even a new job. When completing these jobs and quests, the rewards received depend mostly on luck, though you can drastically improve your odds by assigning specific characters to jobs they enjoy doing or by doing the same quest multiple days in a row.

On the rest days, Kazuma can either take a nap and miss the entire day or walk around town and bump into the other characters for some nice scenes to perhaps boost their affection toward him a bit. By the end of the game, whoever’s affection is highest (which can be checked at any time on the pause screen) will gain their own Ending. Darkness, Megumin, and Aqua each even have both a Normal Ending and a Good Ending, depending on how high their affection has gone.

On every fifth day, the party can stop by a local store run by Wiz, an undead lich with a heart of gold, to spend their hard-earned money on even more materials, just in case they’re short a few. Additionally, the optional clothes also allow a special material to be used; this material is only available in the shop, but it’s thankfully not required. The only thing these special materials do is edit the ensuing scene’s CG to — usually — be more revealing and modify some of the dialogue. Sometimes, the special material will add a hat! This is clearly the superior use case. After getting their shopping done, the party can make one (and only one) outfit. Sadly, there’s no option to save up a bunch of materials and make all the clothes in one go!

These gameplay elements may be very simple, but they still take some care and consideration to use properly, which may make KONOSUBA - God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World! Love For These Clothes Of Desire! more appealing to those who ordinarily shy away from visual novels. At the same time, the game is still very enjoyable to fans of the genre like me — the story is remarkably hilarious from beginning to end, and each character is unique. Kazuma, our protagonist, is especially funny with his needlessly sardonic personality, and I was always happy to see his sprite show up on screen — his expressions are quite funny. Weirdly, in each of the endings, his sprite stops getting used, almost as though the events were from his first-person perspective; why do this when the man already has sprites? I’m also somewhat sad that none of the craftable clothing options ended up being for him — apparently, the stone slab only knows how to get outfits from the women’s section.

Sadly, some of the great characterisation and comedic plotting here is lessened a bit by a consistently flawed translation. I never felt that I misunderstood the meaning of any given statement, admittedly, but I was certainly struck by many instances of the wrong word being used or missing punctuation. Thankfully, the very well-performed vocal performances do make up for that a bit by getting across the feeling of any given scene, even if you don’t know a word of Japanese.

I was also somewhat disappointed by the opening and ending animations. The music playing over them is quite good — the opening number does a fine job of bringing in some energy — but there isn’t much in the way of animation in either sequence. They’re mostly a handful of the CGs throughout the game with some credits, other text, and character sprites alongside them. That’s admittedly not a huge negative, seeing as having a fun-but-visually-unimpressive credits scene is better than not having one at all; even so, I couldn’t help but want a bit more out of them. Thankfully, the ending credits also feature simple yet delightful art of little versions of the main cast tilting back and forth with umbrellas. It’s not a lot on a technical level, but it’s still incredibly charming.

To be frank, a lot of KONOSUBA - God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World! Love For These Clothes Of Desire! is charming, both with its well-paced comedy and its occasional sweetness, which is somewhat odd to say for a game chock-full of sexual innuendo, revealing artwork, and people being jerks to each other. However, it’s charming all the same — for every moment of pettiness, there’s one of sincerity too. Plus, whenever the party sets off on a quest or goes to do an odd job, you get to see more tiny animations of the characters doing whatever job they’ve been set onto. They’re pretty much all adorable, but the one that takes the cake is the one where Darkness keeps lifting and lowering a rock for all of the gathering-focused quests. I can’t even fully describe why, but it’s both hilarious and adorable to me that this brave knight is looking for herbs, and she’s decided to keep double-checking the space under this one rock to see if she’s missed anything. I know it’s not meant to be taken literally, but I love it all the same.

Beyond these little animations, there’s also the CGs! All of them are beautifully drawn and generally either very suggestive or very funny. The expression work done is particularly nice for me — there’s so much emotion in the characters’ faces, even just in the character sprites. The sexier moments are also usually fairly nice, though that’s mostly because Kazuma’s trying to satisfy some sort of kink or fantasy, and then it blows up in his face somehow. There’s still plenty of sexy stuff, for sure, but it all feels incredibly low-stakes, romantically speaking, even in the various character endings.

KONOSUBA - God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World! Love For These Clothes Of Desire! is a well-made visual novel that manages to maintain essentially all of the series’ charm, and despite some hiccups, it tells a complete story that should be satisfying for fans and newcomers alike. Oh, and also, it has talking brussel sprouts.