Meet the Misaki sisters (artwork from the 2015 re-release)
One of the very few examples of a Visual Novel made by a Japanese producer specifically for the foreign markets, Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~ is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: you play the part of an Occidental Otaku who comes to Japan for the first time and is greeted by two cute sisters (Makoto and Akira Misaki) who take him sightseeing around the country's most famous landmarks (mostly in the Tokyo area, which to be fair is very expansive). In the span of one week he'll learn many things about the country's customs and culture, and maybe also find love...Despite being made by Overdrive, an established eroge maker, the game is not one of them. It's more of a crash course on contemporary Japan tailored to otaku tastes, and thus making use of several anime, manga, and VN tropes. It contains both English and Japanese language, but without any voice acting.
The game was made in 2011 and became available on Steam's Greenlight service in 2014. In 2015 the game received an Updated Re-release powered by the Unity engine, which almost doubled its contents and added more polish such as animated sprites and HD widescreen graphics. Another update was released in 2016 which added even more content and an improved wallet system.
In July 2021, a YouTube channel called "Go! Go! Nippon! Live with You!
" debuted, featuring Makoto and Akira as Virtual YouTubers. A stated goal for this channel was that if it reached 10,000 subscribers a new game would begin development, which was accomplished on April 23, 2022.
On October 12, 2022, the day after Japan dropped the visa requirements for foreign travelers entering the country (which had been in place since late 2021 as a result of the country entering another lockdown as a result of COVID), it was announced that the "Live with You!" project would be shutting down on November 5. An archive to a stream where the sisters talk about this can be found here. Despite this, the new game is apparently still on.
The visual novel and/or YouTube channel contain examples of:
- Accidental Pervert: How could a game made for otaku not feature this? It's limited to two brief scenes in the beginning, where the protagonist walks in on, respectively, Makoto after a shower and Akira taking off her pajamas in the morning. The former remains mostly unfazed, but Akira doesn't take it well...
- Adaptation Dye-Job: Akira's eyes are brown in the visual novel but purple in her VTuber form.
- Asian Speekee Engrish: Akira's English is terrible, and her attempts at speaking it inevitably bring this trope to mind. Makoto, on the other hand, speaks English well and averts the trope.
- Downplayed by their VTuber selves: Akira has gotten up to the point of being able to speak conversationally after a few years of study, but both girls have noticeable accents.
- Bland-Name Product: The backgrounds come from photographs and all brands appearing have been retouched to become fictional ones.
- Contrived Coincidence: Before going to Japan, the protagonist chatted extensively with Makoto, who knows English thanks to her studies in English Literature. During all this time, he believed her and her sister to be boys because of their names. Somehow, in all that time, apparently no pictures or social media accounts with details were ever shared, and no pronouns were ever used.
- Covert Pervert: The VTuber version of Makoto shows an interest in more risque content. This occasionally results in Hypocritical Humor, as one of her dislikes is "naughty jokes".
- Distant Finale: Both routes feature an epilogue where the player character returns to Japan a year later.
- Distant Sequel: The VTuber versions of the sisters are the same characters years later in a version of events where the player character didn't end up with either of them.
- Edutainment Game: Sort of. One purpose of the game is to learn useful info about Japan such as transportation fares, geography, history and etiquette in a package that makes learning it much more fun and natural than looking up the information manually (and with the Google Maps feature, gives you context to locations that you might not otherwise have just by using Google Maps on its own).
- Featureless Protagonist: The main character, being a stand-in for the player, is intended to be this, Eyeless Face and all. Not only is the character still explicitly male, however, but the rest of his design aside from eyes is fully drawn. Beyond that, he also has a very distinct personality.
- Gender-Blender Name: The two sisters, Makoto and Akira Misaki. The protagonist actually believes them to be boys before coming to visit them.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You can enter the name to maintain the illusion that it's actually "you" who's talking to the girls, though they almost never call you by name.
- You also have to manually input the exchange rate for either U.S. dollars or euros to yen.
- Indirect Kiss: Happens between the player and Akira in Harajuku.
- Invisible Parents: The girls' parents are staying away for two weeks for business reasons.
- Lethal Chef: Makoto is a sweet and well-meaning woman, but don't let her cook! When the protagonist tastes some of the food she prepared, the image becomes all warped and with inverted colors. Luckily, Akira is an excellent cook.
- Limited Wardrobe: When at home the sisters always wear the same clothes, and when taking you sightseeing they wear the standard outfit of Japanese tour guides over them. The only time they wear something else is when the destination is a film studio, and they get dressed in ancient Japanese clothing.
- Manchild: At times the player character comes off as this, especially when confronted with Japanese technology. He seems mostly unimpressed when facing great temples or landmarks, but the sight of the Shinkansen makes him rave like a madman. Humorously, at one point Akira tells him◊ to stop being amazed at everything. As this HG101 piece argues, it's almost a mockery of the players themselves (see Stealth Parody below).
- Minimalist Cast: You, Makoto, and Akira. The few (unnamed) other people are seen in silhouette or as disembodied voices.
- Occidental Otaku: While it's never revealed where the player character comes from, since he's supposed to be a stand-in for the player and the game was made for the Western market, he's certainly an example of this.
- Parody: The game has an unauthorized parody in the form of Stay! Stay! Democratic People's Republic of Korea!. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin, but with additional erotic content compared to the original. It was made by American game developers DEVGRU-P, who specialized in making animesque parody titles. Despite being a comedy, though, there's a good amount of research on North Korea, just like its source of inspiration. Here's the game's page on Steam.
- Perpetual Frowner: Even at her most casual, Akira looks like she's unhappy. It's not that she can't smile, it just doesn't come natural to her. During livestreams, the chat would practically throw a party whenever they got her to grin.
- Real-Place Background: Of course. There's actually a button that appears whenever you go to a new location, whose purpose is to show with the help of Google Maps the Real Life places you're visiting in the game.
- Recursive Canon: As VTubers the sisters played their own game, with Akira getting embarrassed at the emotional content of her own route.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: The tall, busty, and sweet Makoto versus the short, snarky, and tomboyish Akira. One is unable to cook, while the other is an excellent chef. On the flip side, one is bilingual (fluent in both Japanese and English) and the other... is not.
- As noted above, the latter is downplayed in their VTuber forms.
- Stealth Parody: Of you, the player. The Hardcore Gaming 101 article for this game argues that, by presenting the player character as a nerdy Manchild who gets overly excited for everything from toilets to maid cafes, and having him - by necessity, mind you - not knowing anything about Japan despite being fluent in Japanese (implying that all he ever learned comes from manga and anime), the makers are indirectly poking fun to their foreign audience. In other words, This Loser Is You.
- Tsundere: Akira is a textbook example - short, pettanko, easily irritable, and flustered. She opens up to the main character thanks to her hidden geeky side, however.
- As a VTuber, she continued this toward the viewers.
- Yamato Nadeshiko: Makoto is pretty much this, being always gentle, helpful, feminine, polite, and smiling.
