Dakimakura Review – Android C from Instant Brain (NSFW)

It’s pillowcase show-and-tell time, and in a first for this site, today’s pillowcase features a subject that isn’t human. Rather, Android C is – obviously – an android, one of the main characters from the Xbox 360 visual novel Instant Brain, which I’m sure almost nobody has heard of.

Microsoft’s Xbox consoles have been maligned – unfairly, in my view – for featuring a preponderance of shooters, foremost amongst them the Halo series. Curiously, the Xbox 360 has become the console of choice for a different type of shooter – the 2D shoot’em up. A staple of 8-bit and 16-bit gaming, the 2D shmup has, like magnetic media, pagers, and photographic film, been consigned almost to historic irrelevance by the inexorable march of technology. However, a few companies still specialize in making games of this type, and perhaps none of them are as dedicated and prolific as Cave. They’ve made many shooters over the last two decades, including Mushihime-sama, DoDonPachi, DeathSmiles, and Espgaluda, among others, and a number of them have been ported to the Xbox 360. Besides Cave’s games, shmups like Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Triggerheart Exelica, Otomedius Excellent, the Raiden series, and Strike Witches have been released on the 360, establishing it as the unlikely console to own for fans of the genre.

Unlike most of Cave’s portfolio, Instant Brain is a visual novel, the first that they have developed. It was released last year on the Xbox 360 to reasonably good reviews, scoring a 9/8/7/8 in Famitsu for a total of 32/40. The game’s protagonist is a spiky-haired man named Zenya Barataki, an amnesiac photographer with a unique camera that captures the memories of what he photographs. The heroine is Android C, often just called C, a model H4667C maid-type android. According to the game’s character page, an android like her costs as much as a luxury apartment. Apparently she is the only family that Zenya has.

This pillowcase was sold through Cave’s shop late last year, right at Christmas time. It’s 160 centimeters by 50 centimeters long and is listed as being made of polyester, but it has the same heavyweight feel and elastic stretch as the dakimakura covers I own that are made of roica. It feels like a durable, good-quality material; I’ve had a few pillowcases that were made of fabric so thin that the printing on the opposite side of the pillowcase would bleed through when you photographed it, but C’s pillowcase has no such problem.

The illustration for this pillowcase was done by Iruma Kamiri, the artist who did the character designs and artwork for the game. He’s probably best known for his doujin work, produced under Hellabunna, the name of his circle. In particular, he published a lot of good Dead or Alive doujinshi back in the mid 2000s, which is how I became familiar with his work. I thought he was a curious choice to provide artwork for an Xbox 360 visual novel, given that much of his work is pornographic in nature, but I’m certainly not complaining.

The front side of the pillowcase depicts Android C in an abbreviated form of her maid costume. While she’s not restrained, there’s an unmistakable bondage theme in her design, with lots of leather, straps, and buckles. I’m not an enormous fan of the archetypical maid outfit – frilly skirts and such – but I like C’s uniform a great deal.

The reverse side shows that Android C has shed much of her outfit. Instant Brain got a CERO C rating in Japan, signifying that it is suitable for ages 15 and up, so presumably this is as much skin as is shown in the game, if she even shows this much.

I really do like Android C’s design; the bondage aspect is attractive, and as I mentioned in my post on Alice, I like the combination of black hair and red eyes. I think her facial expression on both sides is very appealing; a bit of shyness, a bit of vulnerability, but also a sense of impassiveness. And of course, she also has an attractive body.

Talking about a pillowcase can get a bit dry, so I’m going to digress from the dakimakura cover discussion for a bit and show off a few pages from a couple of artbooks. I recently purchased the Instant Brain Official Material Book and the Cave Shooting Artworks book and I think they are interesting enough to share.

Here is the cover of the book. You can see Android C, and the man in the middle is Zenya, the protagonist. I do not know who the girl on the right is; she also appears on the cover of the limited edition version of the game, and I assume she’s someone important. She resembles a younger version of Android C, but androids surely do not grow in the same manner as organisms, so one wonders who she is, or how synthetic Android C really is.

Android C is shown here cosplaying as Reco, the heroine of Mushihime-sama, probably Cave’s best-known game. If I remember right, this image was used for a promotional telephone card. The girl on the right is Kirin Yatsuhisha; she’s voiced by Rie Kugimiya, an actress famous for giving voice to a billion loli tsundere characters. For a game as relatively obscure as Instant Brain is, it features a very impressive voice cast. Android C is voiced by Mamiko Noto, who has performed as Masane Amaha in Witchblade and Satellizer El-Bridget in Freezing, among numerous other roles. Instant Brain’s other seiyuu include Marina Inoue (Yozora in Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai and Laura in Infinite Stratos, to name just a few roles from recent anime), Miyuki Sawashiro (Suruga Kanbaru in Bakemonogatari and Yomi/Dead Master in Black Rock Shooter), Kana Hanazawa (Zessica Wong in Aquarion Evol, Nadeko Sengoku in Bakemonogatari, and Matou/Black Rock Shooter in the anime of the same name), Chiaki Takahashi (Azusa Miura in THE iDOLM@STER), and Akio Otsuka (Rider in Fate/zero, Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid). That’s a lot of high-profile talent for a company’s first visual novel.

Here is Android C’s basic character design in the game. Her maid outfit isn’t exactly modest, but it covers up quite a bit more than what she’s wearing on the pillowcase.

Here’s one of the pictures in the book; the book is mostly a compilation of character profiles and design sketches, but there’s about a dozen pages in the beginning of the book that feature full-page artwork.

Here are the design sketches for the dakimakura cover. The artist considered using a different pose for the front side, where C is covering herself up. I like it a lot; if Cave made an alternate dakimakura cover using the discarded sketch, I’d definitely buy it.

Now here’s some artwork from the Cave Shooting Artworks book. Instant Brain doesn’t show up in this book, being that it’s not a shooter (though it does include a playable version of DoDonPachi, with Kinect controls, even), but it shows artwork from a number of Cave’s other games.

Here’s a couple of pieces of art from DeathSmiles. The book is 159 pages long and the first 52 pages are Deathsmiles art.

Here is one piece of character art. I haven’t played DeathSmiles, though the Xbox 360 version did actually get localized in the United States and is available reasonably cheaply, and DeathSmiles II is available in North America through the Games on Demand service.

These characters are from DoDonPachi Daioujou, which hit arcades back in 2002. The character design and illustrations are credited to Shohei Sato and Junya Inoue. Cave’s newest game is DoDonPachi Saidaioujou, released in arcades just this month. Besides the bullet hell gameplay Cave’s games are known and notorious for, it features character designs done by Nagi Ryou, best known for his work on the Ar Tonelico series.

Here’s Reco from Mushihime-sama. These images were drawn by Tomoyuki Kotani.

And here she is again, this time from the sequel Mushihime-sama Futari. This time, the art is credited to HACCAN. I do own this game; the Xbox 360 version was region-free, an unfortunate rarity amongst 360 games. Cave has been quite appreciative of their overseas fans, moreso than one might expect from a fairly obscure developer of games decidedly outside of the mainstream. (Incidentally, Instant Brain is not region-free and requires a solid knowledge of Japanese to enjoy, anyway. I’m hoping that someone will pick it up for localization but frankly, there’s zero chance of that ever happening).

Despite owning the game, I don’t mind admitting that I completely suck at it, as I do with all bullet-hell shooters. I’d probably do better at the game if I were younger; I spent a lot of my childhood in arcades playing games like 1942, Tiger Heli, and Carrier Air Wing, but these days, I play games like Robo Defense, which doesn’t require much skill, and I’ve played games like World of Warcraft, which requires even less skill.

Here are the sisters from Pink Sweets. They originally showed up in a game called Ibara, where they were the bad guys; in the sequel Pink Sweets, they become the playable characters. I had planned on picking up this game, since it was also released region-free (along with the game Muchi Muchi Pork), but money was short at the time and I never did get it. I still hope to add it to my collection someday, though.

This is Element Daughter 01 A.I from DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu. This game was localized in Europe by Rising Star Games, but the disc is playable on North American 360s. This character got a colored model kit that was sold through Cave’s store and, I think, at various hobby shows and events. Off the top of my head, it’s just the second Cave character to get a figure, the first being, of course, Reco, who got a figure from Max Factory a couple of years back.

She also got a dakimakura cover; it was sold at the same time as Android C. I thought about getting it but I was already spending quite a bit on pillowcases at the time so I passed on it.

I probably should’ve just scanned these pages; it’s hard as hell holding up a camera that weighs five pounds with one hand. I’ve got Darth Talon and Uesugi Kenshin standing on my scanner, though.

Here is artwork from Akai Katana, a horizontal 2D shmup that Cave released a couple of years ago. It’s getting localized in North America by Rising Star Games, which means if you own a 360, you should buy it. Here, I’ll even give you an Amazon link.

This wallscroll depicts Sumire Asaka, one of the characters in the game. The game features gorgeous character art (sort of superfluous, since you fly in an airplane through most of the game, but still appreciated). You can see high-res images of the characters over at Andriasang.

I’ll conclude this very cursory overview of Cave’s games by mentioning that the music for Akai Katana and part of the soundtrack for Instant Brain was composed by Ryu Umemoto, who also scored many of Cave’s other games. He was a completely self-taught musician, which is something I admire a lot, being that I never studied any form of creative art myself. Tragically, he passed away last year at just 37 years of age, after a long illness. It’s sad to read his Twitter timeline, in which his last posts are mentions of his illness and of the Tohoku earthquake. There’s also a mention of a planned trip to Sweden, where he’d visited before. (In a bit of an odd coincidence, I got an e-mail just a couple days ago from Mangagamer announcing that they had acquired the rights to Eve Burst Error, which Umemoto had composed the music for.)

Back on the subject, I really like this pillowcase a lot. Should you happen to play this game, there is a walkthrough available on Cave-STG. In the meantime, I’m going to continue doing my rain dance, hoping that someone will pick Instant Brain up for localization.