C's Ware | 1998 (Original), 2000 (Millenium Box) | Windows 95+ | 1 CD, +Extra CD (Millenium Box)
It's 2013, sometime in November, and there's like a foot and a half of snow outside.
You modded your good 'ol PSP-1001 to play homebrew so you're browsing around the internet to see what cool new games you can find.
You stumble onto this part of a forum board where they're talking about "18+" PSP games.
People talk about how the Japanese get full-on porn released in their country but none of it has come to the USA.
Someone says they got some discs across the ocean but the US PSP won't even read them so they need a Japanese PSP.
One of the replies mentions three "visual novels" named Divi-Dead, Yume Miru Kusuri, and Saya no Uta which are downloadble and even English-translated.
You've never heard of this genre before and you're interested to see what it's all about so you get all three.
Divi-Dead is a charming little game, not the best but definitely the first of the "games made by C's Ware that I can actually attempt to take seriously" alongside being possibly the first* visual novel/adv game I ever played. I put that * after first because the other two games in the little italics part up top were also had at the same time, I can't tell ya which I booted first but I can tell ya that Divi-Dead was the one I finished first.
I'm just gonna start on the glaring negative that this game, and like every other similar game from this era, has to me: good god spam clicking areas and dialog hoping that someone says something new and the game progresses friggin' sucks. This is "classic" in the sense that you're going to hit the constant loop of "go to area, think you made progress, realize dialog is at a standstill, start going to every single location, talk to everyone 500 times to ensure they're saying nothing new, check every room three times to ensure nobody shows up, go back to where you last were, do the same there, move again, keep doing the same, finally find the one person you only talked to six times instead of seven, go back to the area you started at, and finally actually progress". Little me finished this game in like four days, well really four spans of ~3-4hrs in my bedroom, and I want to say that two of those days were spent running in circles. aaaa.
Not really a massive "this sucks" but despite being "eroge" I can't say I actually remember more than like three ero things in the entire game. There was some sort of like ritual sex thing at the end that I don't exactly remember very well, just that people had all sorts of red writing all over them? I specifically remember those because the one CG has the dude transparent on top of the girl and tiny me was just thinking "what sort of ghost porn is this". In the same "ghost porn" vein there was the small girl who I wanna say was in the library(?) giving out blowjobs that I giggled at. There was also the short-blue-haired girl riding ya sometime towards the end which if I remember right kinda came (haha) out of nowhere. If anything, I think I remember the CGs of the decapitated dog ( D: ) and the person with like half the skin on their head missing more because the few gory bits were actually shocking to me.
Onto the things I like, well I haven't actually played this in ten years so a lot has faded but I do rememeber it being just quite the neat little thing. The characters were all unique enough that I don't remember confusing any of them too hard, the two blue-hair girls were a tiny bit confusing at first but if memory serves me right one had longer hair than the other and their personalities were fairly different, I'd call that enough to work with. There's a whole plot twist bit and I was mildly confused my first time reading things through (because I was reading faster than I probably should have been in classic me fahsion) buut I did go back through it all again and it made enough sense. Any time I wasn't running in a circle clicking "Talk" over and over, I was enjoying myself playing this game enough that I actually finished it in reasonable time back when I could've been on the 'ol 3DO, Apple II, or PC that I usually used a lot more than the PSP. It's a fun and kinda scrunkly little game that's dated but hey, I have fond memories of it so I've gotta give it some praise.
At some point in early 2023 I decided I'd like to own a physical copy of this game. A bit of browsing Suruga-ya led me to the C's Ware Millenium Box series of which Divi-Dead has an entry!
Check out some of these photos of the box contents! Click on them if you'd like to see a higher quality version.
| Front | Back | Inner Box | Info Panel |
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| Jewel Case | Opened Case | Extra CD | Mousepad |
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| Case Badges | CD Clock Kit | Keychain | Collector's Cards |
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| Cards 1-4 | Backs 1-4 | Cards 5-8 | Backs 5-8 |
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| Cards 9+10 | Backs 9+10 | Forms | |
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The "Extra CD", meant for you to put the CD Clock Kit on as a silly little wall hanger, actually has some data on it! Check out these posters for other C's Ware titles:
These .jpgs lead to 20MB .bmp files, sorry for the long load times if your internet is slow!
| ADAM: The Double Factor | Desire | DIVI-DEAD | EVE Burst Error |
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| EVE The Lost One | luv wave | Re-leaf | VIST |
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I own most of these games, I'd love to do a page on luv wave at some point as it's a kinda not amazing Ghost in the Shell knockoff but it is a similar "I played this as a kid (well in this case I actually watched the animated hentai doodad first, then played it) and I have some fond memories of it" so maybe expect that in the future?
One of these days I'd also like to buy the DVD-ROM version of this, it's just something like $50-75 which is a lot for what I only assume to be a slight visual quality upgrade! That may have to wait a while.