Are you looking for one of the most forgettable modern moege VNs, with nothing particularly bad but nothing particularly good either? Look no further than Secret Agent, developed by Ensemble.
A lot of people comment that this is basically just a worse version of Riddle Joker developed by Yuzusoft. They both star a socially awkward male lead, in Secret Agent’s case Jin, a trained ninja, who has to infiltrate a school and has secret powers that he has to hide from the rest of the student body, and there is a final villain (in Secret Agent: “The Bat,” clearly a reference to Batman), that the main character is looking to beat while infiltrating the school.
However, that’s where the comparisons stop for me, because this otherwise feels like what I guess we can call a very chill moege.
While Secret Agent can sometimes have some mildly amusing, cute humor at times, it’s not constantly trying to bombard you with over-the-top harem romcom or sex jokes like a Yuzusoft or Smee title.
This works in the sense that the characters almost never annoy me. However, It also feels like the characters are a little too dry or dull at times, despite otherwise being fairly likable. The closest thing to a running gag is one of the heroines, Kanon’s, obsession with ninjas, which I at least thought was mildly amusing, and it was the only reason she was the only heroine route I decided to do.
The common route is maybe 5 to 7 hours long, but I find that it juggles way too many things in that timeframe. In addition to the main character infiltrating a school, it also mildly info-dumps you on how high tech the school is, including usage of AI companions. Most notable is that Jin has his own AI, Momoka, help him with his mission and even slice of life scenarios.
At the same time, there’s this Chevalier Order system in the school, where a bunch of characters, including one of the main heroines, are basically student-council-like enforcers, and they even have sword duels in an arena that can be good entertainment and competition.
With these, and with relatively likable heroines, you would think this would lead to a potentially dynamic and constantly entertaining common route, right? Unfortunately, no. The common route was honestly kind of boring.
I find that it doesn’t really combine all the aspects of the setting I described above in an organic way.
In addition to that, because of the lack of meaningful humor and slice of life, I feel like I barely got to see any of the heroines in the common route outside of maybe one or two major scenes for each of them. While these scenes do give very mild intrigue about what their issues may be, usually the point of common routes in moege is to entice you toward the heroines, and Secret Agent did a mediocre job at that for me, outside of Kanon as mentioned above.
The common route tries to end on a high note by having the main character find what I guess we can call the mid-boss of the conflict behind why he’s infiltrating the school. However, what’s supposed to be this big dramatic reveal with a cool fight scene and everything led to indifference on my part. Because there wasn’t that full focus on a serious infiltration story, when the main character finally has a fight with this mid-boss villain, I just didn’t care.
This leads into the one heroine route I cared enough to do: Kanon’s route. I know there are “real” ninja heroines in other VNs like Senren Banka, but Secret Agent having a ninja fangirl in a high-tech modern school setting made the contrast that much more amusing. And on top of that, figuring out the reason why Kanon’s obsessed with ninjas is so cheesy that once again I found it kind of cute.
Similar to the common route, Kanon’s route ended up juggling a bunch of things that were kind of interesting on paper but didn’t fully commit, so none of them super landed. In addition to Kanon wanting to continue being trained in the ninja ways by the main character Jin, there’s also a small arc where, since she’s not part of the Chevalier Order, doesn’t fully agree with their methods but is friends with a few members so she can understand their motives.
She is the ideal middle ground, someone who can empathize with the average students’ frustration with the order, and the Order's members opposing frustrations with the average student. This leads to a really small arc where she temporarily becomes the leader of a “revolutionary army,” as the game calls it. This seemed like something that should be a huge deal given the over the top name, but the issue is resolved in less than an hour with lots of small time skips.
Even though I liked Kanon’s role as a mediator on paper, that aspect just ended up being a kind of nice but overly rushed arc for her character.
And then it led to the second half of her route being about her rich overprotective dad, which went about as predictably as I expected. Since Kanon’s dad doesn’t even have a sprite or voice acting, it was hard to care that much about any of the major attempts at drama that happened. On top of that the main villain, The Bat, doesn’t get confronted in the route at all.
Finally the romance with Kanon was incredibly rushed. At the very least, Kanon had the most interactions with the main character during the common route, so their relationship potentially felt the most natural enough. But said development boiled down to “I appreciated him as my ninja teacher, but now I like that he’s a nice guy,” which was way too quick. It also did the classic moege trap where most of the other heroines barely even exist, with only Mai having relevance.
Speaking of which, while I didn’t mind the other three main heroines in the common route, they didn’t particularly interest me either. I figured their routes were gonna have the same “rushing too many things at once” issue as Kanon’s route, so I ended up not doing them.
Instead, I used a 100% save to unlock a fifth afterstory that did not have to relate to the four main heroines. Turns out this is the only route where the main character confronts the main villain The Bat.
Not having The Bat conflict take over the heroine routes was good in a way so they could be typical character-focused moege stories.
However, segmenting this epic final confrontation into an unlockable short side story makes it feel like a rushed afterthought. It takes place after Jin gets with a non-named girlfriend in a vague timeline. The reveal of who The Bat is and the final fight were nice on paper but didn’t hit as hard due to how you have to access the story.
All these aspects make Secret Agent a title I have incredibly mixed feelings on. The best I can say is that it’s somewhere between medicore and okay. Nothing about the game really got me angry, but nothing particularly excited me either.
For any potential that it had in its setting, with a mix of AI technology and the Chevalier Order system, and its potentially okay enough characters with an actual villain and some potentially interesting character arcs, that was just way too much to do in a 20 hour visual novel with 4 routes.
This is on top of the usual trappings of your average moege, like a typical bland dense protagonist, lack of sprites and voice acting for most characters, and a forgettable soundtrack. I guess at least there was no lame humor like in a Yuzusoft or Alcot VN, but there were very few jokes or memorable character quirks that made anyone besides Kanon stick out to me. I guess the overall pacing of the VN wasn’t the worst outside the boring mild infodump scenes that ended up not mattering much.
I read Secret Agent in part because it was a gift, and in part because I was always interested to see what a (non-trap protagonist) Ensemble VN was like, especially since Kagami Games is going to release Koikata soon. Suffice it to say, after I read Koikata, I’m probably never going to read an Ensemble moege again if they’re all this rushed and incredibly forgettable.
