Pleasure Airlines (PC)
The idea of the Mile High Club is apparently popular enough that it serves as effective shorthand for getting intimate on an airplane, and if there’s one thing that erotic entertainment excels at, it’s providing for fantasies without any of the risk or planning needed to pull it off in real life. It’s easy to imagine why Kavorka Play chose it as the premise of their adult visual novel Pleasure Airlines, and it feels like it should have been an easy concept to stick the landing on. For people looking for a simple and sexy thrill though, they’ll find Pleasure Airlines to be a bit of a bumpy ride.
Pleasure Airlines takes place on a long flight to Europe with the player taking on the role of a mostly faceless male protagonist. On this long journey, four chances for romance emerge, Pleasure Airlines mostly focused on female love interests but there is a single man to pursue as well that is presented with equal attention. While it’s easy to imagine a lurid game allowing you to hook up with the flight attendants, that only encapsulates two of the romance options, the others being the plane’s pilot and your childhood friend who has elected to go on the trip with you. There is a bit of a plot surrounding a strange man in a trenchcoat known only as K who everyone on board deems suspicious, but mostly the focus of the story is on making choices that will bring you closer to intimate encounters with the character you choose to pursue.
Perhaps the most robust of the romantic leads is Natsumi, your pink-haired friend inevitably the one who will speak to you most even if you completely ignore her advances. While this budding relationship unfolds on a plane, it does mostly tie into the expected progression of a childhood friend turned significant other, which allows Natsumi to bring up her past with the protagonist and more often justify speaking to him casually during moments like the story set-up or when K starts acting strange. The other three characters are defined more by the moments you elect to speak to them specifically. Pleasure Airlines is a pretty linear visual novel, the broader course of events unchanging and the only major changes between runs through the game being specific moments where the character you’ve pursued romantically will be the one to appear for an erotic event. There are still brief junction points that serve as your way to show interest in a character, many straightforward choices making it pretty clear who you’ll go talk to or engage with based on which choice you make.
Beyond Natsumi, you’ll need to get to know the others through these limited chances to interact, which often means they’re fairly surface level characters or you’ll be told something is true without really seeing it. On one hand, the plane’s pilot Yoko clearly puts up a serious front but has a softer and more demure side when she is comfortable with someone which is pretty easy to express, although her justification that she flies better without a co-pilot to help is a pretty corny excuse to make sure the cockpit is private enough for some fun times. On the other hand, the stewardess Mai is a flagrant flirt and the protagonist can sometimes barely form a sentence around her, and yet when you get close to her we’re told the protagonist was able to see a deeper side to her character and she fell for his supposed appreciation of her beyond her body. The male flight attendant Hajime is decently handled at least, his intellectual side at least a bigger focus of one of his interactions before you start praising it. There is a little bit of voice work present in the game, although it involves spoken Japanese and the rather odd choice of making Mai have a haughty laugh when she’s usually a very straightforward and friendly seductress. It is better than having absolute silence, especially during the scenes involving intercourse, but its application outside of that context don’t add too much to the experience.
After a few interactions that are pretty easy to set up, eventually the budding relationships formed on Pleasure Airlines will lead to more intimate interactions. They are not all straightforward intercourse nor do they all go for the Mile High Club standby of heading to the lavatory to mess around, an effort made to vary things up. Sneaking some fun while in your seat or playing with the pilot while autopilot keeps the plane aloft join the lavatory excursion in trying to make the most of a cramped setting, and it can be said different characters have different preferences since of the three encounters you’ll have with them, they won’t be hitting the same notes necessarily. As a piece of adult entertainment, these are the main attraction and the draw that will bring in most players, this definitely needing to be where the art and writing comes through regardless of anything else featured.
Sadly, Pleasure Airlines seems to have quite a few struggles with artistically rendering its lewd scenes. Already it had a few struggles, the half-lidded sultry stares of your potential romantic partners feel off because they completely cover up the pupils in this particular approach to anime eyeballs. When it’s time to get down and dirty though, things can start to really get rough from a visual standpoint. Flat colors with light shading is the norm here, but you’d hope at least if you found the characters attractive in their normal character art, they’d still look just as nice when presented in the more detailed event scenes. However, characters can assume rather uncomfortable or strange poses, it feeling like the artist sometimes can’t really figure out how the arms and legs should be positioned. This has to be at its worst during the typical Mile High Club encounter in the bathroom though, it not even looking like the bodies are lining up properly for the action. Poor Mai is also a victim of Kavorka Play’s consistent inability to keep a blonde woman looking similar between her conversational character art and her event art, her dark eyebrows turning blonde when she’s featured in the more detailed images. One scene even has some versions of the image seemingly forgetting to remove the character’s underwear only for them to disappear without explanation as you wrap the scene up. Every romantic path does at least end with the undoubtedly best erotic image of the character, a lot more care put into presenting a full screen image that should please a player even they weren’t a fan of some more subdued interactions characters like Natsumi and Hajime have before the finale. However, these scenes are also let down by removing any really relevant narration or dialogue, instead focusing on wrapping up the story as a whole over top the visual that had the most love put into it.
That isn’t to say the erotic writing during the other acts is particularly exceptional. It isn’t cheesy or flowery, it feeling more like a quick and efficient description of events that knows to throw in certain elements like character conversations and some build-up. It is serviceable and that’s not necessarily bad since that means it doesn’t distract from the fantasy of the moment. At the same time, a few scenes maybe could have done with diverting your attention away from the art’s failures, especially when the game goes for a tamer interaction where the right narration could have sold it despite it not being as exciting or saucy as other scenarios. Thankfully, Pleasure Airlines is pretty easy to play through for all four different routes, the player easily able to save and load multiple files, skip past text to get to choices, and the overall plot being on a pretty set path means you only really need to read the relevant scenes once before focusing on the love interests on your next playthroughs. You can see everything there is in about two hours, but with some of it disappointing in concept or artistic representation, it’s hard to get excited diving back in to see the scenes involving the other characters.
THE VERDICT: While the writing in Pleasure Airlines does its job just fine for an adult visual novel, especially one where the plot is clearly more an excuse to set things up than something worth your attention, the art lets things down during key moments. Every character at least gets one nice image at the end of their route, but otherwise you will see odd poses, poorly drawn bodies, and inconsistencies that distract from a meager set of event scenes. With the romances more an excuse to mess around with the character you find attractive, Pleasure Airlines needed to nail these scenes but it slipped up far too often to leave a player satisfied.
And so, I give Pleasure Airlines for PC…
A BAD rating. Amateur adult images do not a good visual novel make. While the characters can look fine in their portraits when speaking, it makes it a bit sadder that the moments they’re meant to really shine visually are where they can look sketchy or poorly posed. By the time I was on my last run I was outright worried about what would be wrong with the character during the scenes, and since it was Mai, I also happened to see the worst of the worst when the sultry stewardess feels like what the game would want to put its most effort into realizing. Characters like Natsumi and Yoko have just enough to them that they’d work in a game that could also muster up the artistic chops and writing talent to make the scenes involving them steamy and exhilarating, but every route includes some form of disappointment even if it feels like often some earnest if basic effort was put into the game. This is the oldest of Kavorka Plays’ adult visual novels I have played so some improvements only come through mistakes and experience, but I can see Pleasure Airlines being a serviceable and swiftly completed bit of erotic fun if had landed the basics of its most important elements. All it really has is a short romance and a few pictures to provide you with for a playthrough so it needed to succeed somewhere, and appreciating the designers for trying isn’t really going to improve what little there is on offer.
I can easily say future titles from Kavorka Plays like Witch College better figured out a way to present its erotic story and the art and writing improved as well, but that game aims for a different fantasy than Pleasure Airlines. The idea of an adult visual novel aboard an airplane with an anime art style will certainly draw in some players who won’t be too happy with what they’ve found, things looking just decent enough that they might get their hopes up until they reach the moments that really count. I’m not sure I can recommend anything to replace it in that very specific niche, so we’ll just have to accept this offer to join the Mile High Club is just a disappointment.