Tom

Aside from Gakumas, obviously, I've still only really played the very original game and Starlit Season (okay, and some of the DS game, too, but who's counting that), so I'm admittedly drawing upon a fairly limited pool of experience. I do want to get around to playing more of the games in-between and have some of the others waiting in the wings; I just want to do deeper dives into that original game in particular first so I can have a better perspective of everything else once I more widely explore the series.

Anyway, I'll give you three answers and throw in pictures up top for people reading this who understandably can't necessarily keep them straight.

The OGest of OGs (ie: first game, but only the ones present in the very original arcade game): Azusa. She's the very first one I cleared the Xbox 360 version with a few years back. I don't tend to gravitate all that much towards ditzy characters in general, but her being one of the only adults and the elder out of that entire cast means that she's still pressing my oneesan button quite a bit (even if Ritsuko is probably more of the actual oneesan in terms of disposition, I'll admit). Really, her relative seniority just lets her have a bit deeper chemistry with your character as her producer in that game, which I personally appreciate. One of these days I'll go back and get her true ending.

Mostly an OG, but not quite: Takane. (I like how she looks now a little bit more than how she was originally depicted, but, we'll stick her first incarnation for relative consistency.) Like Azusa, to be honest, ojousama characters rarely do that much for me, but after producing her in Starlit Season, I've definitely come around to her. She has a particular cadence to the way she carries herself in Japanese that I think is fairly hard to convey in English, or at least in the same way. I dunno, man. There's just something about the way she projects herself that makes her a lot of fun to listen to without being tiring like her more stereotypical counterparts that I dig, especially when she's being a goofy dork. And, yeah, her rendition of the hamburger song is a series all-timer for me.

Shiny Colors: Sakuya. I've only played the tiniest bit of Shiny Colors, which I bounced off of pretty quickly when I wasn't as into character raising sims as I am now. (I do want to give it another shot again one of these days, I swear!) So my only real gameplay experience with her is also Starlit Season, but I was actually first introduced to her to a tweet from several years back where she was Photoshopped to be the cover girl for a PS2-era VN that never was. And holy christ was I all about her from the minute I saw that fake box art, which I still love to this day.

Sakuya has gotta be my actual all-time favorite, as much as I like a ton of her SC cohorts in Starlit Season! Again, just notably more mature and self-confident in herself than a lot of the other characters and, my god, the huskiness of her voice is, like, everything to me? She strikes me as the sort of character that could only come out of this series so successfully after a lot of time spent exploring a lot of other personality archetypes, some very adjacent to her, but only arriving at her through a lot of really careful, considered design and self-reflection. I don't get the impression that she sits at the absolute top of a lot of Japanese fans' lists, especially given that it's a franchise that tends to cater to other tastes, but for my money, I dunno that she'll ever be beat. I love her so much that I spent years tracking down the one statue she's ever gotten and only just finally obtained it after paying fairly stupid money for it; that's how much of a lasting impression she's made on me.

...I guess when it's all said and done, you could just say I have a weakness for the handful of oneesans that have cropped up over the years, which is, admittedly, the story of my life with galge more widely. I'm nothing if not consistent. 😩