WAGAMAMA HIGH SPEC OC review

Fan disks live or die by one question: does this actually need to exist? WAGAMAMA HIGH SPEC OC mostly earns its answer. It returns to Ōsui Academy with a clear sense of purpose. There are more time with the heroines, proper routes for the side characters who flirted with being someone’s favorite, and after-stories that follow up on the original’s confessions without fumbling what made them land.

It never tries to be anything bigger than that, which is the right call.

Kouki Grows Up (Just a Little)

Kouki gets a quiet kind of development here. The “secret manga author” angle is still the backbone, but OC reframes it less around whether he can keep the lid on things and more about how that hidden ambition sits alongside being an actual boyfriend. It’s a small shift, but it makes him feel a bit more considered than he did in the base game. He leans on people more. He’s not quite as isolated in his stress. A few routes in particular push on this in ways that feel earned rather than convenient.

The four main heroine after-stories cover what you’d expect after the confession. But the better ones find something specific to dig into rather than just rolling credits on a date montage. Kaoruko’s story plays up the friction between her put-together, slightly overbearing student council president energy and Kouki’s general chaos, which stays funny without turning mean.

After the Confessions: Everyday Romance

Ashe’s is the most emotionally satisfying of the four: her tsundere sharpness doesn’t get sanded down, but OC gives her more space to actually say what the relationship means to her, and it works. Mihiro’s best moments come when the teasing gets dialed back and she’s just allowed to be a decent, if scatterbrained, partner. Toa’s route is the lightest. Her laziness and selfishness are still the main event, but there’s a thread about small, incremental growth running through it that gives the comedy some weight.

The new routes for Karen, Yukari, and Chitose are where OC justifies itself the most. All three were memorable in the original and visibly underserved by it.

The Quiet Route That Speaks Volumes

Karen’s route has the best energy of the three. She’s outwardly cheerful in a way that covers some genuine insecurity, and that pairing with Kouki’s tendency to spiral works better than expected. Their banter doesn’t feel like a retread of any existing heroine dynamic, which matters more in a fan disk than it might elsewhere. Yukari’s is slower and more interior.  It’s built around quiet conversations and small compromises rather than any big dramatic turn, and if you’re in the right headspace for it, it’s probably the most grounded thing in the package. Chitose’s leans hard into comedy, which suits her, but the better scenes underneath all the chaos are the ones about reliability.  Her impulse to just charge forward versus Kouki’s more methodical instincts, and how two people work that out without one of them having to fundamentally change.

Structurally, OC strips out most of the setup and meandering that the original needed to establish its world. You already know everyone, so it can skip ahead. That’s mostly a good thing. The ratio of actual character content to filler is noticeably better. But it does mean the whole thing feels like a set of separate vignettes rather than something with connective tissue. That’s fine as long as you come in treating it as exactly what it is: dessert. Not a second dinner.

Dessert, not a Second Dinner

Production-wise, nothing has slipped. The art is as expressive as ever, there are enough new CGs that recycled content isn’t a problem, and the voice work continues to sell the quieter moments as well as the bigger ones. The soundtrack leans on familiar tracks, but that’s more or less expected.

If you finished Wagamama High Spec and came away wishing the side characters had gotten more, OC is a direct answer to that. It’s warm, it’s focused, and it doesn’t overreach. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want.

WAGAMAMA HIGH SPEC OC was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.