The Fox Awaits Me HANA, known in Japan as Kitsune ga Boku wo Matteiru Hana, sends a young man named Takahiro deep into the mountains until he stumbles onto a shrine built for a fox deity. Getting lost there pulls him straight into a mystical world on the other side of that shrine, where a fox girl named Hana is waiting. The deeper Takahiro gets pulled into her life, the more of her own hidden past starts surfacing alongside his growing feelings for her.
COSEN and TALESshop co-developed this as a direct sequel to The Fox Awaits Me, a story that first launched in 2017 for Android and iOS in the Korean mobile market before COSEN brought a multi-language console version, English included, to Switch in 2020. That original game built its foundation around themes of found family and the bonds that come from choosing the people around you, and HANA carries that same emphasis forward into Hana and Takahiro’s own relationship rather than treating it as a clean break from what came before. Choices throughout steer which outcome Takahiro and Hana actually reach, and the game supports English alongside Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text, on top of Japanese and Korean voice options, carrying a CERO rating of fifteen and up in its home market.
Jinaga Deon-Gae wrote and directed both this and the original entry, and that continuity shows in how naturally Hana’s backstory folds into a world already established by the first game rather than getting explained from scratch. Shinoba, the same illustrator behind the original Fox Awaits Me and the unrelated My Girlfriend is a Mermaid, gives the fox girl’s design the same warmth that made the earlier game recognizable, giving Hana an expressiveness that sold her shifting moods scene to scene.
Watching Takahiro’s initial disorientation at being pulled into an unfamiliar world slowly give way to real investment in Hana’s own history made the mystical setup feel earned rather than just a framing device for the romance. What any of the choice-driven outcomes actually resolve stays out of scope here, but the game trusts Hana’s past to hold real emotional weight instead of treating it as a twist to reveal and move past quickly.
An eight-person Japanese voice cast, Tamako Miyazaki, Nozomi Nagumo, Risa Kageyama, Kanna Nakamura, Kanako Nomura, Mao Amatsuka, Ryouta Yoshizaki, and Atsuko Oota, covers a fuller ensemble than the central romance alone suggests, and switching between the Japanese and Korean audio options let me hear how differently Hana’s warmth translated across languages without ever losing the core of who she was in either version. I couldn’t track down a specific credited composer for the score, so I’ll note that gap honestly rather than invent one, though COSEN did release a dedicated two-disc Theme Song and Soundtrack CD alongside the game’s Japanese launch, confirming the music got real standalone attention even without a name attached to it in the sources I could find.
The Japanese release shipped as both a standard edition, physical and digital, priced at 5,500 yen, and a physical special edition running 9,900 yen that bundled that same theme song and soundtrack CD with an acrylic figure, a digital artbook, sheet music for the opening and ending themes, and digital audio of both songs plus a ringtone voice clip, the kind of packaging that signals a publisher treating a visual novel sequel as a real collector’s item rather than a budget release.
COSEN ended up canceling the game’s western Switch release entirely in September 2023, just weeks before the Asian release that November. The company was explicit that the decision wasn’t theirs or the development team’s to make, without naming who actually made the call, and said separately that any future western release on other platforms would likely need portions of the game changed, changes they weren’t yet sure they were willing to make. English text remained included in the Asian release regardless, which is the only way players outside Japan and Korea can currently read this story as intended, through the Japanese or Korean eShop, or through a physical copy shipped internationally by import retailers for anyone who’d rather own it on a cartridge. COSEN’s own catalog beyond this pairing includes titles like Defoliation, Behind the Screen, and Destruction alongside their earlier hit My Girlfriend is a Mermaid!?, giving HANA a home inside a publisher with a real, established track record in bringing niche Japanese and Korean visual novels to Switch specifically.
Knowing how deliberately COSEN chose to keep the story intact rather than compromise it for a wider release made me read every scene with a little more attention to what exactly they were protecting. Whatever that was, The Fox Awaits Me HANA reads like a team that cared more about finishing Takahiro and Hana’s story honestly than about maximizing how many players got to see it.
Verdict
The Fox Awaits Me HANA turns a wrong turn in the mountains into a sequel that trusts Hana’s hidden past to carry real weight, backed by Shinoba’s expressive art and a dual Japanese and Korean voice cast that sells her warmth in either language. COSEN’s choice to protect the story rather than alter it for a broader Switch release says a lot about what they were trying to preserve, even if it means most English speaking players have to go through the Asian eShop or an imported copy to actually read it.
