School Days haunted house event lets you live the life of anime’s most brutally murdered playboy

You’re invited to ”Experience Makoto’s bittersweet youth and its bloody conclusion.”

For a lot of otaku, the idea of living the life of an anime protagonist sounds like it’d be pretty awesome. Luckily for them, there’s an opportunity to do just that coming up, with a special event that lets you experience what it’s like to be Makoto Ito.

While Makoto’s name might not ring as sonorous a bell among casual anime fans as, say, Goku or Naruto, he’s still a leading man of some renown, as the male lead of 2007 anime TV series School Days. Adding to the ostensible appeal of living Makoto’s life is that School Days is a harem anime, based on an adult dating simulator computer game, and so living Makoto’s life means getting to romance multiple beautiful girls. Pretty desirable fantasy to dip your toes in, right?

There are, however, two very big catches. First, School Days is infamous for the mercilessly violent comeuppance it serves Makoto for treating the women in his life like disposable pleasure vessels, and second, the event, called Makoto The Real, is a collaboration with Japanese haunted house designers Kowagarasetai.

Kowagarasetai is the team behind the Zekkyo Kyukyusha/Screambulance haunted house delivery concept, and Makoto the Real is its latest iteration. Pitched as a “sound horror” experience, it has similarities to an audio play, as guests listen along, from the perspective of Makoto, as he goes shopping for paired rings with Kotonoha, one of his possible romantic conquests.

▼ Makoto and Kotonoha, whose anime voice actors, along with those of the other characters in the event, reprise their roles

Things, in the established fashion for the franchise, don’t go very well from there. The School Days anime ended with Makoto being murdered by one of his many objects of his physical affection, followed by his killer being disemboweled as an act of revenge by one of her romantic rivals, and while it’s not clear if the Makoto the Real storyline will wrap up the same way, Kowagarasetai promises “At the end, ‘she’ will invade the ambulance!”

▼ Sekai, Hikari, Setsuna, and Otome are also part of the Makoto The Real storyline.

▼ The event’s organizers say the 3-D microphones used for recording the dialogue creates the effect of the characters speaking directly into your ear.

The Makoto the Real event kicks off on December 24, considered the most romantic night of the year in Japan, at its venue at the Fuji Soft Akihabara Building in Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood, operating from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day between then and January 3, and then on January 8-10, 15-16, and 22-23. Tickets are priced at 2,000 yen (US$17.40) per person, with up to six guests able to participate per session.

Oh, and if you prefer your horror without anime overtones, you can always keep your fingers crossed that Kowagarasetai creates another haunted toilet somewhere.

Related: Makoto the Real official website
Source, images: Kowagarasetai via IT Media
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