Ryuyoku no Melodia (竜翼のメロディア) is an old game from Uzumaki-sha. Its themes are “singing” and “dragons” — same half-fantasy flavor as always. How should I put this game… it’s very… long-winded?

There’s a fairly unique phenomenon in East Asian cultures: the concept of reincarnation. Of course, it’s not culture that decides this—it’s religion. Reincarnation is preached heavily in Buddhism, and a lot of Eastern countries are big on Buddhism, so naturally the concept gets accepted by more people. What is “reincarnation”? Pretty much what it sounds like: after a person dies, their soul is reborn in another person’s body, sometimes with memories of the previous life, sometimes without. It’s got a bit of a “conservation of souls” vibe. In most literature, reincarnation tends to get tied to romance. Lovers from a past life fall in love again in the next cycle. Over thousands of years of轮回, they meet hundreds of times—sometimes they end up together, sometimes they never truly do. Watching them flail around in an endless loop of rebirth makes us, the audience, sigh with melancholy. Why the sighing? Because it’s just fate screwing with people, and you can’t help but think: this is destiny.

I’ve been using the Google Pixel C for a good while now, but there are a few problems I need to mention… The touchscreen is really unresponsive. Foreign users have reported this badly, and a lot of them ended up asking for a replacement, which didn’t help. The keyboard keeps double-clicking or registering multiple presses. Some foreign users have this; I haven’t hit it. Weak Wi-Fi signal. Didn’t hit that one either. But an unresponsive touchscreen is bad enough on its own. It doesn’t just mess with normal operation — I couldn’t even use the Jot Dash stylus I bought for it..

Lately the stuff I’ve been playing has been a bit unusual — either hand-chopping, big meat grubs, or hookup — and after wandering the non-traditional aisle for so long, I couldn’t help but miss plain old moe. So when I was grabbing January releases, I figured I’d look for something light and fun. That’s how, among the January titles, while downloading Toukyou NECRO, I stumbled on this thing called Hanikami Clover. Compared to whatever Toukyou NECRO is doing, Hanikami Clover is obviously on the classic cute-girl-game track. So I got hyped, saw it was Ryokucha-soft, figured Ryokucha wouldn’t screw anything up — Minamijuujisei Renka (南十字星恋歌) got decent reviews, so this probably wouldn’t be a disaster either. Then I checked the official site for the cast: the first heroine is obviously Gotou Mai, and Hanikami Clover also has Akinohana, Sendai Eri, all solid voices. The most explosive part, though, was when I later watched the game’s OP. The dere-dere student council president, the sweet senpai, the lewd girlfriend, the little sister who’s a failure-of-a-brother manufacturing machine — all wrapped in a tempting, rhythm-heavy montage. The tagline was “a love story with a slightly H her.” Honestly, that OP makes it look like a moe-nukige, but hey, at least it beats hand-chopping big meat grubs and hookup games, am I right? Going by years of experience, this had to be a cheerful charmer of a moe game — and even if it’s a nukige, it’d be a comedy nukige, a light and fun one with no special effects. Playing it would definitely be a good time. My reaction at the time was:

A long time ago—though looking back now, it wasn’t that long—I was out to dinner with some friends. They asked why I wasn’t looking for a partner. I’d already lost weight, so was I still hung up on that fujoshi who’d toyed with me, or was my orientation just broken? At first I refused to answer. But refusing to answer only makes things worse. Being mistaken for a simp drooling over some crazy bitch, or for a pathetic freak who turned gay because he got dumped—either way, it’s bad news. So I thought about it and gave a careful reply. “Because, uh, I don’t really know how to deal with women. They’re hard to figure out. It’s stressful. And kind of a hassle.” My friend blinked, then burst out laughing.

LOVEREC. -Mini Theaters- is the fandisc for Loverec. Honestly, LoveRec is a pretty solid game. This fandisc, though? It’s… bone-dry. The whole thing is 1.95 GB. The story picks up right where the original ended—the protagonist is about to graduate, and the white-haired little sister plans to sell the film she shot at the next C90. Everyone’s trying to make it happen. Yeah… except that’s just the prologue. The actual filmmaking never comes up.

Maggot baits was made by Clockup. If you know them—or if you were dumb enough to poke around—you’ll know they’ve put out a few hardcore titles… So for Maggot baits, just taking the name at face value, you can probably guess what you’re in for. Maggot: maggot baits: bait Put it together and you get bait for maggots. Given the game’s plot, that’s exactly right. There are tentacles, giant bugs, and the people devoured and gnawed on by those bugs—some called witches, some called hunters.

Buying these earphones was an impulse purchase. I was helping my mother buy a Xiaomi Mi Band, and I figured I’d add some Xiaomi batteries to the order. My hand slipped, and I bought a pack of AAA batteries instead. I only noticed the mistake when the package arrived. Not that AAA batteries are useless to me. Thanks to that mistaken pack, the crappy TV in my room no longer needs me to hunt for buttons on the unit itself, because its remote’s batteries died long ago, and they’re AAA. So I thought about ordering the Xiaomi rainbow batteries again, this time AA. But batteries are so cheap that shipping is never free, and shipping alone costs more than a battery, which is a bad deal. I figured I’d add something to hit the free-shipping threshold, and that’s when I saw the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid earphones. I hadn’t looked into what the market thought of the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. I’d only heard bits and pieces, and naturally none of it was good. “For that money, go eat a nice meal.” “It’s just garbage.” “I pulled them off after 30 seconds.” “No sound quality whatsoever.” “Boomy, can’t hear the vocals at all.” Anyone with even a passing knowledge of earphones would say the same. I was inclined to believe they were trash too, because at this price, unless it’s a specialist manufacturer, they’re all the same: boosted bass and nothing else. But these are hybrid drivers, and I’d never heard a hybrid before. And… I needed something to pad the order. The power banks were out of stock! So somehow I bought the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. Or you could say I bought batteries and threw in a 99 yuan hybrid to hit the shipping threshold. So the question is, how do they actually perform? I hate keeping people in suspense—as the title says, “they’re not as bad as expected.”

I’m pretty open-minded. If a game’s supposed to have an interesting story, I’ll give it a shot — moe, otome, BL, mystery, guro, whatever. Tokage no Shippo Kiri is a guro game. Actually, every game this developer puts out is guro, and there’s a funny pattern: most guro and hardcore titles get surprisingly high praise. They’re supposed to make you uncomfortable, yet tons of people sing their praises, and a lot of them say shit like “yeah it’s guro, but the story is so healing.” I genuinely don’t get that take. Guro is just a device; the actual story is what matters. A kid named Xiaoming helping an old lady cross the street, Xiaoming on crutches after a car crash still helping an old lady cross the street, and Xiaoming with a vibrator up his ass still helping an old lady cross the street — they all mean the same thing. Sometimes obsessing over those details really is pointless. It’s seasoning. The main dish is the same. So how does Tokage no Shippo Kiri fare? How’s the seasoning? How’s the main dish? Short answer: it’s pretty fucking bad.

Honestly, I sat on this game for almost a year. It’s a bad habit of mine. Whenever everyone else is playing something, I look at their impressions, their screenshots, and I can more or less reconstruct the plot in my head. Once I’ve got that rough grasp of what a game is, well — having that grasp means that unless I’ve literally got nothing better to do or some other factor kicks in, it never gets priority. Most of the time I’d rather spend my hours breaking new ground. That’s just how it is. So I only remembered I still had this one sitting unfinished when the anime was about to air — literally, the anime was almost on — and finally started pushing through it. And because the game itself was so gripping, I took it slow, which meant that by the time I actually finished it, the anime was already two episodes in. Hm? What did I just say? The game itself was so gripping? Yes. This is a good game rich in positive energy, bright life-affirming values, and the ability to heal psychological trauma (adjusts glasses).