You’re a 42-year-old middle-aged guy. You’ve got a family, a wife, and a daughter in middle school. Your days never change. One after another, and somewhere in there you’ve forgotten that time is even passing. Sometimes you shoot the shit with coworkers about nothing in particular. You’ve forgotten what the world out there even looks like. Work is a two-point commute with nothing in between — no fun, no passion. Your coworkers are all hooked on one thrill or another, chasing kicks online, hunting for strangers. You figure none of it means anything. Maybe you still love your wife. Sometimes you want to get intimate with her, and you get the cold shoulder. “You’re 42 already. What are you even doing this for? Aren’t you tired enough as it is?” Your wife has zero interest in the bedroom. It’s depressing. Sometimes you have to take care of it yourself. But sometimes your eyes drift toward your daughter. She’s nearly grown now, and she’s beautiful — sometimes she even reminds you a little of your wife. She’s completely unguarded at home, and sometimes you see things you shouldn’t. Sometimes, you even start to react to your own daughter… That’s dangerous.

I once saw some otaku girls who play otome games complaining: “In most galgames the heroine kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat, and in otome games the heroine also kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat. Man, male-oriented or female-oriented, the heroine always has it rough. You get used to it.” Thinking about it, that’s pretty much true. In a lot of stories women are painted as fragile things that need a man to protect them. Even the “senpai” type in galgames tends to get a later scene revealing she’s not actually that strong and is secretly fragile inside. It feels like something baked into the gender roles themselves. But every so often a game tries to change that. Sure, seeing the heroine carry the hero the whole way through in a male-oriented game is unrealistic. Everyone knows the protagonist is “the weakest” by default, and, well, by the end he’s always some broken-ass cheat character anyway. So all we can do is look at female-oriented games and see if any of them dare to make the heroine the strongest. So 断罪のマリア (Maria of Condemnation) might be one of those games. Not entirely, but it’s close — at the very least, the heroine’s combat power is the strongest in the game.

Kareni Sekai to Owaru Hana is a game I had mixed feelings about from the start — both anticipation and a bit of fear. Anticipation because the premise is intriguing, almost giving away nothing about what kind of story it’ll tell, and the art, character designs, and even the voice cast all felt really comfortable. A bit of fear because of the planner/scenario writer: Yukihito. Who is this Yukihito? You might not have heard of his other works, but there’s one you definitely know… Nekopara. English title Nekopara, and I don’t know the Chinese name, but I know its nickname: “Catgirl Porn” — it sold like crazy on Steam. He also did two nukige with Sayori, an artist from China, so when a writer like that suddenly drops a new title with what looks like a very abstract, artsy premise, how could you not suspect it might be a landmine? But after playing the trial last month, my doubts got even worse. Because the trial still explained almost nothing — what the game is trying to say, what the theme is, all still unclear… The world setting feels like a fantasy, and while that’s not uncommon in games, it’s everywhere in Japanese anime. The most recent example is Kowareta Sekai to Garasu no Hana — and the title format is suspiciously similar, which only deepened my suspicion that it might just be pretentious bullshit that ends up saying nothing at all… Of course, after playing it, those worries vanished. Or rather, I had it wrong — this isn’t some “artsy pretentious” game, it’s more like a fairy tale. Yeah, a fairy tale — the kind a mother tells her kid before bed, the “Long Long Ago,” “むかしむかし,” “once upon a time” kind… No wonder the world and scenery in this game feel so “fairy tale.”

My father said he wanted a Bluetooth speaker, to pair with his phone and listen to music. Sure, when he’s home he blasts music from his phone at some ungodly hour every morning and wakes me up with all that boom-tss boom-tss, but since it’s my tsundere old man asking, and he’s wearing that face of “if it’s convenient for you you can just casually buy me one, of course if you don’t I can buy it myself, it’s not like I’m asking you to buy it or anything”—no reason not to buy it. Money spent on your parents is money well spent. But since this was my first time buying one of these, I didn’t want to go too expensive. Buying a Bose felt like a bit much for him—start with something with good value for money, so it won’t hurt if Dad accidentally loses it. After looking around, I settled on the Sounder Honeycomb 2S+. It happened to be on special at JD, 299 - 100, and with a BaiTiao savings coupon it came to 169 in the end.

Your Diary is a game by CUBE, and about… two years ago, I played the Chinese-patched version… Holy shit, it’s already been two years!!! I swear it felt like no time at all!!! Of course the impression that game left on me was still pretty good. Whenever someone who’s just getting into Galgame asks me for recommendations, I recommend this one. Reason’s simple: good art, good music, the story is a bit clichéd but not toxic, and it’s still a very orthodox, wholesome story — isn’t that perfect to hand to a newbie trying to get into Galgame! Back then I didn’t really look at what Japanese players thought of the game. Later, while reading up on CUBE, I checked it out, and found Your Diary doesn’t rate that high in Japan. I originally thought a story like this should get an 80, but it barely held onto a 70. What’s funny is some Japanese players called the game “boring.” Boring… that’s a hard one to call. My thinking at the time was that Japanese otaku probably love those “wild twists” and see Your Diary’s story as all formula, so they’d find it boring. Of course, if you asked me to look back on Japanese opinions now, I’d say they actually have a point…

I don’t know how other people chase that “immersion” feeling when they read a story. Let me just say what I think. Most of the time, when I come across a story, I notice some plot point that mirrors something that happened to me. Maybe the ending lines up with a stretch of my own life, maybe it only shares the same beginning but not the same end, maybe some character reminds me of a friend or an acquaintance, maybe the protagonist is a lot like me, and so on. Whenever I hit a story like that, I start thinking about my own stuff. Sometimes I even feel a bit of regret or wistfulness because the story went differently than reality did. That’s it. Yeah, that’s all. I’ve never imagined myself as the protagonist. I’ve never imagined the girls the protagonist meets as my girlfriend. I might think a character is cute, but that’s it. Anyone who knows me has probably noticed: I’ve never called a game girl “waifu,” I’ve never said “XXX is mai waifu” or anything like that. I like a character because I like her story, her personality, the things she says. As for looks… come on, Japanese art styles are all basically the same handful of templates, and one artist’s characters all look mass-produced. Everyone looks the same. So personality and story carry way more weight. One principle I hold: characters become full through their stories. And that’s not just true in fiction. In real life too, someone who’s been through a lot, who has a complicated past, naturally has a certain charm in how they talk and carry themselves. Hell, anyone can pull out some old war stories to impress people. Look at me, a washed-up old fuck, still bringing up the past to show off. So I rarely look at standalone artist illustrations. On Twitter I might like an artist’s style, glance at it, share it, sigh about how cute or pretty it is, but I don’t save it. Sometimes I’ll use one as an avatar, but I switch it out pretty quickly—it feels kind of rude, somehow. Right—without a story to prop them up, an empty character means nothing. Someone just standing there, and you don’t know their personality, their voice, their mannerisms—you know basically nothing about them. Saying you like them is almost empty talk. I don’t collect character art, but after playing this many games, I do have a collection of sorts. Mostly game music. Same style as before: the game songs I listen to are almost always from games I’ve actually played through. Especially OSTs—when I hear a track, I remember the story and the characters in it. If I happen to hear a good song from some game, I’ll listen for a while and then pick up the game, wanting to see what story is behind that song. So one day I heard “永遠の魔法使い.” I got curious. What kind of story produces a person who’s a jack-of-all-trades (八面玲瓏), who even with magic can’t grant a single wish and almost gives up…? So I played “魔女こいにっき” (Majo Koi Nikki).

I bought my mom a Xiaomi Mi Band 2, so her old optical heart rate Mi Band landed in my hands. I tried wearing it on my right wrist, since my left one already has a Moto 360 2nd. Honestly I wasn’t expecting much from this thing. I even installed the pairing app on my backup Nexus 5X. My demands were low — mostly I just wanted to see if it could track my sleep quality, and whatever else it did, whatever. Since it has an alarm function, I set an alarm on it identical to the one on the Moto 360 2nd. The original band strap was disgustingly filthy, so I swapped on a spare yellow one that came free when I bought the thing.

I bought a Mi Robot Vacuum because my room gathers way too much dust—the kind where you leave your phone out overnight and wake up to a layer of dust on the screen. I tried sweeping once a day, but it still wasn’t enough, so I figured I’d get a robot vacuum. I looked on Quora and couldn’t afford anything they recommended, until I was scrolling X (Twitter) and saw that creep Wu Lao’er’s avatar, and thought, why not just follow Wu Lao’er and buy Xiaomi stuff? I assumed the Mi Robot Vacuum would be hard to snag, but it turned out to be in stock on the official site… so I placed an order. Ordered in the morning, and EMS delivered it that afternoon. Damn impressive…

I’m a person with some integrity. Mostly this shows up as my OCD. If I say I’ll do something, I’ll finish it, and if I don’t finish it I feel guilty, worried someone will call me out and roast me over it. Taken a step further: if I’ve opened the full release of a VN, I won’t drop it. One day I’ll finish it, no matter what. Note I said “full release.” Translation: if it’s just a trial version, yeah, I can absolutely bail. Magical☆Dears is one of those games I left sitting forever… one of many…

I figure everyone’s got a dream, but it keeps shifting with age and circumstances. The very first one we ever had—aside from those endless dumbass questions teachers ask, “what do you wanna be when you grow up”—was probably always school-related, deep down. A buddy of mine, Crab Boss, his dream was to open an internet cafe right across from the school. “I’ll open a net cafe right across from school, rig it with the sickest machines, run the sickest membership perks, pull in the sickest kids, and piss off every last one of those dumbass teachers.” Crab Boss really loved hanging out at net cafes back then. Hmm… sometimes he’d drag me along too. Another friend, Tao-san, his dream was to bang every woman on earth.