The Nintendo Switch finally arrived before my birthday. Honestly, after buying a 2DS I already felt like the Switch was inevitable, and after thinking it over I went ahead and bought one. I bought it locally in Zhengzhou, picked it up in person to avoid unnecessary hassle. When I checked it over at pickup, it turned out the three serial numbers all matched, so it should be fine. I picked up Breath of the Wild and Splatoon 2, and I’m currently playing Breath of the Wild. Most of the time I use it as a handheld. I haven’t run into any of those weird problems people complain about online, so I’m pretty happy with it.

More isn’t really a studio that specializes in galge, honestly. It looks more like… “A bunch of music people who make galge on the side so they have an excuse to put out albums.” The company name is MME — MORE MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. Which is my whole point: their center of gravity is clearly music. Making galge, a cheap kind of game dev, probably isn’t the day job for them. More like a hobby? Hobby or not, they’ve put out a decent number of games, and they don’t look like they’re doing a “one and done” bit. If anything they keep branching out, spawning more and more sub-brands… Sometimes I wonder if registering a new brand in Japan is just free. Why else does every eroge company change its skin every other year… This time the new More brand is called Niko, and their game is Golden Hour (ゴールデンアワー). I mean, More already had two brands running fine — More for pure-love stuff, Pure More for nukige — and now there’s a pile of sub-labels: Chelseasoft, which looks like it’s going for moege, DOLCE, which put out the little flower of Casablanca, and now Niko. God knows what style this one is supposed to be.

Wagamama High Spec (ワガママハイスペック) did pretty well for itself last year. It even got a short-form anime, and a way better one than that princess stray cat got — word is the latter ran out of money entirely. And when a game sells, a sequel is inevitable. So Madsoft sat on it for nearly a year and put out Wagamama High Spec OC. At first I assumed it was a sequel, and Madsoft’s own copy sort of implies that. In this “sequel,” the class rep who wasn’t a route before, April 1st Kanade, the protagonist’s editor-in-charge Takatsukasa Chitose, and his homeroom teacher Iwakuma Yukari all get promoted to heroines — while the original cast stays available too. No trial version. Straight to the full release. Which made me wonder — is this just a fandisk? Then I saw the price. Nearly 10,000 yen. You can’t be that brazen. Booted it up. Holy shit. It’s a fandisk.

I was using a ThinkPad X250 before this, and I upgraded it bit by bit over time, but I had a few complaints about that laptop: Cooling was terrible. Hook it up to a dock and it hits 90°C in no time, and breaking 100°C was routine. I tried modding it, but it was basically useless. Performance was lacking. With the dock running dual 1080p displays, it just couldn’t handle it—open YouTube and performance explodes. Build quality was so-so. The ThinkPad X250 was a step back from the X230 in terms of build. It’s all fiberglass, even though every media outlet hypes it as carbon fiber. It’s not, and there’s no metal either. Fiberglass, plainly put… is plastic. Overall, the laptop was okay at first, but later it started to annoy me, so I planned to upgrade after two years. This time I looked at the X270, but found nothing new, and it seems the ThinkPad series has given up on the X200 line. So my targets were the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Yoga.

I used to wear a Xiaomi Mi Band on my right wrist. Honestly there’s nothing really wrong with it, but I bought it at launch, my mom wore it for a year, then I wore it for another year, and then the strap snapped and the charger went missing… I figured I’d just buy a replacement part, only to find the official store had discontinued every accessory for it, and the prices on Taobao were somehow higher than a brand-new one cost back then. Forget it, I got my money’s worth, so I gave up. But wearing something on my right wrist had become a habit, so I thought I’d get something else to wear. What though? Maybe something that actually looks good? That’s how I came across the Misfit Ray.

Looking back on some of my old Gal impressions, I always want to laugh bitterly. The old me thought a game had to have a good story to be good. And what counts as a good story? It has to have a big twist, but not too absurd a twist — explode the plot while staying coherent, plant a pile of foreshadowing and pick every bit of it back up. Best if it also works in a little life wisdom and the truth of the world. That’s a good game. Now I see that what I was after was just the “good” games within the story-driven category. But like how a cinema shows more than Hollywood blockbusters, Galgames aren’t only the story-driven kind. I’ve also thought that if a game can make its characters cute enough, that’s fine too — I just always felt that kind of game was a tier below the story-driven ones. Because those are the big titles, and this is just selling moe character writing, tea-party-slice-of-life level. Like holding up Death Note against Yuru Yuri, or a AAA title against Minecraft — most people figure the two aren’t even on the same level.

Obviously I’m a handheld nut, and my love for handhelds outweighs any other kind of console gaming. In some ways I even use the Surface Pro 4 as a handheld, even though it’s not remotely “handheld” sized. A while back I got my hands on the GPD Pocket. It’s great in every way except that gaming on it is a hassle — compared to the GPD Win it has no built-in gamepad buttons, and the default keyboard is just painful. So pairing it with an 8BitDo portable gamepad does the trick.

I was originally going to buy a Nintendo Switch, but I’m broke, and there were games like Mario 3D Land I’d never played, so I figured I’d just get a 2DS LL first.

I’d been using the Moto 360 2nd, but it had been nearly two years, so I figured it was time for a change. Then the LG Watch Sports came out, and I saw you couldn’t swap the strap, so I didn’t buy it. Half a year went by and there was still nothing I liked. I figured, fine, if I can’t change the strap, then I just won’t change it… When I went to order the LG Watch Sports on Google Play, the titanium version was out of stock, of course. Then one night I refreshed out of boredom and there it was. Ordered it right away, and it turned out I’d picked the wrong payment method and paid $16 extra in shipping, even though the Google Play Store page said free shipping. I was worried it’d sell out so I didn’t look closely. The next day I saw the extra charge and asked Google for a refund. They said no… So I said, fine, I’ll return it and order again. They said it had been more than two hours, so no returns… I’ve got a few choice words for them that I’ll keep to myself. So I chalked it up as a lesson learned. The surprise was that when it arrived via a forwarding service, there was no customs duty… I looked, and the customs declaration listed the thing as an “electronic watch.” Clever. I wonder if next time I forward a phone they could write “cordless telephone”…

I played サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ last year, and my takeaway at the time was: strong opening, decent premise, peaks early and then nosedives, rushed ending. I remember the promo OP being absolutely insane. The buildup before the OP hits is done perfectly—basically the protagonist falls in love for the first time, confesses to the girl he likes, Madoka, and then the very next moment, because he wasn’t paying attention, she gets killed by a serial killer. His rage, despair, regret—all of it explodes the moment that blazing OP kicks in. Hell of an opening. I won’t get into the rest of the game. It’s a textbook high-open-low-walk. The protagonist starts randomly chasing the killer who murdered his girlfriend, randomly joins a few organizations, solves a few random haunted-house incidents around town, and the plot gets more and more psychedelic. The killer turns out to be a psycho, also bisexual, then the killer himself starts randomly getting superpowers, and the protagonist gets a parasite… This kind of escalation reminds me of a ghost story I read in high school. The mystery setup was solid, then suddenly the protagonist gains Taoist powers and starts having superpowered xianxia battles with all sorts of ghosts. I literally spat out my drink. It went from mystery to melodramatic wuxia, massive disappointment. Same with サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ. Massive disappointment. Great start, then it turned into a mess. After that, the scenario writer for サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ, Go Nii… oh wait, Mr. Go, went off to write other games. Still heavy horror stuff, but no longer the “dream diving” of the original サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ. The game called 仄暗き時の果てより tells a story of aliens and Cthulhu-style time travel. It was actually okay, but I was starting to feel fatigue with Mr. Go’s approach of “not enough plot? add ketchup.” Then サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ 2 was announced as a sequel. At first I was curious what kind of story サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ 2 could possibly tell, since the first game basically wrapped everything up. The protagonist’s girlfriend died, killed by a bisexual psycho. By the end, Madoka had ascended to heaven and the protagonist couldn’t even see her ghost anymore. The mastermind, that bisexual psycho, had been taken out by the protagonist. The story had a relatively complete ending. All that was left were some loose threads with the side heroines. I could understand an FD, but a “2”? Are we just calling FDs “2” now? Then the game came out. After playing through it in bits and pieces over two weeks, I’d say as a “2” it holds up.