Since I started playing eroge I’ve eaten a fair amount of shit, and my standards have kept dropping. At this point I figure a game just has to tell one story without being brain-dead, draw the characters decently, and not have some Sendai oba-san for a voice actress — that’s a good game. Fine, a “not-bad game.” Japanese people like to call an unexpectedly garbage game a “landmine.” You go in hyped, the drop is enormous, it doesn’t just fail to meet expectations, it’s a turd — like stepping on dog shit, like hitting a landmine, you just explode. Pretty apt, honestly. I haven’t played many landmines, to be fair. Maybe I just don’t want much, so I don’t expect much, and I’m easy to please. No matter how ridiculous a game gets, I figure it’s at least dumb in an amusing way, at least it’s got something. Whether a game is dumb or garbage mostly depends on the dev team. Some games, I think the devs could’ve just played them once themselves and known what level they were at — no need to let the players judge, judging it themselves would’ve been enough. One thing puzzles me though: some eroge are clearly made with zero care in every department. The dev team has to know it’s a slapdash rush job. And they still ship it and sell it. In other words: you know it’s a turd, you put it on sale anyway, you won’t make money, you’ll only make enemies. Why insist on releasing it? Today’s subject is a game called Aoiro Note.

Back when I played World of Warcraft, I’d always run into these “casual guilds.” They didn’t have any strict raid schedule. Anyone could join, and the guild leader would help out the newbies a bit, and the atmosphere was relaxed. Every now and then they’d run a raid, but most of the time there were no rules at all — just people screwing around. A lot of the hardcore players wanted the kind of guild with a rigid hierarchy and harsh rules that could push into better raids for better gear. They had nothing but contempt for the “casual guild” type. Most of them couldn’t wrap their heads around what the point of such a lazy, ambitionless guild even was. But the members of those casual guilds didn’t care. They just quietly lived their lives. I’ve had my own hardcore phase too. I used to not get casual guilds either — until I got old, until I no longer had the time to dump into a game as a hardcore gamer, and I joined a casual guild, because no other guild would take me. Once I was in, I understood. The guild looked like it was just “a tag for people who don’t have a guild,” but it wasn’t that simple. The core of a guild like that is almost always the leader. The leader is very likely a middle-aged guy — good-tempered, easygoing, doesn’t get angry. Because the guild takes all comers, the leader is constantly playing peacemaker. Members might rub each other the wrong way, but most of them have no complaints about the leader. Plenty of members leave when they find a new guild, and the leader wishes them well. Some people complain that the guild has no events, can’t down bosses, can’t get gear, and all the leader can do is apologize and say he’s useless. For a casual guild like this, lose the leader and it’s done for in a heartbeat. But these leaders have a hell of a lot of willpower, and they always manage to keep the guild alive. Once I was chatting with a guild leader and asked him out of curiosity: “Why do you pour so much energy into keeping a guild like this running?” “A game is like society,” he answered. “There are always people out there who don’t belong anywhere, who have no home. They need something like a family to take them in, to give them a harbor that feels like home.” I still think about that line a lot. It makes a lot of sense. Whether our parents are around or not, we always feel lonely — that loneliness of “nobody is here with me” — so we need something like a “family” to let us escape and rest for a while, a harbor for the heart. That’s why you see people trying to do this in real life too — adopting orphans and whatnot. In fiction there are even more of these characters: the ones who take in lost children, the “hopeless good guy” setup, that’s everywhere. Like this game, Ouchi ni Kaeru made ga Mashimaro desu (お家に帰るまでがましまろです).

Kage no Umi no Apeiria (景の海のアペイリア)… This is a game built on deception.

If you search Quora for “what headphones are good,” you’re bound to come across a brand called Superlux. I’d never heard of this brand before, and probably nobody else had either, but there are just a ton of people on Quora hyping it up. Most importantly, it’s cheap—only 78 yuan, and shipping is fucking free. A while back I stopped even going on blind dates, felt empty inside, and just started buying shit. I’d sworn off buying audiophile-mysticism products, but I just wanted to see whether Superlux was all hype or not. Ordered on JD.com, said it ships from JD, but it still got third-party treatment. Anyway, it arrived. I listened to it for about a week, on and off. Not long, but I basically get it now—why people hype this thing, and why it’s so cheap.

I pre-ordered this one and slapped it on the moment it arrived.

These days most galge are locked into a mold — standard school romance, over-the-top bloodbath, or the “playable” kind. “Playable” means the game has some actual game to it, unlike a traditional visual novel. Maybe lots of choices, maybe combat, maybe investigation. Right, investigation. The easiest thing to bolt onto an AVG is an investigation and deduction system. Throw together a Danganronpa-style investigation screen, then pile up a bunch of choices during the deduction phase — points for right answers, deductions for wrong ones. Compared to building an RPG with combat, this is as simple as it gets, and it’s the go-to for any studio trying to inject “gameplay” into an AVG. So this month we got a game called Tantei Seven (タンテイセブン), which is just “Detective Seven” (I’ll call it Detective Seven from here on). The marketing pushed the “mystery detective” angle hard, and the promo art was so over-the-top cool that it instantly reminded us of a certain game called Persona 5. The OP is genuinely hype too — gives off a “there’s something big here” vibe. I happen to like this kind of setup, so I gave it a spin this month. And after playing it, I was fully satisfied… (on multiple levels)

I’m not really interested in Tongque’s earphones, but I do enjoy watching their founder pick fights with people on X (Twitter). Honestly, the way he goes after people is pretty on point — some folks really are that dumb and deserve it. I didn’t want to buy a Tongque earphone, though, because word was the sound was pretty mediocre. Then I saw the founder announce the new EN700 Pro in red and black, 12 months interest-free, and his line “if the sound’s bad, you can hit me.” So I bought one on impulse.

Haruoto Alice＊Gram, also known as My Daily Life With the Black-Tights, White-Tights, and Blonde Big-Tittied Girls in the Mental Hospital, comes from the Japanese eroge company Nanawind. It assembles star artists Nanao Naru and Takanae Kyourin giving it their all. A luxurious voice cast: the 36-year-old Sendai auntie who can’t find work and begs eroge companies on Twitter to no avail voices a heroine, the nearly-30-still-unmarried Ishihara Mai gets picked as a side heroine, and Ozaki Mami — the professional seiyuu who landed one lead in Girls und Panzer and then never got another anime gig — does a typecast brain-dead foreign ojou-sama performance. After several delays and repeated script polishing, it finally launched with much fanfare this month, with PlayDRM standing guard, leaving countless otaku sighing at the mysterious 300 and unable to play. Two weeks after release, it hit fifth place on ErogameScape’s most controversial games of the month, right behind that bug-ridden mess Tantei Seven.

The GPD Pocket is the follow-up to the GPD win. There were a few things I wasn’t happy about with the GPD Win: The screen was awful. After finishing Baldr Heart on it I felt like I was going blind. Bad cooling, which is why so many people modded theirs. I didn’t want to bother. Cheap build. All plastic, and the construction was just passable — usable, nothing more. The keyboard was useless. That thing was on the level of calculator buttons… worse than a Wenquxing electronic dictionary. So I backed the GPD Pocket crowdfunding campaign… and once it arrived, plenty of surprises.

I have two phones. Before, it was a Nexus 6P and a Nexus 5X—one on China Mobile, one on China Unicom. Right now the Unicom one is Sony’s XZP, so for the Mobile line I picked the OnePlus 5. OnePlus 5: OxygenOS leans stock. Snapdragon 835—honestly, at this point if it’s not a Snapdragon 835 I don’t even want to use it. Chinese full-network support, plus warranty. Supposedly the warranty service is good. Build quality is solid. I watched that foreigner’s bend test video—the OnePlus 5’s materials are impressive. Then again, OnePlus has always been a spec-stacking factory. The OnePlus 5 still meets my few requirements for a phone—except the screen… but since it’s a secondary phone I don’t care about the screen. So I bought it.