Last year there was one insanely good game I recommended hard: Haruoto Alice＊Gram. This year it got a sequel, Hakuai Sakura＊Gram. After finishing it I looked up at the stars and felt a whole lot of ripples in my chest. People always call Japan the “Warring States period of eroge” — every company dives into the fray, blood and guts everywhere, trying every trick in the book to survive and sell copies, and still taking heavy casualties. While every other studio was racking its brains over how to make otaku open their wallets, the great Nanawind did not let me down. Hakuai Sakura＊Gram is a satisfying answer sheet. An eroge has to sell to survive, and Hakuai Sakura＊Gram is a runaway commercial success. Hell, it’s a textbook success.

Lately a lot of eroge makers give off the vibe that they’re about to go under… Alcot, for instance. Aside from peddling expired pillows and illustrations on Twitter every day, you barely see them do anything. I remember last year they put out what they called a proper game, 将軍様はお年頃, and then basically nothing for almost a year. Just when we figured they were about to croak… Alcot announced a new release! And then I look closer and holy shit, the new release is a fandisc. Honestly I’m so sick of fandiscs filling my screen I could puke, but it seems like a lot of studios can’t manage new titles anymore and just repackage old stuff to scrape by. Whatever. If Alcot’s done for, might as well see them off. Alcot’s new release is called 将軍様はお年頃 ふぁんでぃすく -御三家だヨ！ 全員集合. Long as hell and contains zero information… the name itself looks cheap, like a little flyer ad. Fine, fine. Don’t speak ill of the dying. Let’s just look at the game.

Maybe everyone gets this illusion — that when you meet someone, or hit some particular moment, your brain flashes “wait, have I seen this scene／this person in a dream before?” Plenty of people have researched and argued this phenomenon, and most land on a few possibilities: memory misplacement, an illusion of similarity between scenes, or some blurry subconscious memory of a scene. One of the Steins;Gate games even explains it as “déjà vu across worldlines.” And then there’s the one factor that’s never certain but can’t be ruled out: dreams. Which is to say, it’s entirely possible that the familiar thing you just ran into really was something you saw in a dream. Dreams are funny like that. Humans can never control their dreams, yet the dream is something the person themselves created. So when we go adventuring in a dream, the dream is something we wrote ourselves. There’s a bit of “playing with yourself” to it. Some say a normal person creates one to three dreams every night, and over the course of growing up, all those assorted dreams pile up to a terrifying number. Among them, one or two scenes are bound to resemble something you run into in reality, and that produces the so-called “déjà vu.” This is probably the most reliable explanation for the “I keep seeing it in dreams” feeling — but compared to that cold reality, we’d rather accept the romantic explanation: “You and I are connected by something heaven ordained, so we met in a dream long ago, and that dream scene guided us to meet in reality…” Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? uh?

The Redmi Note 3 my parents have been using is almost two years old now, and I’ve had it repaired a bunch of times to keep it breathing, but recently I found out my dad smashed the screen again. So I couldn’t be bothered to keep it on life support. The Redmi Note 7 is out, so let’s just switch to that.

Another day like any other. My little sister comes to wake me up, same as always. “Big sis, breakfast is ready. Time to get up.” I’m a guy, but my sister has always called me “big sis.” “Hey, is it really okay to keep calling you that?” Just as my sister leaves, a figure slips out from beside me — a girl with black hair, asking me that. Actually, this “girl” is a cat. And not just a cat — a cat god. A cat god who also happens to be my savior. It all started two weeks ago.

Heard the industry’s own tumor, minori, is finally closing up shop and quitting games. I was so happy I didn’t write a damn thing all day. Plenty of people think minori made “masterpieces” like Ef and Eden, that it was a big-name studio worth mentioning, and that its sudden “collapse” (just quitting games, mind you) is somehow sad. But I still say the reason the Galgame industry is in this mess has a lot to do with these so-called “old studios, old stubborn farts” who refuse to die. Go back to the ancient days, before the concept of Galgame even existed — there was only what they called エロゲーム, porn games, literally. Everything in them existed to deliver porn. Later, as some older studios joined in, the porn ratio in these porn games kept shrinking and the “story” kept growing. As the industry developed, “30% story, 70% porn” gradually turned into “70% story, 30% porn,” and some games even went “100% story, no porn,” becoming true visual novels. The hordes of otaku who’d been secretly playing porn games could finally straighten their backs and announce they weren’t in it for the dirty pictures, purely for the story — and some elite specimens among them even elevated “playing porn games” into an “artistic pursuit.” So we see a lot of companies wanting to put out all-ages games, to finally operate in the clean light of day, goods out, people in, no longer forced to spend every day side by side with AV, becoming real game development companies. Sounds like the birth and sprouting of some new art form… except Galgame’s audience was never the general public. It’s otaku who want to see tits and pussy. Which is why KID, who went all-ages, died. 5pb., who inherited the mantle and wanted to go all-ages, is still desperately clinging to the accidentally successful Steins;Gate. Key puts out all-ages games too, but its output feels like it’s stopped running entirely. minori tried all-ages as well, took a massive loss, and afterward started frantically selling tits and ass to survive. People always criticize otaku as disgusting — on one hand elevating themselves by saying they play for the story, on the other saying they won’t buy a game without 18+ content. In the end they just want to see dirty pictures. I thought that way years ago too, but now I’ve got a new take:

I thought about writing some clever, unconventional intro, but then I figured nobody actually reads those closely anyway, so forget it. Let’s just talk about the game.

Win10 tablets are everywhere now, and honestly the specs aren’t bad. But Sony was already making this kind of device back around 2005. I remember devices like this — at the very least I saw them in Popular Software. Though it was only ads and reviews, because this thing was expensive as hell, and back then even a desktop couldn’t meet the demands of DOOM3, let alone some overpriced, underpowered “crippled laptop.” But as the old saying goes: “The swallows that once nested in the halls of the nobility now fly into the homes of common folk.” Even something that 14 years ago only the rich and flashy could afford has ended up in my hands. Here I need to thank Duan Ye, a proud Hammer phone fan and man of means, for his support. Duan Ye’s passion for gadgets is full of craftsman spirit — born proud!

Tsuki Kiraboshi no Koi Iroha (絆きらめく恋いろは) looked like it had nothing going for it when it came out, but the sales ended up surprisingly good—and the reviews were really high too. The high praise isn’t because the game itself is all that good, or because the main heroine is written all that well, or because the main story is all that great either… It was because of the game’s second heroine — Tsubaki — who looked so cute and charming. So what is Tsubaki’s route actually about? She’s the one holding her family’s biggest prestige and resources, yet she gets dunked on by every self-made striver, and in the end she barely preserves her own dignity. So what’s there to praise about this plot? But the masses just think Tsubaki is moe, is cute, and completely ignore the psychological portrayal and the stuff about effort and striving—the only parts of that route I actually found decent…… トニカクカワイイ — in other words, as long as it’s cute, that’s all that matters. This is some absolute bullshit! Again! AGAIN! The story got beaten out by moege fluff! And this time, to throw a bone to the moe-blob crowd, the game got a fandisc — the protagonist isn’t the original one, the route isn’t the original route, it’s… Tsubaki. The game’s title even became Kizuna Kirameku Koi Iroha -Tsubaki Renka- (絆きらめく恋いろは －椿恋歌－).

The not-exactly-famous eroge developer LASS died for good in May 2018. Company president 剣技マナ said that after May 1st all business was transferred to DMM, and LASS’s main scenario writer LEGIOん went along to DMM too, getting involved in the development of a new title. Then in the second half of the year, a new company, Fluorite, showed up — and with it, a new game: ソーサレス＊アライヴ! ～the World’s End Fallen Star～. In the credits list, we saw some familiar names: LEGIOん, and another familiar artist, 早川ハルイ. Speaking of this “LEGIOん”, I actually had some interaction with him. His life didn’t seem to be going well. After LASS went under, he gave off a real drifting-along-with-the-current vibe — company gone, his mother passed away too, living like some ant-tier wage slave. I even hit him up on Twitter hoping he’d stay strong, and he actually replied to me. But what shocked me was…… He actually knows Chinese! And the scarier part: he seems to have been following my Twitter for a while now… which means all those days I’ve been up there shit-talking, calling this developer a dumbass, calling that scenario writer a dumbass—he probably understood every word of it. So when ソーサレス＊アライヴ! came out, I immediately went and shitposted about it on X (Twitter). For one thing, letting the producer find out I was playing a pirated copy would’ve been awkward. For another, telling the producer to his face that his game is garbage… that’s just rude, man. So is this game actually shit or not? At least that’s how it seemed from the trial version.