A while back I saw a story that caught my eye: a Taiwanese game called Shi Yong Xi Shao Nü got rejected from Steam for having too much porn and other objectionable content. Not exactly breaking news, really. Everyone and their dog wants to get on Steam these days, including a whole lot of straight-up porn games and stuff that’s just skirting the line. Steam is a US platform run by white dudes, so that kind of child-endangerment material was always going to get the hammer. So I looked into this Shi Yong Xi Shao Nü thing, and it turned out to be nothing like what I expected… It looks like softcore, but the game itself isn’t a visual novel… or at least not that kind of eroge-style text game. There’s actual stuff to do. To put it bluntly… it’s primarily a management sim. Which actually made me interested in it. The dev is Taiwanese, though, and their official site banned all mainland IPs, and since Steam won’t take it, the game’s only sold on physical disc. I had no idea how I’d even play it… But with a buddy’s help, I got my hands on a copy, so I started playing.

Dayglacia no Rashinban (デイグラシアの羅針盤) is a doujin game by the circle Catalyst, first released around 2015. In December 2018 it got a graphical upgrade, an OP2, and a port to Nintendo Switch.

I ordered a RhinoShield case on Black Friday when it was on sale, and then one thing led to another. After a bunch of tweaking, the phone feels pretty good to use now, basically satisfied, so I’ll sum it up here.

Kotonoha Mau Natsu no Fuurin (言の葉舞い散る夏の風鈴) had a lot of buzz before release — not because of some insane premise or anything, but because of the staff. Writer Noriaki Hanno had previously done Kage no Umi no Apeiria and the rocket-building thing, and both were received pretty well. This time almost the whole original team was back (with an even stronger artist brought on), so of course people were hyped. Once the game was announced, though, it looked like there wasn’t anything special in it — at least compared to Apeiria, this one’s setup is basically plain water. But because of the writer, most people still had high expectations. And what were we all expecting, exactly? Some crazy twist? High tech? A physics textbook? Logic-puzzle quizzes? A lot of people probably figured that since the writer had done something that good before, this one should be good too — even with its very “youthful,” very “ordinary” premise, there had to be something thought-provoking underneath. Well, we were all wrong. It’s just an unbelievably simple, plain-water game. Hell, it’s not even up to plain-water standards…