Once again, my hands got itchy. This one was for use at the office, so obviously I couldn’t buy anything too nice, and the budget couldn’t be too high either. So I found this on Taobao. It claims to be an RHA CL750, some kind of “factory surplus stock,” but the price is obviously suspicious — only 150 yuan.

In the 1980s, Japan entered the exceptionally prosperous “bubble economy” period. How prosperous was Japan back then? Roughly this: everyone was trading forex, casually waiting for the yen to appreciate, and the money in their hands would gain value every so often. As long as you weren’t an idiot, as long as you dared to put money in, you could do some random bit of financial business and easily end up rolling in cash. By then, Japanese people had already become synonymous with “the rich.” No longer satisfied with spending at home, they went on the offensive in America, kicking off a lavish overseas spending spree. Their “binge buying” in the US left white Americans stunned—seeing something they liked, they’d snap it up without hesitation, even buying up famous Van Gogh paintings and acquiring ownership of the various billboards in New York’s Times Square. Beyond the overseas frenzy, people back home in Japan threw one last wild party: consumerism and hedonism ran rampant, teenagers sported the latest pagers and brick-sized cell phones, capitalists and the yakuza madly speculated on foreign exchange and real estate, nobody gave a damn about the real economy, and massive amounts of money poured into the property market. Tokyo housing prices soared all the way up—the money to buy one house in Tokyo could even buy several teams in the American baseball league… In such a frenzied atmosphere across Japan, huge numbers of poor people also poured into the neon-soaked city of Tokyo, chasing their own get-rich dreams. Some of these people come from the Japanese countryside, some from overseas, and some even from China. And Bubble De Jing (泡沫冬景) is a game that tells exactly this kind of story.

After buying FiiO’s Bluetooth over-ear headphones last time and liking them, I’ve finally started buying FiiO earphones too. The reason I bought this was purely my hands acting on their own. By the time I came to my senses, the order was already placed. Of course, the main factor in that impulse was the discount being too big to resist. The first-batch preorder was 30 yuan cheaper, with six interest-free installments, plus a free cable if you posted a review. Basically 100 yuan off. The earphones arrived pretty fast, and unboxing them was full of that typical FiiO “pile on the extras” vibe. It came with a bunch of accessories — a case, a pouch, everything you’d expect. But what we care about is the earphones themselves. As a certified fat otaku, purple was the obvious choice.

A lot happened to me in 2019. The most important thing was that I gave my Surface Pro 4 to my wife, which left me with basically no device to keep playing galge on. And the second half of the year was genuinely busy—I abandoned a lot of games, and for some I finished but can’t find the screenshots anymore. But with some recent effort, I’ve slowly written up all my 2019 game impressions, and with yesterday’s final post done, I can finally start this belated game of the year write-up. So without further ado, here are the works I think are worth recommending.

The word “youth” shows up everywhere. But what is it, really? You see people saying this all the time: “That TV drama ended, and my youth ended with it.” “That anime finished, and my youth finished with it.” “So-and-so got married, and my youth is over.” If “youth” is just a state you’re in while you’re young, then it ends on its own as you get older. It doesn’t depend on some person, anime, or TV drama. For different people, “youth” means different things.

A doujin game caught my eye last year: 慰愛の詩. The one thing that drew me in: it’s a BL game told from a heroine’s first-person perspective… And no, I’m not gay. I played it because it’s not just BL — there’s BG in there too. Putting GL in a BL game sounds like a huge joke, but the joke actually happened, became real, and landed in front of me as a game. It’s a doujin work, but unusually it has full voice acting. Unfortunately, there are no character sprites. First, credit where it’s due: the voice acting is spot on, especially the heroine’s portrayal — deep and captivating. The two male leads I couldn’t care less about; they’re serviceable at best. But no sprites really hurts. Maybe they couldn’t find an artist. The backgrounds are just real photos run through Photoshop, so yeah, the budget was clearly tight. Let’s get into the story.

My libido’s been through the roof lately, and on top of that it’s been ages since I played a game with a genuinely cute heroine. Everything on my plate lately has had art that doesn’t do it for me and plots that are aggressively stupid. Then a thought surfaced: I wanna play a moe nukige. Like, right now. So I dug through my abandoned-games folder and pulled out Panical Confusion (パニカル・コンフュージョン). I’d actually downloaded this one ages ago and never touched it, because Japanese otaku didn’t rate it well. Most of what they said boiled down to “the art’s the only good thing about it,” so I kept bumping it down the priority list. But I’m not the same person I was back then. What I need right now is exactly this kind of moe nukige where the heroine is cute and bonable and there’s nothing else going on — plus heroine #1 is drawn by 白もち桜, so, y’know. So I opened it.

I’ve always thought the Japanese eroge industry should learn some new tricks. Try new game styles, beef up the interaction systems, expand the settings and worldbuilding, and open up more distribution channels — Steam, say, with a Simplified Chinese launch on day one. Boost sales on one hand, improve quality on the other. But things never go the way I imagine. The Japanese eroge industry learned the first half and threw away the second. In other words, they started caring more and more about sales and profit. Improve quality? Doesn’t exist. Once in a while there’s a seemingly sincere “big-budget production,” and it’s still some baffling wildcard where the writer runs wild, it bombs, and the whole brand vanishes. Unlike those wildcards, most of the old brands that “can’t afford to lose” went for steady, solid… scamming. So we get more and more volume splits and Steam releases, plus all kinds of blunt, simplistic premises. They honestly don’t care what the story’s like — as long as it sells and makes money, that’s fine. This quick-cash approach naturally left the companies that “actually tell a good story” half-dead. But some of them learned a new trick: crowdfunding.

When Saleté wakes up, she finds herself in a strange place that looks like a theater stage—except there’s no audience. “Hello there, Saleté. You’re dead.” A masked clown appears and breaks the news in a flippant voice. “I’m dead?” “Yes, more or less. Unfortunately, you don’t seem to know you died, or even how you died. So I prepared this place.” The clown snaps his fingers and the stage lights come on. “In life you were an actress, and also a princess of a kingdom. I’m going to give you a chance to come back. The condition is that you perform your entire life on this empty stage, up to your death. If you satisfy me, I’ll let you live again.” “But I don’t remember how I died.” “As your performance goes on, I’ll give you some hints. Maybe you’ll remember without even noticing. Or… do you want to give up this chance at resurrection?” Saleté doesn’t want to give up. She decides to try, and with the limited memories in her head, she begins her monologue and performance on this stage—and begins recalling her life.

Whenever I tell someone new that I play visual novels, I hear the same thing: “Oh, galge? Yeah I’ve played those, Nekopara, right? Man, that stuff is something else, heh heh.” Sure, Nekopara technically counts as a visual novel, but every time someone treats “visual novel” and “Nekopara” as the same thing, I get annoyed. Simple reason: I don’t like Nekopara. Unlike certain other Nekopara-hating keyboard-warrior otaku, I don’t hate it because the artist flip-flops politically, or because the devs are milking Steam. I hate it because the game just isn’t very good. First off, Nekopara is a nukige, and a pretty mediocre one. The everyday dialogue and setup have nothing going for them—throw it on DLsite and it’d be one of a thousand. Its only real edge was using Emote, which made it look fancy, and one of the biggest reasons it blew up was that it launched with “official non-Japanese language support.” There are otaku all over the world stuck not knowing Japanese, staring at squiggles with no idea what’s being said, refreshing forums every day waiting for a fan translation—it’s agony. Then suddenly there’s a Steam game with an anime art style, Japanese voice acting, localization support, and a cheap price, and it was the only way to play a visual novel on Steam. So it sold like crazy… Yeah, if I remember right, when Nekopara hit Steam, the only other thing on there was some Willplus game with an English-only release. It was your only option. So Nekopara’s success was just timing and circumstance. The era made it, not the quality.