I actually finished Jewelry Hearts Academia a while ago and just couldn’t be bothered to write about it. Main reason: I’d already done the commercial piece, where I dissected the plot front to back, went through the details, and gave the damn thing a thorough evaluation from every angle. It wore me out. The thought of writing a second version for the blog made me want to throw up, so it just sat there. Still, for the year-end roundup and review, I have to write about it eventually. No escape. I really can’t be bothered to lay out the plot. It’s too fucking long and too fucking complicated. Let’s keep it brief, just a summary, and skip the details.

Buying the Pixel Buds Pro was decided from the start, and its release was completely expected. Because the first-gen and second-gen Pixel Buds had no noise cancelling and mediocre battery life, they looked like half-finished products in every way. So I bought the Pixel Buds Pro not long after it came out. Worth mentioning: I bought it through Wellbot, and it was actually $50 off at launch — a pretty big discount. My expectations for the Pixel Buds Pro were simple: the noise cancelling just had to work, and it must not do what the previous Pixel Buds did, where one ear’s battery suddenly died. When it arrived, the box was smaller too — no idea if that’s to go along with the so-called “environmental friendliness.”

More and more Japanese studios have figured out just how much money the overseas otaku crowd is sitting on, so we keep seeing visual novels pop up on Steam—including a whole crop of “Steam exclusives” planned specifically for the overseas market, with the domestic audience written off entirely, all in the name of moving units and making a buck. Most of these games sell like crap. Maybe it’s that Japanese “don’t cause trouble for others” instinct, but they always try to read overseas players’ minds using their own assumptions. They figure anything “too Japanese” or “too hardcore” won’t land with foreigners, and they unilaterally decide that what overseas weebs want out of Japan is ninjas, cherry blossoms, JK, school festivals, and so on. This kind of presumptuous pandering reliably produces results that are deeply, painfully cringe. If you need a reference point, look at how Japan “localizes” for overseas markets: they assume Chinese users want to hear Japanese anime girls speak Chinese, so they record exclusive Chinese theme songs, and some games even rewrite the scenario for overseas players. Nobody buys any of it. Back then the Japanese side genuinely couldn’t understand why so many Chinese users who don’t speak a word of Japanese insist on the Japanese voice track—like, does not understanding it not bother you?

Earlier this year I read a business plan from Visual Arts, Key’s parent company. The president, Baba Takahiro, turned out to have a surprisingly complete read on the industry—he knows how huge the overseas market is, especially the Chinese-speaking one, and he’s been actively registering local trademarks there, looking for local agents and partners. He also gets that the traditional “galgame” era is basically over, that selling on sex appeal alone can’t grow the market anymore, so the only way forward is all-ages. Raise the quality of the games themselves, and build IP across anime, manga, novels, and music. Rather than making games, make IP—that’s how you actually milk the 2D girls for money. At the end he said he’s extremely interested in the “metaverse,” and if they have the means, he’d like to explore whether the company can get in early on it. Reading this plan actually surprised me. My impression of Japanese companies, especially ones that got their start making Galgame, was that most of them are hopelessly stuck in their ways, utterly immune to reason, clinging to the same ancient engine until the day they die, at best peddling overpriced merch to scam people, and just shutting down outright when they can’t keep going. But Visual Arts is surprisingly clear-headed about the fact that the core of the “2D character” market is “IP” and “characters.” Be it story, music, games, or novels, every medium exists mainly to build the IP, and that IP then gets sold worldwide. That really is the kind of marketing strategy a cultural/creative company ought to have. Whether that roadmap is just bullshit or not, I honestly don’t know — but I did for sure notice this one thing: 『終のステラ』, the final chapter of the robot trilogy that began with 『planetarian』 and 『Harmonia』, written by Tanaka Romeo, scheduled for a spring 2022 release, aiming for a theatrical-film scale… And as you can all see, it’s already autumn and the game only just showed up. As for the “anime adaptation”—yeah, nobody brings that up anymore. Anyway, back to the game itself.

Hooksoft’s earlier Houkago Cinderella (After School Cinderella) was a huge hit. I thought it was a decent game, but I never expected it to be popular enough to get an official sequel… so here’s Houkago Cinderella 2. The original was a pure school romance setup: the protagonist picks different after-school routes, runs into different heroines, and each one spins out into a different love story. The only real gameplay hook was the “fortune telling”: every day after school you can hit up two bros for a reading, they hint at where each heroine might show up, and you pick your route based on that to clear each girl’s route.

There’s a weird phenomenon in the visual novel scene: a lot of works that advertise themselves as “telling a story” keep getting more and more horny and “practical,” while plenty of titles that come right out the gate branding themselves as “hardcore” suddenly start telling stories for no apparent reason. This isn’t unique to visual novels, either—Japan’s adult film industry is the same. That’s exactly why I love watching stuff directed by “Maeda the Literary Giant.” You get the visceral impact of flesh, sure, but also plenty of food for thought. It’s like how we judge people. We always slap the label of good guy or bad guy on them based on some kind of “contrast.” A guy who does ten thousand good deeds becomes a bad person after one bad one, while a total scumbag becomes the representative of conscience because he did one good thing. So some game producers deliberately go down this route, trying to cram something more humanistic into a nukige that’s supposed to be pure fap material. It’s one of the easiest ways to birth a so-called “masterpiece.” Of course, it doesn’t always work.

Years back there was a game called Study § Steady (a.k.a. “Study and Steady”), from a company called Marmalade (“Orange Marmalade”). I’ve always had a soft spot for this studio’s stuff — the early “Primal” series, and later Marshmallow. The vibe they give off is “solid”: no shitposting in the plot, just ordinary school romances with a little heartstring-tugging. Straight-up orthodox work. But for some reason, with the previous Study § Steady they lost their damn minds and changed the whole production style, pivoting hard into engine R&D. They poured what looks to me like a shitload of effort into a not-particularly-novel Emotion tech, and sacrificed most of the game’s content for it. So Study § Steady ended up feeling weird as hell. The story was dead simple, the pacing was a bore, and the only bright spot was the “animated heroine sprite” wobbling around like a balloon. But the tech wasn’t mature, so not only did the sprite look stiff and yank you out of the story, the game’s specs were absurdly high — no top-tier PC and you couldn’t hold a stable 30fps. Sure, plenty of people were praising the heroine’s black-tights CGs, and the game had a ton of HCGs, but those HCGs weren’t “animated” at all, which made them a total snooze… In my book, Study § Steady is a complete failure. The weird part is it still got Fandiscs, and the even more baffling part is it got a sequel… Study § Steady 2!

Back in the summer, bored out of my mind, I was poking around online and found out you could actually buy a Pixel 6 Pro case on Etsy. I got hooked pretty fast on these wooden cases from a brand called HARDWOOD. There are plenty of similar ones on eBay, but this grain pattern was just too unique. The price wasn’t bad, so I bought one just to see if it would even arrive. They shipped it out quickly enough. What I did not expect was that it was coming from Ukraine 🇺🇦, followed by nearly a month of total silence. Ukraine is still fighting Russia, right? I was half convinced my package’s plane had been shot down. Then after a bit over a month it suddenly showed up in China, and I had it in hand.

A while back, for some reason I lost my mind and went back down the audiophile money-pit road. This time I was noticeably more broke about it: no four-figure new releases, no $199 AKG n5005, just a calm little DAC purchase. The reason was simple enough. I had some fairly specific requirements: The DAC has to support a 4.4 balanced output It also has to have a 3.5 headphone jack It has to be portable, suitable for laptop use It needs its own power, a battery, but also an option to toggle between “battery power” and “USB power” It has to be cheap. I know about the Mojo 2, I just can’t afford it Decoding specs shouldn’t be too low Eventually I found this magical thing, the “FiiO Q3S.” Magical because I have no idea when it came out, FiiO’s official store doesn’t sell it anymore, but you can definitely find traces of it on eBay and Mercari. It matched my decoder needs perfectly — everything I wanted was there, the price wasn’t bad either, just 850, and it even supported installment payments, so I got carried away and bought it.

A while back, right after I got my Pixel 6 Pro, I fired up Genshin Impact and watched this piece of junk stutter just fighting Dvalin. Then I thought about all the people hyping up the “Tensor Core” GPU as some beast… So I figured, if this crappy SoC keeps throttling because it overheats… Why not just slap a cooling fan on it? When it comes to phone cooling clips, the first thing that comes to mind is the “Black Shark Cooling Case.” Yep, my thoughts still drift back to that virgin shark.