Finally got around to writing up everything I played last year. Turns out I went through 31 games, same as 2021. That said, I can already feel 2023’s number dropping off a cliff — not because I don’t have time, but because the industry is just cooked. Look at May: barely a handful of titles worth mentioning. By year’s end I’ll be lucky to count ten on my fingers. Looks like my dream of “watching the galgame sunset industry finally die” is about to come true. Last year’s quality was honestly nothing to write home about. If you asked me to list my “personal best,” I doubt I could even fill ten slots. So let’s do it differently this year — alongside the usual recommendations, I’ll throw in some roast-flavored awards. “Worst,” “dumbest,” that sort of thing… just for fun. Helps people dodge landmines.

Taiwanese rapper MC HOTDOG shows up in a lot of movies too, but he’s a bit different — he only does “low-budget,” “rough around the edges,” the kind of thing you look at and think, yeah, this is gonna be a mess. He’s worked with the likes of Xiao Shenyang, Da Peng, Yue Yunpeng. Sometimes he even pops up in Taiwanese horror films by directors nobody’s heard of. The results are about what you’d expect: most of these movies got panned. Basically everything he’s been in is a stinker. A lot of people, me included, were puzzled. The guy is arguably the face of Chinese-language rap. Eminem made 8 Mile. Hotdog should at least have the ability and the resources to make something decent — even a vanity project shouldn’t turn out to be a “bad movie.” But in a later interview he brought this up himself, and his answer stuck with me. Hotdog explained that he doesn’t like so-called “big productions.” He prefers that “cheap” B-movie feel. And he laid out all the upsides of B-movies: because they’re niche, the subject matter can be sloppy but also way more unhinged; because they’re niche, the content can be bolder, more willing to shitpost, even touching sensitive territory that “big” films won’t go near; because they’re niche, the style gets more exaggerated — horror gets scarier, gore gets bloodier, comedy gets to cut loose. And because it’s a B-movie, niche audience, niche marketing, nobody’s really watching, so it’s just more free. There’s a decent-sized crowd of B-movie lovers out there going nuts over films that “don’t belong in polite society.” That idea hit me, and it reminded me of when I first got into visual novels. For a market that’s been called a sunset industry for years, the B-movie approach works just as well — in both subject matter and plot development, visual novels are freer, and a lot of the “masterpieces” were born inside that freedom. No wonder so many people find “healing” in themes of darkness, death, torture, even training. So finally some developer remembered the common ground between visual novels and B-movies. Like CUBE’s Same to Ikiru Nanokakan (サメと生きる七日間), “Seven Days Living with Sharks.”

When I first saw the announcement for this new Lump of Sugar title, Arcana Alchemia (アルカナ・アルケミア), I genuinely couldn’t hold back a laugh. What year is it, and they’re still making traditional “alchemy” stories? The moment you say “alchemy” it’s always “human transmutation” this and that — at least bring up how alchemy was a precursor to modern medicine, philosophy, and chemistry, would you? Then I read the premise. Oh boy, of course it’s “transmuting a living beast-eared girl.” No idea if that was on purpose or an accident. When the game came out at the end of December, I couldn’t shake the association — seeing “shark” reminds me of that Osaka black-veil otaku, which then reminds me of jerking off, and that’s just uncomfortable. So I got around to this one first. And it turned out to be surprisingly decent. Honestly I’d even say Arcana Alchemia is the best thing Lump of Sugar has put out recently, good enough to squeeze into my year-end ranking.

Honestly, when I first played Hamedashi Creative, I was completely baffled. First off, the story made no sense. The game is packed with “instantly fake” elements: a little sister who’s deep into 2D culture, a brocon, and loaded enough to support her worthless older brother; a 2D artist who loves drawing lewd art, enjoys hanging out with fat otaku without being gross like them, and is willing to date one; a cold, sharp-tongued, self-absorbed black-haired beauty who flip-flops between tsundere and queen just to throw herself at a fat otaku; and a Vtuber who looks totally ordinary—the kind who’d graduate in a month in the V-tuber world—yet somehow becomes a top earner without relying on insults or dirty jokes, and still falls for the otaku… In this game’s world, it’s as if every woman sees the protagonist and wants to sleep with him. Their insults are just tsundere, their rejections are just playing hard to get, their “NO” actually means “YES,” they say one thing but mean another, and deep down they’re always craving to be conquered by him… Unless you tell me the setting is that only one man is left in the world and women can only survive by mating, I still can’t buy into this story.

One of the hottest topics lately is AI. ChatGPT blowing up again at the start of this year left the masses stunned—“it’s already this powerful?"—and also a little scared. “If computers keep getting this strong, it’s only a matter of time before they replace us, right?” Along with that fear comes every sci-fi plot about machines ruling humanity, as if in a few years we’ll all be jacking cables into the backs of our heads and entering a metaverse called the matrix, while our bodies form a resistance underground against the mighty robots. The crisis always arrives fast and sudden. But is that really how it goes?