Last year, I think, Qingzhou Xiaoxiong—the online seller most respectful of electronic waste—listed a batch of e-ink devices: the first-generation Remarkable, at a very lovely price, probably under 600 yuan, brand new. I got excited and grabbed one, and I’ve been using it on and off as a reading and e-paper device ever since. Here are some quick thoughts.

I’ve been playing fewer galgames lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve left the scene — I’ve just played a bunch of stuff and haven’t felt like writing about any of it. And since that last post, I’ve upgraded my “gal machine” too: swapped it out for a GPD Win Mini, which I’ve been using ever since. This little thing is honestly better than I expected. As a “gal game player,” I can’t find anything more suitable right now. I’ve said before that if I ever bought another GPD product I’d eat shit, but this little guy has somehow become GPD’s best product to date, and the “gal machine” I’d recommend most. So, well — time to eat.

Years ago — don’t ask me where, probably the Google Play Store — I came across a game called Boku no Kanojo wa Ningyo Hime!? (My Girlfriend Is a Mermaid Princess!?). It was a mobile game, but it looked like a visual novel. I didn’t have time for it back then, so it went on the pile. Later I found out it had actually been ported to PC and put up on Steam, complete with a bunch of language options. So at some point it ended up in my Steam library… Well, I have to admit it: I’ve been “cleaning out” the visual novels in my Steam library lately, so this Mermaid Princess became the next target. I did finish it, and picked up all the achievements along the way. But when it comes to actually reviewing it, I find it hard to say anything.

I don’t know when I bought a Chinese-made galgame (for lack of a better word) called Migratory Bird on Steam. I strongly suspect I meant to buy Qingxiang and misclicked, but whatever — it’s bought, no refunds, might as well take a look. From top to bottom, the production values on this thing are relatively “serious.” The whole work gives off this dead-earnest vibe. That’s not a dig, and it’s not a joke — I mean it in a mostly positive way. The story’s theme is the one we always see when former high schoolers look back on the Gaokao years: the Gaokao sucks, but youth is forever. It follows an utterly unremarkable male student who loses his sense of direction, meets the top-of-the-class heroine, finds a reason to try, grinds through high school, watches his grades climb, and promises her they’ll get into the same school. He fails the first Gaokao, but resolves to repeat the year for her sake and his own future — and it works out.

Love Love School Days is a game I played a while back. Gotta say, this one’s got serious legs — and it’s perfect for streaming, absolutely packed with content. The map is randomized every run, so replayability is through the roof. No saves either, so you can’t just memorize the layout and save-scum your way through. It’s a “horror chase” type game, so the tension is high and it gets the streamer’s adrenaline pumping. There are plenty of “counterintuitive” tricks built in, which makes it even better on stream. So yeah, a game this good, and nobody in China seems to stream it. Probably because there’s no Chinese version. I’d originally 100%’d it, then a while back I noticed the game had gotten an update — and my full achievement set had vanished. My OCD forced me back in, and it turned out to be way more fun than before.

Around 2016, I think. Google+ was still alive back then, and I had this massive urge to express myself—I just really wanted to write something. I was super active in a Google+ community that had these “three-topic snacks” prompts, where they’d give you three related or unrelated words and you’d write a story around them. Eventually I got it into my head to write this insanely badass novel, serialized. I was still deep in my chuuni phase, and I’d played way too many visual novels, so the stories in my head naturally took on that shape. The idea was a story about an edgy male lead and a heroine at school. Students start dying mysteriously, but it turns out they all killed themselves, and the mastermind behind it is the cute, cheerful, harmless-looking heroine who has a hidden dark side. Using her secret identity, she lures students online, draws out their inner darkness, and talks them into suicide or into hurting each other—all for fun. She keeps her identity perfectly hidden, and since she never directly kills anyone, she can’t really be held responsible. The male lead keeps investigating because of a friend’s death, and the heroine hides who she is and investigates alongside him. The final boss is right next to you—that kind of feeling. Looking back now, that story is chuuni as hell, and a lot of it is immature and childish. But I still don’t think the subject matter is bad. If anything, it’s something you can always write, because I firmly believe that so-called “demonic whispering” really can drive a person to death. Everyone in modern society is under a ton of pressure, facing all kinds of pain, and it’s not uncommon to be unable to take it and momentarily lose hope. But what I want to talk about isn’t the story itself. Recently I realized that someone actually wrote the story I wanted to write back then, and turned it into a game… It’s this Steam hit, Seven Days Until the Protagonist Dies.

Today I’m going to talk about a game… First, the story takes place in Japan proper… Then, the protagonist is a black guy… Next, he’s also a samurai… And he’s an orphan, taken in by a leader and serving that leader… Yes, the game I’m talking about is… CRYSTALiA’s new cash-grab: Setsuna ni Kakeru Koi wa Hanabi!

Kamigami no Kuni no Mahoutsukai (神の国の魔法使い) Another China-Japan co-produced visual novel, another Nekoneko Soft, another Kataoka Tomo. Nothing about its existence surprised me. Honestly, I half-wondered if Kataoka Tomo and his company had run out of ways to survive in Japan and now had to lean on Chinese money to keep making games. The premise didn’t grab me at all — a Chinese brother and sister go sightseeing in Japan, get swept up in some incident or other. At one point I was convinced this was basically Toshimaen Winter Scenery Mark II. And the weirdest part: the first release wasn’t even the full game. The story got pushed out in episodes. I still can’t understand that decision, and I think it’s one of the reasons the game flopped. Anyway, after half a year of stop-and-start updates the story was finally complete, and reading it straight through, it’s not as low as I expected. Plenty of it is actually pretty creative, and it overturned my fixed impression of Kataoka Tomo as a scenario writer who likes to whine for no reason.

A game called Dougan, I Was Surrounded by Beauties! (完蛋，我被美女包围了！) suddenly blew up, and the reason it blew up is, to me, completely baffling. Mostly it’s some dumb meme like “give Haohao a home,” and the game itself doesn’t strike me as anything new. Live-action dating sims were already a thing in Japan last century, the AV industry has put out similar stuff, and across the whole AVG space a live-action text game called The Sealed Shibuya was huge years ago. Not to mention localized Chinese titles like The Invisible Guardian or Leap to the Thirteenth Room, which already pulled off results that were maybe passable. So why did Dougan, I Was Surrounded by Beauties! suddenly blow up again?

A while back, while I was working on a commercial piece, the editor hit me with a request: could I write something about Amairo Chocolata 3 (あまいろショコラータ 3)? As a former internet editor who got canned over a decade ago, writing this kind of article is no problem. The problem is: why? Why write about this game? Amairo Chocolata 3 is the kind of game where you can see the ending from the first glance, and its marketing was pretty mediocre too. I honestly don’t even get why Cabbage Soft (きゃべつそふと) would push this thing out to a third installment. And the other “why”: does anyone actually want to buy this game? So, to write a better commercial piece, I looked up the relevant data—and got a very unexpected result.