As most people probably expected, the staff behind Kanata no Ningyo Hime (彼方の人魚姫) is the same crew carried over from Yukiiro Sign and even further back, Aonatsu Line—same artist, same writer. So naturally this one inherits that same “youthful air.” Though “youthful air” isn’t quite the right phrase. Starting with Yukiiro Sign, this little lineage shifted from “youth” to “melodrama.” When I heard Kanata no Ningyo Hime was coming out, I had a bad feeling—I figured that melodrama would carry right on over. But this time the setting had moved from “school” to “fantasy,” so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Turns out I was wrong.

Dear readers, good afternoon, good morning, good evening — somehow it’s already April and I still haven’t posted my 2023 Galgame wrap-up. I originally wanted to finish writing up last year’s backlog of impressions before posting, but looking at my pace, I probably won’t finish. Whatever — the games I didn’t write about aren’t worth recommending anyway, so I’ll just post the annual summary. For the ones I played but didn’t write about, I’ll leave links here to hold the spot and update them slowly in the future. I went through last year’s screenshots and found that in 2023 I played, all told, only 19 games related to “dating simulation.” I even fully cleared a 2024 game and wrote a commercial article for it, and I still couldn’t be bothered to write a blog post…… You can find the list of commercial articles here. There are many reasons for this. On one hand, I’m busy with life and need to take care of kids, so I have less time; on the other hand, in 2023 I’d basically switched over to playing all kinds of console games, and my Steam playtime has been rising day by day. These increasingly dumb Galgames I look down on more and more, and I can’t bring myself to play them anymore; and another reason is that the Galgame market in 2023 was just this sluggish. In some months mid-year, you couldn’t even find a so-called “proper release” released that month — nukige and nothing but nukige. Even the “proper releases” were half re-releases, half garbage…… So this isn’t my fault. The responsibility lies entirely with Japan. The games are made so assembly-line and so abstract — how the hell am I supposed to keep playing? So let’s just get to the games I recommend this year. I’ll probably struggle to even scrape together 10……

Your Desperate Attempt to Be Praised Really Makes It Hard for Me to Praise You Years ago, when ANIPLEX.EXE entered the Galgame market as a Sony brand, a bunch of people were shouting “the big one is coming.” I sourly wrote a piece for Dimensional Fanaticism, roughly arguing that Sony was just dabbling and never had much expectation for this market anyway—that the day ANIPLEX.EXE stops putting out products purely through outsourced white-labeling and actually becomes a so-called “first-party developer” is when “the big one” truly arrives. And you’ve seen the results. “The big one” never came, and ANIPLEX.EXE went nearly two years in obscurity, until this year it started rolling out new titles again—still “outsourced” and “white-labeled,” except this time the label says “Looseboy.” The most famous title under ANIPLEX.EXE is of course ATRI (ATRI -My Dear Moments-). The game is a thoroughly formulaic Japanese sci-fi-future work—which doesn’t mean it’s bad. Clichéd stories can still land well, just like how we keep getting moved by formulaic hot-blooded action. Maybe to replicate ATRI’s success, the original team regrouped outside ANIPLEX.EXE and put out GINKA (GINKA). The art style, the scenario writer, the studio, even the title all scream “tribute to the predecessor.” So does GINKA deliver the same feeling as ATRI? Objectively speaking, yes—it even delivers far more content than ATRI. But is “more” good? That I’ve always doubted, and it’s exactly what I find most baffling and worth criticizing about this game.

I’ve lost count of how many “retro handhelds” I’ve bought, but this one grabbed me hard, purely because of how it looks. Anbernic markets it as a “fighting handheld” built for FTG, but the button layout is obviously lifted from the SEGA Saturn pad. Which means it’s not just good for fighting games — it’s better suited to SEGA MD and Saturn titles. That’s the idea, anyway. Reality is another matter. When this thing launched, they pulled a sneaky one and split it into two versions: the single-OS ARC-S and the dual-OS ARC-D. Generally the whole “Linux and Android dual system” thing on these handhelds is pointless, but of course this one used it as a sales gimmick. The retro colorway everyone wants is exclusive to the dual-OS model, while the single-OS one only comes in “translucent black” and “translucent white” — the colors that love to crack. And the dual-OS version costs more, so players like me end up paying extra for a dual-boot setup we’ll never use, just to get the color we want. And in practice, this machine has way more problems than I expected.

When I heard Asa Project’s new game Koibana Renai (コイバナ恋愛) had been slapped with the “landmine” label, I was genuinely shocked. Sure, I think their games have been on a downward slope compared to those old meme-face classics, but there’s no way it deserves “landmine” status. Asa Project has always made these “politically incorrect” games where the whole point is unhinged nonsense. You can force a guy into a girl’s body, you can stumble into BL endings without trying. Their audience is mostly shitposters who know exactly what to expect and have the mental fortitude for it. No way they’d get got by Asa Project’s antics and slap a “landmine” label on it. Besides, from what I remember, their 2023 release Koibana Renai was billed more as a “youth ensemble drama” — basically boys and girls bumping into each other, and the title spells it out. コイバナ means “love talk,” so Koibana Renai feels like a big pile of lovesick brains. Tell me how that premise could possibly be a landmine. Unless the protagonist joins a youth-themed swinger club or something. So out of curiosity I checked the game out. My first impression: yeah, it’s not good. I also get why people call it a landmine. But the reason it’s bad isn’t the landmine — it’s something else entirely.

The Devterm is a portable computer from Clockworkpi, modeled on the TRS-80, the first mass-produced personal computer in history. Not a 1:1 replica of course — a shrunk-down one. The full specs are on the official site, go look for yourself. Here’s a quick rundown of the config I bought: the A06 high-end core, which is really an RK3399 with 4G RAM and Bluetooth/Wi-Fi built in. As far as this device goes, that’s the top spec you can get. By the way, the core slots in as a module over a DDR2-SODIMM 200-pin interface, which means you can swap in other compatible cores yourself. I asked the official folks whether things like a Banana Pi or Orange Pi would work. They didn’t say Yes and didn’t say No — just that they only provide system compatibility for official hardware. Which I read as “it might run, but if there are driver problems, that’s your problem.” I bought this thing on impulse. I wanted a portable text-input device, ideally one you can hold with both hands. You might say plenty of mini Windows laptops can do that, but I don’t think they’re coool. Nothing is coooler than something like the Devterm, so on a whim I dropped 1600 on a top-spec, unopened unit on Xianyu.

The past few years have brought a wave of “retro.” People start missing the “old” stuff, and more and more content with a “retro” flavor gets dug out of the historical junk pile and put back into production. Keyboards with last-century styling, computers, handhelds, all sorts of odds and ends. FiiO recently put out a “cassette player,” not cheap, and chunky as hell. And yet people were falling over themselves to buy it. Even with the “retro” tax that steep, there’s still a market—at least enough of one to keep the manufacturers churning out reshelled products alive and well. Which gets me thinking about another industry soaked in the same “retro” smell: the beautiful-girl dating simulation game, commonly known as galgame. Anyone with a bit of history knows the earliest galgames weren’t like today’s mainstream products. The universally acknowledged granddaddy is the Tokimeki Memorial series—I remember it also being called Jun’ai Techou, though back in the day I kept reading the pirated disc as Jun’ai Techou… anyway, not important. What matters is that Tokimeki Memorial was a deadly serious game about “simulation,” “romance,” and “raising.”

A while back I was listening to a podcast from Aifou, and one line stuck with me: “I think the most impressive thing about Lei Jun is that he can push prices down so low that nobody else can match him.” In that context, judging by the standard of “pushing prices down,” Lei Jun really is impressive. Whether it’s Xiaomi or Redmi, they’ve definitely driven down the price of a lot of things. But is that what “impressive” really means—driving down the price of something expensive so it sells cheap? Shouldn’t it be the opposite? Isn’t it far more impressive to take something worthless and sell it at a very high price? By that standard, the “Big Monster Block Bluetooth Earphones” are a very “impressive” product.

There’s a classic meme about Intel releasing the 11th-gen i7-11700K, which benchmarks showed was not only worse than cheaper competitors but even worse than the previous generation—a pure reverse toothpaste squeeze. Gamers Nexus famously called it a “waste of sand.” After playing Lump of Sugar’s so-called “new” 2023 release, I had a similar thought, and it led to the question in the title: If selling a CPU with reverse toothpaste squeeze is a waste of sand, what does developing a completely pointless galgame count as?