I once had an idea I thought was the shit: a visual novel with one of those fiery “feminist warrior” types as the heroine. Talk about a gimmick, and the conflict writes itself. I’m not against women’s equality. But feminism and what gets called “femcunt-ism” are not the same thing. The former is a demand for equal rights; the latter is extremists wrecking it for everyone. And in an internet that gets more torn apart by the day, the latter’s rise and volume have long since overtaken the former. Put plainly, the former are normal people and the latter are morons. Putting a moron in a visual novel—ideally a nukige—and giving her a good hard fucking isn’t an unreasonable thought, is it? Anyway, last year that wish got granted. A game called Otome Sekai no Arukikata (オトメ世界の歩き方) sold itself on exactly that premise. The setting: the future, where women have taken total power and passed a special “Gender Segregation Act.” Women are top-tier humans, men are beasts of burden, and the two sexes are physically separated. So the “New Tokyo City” that symbolizes high society is almost entirely women, while the men are out on the frontier as soldiers and disposable material, fighting off an invading hostile power.

The story opens with the protagonist as a corporate drone, ground down every day by life and his boss, starting to think about ending it all. At the subway station entrance — the Japanese favorite for this sort of thing — he stares at an oncoming train and considers jumping. One little hop and it’s all over. Of course, he doesn’t have the guts, so he keeps scraping by. Right when he’s at his lowest, he meets a girl who asks him to help her get into a mixed-bath bathhouse. Her reason is simple: she’s never been in one and wants to see what it’s like. The girl calls herself Nagisa. She seems cheerful enough, and not only does she drag him into a mixed bath, she hauls him all over the place — eating good food, trying new things, sightseeing by the sea, vacationing on a little island. Maybe it’s some kind of magic spell, but he just lets her pull him along. Total strangers, yet the two of them do couple-ish things together like a string of dates, and eventually they do the thing couples do, too. Then, right after they’ve finished and he drifts off, he wakes to find she’s quietly gotten up and walked out onto the balcony. She thanks him, says she’s an unforgivable murderer, and that her last wish has been fulfilled. Then she jumps. She hits the ground hard and lies there in a pool of blood.

It’s been a long time since this happened, but I kept going back and forth on whether to write it down. Same as my experience two years ago when I got dragged into a quarantine facility for over ten days — I really wanted to write about it, and it would be meaningful, but it’s easy to get burned, to invite unnecessary trouble. Last year I really wanted to write it out and vent, but as time passed I forgot about it. Today I happened to remember, and figured I should write it after all — the whole process is not just surreal but ironic, and it also illustrates the state of most of the industry from the side, and it even calls back to some of my experiences from years ago. To avoid unnecessary trouble, I won’t mention the product’s name in this whole piece, and I won’t comment too heavily on the product’s R&D and management strategy. I’ll try to just lay out the facts plainly and let everyone judge for themselves. At the end I’ll give my short take. Of course, this is just a long dream I had last year. All the plot comes from the story in the dream, not reality. Please don’t match it to anyone real, and don’t make weird guesses.

When this game was first announced I was hyped as hell. Madsoft at the helm, so you know the production values are solid. Yuzuna on art, easy on the eyes. And the premise—a “comeback story”—was exactly my shit. The writer had previously done all sorts of training-and-humiliation eroge, which made it even more promising. Pair that with the absolutely fire OP from the initial promo, and my expectations were through the roof. Then the game dropped. I dove in full of hope, and pretty quickly something started feeling off. The “play dumb, crush the elite” / “poor dude climbs to the top” power fantasy I was promised? Nowhere to be found. Instead the whole game turned into the usual Otome-soft style routine—the protagonist becomes the school’s incubus, every woman goes crazy for him, and he even gets a direct invite to join the student council. The story then headed in the direction I was most familiar with but had zero desire for. The protagonist says he wants to climb the ladder, but his method for crossing class lines is to bang some upper-class young lady—works out great whether you’re talking bloodline or marrying in. He even starts fantasizing—oh, he’s fantasizing again—about becoming the school’s stud horse, every woman becoming his wife, and he’s already picked out how many kids they’re gonna have… What kind of Shandong peasant logic is this…

Last time I mentioned I bought an RK3588 laptop. It used a no-name OEM chassis, but the overall experience still beat my expectations. I also mentioned that the laptop had a few shortcomings, and fixing them would be a huge improvement: Fast typing on the keyboard causes double presses (probably a chassis issue) Battery capacity isn’t big enough Build quality is a bit poor, the whole body is plastic Only one USB-A port Too much empty space inside So is there an RK3588 laptop that solves all those pain points? Yes, there is, my friend, there absolutely is.

Around May last year I was thinking about replacing the laptop I’d been using for over three years. Unfortunately, the only new stuff out at the time was either a Ryzen 7840HS with mediocre Linux support, or the new Intel Meteor Lake ThinkPads. Even though going from an 11th-gen chip to Meteor Lake would have been a big jump, Meteor Lake barely improved over the previous generation — it even regressed in places — so I decided to wait it out. While waiting, I stumbled onto this “Chinese-made laptop,” the Cool-Pi CM5 Laptop. ARM architecture, RK3588, native Linux support, 32GB of RAM, hard drive expansion, and interest-free installments on the Tmall store. I thought about it and figured I’d play with it for a bit. Ended up buying one.

The story starts with our protagonist, Kakehashi Yashiro (宵宮梯子), a truant who’s already stopped going to school. On the road after running away from home, he wanders into an abandoned ruin somewhere in the city and meets an angel with only one wing. The angel grants him a mysterious power through her feathers and asks for his help recovering them, handing him a feather that bestows a special ability. The price: once the feathers are returned, he’ll forget everything.

I’ve had this nagging question for a while now: what exactly is up with this company called Azarashi Soft? They’re constantly doing collabs with different companies and teams, while their own games are all template-ridden “XX girlfriend” romance stuff. So I looked into the company’s background, and it turns out it’s no small deal. Skipping the long story, the parent company of “Azarashi Soft” was actually the precursor to Key, and they also made the fairly well-known game One. Maybe it’s because they’re a big enterprise, or maybe it’s nostalgia, but the company is still active in the visual novel industry, just now as “Azarashi Soft.” Recently they did another collab with a company that has history — Lump of Sugar, which always seems half-dead — and put out this new game, Kira☆Kano, that looks like it’s chasing the youth trend but actually ends up chasing nothing.

I’ve always thought of Lucle as something of an outlier among scenario writers in the visual novel market. While other works were still stuck on surface-level romance full of anime stereotypes, Lucle used theatrical prose and direction to deliver something genuinely different — a dimensional strike against a VN scene already frozen into “chuuni philosophy,” “dark and edgy,” and “cookie-cutter school confessions.” After Mahou Tsukai no Hako (紙の上の魔法使い), Suisou Ginka no Istoria (水葬銀貨のイストリア), Sora ni Kizanda Parallelogram (空に刻んだパラレログラム), and Meikai no Rupekaria (冥契のルペルカリア), Lucle went quiet for a long stretch with no new work. Some say he got lazy, but I doubt it. If you’ve followed his narratives, or really sat down and experienced them, it’s easy to spot Lucle’s three favorite tricks: a miserable fate built on contradictions, a weak-willed protagonist, and a villain who whispers demonic temptations at him for the long haul — plus a genius character whose presence he uses to show ordinary people their own inferiority. Meikai no Rupekaria was already the culmination, a distillation of everything Lucle could bring. You can see echoes of his earlier works all over it. Sometimes I think Lucle burned himself out finishing Meikai no Rupekaria. Or, to put it more bluntly: he ran out of material.