My Most Recommended Galgame of 2021
Early 2022 was a mess, so I never found the time to write anything. The biggest problem I have now is that there’s a ton of stuff in my head but no time to get it out — and we’re already almost a third of the way through 2022 and I still haven’t written up last year’s games. I originally felt kind of guilty about it, but then I realized it doesn’t really matter whether I write it or not. Most people don’t play these games anyway; they just like watching the drama. Still, I figure I owe myself some kind of accounting, so here it is. If it turns out useful to anyone, even better.
I played 31 games in 2021, a full 10 fewer than in 2020. Honestly, I don’t think it’s because I had less time — it’s that 2021’s games were just that bad, and quite a few were bad in a “very unique” way. With that in mind, after I cover the ones worth recommending, I’ll also roast some of the year’s hotter titles, so people stop asking me “why isn’t XXX on the list?”
Personally I really don’t like this game. I don’t know if the writer Hato is a Kunihiko Ikuhara fan, because the direction in his games is way too similar to Ikuhara’s, and after rewatching Mawaru Penguindrum recently I confirmed exactly why this game gave me such a strong sense of déjà vu.
The narrative style here can’t be judged by normal standards, but at its core it’s about something very ordinary — mutual understanding between boys and girls. The real problem is that the second half goes way too off the rails, and the game lacks a proper tsukkomi character, which makes the story painful to sit through. Considering the average level of galgame in 2021, Monkeys!¡ still counts as “excellent.”
Everyone’s tired of the same stupid clichéd plots by now, so a bit of fresh stimulation is nice.
Hoshi no Otome to Rokka no Shimai
Even though this game bills itself as a “crossdressing infiltration” story, it’s doing way too much. It stacks basically every element you can find in light novels and galgame — the kind that trends easily online these days. Vtubers, AI, virtual reality, spy warfare, idol culture, and so on, until you forget what the game is even about. The chaotic pacing somehow makes it weirdly addictive. If you like wildly imaginative games and don’t mind the strange art style, it’s worth a try.
Sousaku Kanojo no Renai Koushiki
This was the most hyped big title of the second half of the year, and I imagine plenty of people have heard of it. The ending is a bit of a landmine, and the writer’s self-indulgent forced sentimentality is hard to connect with. That said, the game does have solid fundamentals, and Kiriha’s route is genuinely well written — the voice acting alone salvages a fairly ordinary story and, through the couple’s ups and downs, gives you a girl who feels relatively real within the fake “2D world.”
In short: play it for Kiriha, skip the other heroines.
Lots of people call this a landmine because it made the main heroine have “split personality” — Hook’s first big gamble gone wrong. But I think the bigger point of this game is the tsundere voiced by Sakura Hanazawa, who is just way too good. When I think about how this might be her last role before retiring from voice acting, I get really emotional. Hanazawa Sakura has been in the industry for years, voicing so many fucktoys and broodmares, and yet right before retiring she found her old form again. Really don’t know what to say.
Like the previous games, this one is extremely long, the main heroine has annoying elements, but Hanazawa Sakura’s blonde tsundere side character is the only highlight. Worth trying for her alone.
Ore no Koi Tenshi ga Ponkotsu Sugite Kowaa~i.
In the sample magazines I got after contributing to a magazine, I saw another big-name reviewer tearing this game apart — saying it was hollow, the developments were illogical, things didn’t line up… basically the same complaints I have about certain hyped titles. But my reaction after reading that review was: “Are we even playing the same game?”
Honestly the premise is extremely clichéd, and it borrows heavily from Death Note. But I’d call it “classical” and “old-school.” That old-fashioned production style runs through the whole game, and unlike the similarly old-school, melancholic Umi to Yuki no Cyan Blue, this one is a classic romcom — light and fun, and it actually gave me a lot of enjoyment.
Lots of F-company fans dislike this game because it doesn’t have a certain long-winded Urashima. But I actually like it — it brings some rare literary and exotic flavor.
A game set in Russia, bold enough to include “Kitans” (Chinese characters), on-location shooting in St. Petersburg, music with a strong Far Eastern vibe, and that hidden “Harasho” code in the title — I think this game is pretty good. Most importantly, the length is just right; you won’t play until you’re puking blood and still not see the ending. And Natsuwa is adorable. As a story about chasing dreams, this one has the atmosphere of a “good game.”
And sadly, in 2021, a game just had to not do anything stupid or make mistakes to count as good.
When I played this back in March last year, I couldn’t help but sigh: “Lukuru’s really lost it, probably out of ideas. Any decent game in the second half of the year will crush this.” Then by the end of the year I realized I was way too naive.
Looking back at 2021’s games, the strongest one turned out to be Meikei no Lupercalia.
Content-wise there’s nothing major that stands out compared to Lukuru’s earlier works — it’s basically a large-scale stitching-together of story patterns he’s written before. The character deaths and opera performances and “play within a play” from Shajo no Mahoutsukai, the flashbacks, escapes and inner turmoil of Suisou Ginkа, plus the later aerial competition’s similar inner battles and inferiority complex toward geniuses — Lukuru consolidated basically every element he’s good at into one package, with full-power music production and visuals, and that’s this game.
You can’t say it’s bad, but as a longtime Lukuru fan I feel like I’ve seen this story before.
It’s a good game, but I still want something new. And Lukuru apparently said the company doesn’t have money to keep making games and he’s taken on outsourced work, so this might be the studio’s last hurrah.
Next, some quick thoughts on games that were popular in 2021 but I don’t really recommend:
**Asagao wa Yoru wo Shiranai**
This one goes for a literary route but veers off course. It’s about a bunch of mentally ill people falling in love, and the core element is “I love you so much I’ll kill you — will you forgive me?” That kind of twisted love is generally only talked about in Japan. It could actually have been a philosophical work on that topic.
But this game is so fucking long! Long enough that you lose patience, long enough that you lose the energy to think. Especially the final “kill or not kill” choice, which gives you that same eating-shit feeling as The Last of Us Part II.
SMEE and HOOK seem to have had a good 2021, because this stupid company learned to rehash old stuff, and kept rehashing into 2022. Hajilove -Making*Lovers- is exactly that: riding on a famous title’s name while selling something completely different. It has almost nothing to do with the previous game — not the art style, not anything. Apart from the same background images, you’d never know it was part of a series. After playing it I woke up: ah, this was just laziness and riding the hype. Japan’s been great at skin-swap games since the ’80s. This one was probably some nukige project that realized it couldn’t finish, so they slapped on a skin and sold it on the hype.
Parquet
Yuzusoft’s big title I’d waited a year for, and it turns out to be all-ages. The story after playing is hard to describe, but Yuzusoft fans won’t care. I’ve already seen plenty of brainless kids praising this game and saying they were moved… If you were moved by the final boss fighting itself, that comedic scene, then you win.
The production is fine, the day/night dual personality presentation is interesting, but that’s it. What I can’t accept is that Yuzusoft put out such a garbage OP animation — a real black mark on the company.
Lots of people praise this game. It doesn’t really have anything wrong with it — from start to finish it’s filled with the feeling of a ’90s text dating sim on an old PC: slightly melancholic atmosphere, a long shot of the heroine standing by the sea, day after day of routine life, talking to a few heroines every day in order, changing your life through choices…
But even though the atmosphere is on point, this game always gave me a weird uncomfortable feeling. After thinking it over, I realized it was a “cheap” feeling — the whole game feels like it had a limited budget and wasn’t made with care. The broken art, the music that borders on plagiarism, the copy-paste dialogue — the team didn’t really care. Even Daichi Yō’s performance as the main heroine feels half-hearted, completely lacking the commitment she has when she sings. Playing it is like eating a chicken rib — it could have achieved an old-school renaissance but didn’t.
A game Key fans love — the kind that’s a mix of friendship, a small team, forced comedy, plus superpowers and saving the world. To put it bluntly, this game is more like Angel Beats. I don’t know if today’s Key fans have seen Angel Beats back then. When I followed it, I also thought it was quality, but after seeing the ending I never trusted Key again. A story with a bad ending and forced sentimentality, yet people still call it a masterpiece — and the reason is just that the ED and OP are good and the animation is amazing. By that logic, Guilty Crown would be a great work too, wouldn’t it?
Of course, Maeda Jun wasn’t involved in this, but the style is very close to his. I don’t like Ryukishi07; I appreciate Maeda Jun when he’s not off his meds. The art and music here are fine, but the production and narrative are too similar to Key’s anime — a strong start and weak finish, empty mid-game plot, plus a “positive-energy protagonist” that repeats himself like a broken record, which maximally triggers my inner old-school otaku dissatisfaction. While playing, I was curious how this kind of plot — which would get shit on even in seasonal anime — was received on 5ch, and sure enough it got shit on…
This isn’t about being a hater or a fan; it’s more about raising your standards. If you’ve played too few games, the first time you see something like Loopers you’ll think it’s so cool. Later, when you realize 8 out of 10 games you’ve played are like Loopers, you’ll understand how I feel.
Conclusion
I actually had more than half of this written back in January, but never found the time to finish it. Now that we’re already a quarter into 2022, I’ve finally completed last year’s summary. I played plenty of galgame in 2021, but honestly many of them were hard to be satisfied with. I don’t know if the industry is declining, or my standards have risen, or I just don’t fit in this circle anymore…
I’m not sure how much longer I can keep playing. If I can hold on, let’s meet again in the 2023 roundup!
Appendix: List of 2021 game articles
LUNARiA -Virtualized Moonchild /archives/12946/
Uchi wa Mou, Enki Dekinai. /archives/12939/
Sousaku Kanojo no Renai Koushiki /archives/12924/
Hoshi no Otome to Rokka no Shimai /archives/12895/
Kemono Michi ☆ Girlish Square /archives/12854/
Monkeys!¡ /archives/12826/
Koumuin Yamete, Ana wo Horu Koto ni Shimashita /archives/12801/
Ore no Koi Tenshi ga Ponkotsu Sugite Kowaa~i. /archives/12780/
Omoide Kakae te Ai ni Koi!! /archives/12867/
Einstein Yori Ai wo Komete APOLLOCRISIS /archives/12762/
Old Watch + Hallucination /archives/12750/
Asagao wa Yoru wo Shiranai /archives/12736/
Hajilove -Making*Lovers- /archives/12731/
Parquet /archives/12709/
Renai x Royale Mari & Shion & Ao Mini After Story /archives/12705/
Madohi Shiroki no Kamikakushi /archives/12688/
Happy Live Show Up! /archives/12674/
Amairo Chocolate 2 /archives/12656/
Loopers /archives/12647/
Yubisaki Connection /archives/12640/
Umi to Yuki no Cyan Blue /archives/12631/
Ruri Sakura /archives/12627/
Suteki na Kanojo no Tsukurikata /archives/12616/
Hinata Chihiro wa Shigoto ga Tsuzukanai /archives/12593/
Yukiiro Sign /archives/12576/
Meikei no Lupercalia /archives/12549/
Kaiko no Okurimono /archives/12542/
Glass Hime to Kagami no Juusha /archives/12507/
Gohoushi Akuma to Oshioki Tenshi /archives/12495/
Ichizu na (Shojo→) Kanojo to Koi Shitai /archives/12489/
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