Quick Reviews of Some Galgames I've Been Playing Lately...

Honestly I should probably be reading novels instead, since when I play a galgame I actually pay attention to the story. Most people treat them as fap material, I guess — I fast-forward through every H scene, they’re so goddamn monotonous. It’s always: grope tits, strip, push down, thrust… ahhhh ahhhh [insert protagonist name] oh yeah, then hold the pose for a while after she comes. Can’t you write something with a little originality? The 11区 scenario writers really ought to come visit the literature section of SIS and take notes…

Ahem, that went a bit off track. What I wanted to say is… I’ve played a bunch of galgames recently. Some deserve a proper writeup, but a lot of them don’t warrant a long essay. Still, if I don’t say anything I feel like I never played them at all, so I’ll just sound off briefly here. If any of them make you want to play, I’ll give suitable advice that can effectively save you from getting disgusted.

I’ll avoid spoilers as much as possible, so you can treat this as recommendations and reviews. If you’re interested, use it as reference. Games covered:

Natsuzora Kanata (夏空彼方) Kono Ao (硬要无视与你的未来) Shinigami no Kiss wa Wakare no Aji (死神之吻乃离别之味) Secret Game: Killer Queen (秘密游戏：杀手女王) Sakura no Uta (隙间樱花与谎言都市) Ashita no Sekai (明日的世界) Katawa Shoujo (片轮少女) 3days

Natsuzora Kanata

An early work from everyone’s favorite moe-ge company, and the setup includes everyone’s favorite “loses her memory every N days” attribute. In this April where a bunch of people are yelling about how heartbreaking One Week Friends is, playing a game with a similar premise feels especially good.

Natsuzora Kanata’s promo posters everywhere are full of Uesaka Chihaya. When I first read the game intro, I was reading Chihaya’s story too — long black hair, straw hat, white dress, Taguchi Hiroko — put it all together and she’s the perfect member of the opposite sex. But after finishing it I found out… Chihaya’s route is, at best, a side story. The real story is Sasara’s.

The plot doesn’t have too many glaring flaws, it’s just that the setup and descriptions are a bit abrupt — there’s this weird hybrid feeling of science and mythology, but it doesn’t stop you from getting the gist. Compared with later Yuzusoft works like Tenzin Ranman, the vampire one, Amatsutsumi… well, only the president’s route in Tenzin Ranman comes close to Sasara’s route in depth. You could say Sasara’s route single-handedly raised the story level of the whole game.

Production-wise the game is very sincere. I looked it up on Wiki — Yuzusoft actually went to Okinawa for location scouting for Natsuzora Kanata… the coastline, the forest, the shrine in the game can all be found in real life, and some of the voice recording was done on location too. No wonder it sounds so real.

Also worth mentioning: the OST is top tier, violin main melody with piano accompaniment, worth listening to over and over.

If you’re going to play, I recommend Chihaya’s route first, then Yui’s, then Sasara’s last, so nothing feels abrupt.

Kono Ao

This game was weird when the fan translation came out. Whenever people were asked “how is it”, the answer was always the same: “a short little game”. I don’t know if that’s praise or criticism. Anyway I finished it, and I played it right after finishing an August game.

Right from the start I felt August’s sincerity in making games — oh right, I say that because compared to August, this Hive game is just crude… The background images are obviously digital photos of real scenery with an oil-paint filter slapped on, and even the character art is clearly several tiers below August’s… The music is even worse, though a lot better than that Chariot company…

That’s not to say the game isn’t fun. Plot-wise there’s basically no serious content. Have you ever read those youth novels… the kind of romance novels aimed at middle schoolers in bookstores? Haven’t read them? Have you read Grass Years? The one where the protagonist is always slacking off and snarking? What, not that either? Then have you read Guo Jingming’s How Many Flowers in a Dream? The one where the heroine keeps saying “fuck” and the protagonist is like a uke? Yeah, that style. The whole game is full of flippant nonsense, the protagonist and the various heroines never have any proper emotional scenes, it’s just constant snark and skits. It’s pretty good if you watch it as relaxing comedy. There’s also a lot of exaggerated faces, including QAQ, the expression I hate most. If you want to screenshot “my face when XXXX”, try this game.

But as a romance game, eventually you have to enter a route… and there you can feel the scenario writer’s carelessness. The little sister at least got a plot, but the childhood friend Manabe Kei just gets something crude and simple — this is the most ridiculous confession I’ve ever seen in a game… Anyway, if you just want some fun and want to watch girls giggle, this game is pretty good…

The OP is average, the ED is even more average, the BGM is average too… though I did keep the OST.

If you play, you can go through the little sister and Manabe Kei (Kiritani Hana) and that’s it, Ctrl through the rest.

Shinigami no Kiss wa Wakare no Aji

A very plain game… still has Taguchi Hiroko and Ono Ryouko. The story is a very orthodox romance, all the shinigami stuff is there to fool you — you can figure out the shinigami’s true identity in three minutes with your ass… spoiling it would be meaningless…

The game seems old, and the art is old too, but relatively polished. The romance plot, plainly put, is that everyone except the protagonist and heroine is playing wingman, and the occasional antagonist is a clown… The True End suspense is also so-so. If you just want something plain to play, it’s not bad.

Also… this game has a lot of H play…

Only three routes, not long, finish the two and then the True End… playing it isn’t a waste, not playing it doesn’t matter either…

Secret Game: Killer Queen

If there were a game where I told you only the OP is the real deal, would you believe me?

Secret Game: Killer Queen is exactly that kind of scummy game… from FLAT, a doujin circle turned company. I can’t believe anyone who got burned by this game’s story would go support the sequel. I’ll just say a few things.

1. The protagonist is a giant bleeding heart, an incredibly stupid bleeding heart, so much of a bleeding heart that he doesn’t seem like a normal person, so much that you wonder if the writer’s brain is waterlogged.
2. Such a stupid bleeding heart somehow has luck at 10000%, he doesn’t even die!
3. Look at the CV list, the most famous one is the True End character.
4. The game uses the dumbest possible parallel worlds to explain the mystery, and in the end doesn’t even connect them like Ever17 did. Huge failure!

Also the CGs are too sparse, the sprites are broken, but the CGs look better than the sprites — I don’t know if the artist saved money or not.

Anyway this game has nothing worthwhile story-wise. For the puzzle-solving part, refer to my piece Two Kids Arguing About the Sun. If you’re thinking about playing this game, make sure you really have nothing better to do.

For this game, this album is all you need, you can throw the game away.

Sakura no Uta

Yeah, the game my avatar is from. I’ve been wavering over whether to write a proper impressions post about this one, but in the end I figured it doesn’t deserve a standalone piece.

The art style is bizarre — characters are split into the main group and the mob group, and the mob group looks close to Hayate the Combat Butler season 3, while the main group looks a bit like Madoka, with relatively small eyes. Honestly the main group’s art is cute, but the gap with the mob group is so huge it feels like a parallel world.

The engine got some care put into it — falling cherry blossoms, background blur effects, all just right, giving a genuinely dreamlike city feel. Music is also worth getting the OST for, both OP and ED, and that opening Fairy City melody, all intoxicating, worth revisiting.

So that’s about it for the good stuff… now let’s talk about the plot… Let me put it this way: the game’s story feels like the scenario writer came up with one amazing twist, then realized he couldn’t fill in the rest of the plot, so he just crammed a bunch of random stuff in to pad it out…

Like you made a delicious fried egg, but you have to use it to assemble a full banquet, so you can only go buy a pile of junk food on the street to fill the numbers. Still, that fried egg is undeniably delicious, it’s just that a lot of people might get chased off by the junk food…

The game aims to explore the theme of lies. In the non-main routes the plot also leans toward lies, but it’s far from the theme. Leaning toward lies is easy, who doesn’t tell a fib…

But in the True End route, the descriptions of lies make you suddenly understand, and it’s worth reflecting on.

Do people lie to cover up their shortcomings, or simply to state a wish they hope for?

Fortunately the game leaves some room to maneuver — after all, it’s describing a “city of lies”, so the other routes can be explained as legends belonging to each person in the city, even if their story quality is low and they’re far from the main line…

If you want to play, just go straight to the Yura little-sister route, then Ctrl through the others to the True End.

Last thing — the “city of lies” setting is so convenient, you can even say fucking your real sister is a lie. This is the second game after Yosuga no Sora where I’ve seen someone fuck his real sister.

Ashita no Sekai

Back when I wrote How to Elegantly Roast People on G+, someone was disgusted with me:

“How can such a gloomy guy exist, good thing I didn’t add him, so disgusting”

I didn’t know how to respond. All I can say is everyone’s worldview is different — some people live facing the cruelty of reality, others live in their own dreams.

Waking from a dream leaves you with a sense of落差; a little progress in reality makes you stronger.

Maybe I should have responded: “I wrote about how to roast people — have you ever seen me actually use those methods to roast anyone?”

No one knows better than a forensic examiner how to kill a person quickly, but that doesn’t make them a killer.

The world is cruel. We can live in a beautiful dream, we can avoid the cruel things, but at the same time we have to understand: this is a dream, it will wake up eventually.

Ashita no Sekai tells a story inside a dream. Although it says right at the start that the Earth is about to be destroyed, throughout the whole game you never feel the despair of that destruction… the game is too gentle, the side characters and mobs are too gentle, the heroines are too gentle, everyone is too gentle, the world is as gentle as in a dream. Even with the handy “isolated island” setting, the scenario writer can’t hide how calm everyone is before the “end of the world”, and can’t explain why revenge against the privileged is just throwing stones.

Even more absurd is how unbelievably nice everyone in Ashita no Sekai is. A father with two daughters actively asks the protagonist to marry both, even though his wife once had an affair with the protagonist’s father and he’s just the cuckold raising someone else’s kid. I can’t imagine how such a guy coexists peacefully with others. But this is also a manifestation of the truth, goodness and beauty the game advocates.

Many people sigh over the beauty of human nature through Ashita no Sekai. All I can say is that the beauty of human nature can’t be expressed through this kind of fake praise alone — adding more darkness, and facing and challenging that darkness, is what better expresses the essence of beauty. Like, if you eat candy every day, you won’t know salt exists. If you live in a dream every day, you won’t know the cruel reality exists.

And once one day you stop eating candy and taste salt, having never tasted this flavor before, you might instantly become unable to accept it… Just like how when a dream ends and people see reality, many break down and want to kill themselves.

What Ashita no Sekai advocates isn’t wrong, what’s wrong is that the plot is too fake. That said, Nitta Ryou’s art is great, and I’ve’s music is great too.

If you have a perfectly pure heart, you can play this game.

Katawa Shoujo

Katawa Shoujo is a galgame developed by 4chan’s gaijin on the Ren’Py engine, currently only a complete English version exists.

Honestly I finished one route and felt baffled, and there’s no need to play the rest.

This game is full of malice, gaijin malice — not homage, malice.

The English dialogue deliberately imitates how Japanese people speak. Even though the names are all in English, they still add -kun and -sensei. I’d rather you call them Shiro Teacher and Mr. — the plot has no bright spots, inexplicable romance, inexplicable dark turns, inexplicable directions.

It feels like while writing the scenario someone suddenly said “hey, dark turns are popular now, let’s add one”, and so the dark turn plot appeared.

Too sloppy. A story should be whole and rigorous, even a comedy should flow in one go…

Anyway, if you want to experience a foreign flavor, you can play it. The OST is okay, but there’s no lossless — I asked the producer on Twitter, he said there isn’t any…

3days

A work that a bunch of people praise as a masterpiece. Honestly, the art is too rough, completely not on the same level as the later 11Eyes. A lot of grade-schoolers praise it as a masterpiece because of the infinite three-day loop, but…

I don’t see a masterpiece, I just see the programmer being lazy.

I once thought about making a galgame where if you don’t go through every branch, you never reach the true ending — that would be really cool.

But after finishing 3days, I think having that thought makes me an idiot, especially after seeing the protagonist have that annoying dream over and over.

The plot is simple: three days loop over and over, each loop advances the story a bit, and at a certain point more things unlock. You can think of it as endlessly grinding — once you’ve gone through all branches, you escape this infinite dead end.

After escaping the dead end, the story has nothing new, it’s too much of a sudden twist, and by the end it’s a completely different thing from the first half.

Actually I think you could just cut the earlier part and keep only the later plot, and the game wouldn’t feel too off… After finishing and looking back, I realized I was completely played — the endless three days earlier were just stalling for time… If you really condensed the plot, three playthroughs of revival would be enough to explain it.

The setting follows Lass’s usual chuuni style, but still a bit immature — with some improvement it’d be pretty good, which is probably why the later work 11Eyes was a big success.

Plainly put, no substance, the OST isn’t good either, though the OP is nice. It’s just an endless three-day loop with some overly scary CGs that make grade-schoolers feel fresh and hyped…

If you play, I recommend going through the first three days of loops, and once you understand Rika’s situation you can load the save at the door of truth and watch the ending. Don’t worry, the ending is long…

Closing

So that’s basically everything I wanted to say. I still have a few games on hand to play — though I keep saying this is the last galgame, I just can’t stop… including Asairo, and Kimi to Boku to Kikkawa no… whatever it’s called.

Also I didn’t mention Wheel Country because that game deserves its own separate post…