Your Diary + H Review

Your Diary is a game by CUBE, and about… two years ago, I played the Chinese-patched version…

Holy shit, it’s already been two years!!! I swear it felt like no time at all!!!

Of course the impression that game left on me was still pretty good. Whenever someone who’s just getting into Galgame asks me for recommendations, I recommend this one. Reason’s simple: good art, good music, the story is a bit clichéd but not toxic, and it’s still a very orthodox, wholesome story — isn’t that perfect to hand to a newbie trying to get into Galgame!

Back then I didn’t really look at what Japanese players thought of the game. Later, while reading up on CUBE, I checked it out, and found Your Diary doesn’t rate that high in Japan. I originally thought a story like this should get an 80, but it barely held onto a 70. What’s funny is some Japanese players called the game “boring.”

Boring… that’s a hard one to call. My thinking at the time was that Japanese otaku probably love those “wild twists” and see Your Diary’s story as all formula, so they’d find it boring.

Of course, if you asked me to look back on Japanese opinions now, I’d say they actually have a point…

This time I’ll talk about Your Diary’s third version, Your Diary + H… Having played it, then thinking back on when I first played the game, plus later CUBE games and other related ones, there’s a lot to say.

After release, Your Diary got ported to PSP with one new romanceable character, and two side characters upgraded to romanceable. That version was Your Diary +. Then the HCGs for those characters got reverse-ported back to the PC version, becoming Your Diary + H — the version I played.

So basically, all I could be bothered to check out were that one added romanceable character and the two upgraded ones. I couldn’t be arsed to replay the old routes just for the new CGs.

Since it was the Chinese-patched version, I got through it fast. But by now I’d already moved past the point of just “reading the Chinese characters in the patch.” I started with the route for Ichinose Hotori (一ノ瀬 ほとり), voiced by Nanjou Yoshino, and before long I was like, I can’t take this anymore…

Why couldn’t I take it… the dialogue is just so dumb…

This “dumb” isn’t the moe-blob-anime kind of dumb — the dialogue is just way too unnatural. I’ve complained before about games whose dialogue reads like a Japanese textbook, but Your Diary’s dialogue is the real old-school textbook flavor. Grab any new-edition Japanese textbook and the dialogue in it is more natural than this. Everyone’s phrasing is dead simple: apart from the occasional kanji or idiom here and there, most of it is “you have, I have, he has; you are, I am, he is; you know, I know, he knows” type sentences. For someone who’s played a decent number of other Galgames, the drop-off was huge… After a while I was just cringing…

Not just the dialogue either — the plot has nothing special going on. The added routes’ stories can be summed up in one sentence each: Ichinose Hotori is a good-natured girl who can’t say no, and the protagonist helps her; Fujimura Natsuki one day just up and says she likes the protagonist; Enomoto Kaho is always getting in the protagonist’s face, they accidentally kiss, and then they just go with it and find out they’re in love…

But for that one sentence of story, the game stretches it out forever… and just about everyone around you is wingmanning and supporting you. To what degree? To the degree where “aside from the protagonist himself still waffling, every single other character in the game goddamn knows who the protagonist likes.” The game also loves inserting little “inner monologue” bits when characters talk to reveal “she likes you / he’s rooting for you” — once would be fine, but it’s used way too much… Combined with the brain-dead dialogue, it’s even more awkward.

And since I was playing the Chinese patch, I think the awkwardness gets cranked up another notch.

Not that the patch is bad — if anything, I think the translators did everything humanly possible. When translating the dialogue, they polished and optimized sentences according to each character’s personality, which leads to a weird phenomenon: the original dialogue isn’t much, it’s pretty stupid, but the translated sentences really convey the character’s personality. Example: I saw “Yua knows! Yua knows!” more than once, that childish-character voice — but the original was just “それはわかります.” I have to feel for the huge effort the translation group put in. It’s not their fault — if anything, the patch saved the game, making it less jarring for people who don’t know Japanese. The original game’s dialogue really is just uncomfortable: some lines use way too much keigo, some are just too dumb. Even as a foreigner I was getting secondhand embarrassment, let alone the local Japanese otaku playing it.

Also, looking back at this game after so many years, I think… I owe an apology to a game I trashed before: CUBE and Kantoku’s later collaboration, Koisuru Kanojo no Bukiyou na Butai.

Not that it’s a landmine, just that the game was a huge letdown compared to what I imagined… Overly contrived insta-love setups, overly bland story, overly stimulating sex scenes… It makes the writer feel like some loser who can’t find a girl and sits at home fantasizing about a rose-colored life…

That was my take on the game back then. Please forgive my stupidity at the time — I’d probably just come off a few plot-heavy games and thought Koisuru Kanojo no Bukiyou na Butai was just terrible. Thinking about it now, that game is essentially still a moe-nukige, but its dialogue had already improved by leaps and bounds over Your Diary, especially in character writing.

Someone once said (I forget who), when writing characters, the dumbest, simplest method is “stock-type” writing.

What’s “stock-type”? Forcibly slapping labels and settings on a character. For instance, a girl who loves chili peppers, hates being called flat-chested, has a grudge against someone in the next class who’s her sworn enemy, is good at math, fails English, and has a verbal tic of saying “I think” that comes with a hair-flip through her bangs every time…

Think about the setup I just wrote — if you write a girl’s story following that setup, isn’t it way easier?

Easy as hell, right? Easy as plugging into a formula: see chili, smile; see big boobs, flip out; math is always 100, English is always 20; add “I think” to every line and mention the hair-flip. A “setting-compliant” character just leaps onto the page like that.

But a character written this way is only at the beginner level. Easy, sure, and easy to draw cute, but it has no soul, and it gets homogenized fast…

And to be blunt, even if you met a girl in real life who “loves chili peppers, hates flat chests, has a verbal tic, is good at math and bad at English” — does she really use the tic every single time she talks? Does she eat chili with every meal? Does she always visibly freak out at big boobs? Is her math always a perfect score and her English always a fail?

No way, right? People are complicated. A person’s personality changes, and their thoughts are constrained by all sorts of things — how could you write that out with a formula? “Stock-type” writing sometimes gets used in opera for artistic effect, but… between a porn game and opera… there’s still a gap, I’d say.

This is why so many people struggle to “write characters alive” — character writing is hard, even though the “stock-type” method I described is easy.

So in Your Diary, every character is standard “stock-type” writing — so stock-type you can predict how they’ll talk. It’s fine in small doses, but after a while it really is boring.

Whereas in Koisuru Kanojo no Bukiyou na Butai, both the dialogue and the character writing pull away from “stock-type” just a tiny bit.

Only partially away from “stock-type” — mainly China in there. Her dialogue is already closer to a normal person’s, and combined with Yamamoto Nozomi’s voice work, she’s basically got a bit of her own soul. The other one is Alice: she doesn’t have many obvious traits, but she’s still built up into something with her own substance — rare compared to Your Diary.

Of course, apart from those two, the other characters in Koisuru Kanojo no Bukiyou na Butai are still stock-type as ever, but it’s already a big step up from Your Diary — at least it’s no longer so dumb to read. As for the game being a moe-nukige…

Nukige my ass, I got used to that ages ago…

If anything, let’s talk about Your Diary + H’s absolutely insane HCG performances…

This game has a lot of weird things about it, but the weirdest is that while the normal dialogue is pure and dumb, the moment it hits HCG it goes into near-Hardcore mode…

The dialogue gets filthy as hell, and the translation group was still diligently polishing those parts too… which made me cringe, and also taught me a lot. It was the first time I learned you can pinch with the flesh wall — the essence! And there’s stuff like “women think with the womb, men think with the brain” — the kind of line that’d get you strung up a lamppost by feminists, and Japan really has it… Anyway, I learned a lot of filthy vocabulary, in both Chinese and Japanese.

I don’t know what CUBE and Kantoku’s next game will look like, but the way it looks now, the CUFFS/Sphere/CUBE/MintCUBE/Hulotte brands probably won’t go back to the Your Diary-style “pure love” route. They seem to have decided to keep heading down the more ero-leaning road — whether it’s『人気声優のつくりかた』(How to Make a Popular Voice Actress) or『神頼みしすぎて俺の未来がヤバい。(My Prayers to the Gods Went Too Far and My Future Is Fucked)』, in both setup and story they look like games with a bigger ero component…

Thinking about it, it’s a bit of a shame — we might never see a pure-hearted game in Kantoku’s art style again. But then again, maybe there’s nothing to be sorry about: sure, the ero component got bigger, but the dialogue won’t be so dumb anymore…

You win some, you lose some. At least it fits the “adult game” label better, doesn’t it…