Lass Finally Went Under

I’d been saying for ages that Lass (aka LASS, aka the Shit Factory) ought to just die already, but now that the day actually came I’m kind of stunned.

Yesterday I got on Twitter and saw something from Kiritsuki that made no sense at all…

So I checked the trending tags in Japan and lass was right there in the list. Clicked it, and yep — the Shit Factory really is gone…

To be fair, Lass had its glory days. From the early 3Days to the peak that was 11eyes — 11eyes sold like crazy, merch kept coming out, it even got an anime. The anime was dogshit but that still says something about how hot the property was. The later decline, I personally think, comes down to the quality of the games. You can still find Japanese players on ErogameScape posting stuff like “I believe in Lass” — acts of faith, basically. So let me just run through the Lass games I’ve actually played.

3Days

A game that got listed alongside whatever flavor-of-the-month forum favorite some kid was shilling at the time. Its big idea was the Loop — the copy-paste kind of Loop. Lass didn’t invent that by any means, but in 3Days they gave it their own spin.

What spin? Gore.

3Days has a toggle for the gory content. There’s plenty of heart-ripping-out and womb-carving, decapitation CGs, some of it genuinely creeped me out. That kind of horror CG is usually the small studios’ attention-grabbing trick — but wasn’t Lass a small studio back then too?

The plot of 3Days itself has nothing much going for it. What’s worth talking about is everything around it: the excessive gore, the endless Loops, the batshit finale. And the worldbuilding it laid down — that groundwork basically became the foundation for all of Lass’s later games, and one of the reasons 11eyes worked.

11eyes

Lass’s one genuine hit. The gore is still there, just less in-your-face than 3Days. The setting inherits 3Days’ late-game cosmology and fills in more: parallel worlds, witches and magic, reincarnation and rebirth. All those elaborate setting details hooked a lot of Japanese lore-obsessed weirdos. Also the art in 11eyes is way better than 3Days…

“Way better” meaning closer to the moe-game look. The word “Lass” itself means pretty girl, after all. 11eyes’s success wasn’t an accident, I’d say — the OP and ED are seriously high quality, Ayane’s songs still get sung today, the story moves slowly but the pacing holds, and the final battle plus the multi-perspective structure felt fresh. It lived up to the “eleven eyes” conceit. What I personally liked was the second half’s fight scenes — even now, few games top them. The final boss BGM still slaps. Not that any of it matters, since plenty of people saw the anime first, and the anime’s fights turned out like… that. Which tells you the animation studio had no business doing action.

11eyes expanded Lass’s world enormously and threw out a pile of concepts — fans even built a wiki to keep track. The writer was clearly a terminal setting nerd. But 11eyes left plenty of holes unfilled. The big one is “modern magic” — you could absolutely have built a whole separate game around modern-magic combat and written something way better. No time for that now. The modern magic stuff is in the PSP version’s Kuukyou Kaiiki chapter. The protagonist’s father figure, Amami Kanji, keeps showing up in other Lass games, but in the end he’s just a name.

Shoujo Shin’iki ∽ Shoujo Tengoku

11eyes made bank — anime, fandisc, manga — so Lass had money and decided to make a big splash. Which gave us Shoujo Shin’iki ∽ Shoujo Tengoku. And yeah, you know how this goes. It flopped like nothing before it and became the prologue to Lass’s bankruptcy.

Shoujo Shin’iki ∽ Shoujo Tengoku is not easy to follow, because some big shot over on Light Novel Country unpacked the game’s script files and found something wild: huge chunks of commented-out text in the dialogue script. That text covered the game’s underlying setting — where the ritual came from, each family’s background, why any of this is happening, what the whole loop is about — and none of it appears in the actual dialogue. Players finish the game with no idea what happened. The setting is actually deep, built on folklore and fated reincarnation: a remote village under an ancient curse that can only be held back by a brutal ritual every year. The Light Novel Country post has since been deleted…

You can still find it through this link, though.

I don’t know what Lass was thinking. They advertised that every ending in Shoujo Shin’iki ∽ Shoujo Tengoku would be tragic, the OP and ED were cool, the lyrics fit the game — so why make the game like that? Even if you’d just bundled a setting-explanation booklet with the release, someone could have saved you, told other players it wasn’t a landmine. Why insist on self-destructing?

So Shoujo Shin’iki ∽ Shoujo Tengoku got crowned the landmine of the year, Lass piled up debt, the artist walked, the colorist quit, and the studio landed on the edge of bankruptcy.

Mayoeru Futari to Sekai no Subete

Starting with this one, Lass went in a completely different direction. Art and coloring changed enormously — it wasn’t a moe game anymore, it reeked of nukige. Tits got bigger, expressions got hornier, and the violence and gore were still mandatory.

I don’t want to say much about Mayoeru Futari to Sekai no Subete, because there really isn’t much to say. The game is what it is. The writer tried to keep the ties to past Lass works, but the whole thing looks like some medieval World of Warcraft knockoff, the plot is average, the developments are boring. Unless you want to hear Uehara Aoi call you daddy. A lot of players think it’s better than Shoujo Shin’iki ∽ Shoujo Tengoku, but… it’s still just okay. If you’re holding it to 11eyes, what you get is disappointment.

The art isn’t as strong as 11eyes, the story is passing-grade, and it doesn’t fit the mainstream moe-game aesthetic, so naturally it sold mediocrely. Lass’s attempt to recoup with this one can’t be called a success, right?

Compare it to that other studio’s recovery title — the Shit Factory really didn’t grasp the essence.

Midare Setsugekka & Pure Marriage

After Mayoeru Futari to Sekai no Subete, Lass went into debt-repayment mode with short nukige: brief stories, lots of porn, sold for fapping. There’s the marriage one, the ninja-training one — the ninja one even got two entries. The initial pitch was pretty baller: each game sold in three separate pieces, no locks, open it and fap, story available if you want it, and the story ties into Lass’s other games’ worlds, blah blah blah.

Of course, “ties in” means they reused a bunch of backgrounds and BGM from old Lass games. The content is what it is. But I figure if you’re buying this kind of quick-buck nukige, it’s either for the freak premise (fucking your daughter, fucking your mom) or the art (someone like Suzuhira). Lass now has neither. Who are you selling to?

From the looks of it they really did sell badly, the company’s doing poorly, they can’t seem to find a good artist, and the life-support attempt was probably going to fail anyway.

Liber_7

Lass’s swan song, I guess. Liber_7 finally came out after being in planning since 11eyes — and the result was, well, a pity…

The story’s a bit better than the previous stuff, and a lot of the setup is genuinely novel. But the scope is too small, and the second half clearly falls apart. The legendary modern magic setting gets a glancing mention and nothing more. I really don’t know why they wouldn’t just take modern magic and make a whole game out of it.

The final battle is rushed too — the boss dies casually, the protagonist wins casually, you can smell the unfinished product…

Which is understandable, I guess. Getting the game finished at all was probably an achievement. Maybe they figured they’d settle this one, fulfill the wish, and dissolve.

And then they actually died…

I kept saying I wanted Lass to fold, but now that it actually happened there’s a weird, hard-to-name sadness.

Not just me. Lass’s co-founder — the lead artist on 3Days and 11eyes — was clearly feeling it on Twitter…

And the artist shared plenty of anecdotes too…

Where the surname Hirohara came from:

Why Momono Shiori has a band-aid: drawing panties was too much trouble:

And more little founding-era stories:

Lass’s lead writer expressed regret too, and honestly he seemed pretty unstable:

And Hayakawa Harui, an artist I’m not much of a fan of, said a few token words:

What I really can’t understand is that Lass’s president Kenki Mana said absolutely nothing. Maybe he just didn’t know what to say.

It’s hard to say whether I hated Lass or loved it. When I first got into visual novels, I did start out following Lass and Yuzusoft. If the latter gave me moe-blob comfort, Lass was probably the first to give me an actual story experience.

From Mayoeru Futari to Sekai no Subete onward, the games stopped pulling me in. I always hoped they’d get back on 11eyes’s track. Doesn’t look like there’ll be a chance now.

Lass is history, and the holes in 11eyes probably never get filled. Sometimes I think the sadness I feel at hearing they folded is more about missing the younger me eight years ago, playing on a PSP.

Lass is gone. What’s left isn’t just memories — it’s also that whole catalog of great game music.