COLOR OF WHITE Review

LAMUNATION! came out last year. I honestly didn’t know much about it — watched the OP, looked flashy, music was solid, skimmed the premise and it seemed to be some fictional world. But the setting never explains itself, there’s no visible main plot, so I just dropped it.

Plenty of people were actually optimistic about this one, aside from some guy called “Azirayt” — the other being Miss Wang. But Chinese people liking it doesn’t mean shit. The game’s reputation rides on what the Japanese think.

So how did the Japanese rate LAMUNATION!?

According to Chuuni Space’s scores… 45 points. Basically a landmine.

So I’d always assumed it was a landmine too. I’ve seen this type too many times — big budget, stacked staff, flashy OP, massive marketing, and then the scenario writer goes full late-stage psychosis and nobody can follow the story, so the game becomes a landmine. Examples everywhere.

But recently, for a certain reason, I got interested in LAMUNATION! again. I think it might not actually be a “landmine.” It’s just that people don’t understand it for a certain reason.

That’s a bit of a stretch. Normally, no matter how badly a game’s story is written, no matter how dogshit the author’s storytelling is, if you’re willing to meet the author halfway, you’ll usually find the story is “not bad.” But with LAMUNATION!’s writer, it might be a different situation.

Ah… how do I put this? Cultural incompatibility? Something like that.

Which means we have to go back to an earlier work by LAMUNATION!’s writer, Kepposhi…

COLOR OF WHITE is a yuri game by the doujin circle Haiperiyon. I noticed it because of one song: “Statice”, sung by Yuzuki Sora. Sounded amazing, so I looked it up, turned out it was the game’s OP, looked further, turned out it was a yuri game, and the artist was… Mamiya Kise…

So I played it.

Actually, before playing I hadn’t noticed the writer was LAMUNATION!’s writer. I only noticed the game’s original tagline: “Only 100 yen.”

A game selling for 100 yen — in China that’s about 5 yuan. Goddamn.

And after playing it, I really did feel this game was goddamn worth its 100 yen.

First, the game’s only about 2 hours long.

Second, the plot can be summed up in one sentence: a pair of twin sisters suddenly realize they’re in love with each other, are confused about these feelings at first, get talked through it by another yuri couple, stop being confused, bravely come out, the end.

Honestly this game isn’t “yuri” at all. The lesbian part is under 10%. Most of the content is dialogue — slice of life, basically. But the slice of life is genuinely fresh.

Fresh in terms of what the dialogue is about. If you’ve watched a lot of American movies and TV, you’ll get it: the everyday dialogue in this game is stuffed with “American deadpan humor” and “American movie references.” I don’t know how to describe how these conversations are put together. It’s kind of like snark, but American-style snark, and the metaphors pull in a lot of American conversational idioms. The whole game’s dialogue is packed with English and katakana loanwords, and plenty of the jokes are American jokes — some of it’s American internet slang too. The most recent stuff is probably LMAO and that kind of thing.

Honestly, this was the first time I’d seen a Japanese person dare to write dialogue in an American deadpan style in a Japanese porn game. It makes the whole game’s dialogue feel totally out of place. It’s supposed to be a pair of sisters calling each other onee-san, onee-chan, and instead the dialogue is “Fuck You Fuck Me.” And the whole setting skews very American — they’re clearly two Japanese girls, yet they’re written as mixed-race. Mixed-race on top of that, their names written in katakana are actually English names. The lead girl is probably Ashley, and the second girl leans a bit more Japanese.

Honestly I can feel the writer’s personal love for and desire to show off “American culture.” The two girls’ conversations basically have nothing to do with gender anymore. Occasionally there’s a bit of Japanese-style snark, but the content is always American. I personally find this dialogue style pretty fresh, and really interesting — sometimes it feels like “a Japanese person imitating an American movie.”

But this game’s writing still feels… how to put it? Immature? Or did it compromise? The game starts with almost nothing but banter in the dialogue, and then at the end, the writer seems to remember this is supposed to be a yuri game, so he rushes out a big confession scene — and the content isn’t American-style anymore, it’s standard Japanese: “気になります,” “そばにいる,” a mess of cliché lines. Then the game ends abruptly…

And that left me feeling very… I don’t know how to evaluate it.

First, the game is genuinely novel in its dialogue. I’m sick of the Japanese old routines, and suddenly someone hands me an American deadpan routine — that’s fresh. The author clearly has material too; he’s probably seen a ton of American movies, borrowed a lot of American semi-gangster culture… Like at the very start, the little sister is playing GTA on the computer and so on…

But the game itself feels more like an experiment. These elements exist only in the dialogue. In the one and only bit of actual yuri main plot at the end, it instantly reverts to standard Japanese, and the disconnect is huge. Combined with that sudden gasp-for-air ending twist, it probably doesn’t leave a great final impression.

Then again, the game sells for 100 yen. Plenty of people say that for 100 yen, with this length, this music, this art style (even though it doesn’t look like Mamiya Kise at all), you’re getting way more than your money’s worth.

My own take is that the game’s “American dialogue” is really creative, and if they’d been bold enough to plan out a proper full game, it would’ve turned out great…

And as you can see, they did make a proper full game. It’s called LAMUNATION! — and it’s a landmine, according to the Japanese.

Looking back at LAMUNATION!’s premise now, it’s not hard to see the writer’s ambition to do something big. The fictional-world setting shows traces of GTA. The twin heroines reference that game’s setup too. The dialogue is still heavily American-style, the music is by the same team — except the artist, who’s no longer Mamiya Kise.

So where does LAMUNATION!’s problem lie? My guess: the marketing never told most Japanese otaku what style the game was. A lot of Japanese otaku who play galge are used to the same handful of routines. You suddenly hit them with this dialogue, this deadpan humor, genitals flying around in English-mixed profanity at the drop of a hat, plus these weird cinematic storyboard effects — it’s inevitably going to feel… baffling.

Maybe that’s why LAMUNATION! got shit on so hard. Just my guess.

Also, through this game I stumbled on a bit of gossip. COLOR OF WHITE had Mamiya Kise on art, Kepposhi on scenario, and cittan* on music. Those three worked together on several titles. But by the time LAMUNATION! came around, the writer and composer stayed, and the artist was swapped to muku. muku’s art style is actually very similar to early Mamiya Kise. And two years ago Mamiya Kise was selling at Comiket together with muku, and even helping promote muku’s doujinshi.

But Mamiya Kise doesn’t seem to follow Kepposhi on Twitter. The reverse, though — the writer follows her.

Mamiya Kise’s Twitter seems to run on “if someone follows me, I check if they’re a real person and follow back.” Look, she even followed me. But she doesn’t follow this writer, and she never promoted his works again, LAMUNATION! included, and around 2014 she’d already cut ties with the writer’s circle.

Could it be… they had a falling out?

まぁ、まぁ. Just me speculating.

Lastly, I recommend this game’s OP: http://music.163.com/#/song?id=26155430

The arranger, cittan*, is goddamn insane. I think these 100-yen games are basically just ads for his albums.