There was a time when Asa Project’s nickname in the Chinese community was “the face-meme studio,” thanks to those deranged expressions their characters pull. And the shameless gag romance plots, peaking with Renai 0 Kilometer. But Asa Project themselves don’t seem happy with that reputation. After that came Kansetsu Renai and then everything afterward slowly dialed the “face memes” down — at first every heroine had them, then just one, and by now… you basically can’t find any. Personally I think Asa Project sees itself as a pure-love studio that expresses its stories through various definitions of “love.” Every game they pick a new flavor of “love” and put it right there in the title — indirect love, two-timing love, triangle love, love rivalry, part-time-job love, side-character love… at this point I’m convinced they write “renai” in the title first and fill in the rest later. After over a year, Asa Project is back with a new one: Ousama Renai (王様恋愛). The official blurb says the protagonist is a rich young heir who lives like a king every day, and the hook is “love initiated by the man.” At a glance it screams “domineering CEO sweeps me off my feet.” Then I finished the game and… no, that’s not what this is at all.

If there’s one English line that stuck with me more than any other, it’s the Oracle’s from Matrix: “Everything that has a beginning has an end.” I love that line. It states a truism in the coolest possible way—and honestly, a lot of philosophy is just truisms. The difference is that most real-world truisms go unnoticed until someone with a special aura says them in a mystifying tone, and then suddenly everyone treats them as gospel. I bring it up because I still remember 2013, when I laid my cards on the table with a fujoshi I’d been pursuing and she shot me down for good. What I felt wasn’t so much heartbreak as relief. Looking back, she probably knew I was into her the whole time and just never gave me a clear no—kept me on the hook, had me tag along, paid for her meals. Not exactly malicious, but there was definitely some calculation in there. After that day I decided I needed something to do. I’d just bought a Windows tablet—a Dell V8p—and figured, well, I’ve never had a successful romance, so maybe I’ll find solace in games. I fired up Hatsuyuki Sakura (初雪桜), a newly translated release that had just dropped, and that kicked off my Galgame bulldozer mode. Windows, PSP, PSV, even iPad, and later Switch—my assault on visual novels has never stopped, and it hasn’t stopped now.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this on the blog more than once—the story of the very first eroge I ever played. I was in sixth grade. I found it on a disc I’d bought called Recoil. It wasn’t even a compilation disc, just a single-game bootleg with a cover that didn’t list anything extra, yet somehow there were other games stored on it too. I can’t remember the title. All I remembered were the characters for “complete bloodsucking.” You’d open it and first there’d be two women doing yuri stuff, then the heroine meets the protagonist, and she suddenly starts going down on his pixelated crotch… and then it cuts to “that kind” of scene. Bear in mind I was in sixth grade. The most explicit thing I’d seen up to that point was probably some TV shopping channel ad for a bra. This was way too much for me. Right when I was completely losing control and about to keep watching, I heard footsteps approaching from somewhere in the house. I panicked and hard-rebooted the PC. When my mother came in and saw the blue disk-check screen, she thought it was weird, and I just awkwardly told her the computer had frozen.

I’d been keeping an eye on this one for a while but never bought it, and the reason was that whole abstract Chinese crowdfunding mess from before. You open Modian’s front page and more than half of it is various “heart-stopping Chinese visual novel masterpieces” in vigorous development — who knows if you can actually finish yours, maybe you’ve already run off with the money? Then I saw the game had launched, and it even went on discount for the winter sale, so I figured I’d buy it and give it a spin. It’s way longer than I expected, and after finishing it I have to sigh — as expected of a team that went to Japan to study, it’s better than traditional Chinese galgames in basically every respect, and in a lot of places it’s genuinely excellent. At the very least it does things “right.” I’ll break this down into a few points, and since spoiling this game would kill half the fun, I’ll try to keep things spoiler-free:

Ever since Key got acquired by Tencent, their direction changed completely—they shifted to a weird… but also very modern approach. On one hand they ride the heat of old IPs to squeeze out the remaining value; on the other they push a series of small, quick, cheap titles, using fast iteration to boost overall sales. Take the new “Kinetic Novel” line, for example: no-choice visual novels focused on story and presentation for a more three-dimensional experience. Honestly, you can see the logic. Games—visual novels especially—are a one-time development cost with essentially zero cost to copy afterward. As long as you have enough titles and keep throwing sales, you’ll move some units, and you can even count on passive income later. For a traditional galgame company, that’s not a bad thing. So from last year to now we’ve seen Key pump out new title after new title, and this one is Rainbow City.

I have to trot out the old line again, the one I’ve said who knows how many times: I have no idea when I bought this game. Probably some sale. Anyway, I recently noticed it was already sitting in my library, so I figured I’d give it a spin. Saying this every time makes me feel like I’m cosplaying QZXX, but it really is the truth. I probably just saw an interesting title and screenshots that looked decent enough, and bought it. That game is Otaku’s Adventure (otaku的人间冒险).

I found out about Huang Xia because he was bumming around in Zhangzhuang, Zhengzhou — and our work unit was about to move there too. So I stumbled onto him by accident. Then COVID hit, our unit’s plan fell through, and Huang Xia started walking across the country. Some people call Huang Xia an idiot, a lazy bum, a piece of shit. I can’t confirm any of that. What I can confirm is that he’s not a dumb one. His videos are formulaic as hell, but there’s this weird absurdist artistry to them — the camera work, the content, the daily situation reports, all of it has a real sense of image. Huang Xia knows exactly what the audience wants, he films the stuff everyone loves to watch, and then when people start flaming him he plays the victim. And it’s not just him — all his “good homies” do the same. Zhang Gongmao and that whole crowd, same deal. Lots of people say today’s youth are all about deconstruction, deconstruction. Nah. Huang Xia is the real postmodernist artist. Especially since everyone used to dunk on Huang Xia for being a loser every single day — until Liangzi of the Big Stomach Bag fame burst onto the scene, and suddenly everyone thought Huang Xia was actually not so bad.

Purple Software out of nowhere dropped this thing called How Many Times Have We Met (何度目かのはじめまして). Turns out it’s not their usual dumbass fantasy schtick — the title alone screams time travel: “the umpteenth first meeting.” And I, also out of nowhere, ended up playing it. The plot is simple if you want it to be, complicated if you don’t. Basically, the protagonist is a corporate drone with zero hope in life, shuffling around like a walking corpse. By sheer coincidence he runs into this black cat-looking thing. The cat talks, says it wants to form a contract with him and grant his wish. He naturally says his life is garbage right now, and the cat offers to send him back to the happiest time of his life… high school. About seven days’ worth.

Two years on, after a run of teasers early in the year, Japan’s galgame powerhouse Yuzusoft has finally put out its full-price R18 proper new release for the year: LimeLight Lemonade Jam (the Chinese title roughly reads as “Spotlight and Lemonade Performance,” since “Jam” can mean fruit jam or a band’s set). And to everyone’s mild surprise, it’s a girl-band story. From announcement to launch the whole thing ran like classic Yuzusoft: no long gap in between, and they put out a free online demo download well ahead of time — the kind most of today’s so-called “super blockbusters” won’t bother with. Credit where it’s due: no offline demo event, no flying out KOLs on the company dime to say nice things in advance. Just traditional marketing, step by step, and the release didn’t slip. You can smell the mature project management.

Straight to the point: me buying this game, and even playing it, has honestly not that much to do with the game itself. First off, I played the previous entries. To be blunt, only the first one, Memories That Don’t Exist (不存在的夏天), is something I actually understood. The storytelling is weird as hell, full of deliberately contrived “trick narration” and prose soaked in anime-isms — enough that even a veteran otaku like me has to go “damn, the flavor is strong.” But the game also, unusually, has a genuinely beautiful passage in the back half that I still remember to this day, so I walked away thinking it was pretty good. Then the second game came along and the story started getting strange. Probably because the first one got so much praise, the writer got a bit full of himself and decided the “dregs” from part one were actually correct, so he doubled down. The result is something that looks deeply odd to me: the core is packed with Chinese elements, but the prose isn’t written the way Chinese people actually write, so reading it feels off — like a West Coast gangsta rap track performed entirely on traditional Chinese instruments, with heroes pulling pistols out of their crotches to ganggang each other while dealing mystery pharmaceuticals on the side.