QUINCESOFT’s big 2021 opener, and it made me spit out my drink. Gohoushi Akuma to Oshioki Tenshi (ごほうしアクマとオシオキてんし), written as ご奉仕悪魔とお仕置き天使 — “the demon who does maid duty and the exiled angel.” This thing hit me hard enough that we should set the game aside for a moment and first go over how this label called QUINCESOFT even came to be.

The eroge market has been shrinking hard these past few years. Plenty of studios can’t be bothered making “story games” anymore and have all pivoted to short, punchy fanservice nukige, dressed up as “the pursuit of sweet romance.” In reality it’s just low-cost nukige to recoup money. Everyone knows these games have no substance — you’re here for the CGs — and the devs know it too, so they stuff more CGs in. And since a budget title needs more than one volume, they draw a bunch of heroines up front and sell them off in pieces. Small margin, high volume. Why not? Today’s subject is Itchokusen (Shojo→) Kanojo to Koi Shitai, from COSMOS, a small label under Windmill. If you ask me, the game has exactly two highlights. One is the artist Tsukimoto Jin — the art is genuinely good, and the heroine is genuinely beautiful. The other is the original concept by Houmori Kei. Because Houmori Kei may be an old pervert, but he’s decent at writing “sweet romance” stuff. His old light novel Ore mo Omae mo Choro Suginai ka was pretty good: the male lead desperately wants a girlfriend but is kind of flippant, confesses to anyone he sees, and then by some mix-up ends up confessing to our heroine, who — get this — earnestly and seriously accepts. And so the two begin a relationship where they put the cart before the horse…

In the eroge circles everyone knows, there’s a legend going around: they say Subarashiki Hibi is a masterpiece. And when you ask what exactly makes Subarashiki Hibi so amazing, the answers you get are a little off-topic. “There’s tons of hardcore CG in Subarashiki Hibi!” “There’s even gender-bent futanari HCG in it!” “All kinds of violence and sexual elements!” Hearing all that, it’s easy to assume the “masterpiece” label here is just because of “overly hardcore porn.” But that doesn’t really seem to be the case for Subarashiki Hibi either. Search online for impressions of the game and you’ll always find all sorts of write-ups that are “very philosophical, but completely incomprehensible.” Why “very philosophical”? Because a lot of people leave huge walls of text after playing Subarashiki Hibi, discussing everything under the sun—from ancient Cthulhu Mythos to every parallel-space theory after it, quoting sources left and right, citing classics, as if the game’s depth were on par with some massive philosophical tome. The “incomprehensible” part is that after reading all that text, I still couldn’t figure out what kind of story the game tells. But it did make me remember the scenario writer: SCA-Di. Later, out of curiosity, I tried Subarashiki Hibi. Since I couldn’t read Japanese at the time (still can’t), I played the translated version. About two hours in, I closed the game. The reason was simple: boring as hell. A lot of the dialogue in this game is just “mindless insertion of forced philosophical arguments.” The two characters are really just chatting, but it’s padded with tons of so-called “philosophical content.” The main axis of the game is just the protagonist wandering around and talking. That’s it. Back then, what I wanted was “crazy twists” and “world-saving-level battles.” Subarashiki Hibi clearly wasn’t my thing. Later I had the chance to play Sakura no Uta, which shares the same writer as Subarashiki Hibi. Maybe by then I’d gotten tired of stupid chuuni edge-fest games, because I rated Sakura no Uta pretty highly. As a story, Sakura no Uta left a deep impression on me—the dialogues between geniuses, the “Shang Zhongyong”-style development, and that slightly melancholy ending. Some of the philosophical discussions in the game also stuck with me, especially the relationship between “art” and “mathematics,” which let me successfully flex in front of my female teacher. Despite my good impression of Sakura no Uta and the decent rating I gave it, when I saw what people online were saying about it, I was dumbfounded, because a familiar scene played out before me again: Online praise for Sakura no Uta was still a mountain of philosophical text, including the game’s slightly chuuni dialogue, the Japanese literary excerpts it quotes, and all that fantastical self-indulgent emotion. Of course, there still wasn’t much introduction to the plot. Some didn’t even have plot. Don’t ask—the answer is “avoid spoilers.” But even avoiding spoilers, you can still say what kind of story the game tells, right? Otherwise I’m just watching you gush about how great the game is without even knowing what it’s about—how am I supposed to know if it suits me? This reminded me of Subarashiki Hibi back then, the same feeling. And I instantly understood: looking at Sakura no Uta, I should be able to understand what kind of game Subarashiki Hibi is too, right? Of course, to this day, I still haven’t played Subarashiki Hibi again.

In the last month of 2020, on a weird date, a weird game showed up: Sakura-iro Dreamer. The developer is listed as “Cover,” with “Hololive” as its subsidiary — and everyone knows that’s a Vtuber agency. The heroine is one of their talents: Sakura Miko. The name is profoundly dumb, because translated it comes out as the painfully rustic “Sakura Shrine Maiden.” Sure, a Vtuber getting a game is a good thing that fits where the industry is headed. Vtubers are capital’s darling right now, the successful ones aren’t short on cash, and they’ve definitely got more money than the eroge crowd, so a game made with that backing should be solid, right? So I looked at this game, and it nearly killed me with anger before I even got started.

After the follow-up that seriously underwhelmed me, Shiraha Kirameku Koi Shirabe, CRYSTALiA came out with another entry in the series, Kurenai Tsuki Yureru Koi Akari. Honestly, looking at the production team, this one feels more “serious” — at least more serious than the last cash grab. They brought back the original scenario writer and the art quality got a big upgrade. The original planning team, of course, is never coming back. The setup is more of a “prequel”: the seniors from the various families come to this school to train in martial arts. The protagonist’s role changed too — he’s now a discharged instructor taking over a class full of “problem children.”

CUFFS’s HOLOTTE brand spawned a sub-label called HOLOTTE ROI, and they put out a new game titled Kokoro no Katachi to Iro to Oto. The name is pretty generic—it literally means “The Shape of the Heart, Its Colors and Sounds.” The story follows our protagonist, who was born with a superpower: he can hear the “voice of the heart” and sense the “colors of the heart.” Anger is red, happiness is yellow, irritation is purple, that sort of thing. Sounds cool, right? It’s not. Your head gets loud as hell because you can hear what everyone around you is thinking, and it’s annoying as fuck. Our hero is sick of it, so eventually he develops the skill of “automatically blocking out surrounding noise.” This stupid skill is actually necessary, because the game stops bothering to show his power in any complex way. Occasionally the screen flashes a color to indicate he heard something, but otherwise the player pretty much forgets he has this dumb superpower at all. Then the game gets to the point. Two girls show up: a pink-haired one and a blonde one. The protagonist discovers his power doesn’t work on the pink-haired girl—he can’t hear her inner voice, but he can hear the blonde’s. Sound familiar? So even though he constantly hears the blonde’s inner voice screaming that she’s crazy about him while she acts tsundere and tells him to go for the pink-haired girl, he ignores the miserable blonde and keeps heating things up with the pink one.

The protagonist is your average corporate drone slash illustrator. By pure chance he boards a steam train at night and sets off on a journey with no known destination. He’s not alone on the train. There’s a foreigner from Sweden, a squinty-eyed guy, a pretty older sister type, a black cat loli, and of course a conductor who knows absolutely nothing about anything. The trip passes through a lot of places. The dark forests of Northern Europe, an island in southern Japan, the Hakodate planetarium in Hokkaido, and the place where the protagonist used to live. Yeah, you can guess where this is going. The train exists across time and space, and it carries its passengers to the place they once yearned for most. For the foreigner that’s the dark forests back home, for squinty-eyes it’s the island, for the pretty sister it’s Hokkaido, and for the protagonist it’s naturally his own place.

Navel once ran a label called Navel Honeybell, dedicated to games with “high-concept settings” and “a touch of romance.” And the dumbest part is I’ve played all of them—Hishou Hitsuji to Manatsu no Hana, Magical Dear, the works. They all share the same traits: Wildly interesting premises, the kind that make you want to play immediately Decent moe art that gets the job done Openings with huge scope that promise exciting developments Great music, always with Nishi Akio involved Stories that fall apart from the midpoint onward and end in a trainwreck Yep, both of those games crashed and burned. The setups were so promising, and then they just handed you a wreck. Bad enough to leave you baffled, bad enough to make you question your life choices. Funny thing is, the Navel HoneyBell brand died fast. Shut down. But Navel itself survived, shoved out a robot-themed game, and then a new label called Citrus surfaced. I didn’t notice it at first, but one look at its debut title and you know who the parent company is. This time we’re looking at The School Nurse and the Bubble-Blowing Assistant (保健室のセンセーとシャボン玉中毒の助手), Citrus’s second game. The price tag made it seem short, but playing it felt incredibly long, and when I finished, what lingered was a regret I couldn’t shake. Why regret? Let me walk you through it…

Sonora is a brand from the infamous cash-grab factory CUFFS. I’ve said before that CUFFS games, despite the pile of aliases, are all basically the same style—but this Sonora alias actually does something a little different. They built a shared universe across the games under the Sonora label. What that means: the three games released under Sonora all take place in the same world, so you get characters from different games making cameos, which gives everything a familiar feel. Gotta admit, the trick works. Sometimes you play an earlier game, then in a later one you get to see the previous heroine show up and get involved, and there’s this weird sense of closeness—like “oh, the developer actually cares about the players.” Of course, the more important part is that the background art doesn’t need to be redrawn. Reuse, baby. Save that money! So this time we’re talking about Sonora’s new game: Hirono-san Chi wa Eroge-ya-san! (The Hirono Family Runs an Eroge Shop!)

Asa Project’s title from last year was probably their best game in recent years, and the main reason is that they gave up on their usual “dumbass romance setup” and turned the content straight into close-quarters, hand-to-hand catfighting. You can actually see the rare scenario where the protagonist picks one heroine, and another heroine who’s clearly already lost keeps showing up to try and steal him away. In a normal visual novel, once the protagonist enters a route, all the other heroines instantly vanish… That rare brand of infighting actually gave last year’s Asa Project a bit of a “pure love” feel. The love-hate drama between the girls and the protagonist, all that Mary Sue-flavored content, let a lot of otaku find that long-lost “romantic comedy” feel, so plenty of praise naturally followed. So Asa Project probably figured out a new formula that suits them—at least it’s way more solid than the dumbass nonsense they used to pull, like “indirect romance,” “swapped romance,” “long-distance romance,” “love triangles,” and whatever else. And with that, the ugly nature of Japanese capitalists revealed itself: Asa Project announced this year’s new game, Renai X Royale (恋愛Ｘロウイアル). What’s it mean? It’s just Love X Royale. Personally I’m convinced the “Royale” here is totally short for “Battle Royale,” so I’d translate it straight as Love Battle Royale. Battle royale—you know how it goes. Played PUBG? Everyone fights to the death, only one winner. This is blatantly a game where the heroines tear each other apart to the bitter end.