I had my eye on Sakura no Kumo * Scarlet no Koi (さくらの雲＊スカアレットの恋) well before release, mostly because that “Cabbage” game from before was so unbelievably stupid. The scenario is by Fuyu Akane (冬茜トム), who’s done story-driven work for several SugarPot and Cabbage titles, and this wasn’t his first time teaming up with Korie Riko either. The premise when it was first announced kind of baffled me: our protagonist gets sent back 100 years into Japan’s past and has to find a way home. That’s literally the level of a Chinese web novel. One of the bad ones. Trusting the writer, I still opened it up and it took me a good while to finish. Partly because things were busy at home, partly because the early-to-mid game is just so damn boring. The good news is the final chapter is genuinely fun, and it’s tightly paced — it blows through all that long-winded buildup and explains what was actually going on. In Japan they call this “paying off the foreshadowing.” Sure, if you say so. Anyway, let’s get into the game.

Maitetsu came out back in early 2016, so it’s been almost five years now. Hard to believe this game is already over 4 years old. Back then my reaction was “eh, it’s fine” — the production values looked pretty solid, but the story left me with a lot of conflicted feelings. How do I put this… the game is set in a “fictional world,” but it uses a ton of homophones and pictographs to stand in for the real world. And on top of that, everything is bent toward steam train nostalgia. So what’s this “nostalgia” about? I remember the game sets up a “new energy company” and makes it the villain — says the new energy company clearly has pollution problems, and it’s “evil” enough to want to abolish the current “steam trains.” In the end, the game’s story has the “steam trains” receiving protection from a local deity, proving they can still hold their own in the tourism department, and the town’s “new energy project” just gets shelved. Honestly, I’m pretty confused. Replacing old energy sources with new ones is just the natural order of things, so how did it turn into such a tragic, grand issue? It even gets elevated to a political level somehow? And you say new energy has water pollution problems — so steam locomotives have no air pollution or environmental pollution problems either? And to really drive home how evil the “new energy” side is, the game throws in a hilariously goofy mayor route and a little-sister route, which try to stand up to the new-energy faction and make it sound like the entire town’s residents would rather pick the slower steam trains and reject new energy outright — I was laughing and crying at the same time. It’s kind of like that “I’d rather have a blackout than tolerate a nuclear plant” mindset.

Niijima Yuu has a new game out. Out of nowhere in the back half of the year, he announced a new brand under Key called Glovety, teaming up with his old partners from Koi x Shin Ai Kanojo (恋×シンアイ彼女), Kimishima Ao and Shimizu Masatoshi, to put out the brand’s first new title (and I figure it’ll also be its last): Einstein yori Ai wo Komete (アインシュタインより愛を込めて). アインシュタインより愛を込めて — what does that mean? It means From Einstein With Love. Except the game’s actual English subtitle isn’t that at all. It’s The only source of knowledge is experience. Sort of a “theory comes from practice” vibe, and that line also feels like a follow-up to Einstein’s famous quip: Information is not knowledge. Anyway, Niijima Yuu is back, and this time he’s brought Kimishima Ao, the otaku favorite, along with a title so artsy it hurts. A whole bunch of otaku collectively lost their minds. The game wasn’t even out in trial form yet and people were already rushing off on “sacred site pilgrimages,” dissecting every element of the single poster that had been released and guessing what kind of story Niijima Yuu might tell. Coupled with the heroine’s “genius-level intellect” setting, everyone started speculating about the plot: would it be about a super-smart but emotionally clueless person slowly discovering love? Would it end with a science-minded boy and girl falling for each other and trying to prove it? The game hadn’t even shipped, and people were already working themselves into tears. Honestly, outside of Yuzusoft fans, I’ve never seen such a powerful capacity for self-induced emotion, and it made me a little less hyped for the game.

Back when I first became an otaku, I had this weird sense of superiority. I don’t know where it came from, but I just felt one step above everyone else. It was like 2D culture was the ultimate goal of life, and all those people around me who didn’t get it were just aimless walking corpses. In a world of black and white, only 2D culture made me colorful. So I boldly changed my profile picture to a moe girl, set my desktop wallpaper to a big-breasted girl, and wore the strange looks from others like a badge. The whispered gossip behind my back actually made me prouder. “Anyone who loves 2D culture is a friend.” At the time I thought I was insanely cool, like the one sober person in a room full of drunks.

The “caged bird” that got delayed for over a year Cabbit, a brand under Skyfish, is a company I find genuinely interesting. They’ve put out a whole series of “mystery-flavored” games — starting with Midori no Umi, then Sora no Hana, then Hakoniwa Logic, and so on. The premises are always fun, dripping with suspense from the very first scene, and they usually land on a decent ending. But Cabbit’s real signature isn’t the “mystery” — it’s the way they serve up the fear lurking behind it with zero restraint. Their earlier games had bloody scenes, heroines getting broken in every sense, and combined with the fog-of-war plotting, it always hit hard. My guess is that the man behind Cabbit is Mikuri Mikuri (御厨みくり). He’s not officially attached to the brand, but he’s been involved in every single one of their games, often as “planner.” I don’t really know his style — he’s worked with bigger companies too, and nothing about those credits stands out — but compared to what Cabbit was doing before, you can at least infer the guy has some chops. So after nearly two years of silence, Cabbit announced a new title last year: Kagi wo Kakushita Kago no Tori (鍵を隠したカゴのトリ), set for release on August 30, 2019. And then, surprise — this damn game got delayed for a whole year. Various reasons along the way. At first it was probably just not finished, then at the end of the year COVID hit, and there were rumors the producer was hospitalized. Anyway: push after push, delay after delay… Aug 30, 2019 ⇒ Oct 25 ⇒ Dec 20 ⇒ Feb 28, 2020 ⇒ Apr 24 ⇒ Jun 26 ⇒ Aug 28 Finally, a year later on September 25, 2020, the game actually came out!

Pulltop probably got paid off by some local government somewhere, because they’ve started pumping out a whole series of “tourism promo” games. The story is light, sweet, and most importantly, all-ages… Last year they had Sora to Umi ga, Fureau Kanata, and this year they went and made a sequel called Ano Hi no Tabibito, Fureau Mirai. As expected, it shares the same world, the same staff, and even the same characters. Before release, this game had zero presence. I just remember Pulltop putting out a statement one day saying something like “Due to the pandemic, Ano Hi no Tabibito, Fureau Mirai has been delayed.” Everyone was dumbfounded when they saw that. Not because of the delay itself, but because of something else: Since when was Pulltop releasing this game? We didn’t even know it existed! And when they announced the delay, the game didn’t even have a proper website yet. Later on, the scenario writer plugged it while doing promo for ATRI, otherwise literally nobody would’ve cared. Anyway, the game did come out. The previous title’s “Ogasawara Islands diving” story was actually pretty good, so how does this new one hold up?

2020 was a rough year for the whole world. COVID hit a lot of industries hard, and that includes the Japanese visual novel business. I say “even” because visual novels theoretically shouldn’t be affected by the pandemic. Selling software, collaborating online, selling through online stores, and the customer base is all otaku who can’t be bothered to go outside—by all rights, the industry should’ve been totally fine. Unfortunately, the actual visual novel market doesn’t work that way. Because visual novels live and die by first-week sales, and first-week sales don’t depend on game quality at all—they depend entirely on the bonus merch driving purchases. And bonuses are tied to specific retail stores, which means, surprise, you’re back to physical storefronts. It’s 2020 and software sales still rely on brick-and-mortar. Only in Japan, I swear. Saga Planets, though, doesn’t seem worried about money. Their previous title Kinkoi was a huge success and clearly raked in a mountain of cash. Rumor has it Saga Planets split from Visual Arts (Key’s parent company) and went independent. They’re really flying high now. My guess is they’ve gone back to the “money is no object” phase. Remember what happened last time Saga Planets had money to burn? Yeah, you know where this is going. Last time it was Karumaruka. This time, probably because Kinkoi did so well, they made Kakenuke★Seishun Sparking!

Originally I wanted to write something poking fun at the straight-guy Twitter guy, Awen, but then I figured he’s already pitiful enough and I shouldn’t pile on, so I deleted that and went back to the original format. That said, this game is incredibly practical. I don’t mean that kind of practical. I mean the “teaches you how to fall in love” kind. HOOKSOFT and SMEE have always been solid at this, but unfortunately most otaku just use their games as joke-dispensers for rom-com sketches. Genuinely a shame. In recent years HOOKSOFT and SMEE seem to have pulled off a weird identity swap: the former started doing SMEE’s “love simulation” thing, while the latter leaned into fantasy settings. Most people don’t care, since both brands come from the same daddy and their art styles are converging at a frankly alarming rate anyway. Nobody cares about brand purity — honestly they could merge into one label someday. This time HOOKSOFT’s offering is Houkago Cinderella (放課後シンデレラ) — literally “After School Cinderella” — built on the premise of “romance through chance encounters depending on which route you pick on the way home after school.”

Years ago, back when I was still hanging around online, I met this so-called “big shot” who completely overturned a lot of my views on the world. It was the first time I’d ever met someone that impressive on the internet. At least, he claimed he was impressive. The “big shot” said he was living in Canada, young and successful, just taking classes now and then, occasionally doing some work for Microsoft, with access to the latest Windows Vista beta builds. He also had the money to mess around with all kinds of new “UMPCs.” At the time I thought this guy was absolutely amazing—being in the same group chat as him felt like a real honor. But then I started to find it a bit odd. If he was really such a “big name,” why did his Discord name still have all that “Martian language” and scene-kid vocabulary? And if he was such a huge deal, why was he online basically 24/7? So one night, while we were private messaging, the “big shot” said he wanted to show me something “nice.” He sent a video. I clicked on it and saw a huge white guy violating two very small people. Looking closer, those “small people” seemed to be kids—a little girl and a little boy. That video made me extremely uncomfortable, but the “big shot” was still asking me if I “Want Some More.”

Girls Book Maker announced a series of cash-grab DLCs half a year after the base game shipped. Cash-grab, sure, but honestly this is standard practice by now. We’ve seen too much of this over the years. This DLC is called ガールズ・ブック・メイカー ～グリムと三人のお姫さま～, which translates to Girls Book Maker: Grimm and the Three Princesses, so naturally it’s about the world-famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Since Grimm’s Fairy Tales is itself an anthology, you can’t really sum it up with one character, so they just carved out the princesses and split them into three volumes sold separately. Sound familiar? Yeah, classic milking scheme. The three princesses are Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.