The game this time is called God Sisters.

A female teacher I know once said something: “In a romance it looks like the man is chasing the woman, but the initiative is always on the woman’s side. All she has to do is pick from a menu of things the man does.” I think her version is incomplete, though. There’s a precondition: the woman has to be good-looking. If you look like Shonan’s walking dick, no man is coming over to hand you a menu. You can also read that line the other way. In a normal man-chases-woman romance, it looks like the guy grinds it out with persistence and wins his goddess, but really the woman was just giving him chances, one after another. Think about it. If she genuinely has zero interest in you, she won’t give you a single chance to make contact, and she won’t listen to a word you say. You think you’re conquering her. Really you’re just being allowed to conquer her.

So here’s the thing — playing this game was a complete mistake. I don’t even know when I downloaded it. I didn’t know what the premise was, who voiced the heroine, basically nothing about it. I just found it sitting on my hard drive while I was cleaning things up. My guess is the developer name, Prekano, threw me off, since there’s a million games out there called “XX Kano” these days. But through sheer coincidence, I ended up playing it anyway.

A long, long time ago, a game caught my eye: Suite Life, put out by MME before they went under. My English is trash. Back in high school I used to pronounce “Suite” as “Suit,” and it took me forever to realize I’d been saying it wrong the whole time. That’s part of why the title stuck with me. Suite Life, literally “packaged life.” There’s an American TV show with the same name, but this game seems to have nothing to do with it. Honestly, I played Suite Life not long after it came out, and then… I dropped it. Dropping it wasn’t my intention, I was genuinely interested. The main reason was that the game was just too boring. And years later I went back and finished it. The main reason was pretty much the same as why I dropped it: I was too bored.

Feeling empty, lonely, and a bit chilly lately, I decided I needed something “short and sweet,” “gets to the point fast,” “heroine’s got big tits,” “preferably that kind of plot” — in short, the “you know what I mean” kind of game. Which is how I ended up with QUALIA Yakusoku no Kiseki. The premise is about as obvious as it gets: the protagonist is a scientist, he builds a big-titted robot girl, and then there’s that soulful look in her eyes. Sure, this year is drowning in shitty “AI robot romance” visual novels, but this one clearly isn’t like those dime-a-dozen ones. What kind of game this is — you get it, right? Let’s go! My guy!

When ANIPLEX.exe was throwing money at visual novels, aside from ATRI -My Dear Moments-, they also put out Utsuro no Utage (徒花異譚), which has a seriously weird art style. It was made in collaboration with Liar-Soft, which immediately told everyone these people know what they’re doing, and plenty of eroge fans went “based.” Also, you can pretty much guess that ANIPLEX.exe’s two releases were aimed at different audiences. ATRI -My Dear Moments- was clearly for the “casual moe-blob otaku,” while Utsuro no Utage comes off as a bit more hardcore. Of course, that “hardcore” label is just my own wishful thinking. After finishing this fairly short game, all I can say is that Utsuro no Utage isn’t really a game so much as a genuine “short fantasy novel.” This “novel” won’t lecture you about life’s great truths; what it gives you is more of an emotional jolt. I’m not going to go into detail about what Utsuro no Utage is actually about. Getting hold of the game isn’t that hard for most people, and although the scenario was written by Nozomu Kaihara, who previously wrote Uso kara Hajimaru Koi no Natsu (尋蝶者), once it steps outside the “romance game” frame, the story feels all the more comfortable in its own skin.

A lot of fiction likes to play with the “end of the world” theme. I can’t really say why. Maybe it’s that “even after the world ends, I still love you” feeling that comes off as romantic? Or maybe everyone’s got a little bit of wasteland fever in them. An endless wilderness, nothing left but the male lead and the heroine, wandering the ruins looking for some reason for humanity to keep going. That does sound pretty coool. Use it too many times, though, and it stops being coool.

I often regret some of my past articles. The main reason isn’t anything else—it’s that when I was younger I went on huge rants, trashing a lot of games I thought were terrible at the time. First and foremost among them: Lump of Sugar. I still remember that Unmei Senjou de Suika wo Kiru—I called its plot retarded. And Rensou Kankei—I said its system was dumb as shit. And yet, faced with Lump of Sugar’s new game Nekotsuku, Sakura. (ねこツク、さくら。)… I couldn’t help but shed tears. I deeply realized I was wrong.

Girls Book Maker (ガールズ・ブック・メイカー) is an eroge developed by Yumemiru, a new label from some big Japanese company. But compared to your average eroge, this one’s pretty unusual—it’s got a bizarre “setting” and “worldview,” with a dash of “cultural depth” thrown in. The plot: the protagonist is a bookworm who gets summoned by chance to a “library in another world,” where he works as the librarian and helps the head librarian exterminate the “bookworms” hiding inside books. Thanks to this setup, our hero can easily hop between “stories” with different worldviews, interact with “the heroines within those stories,” and go on all sorts of wild adventures. The books referenced are almost all classics: The Little Match Girl, Alice in the Mental Hospital, The Sino-Japanese Co-Production Journey to the West, The Phantom Thief Weak-Ass Gentleman Lupin, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter Goes to the Moon, Gay Faust, and so on. These stories are not only familiar but should be no strangers to most eroge players—Alice, Kaguya-hime, Faust, Lupin have all been done to death in Japanese ACG works.

The game I’d been hyping up all last year, the one bro kept dumping on — Pieces / Wataridori no Somnium — got a sequel after a whole year… Sure, they call it a sequel, but it’s a fandisc any way you look at it — Pieces/揺り籠のカナリア, the canary in the cradle. Honestly, the fact that it got a fandisc surprised me. The original story was already over — if you’re making a fandisc, there’s basically no room for an after-story. Every protagonist wakes up from that “dream world,” and when the male lead and the heroine meet again, they’ve both lost their old memories. It’s just a fated reunion. What else is a fandisc supposed to say? Are they gonna have another go at it in the real world? Real life already has enough of that boring-as-hell “take a humblebrag, swallow it” type of douchebag like Chiku-niu. Not me, no thanks! Then the game got a demo, and I looked at it and immediately started roasting it.