Animal Panic (あにまる☆ぱにっく) is a weird game… First off, the premise is weird. It comes from QUINCE SOFT, a Lump of Sugar sub-brand I’d just been praising for Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro.. I figured it was Lump of Sugar’s experimental plot, a place for oddball new games with strange setups. A year and change later, I got slapped in the face. Animal Panic looks like the most generic moege imaginable, and the staff list gives zero reason to expect surprises. Then, even weirder: I actually played the damn thing for some reason, and found it contains stuff way stranger than I expected.

I’ve always been waiting for Yuzusoft to crash, but unfortunately their games have always been stable—it’s hard for them to crash because their production process is practically an assembly line. Pick a theme/setting for the game Design characters based on the theme Then get scenario writers to split the story, write each part, and stitch it together Start the hype campaign, release countdown animations every day Release character songs, keep building hype Remix the character song tracks and use them as the game’s OST Game ships Also, Yuzusoft’s artists are almost always the same, so the art style is guaranteed, and the voice actors they hire are all competent. After playing, you basically never feel like it’s a “landmine”—at worst you think “the story is just okay,” “too formulaic,” “the setting is a bit childish”—not outstanding, but definitely not bad. This level of quality has also bred a lot of “irrationally devoted Yuzu fans.” I vaguely remember saying on social media that Riddle Joker had a dumb story, and someone tracked me down on Telegram to rant at me, practically saying “I’m so mad I’m so mad I’m so mad.” That shows how powerful Yuzusoft’s magic is. But precisely because of the nature of their games, most Yuzu fans are quite young, many still minors. I remember seeing a post on Twitter about a minor who broke down after being rejected from a Yuzu live event. So I have mixed feelings about Yuzusoft: I love them because they’re genuinely one of the benchmarks of the visual novel genre, and they always manage to cast voice actors I like, I hate them because they’ve always been an assembly line producing moe-feed with zero innovation. The impact of Yuzusoft’s lack of innovation isn’t just on themselves. As a cult company where “every new release tops the annual sales chart,” if they can keep making easy money off the assembly line, other companies will inevitably copy them. I really don’t want every visual novel company to become like Yuzusoft—if that happens, the industry is truly doomed. But this year’s Yuzusoft seems to have actually tried something different… And they crashed…

I remember shelving an article called something like “The Otaku’s Love Manual.” I had the concept worked out and everything, but never got around to writing it, because it’s just too damn complicated. Real love isn’t like an eroge — you’re dealing with an actual person, not a two-dimensional character with preset parameters on the other side of a screen. Real people have all kinds of personalities and traits, which means the “girl” you’re up against in reality might be a fusion of several dozen different heroines from different eroge, and the “events” you run into out there might be spread across different routes belonging to different heroines. Maybe only by improvising and piecing it all together can you keep up. For most otaku, though, that’s not even the problem. The problem is their own emotional intelligence. I’ve met some “otaku” who constantly complain that they can’t find a partner, that girls won’t talk to them. But honestly… it’s not just girls — guys don’t want to talk to them either. The moment they open their mouths it’s all about their own little world, and they refuse to engage with anyone outside it. They lock themselves inside their own bodies and then complain that nobody understands their heart. Communication is a two-way street. If you won’t let anyone get to know you, but demand that they bare their souls for you to pick through — that kind of thing only happens in porn games for people with certain special interests. Of course, not all eroge are “fantasy works” like that. Some are pretty grounded in reality — HOOK and SMEE, for instance. There was a time when SMEE’s games were all about helping otaku leave the otaku life behind, while HOOKSOFT’s games were mostly traditional “school fantasy romance.” “Fantasy” because HOOK’s setups always had some wild idea — robots, virtual reality — and HOOK games always had an in-school chat system that live-roasted whatever the protagonists were doing. These days, all of that is gone. HOOK’s signature touches have pretty much vanished, to the point where their games are indistinguishable from SMEE’s. So HOOK’s latest release is a full-on SMEE-flavored game: Docchi no i ga Suki Desu ka? (Which “i” do you like?)

《絆きらめく恋いろは》 is a game I found pretty creative and honestly pretty damn impressive — it’s got a ton going for it: Solid soundtrack Gripping combat A story that portrays the heroine’s growth in detail, easy to relate to Art that isn’t half bad And this game wasn’t just big in Japan — it blew up in China too. I saw “Tsubaki is my wife” everywhere, and the studio struck while the iron was hot and put out a Tsubaki-only fandisc. Kept the hype going and squeezed out another round of sales while they were at it. Before I knew it, it was late 2019, and word of a sequel started going around. The sequel was called Shiraha Kirameku Koi Shirabe (白刃きらめく恋しらべ). Honestly, I wasn’t worried about it at all — the writing style had already settled into a groove, and CRYSTALiA’s parent company AMUSE CRAFT didn’t exactly look strapped for cash, so there was no doubt they’d do the sequel right… But what confused me was that not long after this game came out, Tomochiyo Kurenai (智斗紅), the planner and producer of the original Kizuna Kirameku Koi Iroha (絆きらめく恋いろは), said some weird stuff on Twitter: He said he’d already left the company back in summer, and he’s barely retweeted anything about the new game — it’s all been stuff about older titles. He also said he was only nominally attached to the new game and didn’t actually do anything on it. What is this feeling? When does a game’s producer normally react like that? Only when the game itself turned out bad, when even they think it’s garbage, and they rush to shift the blame because they’re scared of getting flamed!

Kimagure Temptation (きまぐれテンプテーション) is the new release from Silkyplus Wasabi, a Japanese studio known for horror-leaning games. Most of their past output has been dark, gory, and supernatural, but this one unexpectedly looks like a moe nukige—probably because they switched their main artist to Kimishima Ao. Also, the price is absurdly low for an eroge. After playing it, a lot of moe fans loudly declared it a landmine. Which brings me back to something I’ve said before: “A game that moe fans call a landmine is guaranteed to be interesting.” So I decided to take a look. Having played it, I’m conflicted—not because it’s “especially brilliant,” but because it mostly left me feeling baffled. So here’s my breakdown and my take.

The Japanese eroge maker CUFFS has a whole pile of sub-brands — Sphere, CUBE, miniCUBE, SONORA, and HULOTTE, which looks unrelated but apparently isn’t. I hadn’t touched a CUFFS game in ages. CUFFS games are all basically the same: same engine, same font, same choice-navigation UI, same Duca songs covering everything, same marketing playbook, same coloring style, and… the only thing that really differs is the artist. So CUFFS games get old fast, because there’s just too much that’s identical. Sure, sometimes they roll out a “story premise” that looks decent, but the actual execution always disappoints. Well, not disappoint exactly — it’s more that there’s just nothing interesting there. CUFFS announces a new title, you look at the character setup and you can already guess how the plot will unfold. Beat the game and sure enough, it played out exactly as you expected. No surprises. If anything it’s less exciting than what you imagined… Which leaves you with disappointment… emptiness… and self-loathing for wasting your time on this game.

I. I’m a 20-year-old virgin. The no-sex kind. A friend invited me to a Christmas party and, beating his chest to pieces, swore he’d introduce me to all sorts of cute girls there. But as a great virgin, how could I possibly hold court at such an event? So I made a decisive choice! I chickened out… again.

I have to admit it now: that August title I’d been dunking on for ages, Sen no Hatou, Tokihana Iro no Kouki (千の刃濤、桃花染の皇姫), is actually a really, really goated game. What makes it so good? The good part is that its setting is absurd on the surface, yet still rings true. Back then I was shitposting about it: “How can a world have a theocratic feudal monarchy on one side and a republic on the other, living side by side in peace, with the monarchy’s upper-class kids even going to school in the republic? That’s complete bullshit!” Obviously I don’t think that anymore. And I don’t think you do either. This kind of arrangement really does exist in the world.

I. My name is Sofia. Full name Sofia Kugel Westrin, but it’s so damn long I can’t even remember it myself, so everyone just calls me Sofia. I came to Japan as an exchange student, in my capacity as princess of the country of Elideurone. Of course, maybe my country’s status is just too pathetic, because here I am, a bona fide princess, and I show up at some ordinary Japanese school as a “transfer student.” And to make it worse, I have to rent my own apartment and live there by myself. Not exactly the treatment a princess should get! Of course, I know why. In our country Elideurone, every person actually has two forms — an animal form and a human form. And no, our country isn’t sponsored by the Cenarion Expedition and I’m not a druid. It’s just that everyone in my country has the bloodline to “transform,” switching freely between animal and human shapes. Except I don’t have that ability.

Maybe you like KFC. Maybe you’ve seen the commercial success of that smiling old man with the white beard, Colonel Sanders. But I can guarantee you don’t know about his past, or the things he got up to in his younger days at culinary school. And that’s exactly what I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator on Steam is here to tell you: that mysterious, dreamlike, enigmatic, untold story. Young Colonel Sanders is a student at a mysterious culinary school. It’s a weird school—there are monsters, ghosts, and a gay guy named Van Van. After he transfers in, he becomes the center of attention. Every day he rides a beautiful little pony to class, wins the praise of Teacher Dog (yes, literally a dog teacher), and at lunchtime, Sanders busts out his homemade fried chicken, which earns unanimous praise from his classmates. Why is his fried chicken so good? “Because I carefully selected 11 secret spices, and together they create this irresistible flavor.”