A while back I saw a story that caught my eye: a Taiwanese game called Shi Yong Xi Shao Nü got rejected from Steam for having too much porn and other objectionable content. Not exactly breaking news, really. Everyone and their dog wants to get on Steam these days, including a whole lot of straight-up porn games and stuff that’s just skirting the line. Steam is a US platform run by white dudes, so that kind of child-endangerment material was always going to get the hammer. So I looked into this Shi Yong Xi Shao Nü thing, and it turned out to be nothing like what I expected… It looks like softcore, but the game itself isn’t a visual novel… or at least not that kind of eroge-style text game. There’s actual stuff to do. To put it bluntly… it’s primarily a management sim. Which actually made me interested in it. The dev is Taiwanese, though, and their official site banned all mainland IPs, and since Steam won’t take it, the game’s only sold on physical disc. I had no idea how I’d even play it… But with a buddy’s help, I got my hands on a copy, so I started playing.

Dayglacia no Rashinban (デイグラシアの羅針盤) is a doujin game by the circle Catalyst, first released around 2015. In December 2018 it got a graphical upgrade, an OP2, and a port to Nintendo Switch.

Kotonoha Mau Natsu no Fuurin (言の葉舞い散る夏の風鈴) had a lot of buzz before release — not because of some insane premise or anything, but because of the staff. Writer Noriaki Hanno had previously done Kage no Umi no Apeiria and the rocket-building thing, and both were received pretty well. This time almost the whole original team was back (with an even stronger artist brought on), so of course people were hyped. Once the game was announced, though, it looked like there wasn’t anything special in it — at least compared to Apeiria, this one’s setup is basically plain water. But because of the writer, most people still had high expectations. And what were we all expecting, exactly? Some crazy twist? High tech? A physics textbook? Logic-puzzle quizzes? A lot of people probably figured that since the writer had done something that good before, this one should be good too — even with its very “youthful,” very “ordinary” premise, there had to be something thought-provoking underneath. Well, we were all wrong. It’s just an unbelievably simple, plain-water game. Hell, it’s not even up to plain-water standards…

I played 40 visual novels in 2018 — even fewer than 2017. On one hand that means my real life got more fulfilling; on the other, it means the industry really is done for these days. Looking back, most of what I played was in the first half of the year. The second half was thin — barely anything out there, and nothing that made me want to pick it up. Which is fine. Probably even fewer next year. And honestly I hope the industry croaks soon, so more kids can be freed from it and face reality properly. Still, I did play some. So, as usual, here’s what I think is worth recommending.

When you talk about galge, you can’t not bring up eroge, and when you talk about eroge, you can’t not think of the ones that left a real impression, and when you talk about leaving an impression, you can’t not think of Kami no Ue no Mahou Tsukai, and then you can’t not bring up the writer behind it: Rukuru. And when you talk about Rukuru, you have to talk about his new game with Kiriha at the end of 2018, Sora ni Kizanda Parallelogram. Going from literary subject matter to a sports backdrop—truly a double bloom, literature and sport both, worth keeping an eye on. I’ve brought up Rukuru more than once, and I’ve recommended the stuff he wrote more than once too. The biggest factor is just how good his stories are. Rukuru can tell a story, and his prose isn’t childish either—it reads comfortably, and that’s his biggest charm and personality. Sure, some people rag on him for all the typos, but who among us who writes every day doesn’t have a few typos (I’m not talking about myself here). So the release of Sora ni Kizanda Parallelogram put me in a bind. The dilemma is pretty obvious. On one hand I was looking forward to a new Rukuru game and that familiar sour-sweet script of his. On the other hand… this new game… Sora ni Kizanda Parallelogram… doesn’t it feel a little too bootleg? You don’t need me to say it—anyone with eyes can see it. This so-called Sora ni Kizanda Parallelogram, whether you look at the setting or the character designs, looks extremely similar to a certain work from a certain studio that’s already dead. Yeah, that’s right—Sprite’s Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue, aka Aokana. Same airborne sport, same male lead as coach, same four hair colors for the heroines. Opinions on the game were all over the place at the time; most people figured it was Aokana’s “spiritual successor,” since the setup is just too similar. At the same time, people were guessing based on Rukuru’s previous style—would Sora ni Kizanda Parallelogram have people dying left and right, getting crippled, all that mess…? After all, his previous games were all gloom-and-doom. So I was worried. So I was torn. But whatever the game turned out to be, you only know once you’ve cleared it. As 2018 came to a close, before the Sino-American co-produced Journey to the West started filming, I finally finished this one. And I ended up even more confused. “Compared to his previous work, is this game a step forward or a step back?” Maybe going back over the whole game will make the answer easier to reach.

Kokoro ga Tsunagu Koi Shirube (ココロが繋ぐ恋標) came out last month. I wasn’t even planning to play it, but then I saw a Japanese review saying it was worth an “80.” And like an idiot, I believed them. By all appearances this is MORE’s last gasp: a shell company of a shell company of MME, a factory-line product from KATE. Word is MME disbanded right after this shipped. The whole thing reeks of LASS on its deathbed. Nothing about it says “quality.” But I saw Japanese players online saying the game has multiple routes, and that aside from the other routes being dogshit, the main Kokoro route is actually good. And like an idiot, I believed them again.

There’s a fairly famous song called “Amazing Grace.” The Chinese translation usually goes with something like “divine grace,” though the official rendering in a lot of places is “wondrous grace.” It’s actually a religious song with deep roots in Christianity, but it got so famous that it spread around the world and stopped being confined to religious use. The gist of “Amazing Grace” is right there in the name—praising the grace God has given you, basically a hymn. But what people actually like about it is being moved by that sense of the “sacred” in the song. Maybe that’s the unique appeal of religious music in general. So at the end of this year, a game showed up carrying the “Amazing Grace” title—an 18X eroge, no less, with Korie Riko as the artist and Tsukiyashiro Tomu on scenario. A stacked lineup. The last time Tsukiyashiro Tomu and Korie Riko worked together was Magical Charming, and I called that one “the most insane visual novel ever”. The slice-of-life content, the way the foreshadowing unfolded, even the system itself—all of it was full of highlights. After that, Tsukiyashiro Tomu planned a few more games, but they felt a bit middling. Last year’s Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro. had plenty of highlights in its story too, but something still felt like it was missing a step. So this year Tsukiyashiro Tomu came back, and not only did he drag in his old partner Korie Riko, he also brought out Sakura Saori, who sang the OP for Magical Charming back in the day, and put together this new work: Amazing Grace -What color is your attribute?-. The title means exactly what it says—“Amazing Grace, what color is your attribute?” But look at the staff and it screams Lump of Sugar from every angle. If that bright “Cabbage Soft” logo weren’t sitting right there on top, I think 99% of people would assume this was Lump of Sugar. Same scenario writer, same artist, same OP singer—it’s the exact same formula. Of course, the reason I played this game wasn’t because I had any expectations for a Cabbage Soft title, and it wasn’t some particular fetish for the writer. It’s just that this is a game about “winter.” Yeah, anyone who knows me probably gets it. I like the atmosphere of winter, the way everything looks when it’s snowing, so naturally I like games set in winter. So I looked at the release list, saw Amazing Grace, saw the winter setting, saw that the writer probably wasn’t going to screw it up, and decided to give it a shot.

Whether or not you’re like me and couldn’t care less about the various works under Type Moon’s banner, you have to admit the same thing I do: The Fate series under Type Moon is the most successful visual novel ever made. What counts as success? It’s when a product’s fan effect is so strong that all they have to do is keep reheating leftovers to keep raking in money—where even some slapped-together spinoff with no real connection to anything is a cash-printing machine. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is. From 2004 to 2018, the Fate series has gone through two anime adaptations, a prequel novel adaptation, countless movie adaptations, and all sorts of spinoff games, spinoff manga, spinoff anime, and so on—all the way up to the current mobile game Fate/Grand Order, which still gets hordes of otaku throwing money at it by the fistful. Sure, the Fate brand has now spread into every corner imaginable, but I wonder how many people still remember that the Fate series started as a game—a visual novel, and an 18+ one at that. I know the thing was originally a novel by scenario writer Kinoko Nasu, and it got turned into a visual novel out of necessity to get it to market, but its debut was, in fact, in visual novel form. A whole world expanded out of a single visual novel, reaching the point it has now—if that’s not massive success, what is?

I’ve played a lot of games with interesting premises, and the one that left the biggest impression on me is definitely the one where a heroine turns into an alpaca. That game was actually pretty touching. The moe girl you love most turns into an alpaca—that’s the moment that tests whether your love is real. It’s worth recommending, too. Besides heroines transforming, there’s also the protagonist-transforms genre. The famous recent one is that game where the protagonist becomes a black cat. It even got an anime, so I won’t go on about it. This kind of game always produces a lot of comedy. It’s a comedy-grade absurd premise to begin with—the protagonist suddenly turns into another species, so of course there’ll be plenty of laughs. So this genre has a new member. More, the well-known rhythm game developer, has a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary whose brand got renamed—and that renamed brand, KATE, released its latest work: Koi wa Mofumofu! Love Me Teddy (恋はもふもふ!ラブ・ミー・テディ). Literally, “Love is Fluffy, Love Me Teddy!” Don’t bitch about why it isn’t “Love my teddy” yet—I looked it up, and “love me teddy” seems to be a reference to something. The premise is easy enough to explain: the protagonist turns into a teddy bear, gets taken home by several girls, and gets rubbed all over.

Growing up, every one of us ends up watching some… physiological, health-oriented, body-art, stimulating, videotapes. And among those… physiological, health-oriented, body-art, stimulating, videotapes, the most famous ones besides the female teacher, the flight attendant, and the OL are probably the prosecutor series. Most prosecutor-series films are about a female cop who, to fight the evil forces of darkness, infiltrates the enemy’s ranks, gets caught, gets tortured and humiliated… oh, sorry, disgraced, and then our unyielding heroine defeats the evil forces and completes her mission or whatever… Of course, this kind of educational plot isn’t only something you can see performed by Matsushita Saeko on videotape. We’ve also got the so-called “2D version” in the visual novel sphere.