Asa Project. Once my favorite brand. I used to think Asa Project was the Wong Jing and Stephen Chow of the visual novel world, especially after my first encounter with their games. For a while it seemed like they’d found their lane: exaggerated faces plus comedy. They put out some decent stuff, and by the time Kara Kurashi Renai… no, by the time Hitotsu Tobashi Renai (ひとつ飛ばし恋愛) came around, the meme game and the parody had hit its absolute peak. First time I played it, it honestly kind of “scared me” — felt like they were trying way too hard. Years later, going back to it, I realized that was Asa Project’s actual peak. And when you say peak, you’re also saying everything after it is downhill… Pura Main Wars (プラマイウォーズ) just barely held the rhythm together. Then came that baffling Suki to Suki to de Sankaku Renai (スキとスキとでサンカク恋愛), and I felt it deep: Asa Project had lost the plot. They seemed to be dropping the parody angle and pivoting to pure romance, leaning harder into making the girls bashful and cute — without fully giving up the old “parody skit” stuff. The result is a mess. If you want pure romance, commit to it. Stop having the girls spew dirty jokes every other line. If you want parody, then set up a proper straight man and funny man, let the characters actually play off each other. Sadly, Asa Project trimmed the game’s “plot engine” down to one character — or half of one — and slowly pushed her to the margins, turning her into a mascot whose only job is reminding the player “this is an Asa Project game.” Nothing else. The games started cramming in more and more tsundere bashful cuties, and, well, you know how it is — Asa Project’s artists are what they are. Not exactly boner-inducing. So the games got weirder and more boring: no comedy, no romance either. Funny thing is, under the same HOOKSOFT umbrella, Asa Project is getting outclassed by smee. smee’s skits keep getting sharper, the atmosphere keeps getting cozier, and the romance is still there. Asa Project, meanwhile, became a neither-here-nor-there mess. Painfully awkward. So with that awkward feeling, we arrive at Asa Project’s new release: Karigurashi Renai.

Must’ve been almost two years ago now — there was this game called Hatsukoi Sankai Me. It had that annoying Sendai auntie in it, but the story was actually pretty interesting. And when it came out the marketing was basically nonexistent, yet the quality was already above par for a 2018 visual novel. This is why we keep saying the industry is doomed: everything coming out this year is just too dumb. So the studio behind Hatsukoi Sankai Me, Windmill — colloquially “Fuusha-sha” — grandly announced a new title this year with a name that sounds like they were happy to burn money on it: Yakusoku no Natsu, Mahoroba no Yume. Literally that’s “Summer of Promise, Dream of Illusion.” Though mahoroba isn’t quite just “illusion” — it leans more toward “utopia” or “paradise.” The game wasn’t even out and Windmill started promoting it, at least half a year of preheating. Then I saw how they were promoting it and I fucking spat out my drink. They chose to promote this game by releasing the scenario text first! Look, as an eroge company, wouldn’t you want your marketing to push sales as hard as possible? Who buys eroge the most? Isn’t it the “hardcore wealthy otaku” who scream “my wife” at everything on the internet, retweet every lewd image, and shout “I want to draw bishoujo” in their spare time? The irony is that the people who nitpick the scenario every day (like me) often aren’t the ones willing to drop money on tokuten, and sometimes they even turn into 割り厨. In short: the people who actually buy a lot of eroge don’t care about story at all. As long as the girls look good and the plot doesn’t have them gang-raped into meat toilets, sales won’t be low. What good is a good story? It doesn’t sell. Look at Sakura no Uta — praised to the heavens, and it still didn’t top the sales charts that year. Who was number one? Yuzusoft (lol). So if I were Windmill, for this new title I’d just keep dropping CG after CG, mostly lewd ones, the lewder the better. That’s how you build attention and sales, dammit. Of course, this seems to be the mainstream way to promote a visual novel these days. The industry really hasn’t changed one bit.

神待ち 読み方：かみまち 「救いの手を差し伸べてくれる人を待つ」といった意味であるが、特に、家出した女性が自分を泊めてくれる男性を電子掲示板などで探すことを意味する表現。 Read as: kamimachi Literally “waiting for someone to reach out and save you,” but these days it usually means a runaway girl hunting the internet for some guy who’ll put her up for the night.

I’ve played a fair number of visual novels, and there’s one thing I’ve never quite understood. Since most visual novels are eroge—18+ games whose selling point is the presence of sex scenes—they should by definition sit squarely in the adult game category. People who buy adult games are, for the most part, adults (at least on paper). So when it comes to how the content is presented, you’d think the “adult factor” would be played up even more. But here’s the ridiculous part: in the visual novel market, aside from the handful of developers who actually deliver on “adult game,” the majority of mainstream players have some really weird demands: The story can’t be cruel, or I’m sending you razor blades. The game can’t skip the sex, or I’m sending you razor blades. Logically, an “adult-rated” story worth its salt is bound to have cruel elements—the better it is, the more indispensable the cruelty. Yet the visual novel audience refuses to accept it. If you won’t accept a “cruel” story, then you must like pure love stories, right? But the sex is still mandatory—and not just any sex, you need all kinds of positions, all kinds of play to be satisfied… So what kind of twisted demographic are you people who play 18X visual novels, anyway…

Sometimes I stop and wonder how long it’s been since I last played a landmine game. Maybe I’ve just gotten more sensitive lately. One look at a game’s setup and I can tell if it’s shit, so I haven’t stepped on one since the second half of last year… But there’s one thing I can’t resist: the art style. If the art hits my tastes just right, I’ll overlook the landmine parts and be willing to forgive a whole lot more. And it’s not just me. According to a poll I ran on some dumbass social media site, over half the people said “a work with good-looking characters but a boring story” beats “a work with a great story but characters you can’t stand to look at.” It’s a shallow world, I guess. And I love Sesena Yau’s art that much. Even though one of her previous games was mind-numbingly dull, this time I fired up her new one without hesitation—even though I vaguely remembered seeing someone on Weibo tear it apart with a long screenshot post calling it garbage. The game is Natsuiro Ramune. And just like I said at the start, it’s a landmine. Sesena Yau drew another landmine.

When I first watched Your Name., I saw the heroine frustrated with her mountain village, wanting to go to the big city, wanting to explore a new world. Honestly this kind of thing isn’t exactly fresh for us. We always see it in Japanese film and TV: the protagonist stuck in the countryside, sighing about how they hate this town, hate the sticks, want to go to Tokyo, want the big city. But I figure a lot of people might not get that feeling: “The countryside’s great, what’s so good about the big city? The countryside’s way more free.” Well, you don’t know what you’re missing till you’ve tasted it. Maybe people who grew up in big cities can’t understand the longing for excitement that exists in small towns. Most of the people talking about going back to the countryside are just sick of the noise of the city. And a lot of them have no idea what the countryside is actually like. Drop them out there, let them walk into town and fail to find a single Heytea, and no amount of bike-riding with their ass chafing will fill that void inside. I remember going to the countryside once when I was little. My family’s from a poor county in Kaifeng, Henan — well, not exactly my hometown, my grandma’s side. How poor was it? I remember when we got there, the relatives served us their best meal: a pot of mian gedda soup with a few beaten eggs in it. That was the top standard. And those eggs only existed because the old hen had graciously laid them that day — otherwise there wouldn’t even be eggs. The villagers there didn’t even have coops. Just a laying nest. At night the roosters and hens would fly up into the trees to sleep. Yeah, I only realized chickens were birds too after I personally watched a big rooster fly up to the treetops. They’ve got wings. It’s just that city thinking makes us forget. As novel as the countryside was, I got bored of it fast. Even with flying chickens, it was just too dull. Too monotonous — not just the food, but the people, the things to do, the scenery. Lots of people say the mountain valley views are so beautiful. But watch them every day and you’d get sick of them too. Tell someone they have to look at that for the rest of their life and never go back to the city, and they’d probably break. So maybe now you can understand the mindset of people in the countryside who want to go to the big city. Even with internet and delivery out there now, the exciting world is still better. And what if that “countryside” is on an island?

When I get nostalgic, elementary school inevitably comes to mind. Because back then I felt like an ACG protagonist. People like to reminisce about when they were hot shit, not when they were a dumbass—totally understandable. But my so-called “protagonist” days weren’t about going to Beijing for some “X-Fusion” to brag about “this is so fucking insane,” or riding a bike to get Heytea and chafing my ass, or constantly tearing down laptops and fiddling with Raspberry Pi while saying “how how how amazing I am” in a Shonan accent, or juggling a female teacher, a pigeon girl, and a student I met in Japanese class. It was just that in elementary school my grades were okay, my looks were okay, my conversation was okay—enough that some girls would voluntarily get close to me. But what does an elementary school “protagonist” actually get? You don’t know shit in elementary school, and I didn’t either.

Around this time last year… a game came out… called 9-nine- Kokonotsu Kokonoka Kokonoiro. I didn’t rate it highly back then, because honestly there wasn’t much to rate. The story barely moved at all, it just laid out the setting. That game was really just the start of a series. 9nine is a project sold in volumes, and my initial guess is there are three heroines, one volume each, so at least three volumes total. I already talked about the first volume here: the protagonist gets dragged into a battle between espers. There are villainous espers, and righteous ones like the protagonist and heroine. Some people kill, and someone else stops them, that kind of thing… Except in the first volume the esper murderer was never unmasked at all. It just ended unresolved, so a year later the second volume shows up again. The main romanceable character in volume two is the protagonist’s little sister: Niimi Sora (新海天), so the title changed to something built around her name, Sorairo Sorauta Soranooto.

Around 2010, in my last semester of college. I’d already landed a job, but graduation was closing in and I still had to finish my thesis defense. I’ve actually forgotten the whole process of writing my thesis by now. I just remember that while I was working on it, it got so boring that I started looking for anime to watch online. I was looking for anime and saw some shitpost compilation blowing up on AcFun, so I went and tracked down the source material, and that’s how I found this thing called Toaru Majutsu no Index (A Certain Magical Index). Looking back now it’s got plenty to poke fun at, but for me at the time I thought it was a pretty interesting watch. The interesting part is its setting: battles between scientific ESPers and magicians, with the male lead caught right in the middle as a third-party existence. Even more absurd is that this so-called “third party” male protagonist is actually the strongest one of all, and the story unfolds in the most formulaic way possible: some Boss suddenly pops out saying he’s gonna take out the protagonist, the protagonist fires off a bunch of trash talk, kills the Boss in one punch, keeps the guys around as bros, and adds the girls to his harem…… Of course, after finishing A Certain Magical Index, I went ahead and checked out its spin-off too — the famously well-known Toaru Kagaku no Railgun (A Certain Scientific Railgun). Frankly, the story in Railgun is way better than in Index. Most of it has nothing to do with magic — it’s all about espers. The heroine is a fairly strong esper, and she’s constantly running around with her friends solving all sorts of incidents, from espers losing control of their powers to crimes happening in the shadows. Honestly, the reason A Certain Scientific Railgun is the better watch comes down more to its story and character setups just being way cooler.

Hitotsu Tobashi Renai is an old game, one of Asa Project’s earlier works. Actually, calling it “early” is a stretch—more like early-ish. Hitotsu Tobashi Renai is built around “love one person removed,” and the Chinese patch apparently translated the title as “indirect love,” which honestly fits pretty well. That’s exactly what the game is about. My opinion of Hitotsu Tobashi Renai wasn’t exactly high at first, because I overplayed it. It’s chaotic the whole way through—the “skipped-over characters” are either insufferably nasty or unbearably saintly, and the art style itself doesn’t look remotely serious. Compared to Renai 0 Kilometer, it feels like it goes too far. If you say it’s going the comedy route, then it insists on throwing in some “romance” on the individual routes. If you say it’s going the pure-love route, those enormous exaggerated facial expressions alone make it look like anything but pure love… Awkward, isn’t it…