Lately I’ve been kinda unsatisfied, you know? Getting older, and plain plots just don’t do it for me anymore. Probably I’ve played too many games and seen every story beat there is, so when something completely ordinary happens I just go “meh.” Recently I’ve been hunting for stuff with more “punch,” more “intensity.” Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not about to awaken some weird fetish. I just mean I want that “protagonist starts weak, beats one strong enemy after another, and finally takes down the boss in a blazing finale” kind of story. Ah, whatever, I just want to read 王道 — the tried-and-true hot-blooded route. Honestly, 王道 stories are everywhere in shonen manga; all those long-running mainstream series are built on that formula. But in the visual novel world this kind of content keeps shrinking. Either it’s half-assed, or they force some bullshit and end up making a mess. Some don’t even try. The last game about piloting fighter jets really disappointed me. I don’t think I’m asking for much — I just want something like Aokana. Is that really so rare? In the end I had to go digging through old games. Then I remembered: way, way back I’d picked up Walkure Romanze and never finished it…

The game Hitotsu Yane no, Tsubasa no Shita de — literally “Under the Wings of One Roof,” also known as “I Lived With Four Hot Girls and It Was So Great I Forgot How to Jerk Off” — tells the inspirational story of a protagonist who, as a trainee pilot, gets into his grandmother’s flight school through connections, uses his position to live in the same dorm as four hot girls, spends every day flirting and cuddling and never has time to practice flying, then discovers at the final showdown that he’s trash and cheerfully chooses to surrender mid-match.

If you watch a lot of anime or play galge, you’re probably familiar with a certain setup. In Japanese otaku-oriented fiction, the most common one is the “harem.” This “harem” is a bit different from the Qing dynasty harem dramas we’re used to. Even if it’s somewhat similar to something like The Deer and the Cauldron, it’s still not quite the same. Japanese harems mostly consist of “the male lead maintaining ambiguous relationships with multiple women for a long time but never fucking confessing.” Because Japan is monogamous, you see—if you confess, that means the other women are done for, game over, loser dogs, and the harem loses its meaning. This “harem” thing thrives on that borderline-level ambiguity. You can be naked and hugging all sorts of girls, you can see their entire bodies, you can kiss, you can grab tits, you can even touch pussy, but as long as you don’t stick it in, you and she are just ambiguous, the other women still have a chance, and your harem can continue. So the actual fucking is generally the bottom line. Most harem works never cross that line—unless they’re heading for the ending. However, “harem” in the context of a visual novel is a different picture entirely… Because visual novels have no bottom line, harems split into “true harem” and “fake harem.” “True harem” is exactly what it sounds like—ハーレム—the male lead does 3P, 4P, 5678P… all sorts of indescribable things. “Fake harem” is still the manga/anime routine: all sorts of ambiguity, all the heroines like the protagonist, but since it’s a visual novel you’ll definitely hit a home run and it won’t drag on without an ending like some dumbass manga or light novel. Most harem setups go like this: Ahuhu is an unbelievably ordinary high schooler. At home he has a sister who’s an unbelievably brocon and hates squid, next door lives a childhood friend named Xiaozhu who walks to school with him every day, the student council president at school is a sharp-tongued girl who deliberately picks fights with him every day, and meanwhile Ahuhu has a crush on some girl in the school library—a recent transfer student he ran into by chance on the train one time. Ahuhu keeps saying he has no luck with love, but the story ends with his sister wanting to marry him, Xiaozhu insisting she’s just a childhood friend while actually masturbating to him every day, the student council president being a tsundere who’s crazy about him and only picks fights to talk to him more, and the library girl actually liking him too but unable to say it no matter what, keeping it bottled up inside… So Ahuhu, while humbly calling himself a loser, simultaneously juggles all these beautiful girls like some romance-blind KY idiot, until some event triggers a choice and a confession… Familiar? Clichéd? I can’t say for manga and light novels, but at least most visual novels follow a similar setup… Honestly, this setup has plenty of holes, especially the protagonist claiming he has zero luck with women: “You motherfucker Ahuhu, your luck with women is off the charts!” You get used to complaining about this stuff. Some games try to break out of the framework, but they always roll back in the end… After all, if you want to write multiple heroines, this is the only way… what else can you do… Yeah, what else can you do? Well, a company called Hook gave us a different answer, showing us what a harem looks like when it doesn’t follow the formula…

Kikuzakura is a beautiful girl, with pretty pink hair, fair skin, and a sweet smile. She doesn’t remember her original surname. She doesn’t even know who her parents are. For as long as she can remember she’s lived with her grandmother. “Grandmother” is only the woman who took her in, not real blood relation. Kikuzakura has asked her many times: “Where are my mom and dad?” Grandma always smiles, strokes Kikuzakura’s head, and says slowly: “You’re still young. When you’ve grown up, I’ll tell you.” Time flies. In the blink of an eye Kikuzakura is an adult, eighteen years old. On her eighteenth birthday, after they finish the cake, Grandma gives her a present. The little box is heavy, and she can’t tell what’s inside. Kikuzakura wants to tear it open right away, but Grandma stops her. “After the cake, tonight, in your room. Look at it slowly, by yourself.” Grandma’s expression is full of a kind of helplessness… as if there’s something she can’t say. Kikuzakura nods… ………… An autumn night, cool breeze blowing. Kikuzakura sits at the desk by the window and opens this Pandora’s box. Inside is a notebook… the paper between the layers has already yellowed a little, but the cover is thick enough that the contents should still be fine. She lifts the first page. Tucked inside is a photograph: a pink-haired woman holding a baby, smiling at the camera. Kikuzakura understands. There’s news of her parents in here, and the person in the photo is her mother. She keeps flipping. It’s a diary… a story from the past, unfolding before Kikuzakura page by page.

Lump of Sugar. Yes, Lump of Sugar again — the sugar-cube studio. Its new game is here once more. 这次彻底踢掉了其他所有的傻逼画师，只留下了唯一能打的萌木原ふみたけ，而且萌木原作为唯一的画师还进化了画风，简单来说就是看起来更好看了。 I have to say, the game’s promotion came with some big surprises. Beyond what I mentioned earlier about the girls being drawn even better-looking, another surprise was the worldview setting and the game’s overall atmosphere. The game’s marketing leaned heavily on “Momiji,” and combined with the title itself, Enrite Kono Ha wa Kurenai ni, it finally managed to scrape together a bit of literary flair. It’s genuinely hard for an eroge to have a title with any literary flair. Everyone knows that these days, dumbass Japanese ACG titles have all turned into the structure of “kanji noun/adjective” + “katakana foreign-word fragment,” and it’s been going on for way too many years. Like “Hoshifuru Yoru no Farnese,” “Shojo Sprinkle,” “Apeiria of the Sea of Views,” “Haruoto Alice * Gram,” “Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue,” “Istoria of the Water-Burial Silver Coin,” “Simulacrum of the Moon Shadow"—and besides that kind, there are even more dumbass game titles written entirely in katakana or hiragana with no kanji at all, so many I don’t even know what to say. So I’m honestly puzzled: aren’t Japanese people always calling for their own native culture? You can’t pull that off if everything’s in katakana, right? Are you all going to write exclusively in katakana from now on? Even Mimorin tweeted that she was taking a walk, and she wrote ウォーキング instead of 散歩. I don’t know if Japanese people just find typing katakana more convenient than kanji, which is why they’re so hooked on it. All that said, I really like the title “縁りて此の葉は紅に”. I also really like the autumn-leaves mood and the setting. And you can roughly work out what the title means: because of a “connection / fate” premise, “the leaves here have begun to turn red.” Honestly, I thought January’s lineup was pretty mid all around, and this game ended up being my last hope. After playing it, I’d say it’s a decent step up — though there’s still room to grow.

If you listen to a lot of erotic audio… oh wait, I mean ASMR, dummy head recording, whatever you call those drama tracks for stress relief and sleep, you’re probably familiar with the word “soine”. Even if you don’t know Japanese, you recognize the character for “sleep,” so you can guess it means “sleeping together” recordings. So yeah, Sizhai is truly disgusting. Can’t find a partner, so he relies on games to get him a girl; and when he does find a girl in a game, he just stands there waiting for her to throw herself at him; and even when she does, he’s picky about her; and not just picky—his criteria are absurd: too ugly, no; bad voice, no; not a virgin, no; non-human but doesn’t end up with the protagonist, no; damaged goods, no; a ghost that gets exorcised, no. Most importantly, she has to bang the protagonist quickly no matter what. And not just bang—some even demand she sleep with him. Kidney-level isn’t enough; it has to be heart-level. And heart-level isn’t enough; the service has to be perfect. So as Sizhai gets pickier, games get more complex, and the ideal moe girl is born: one who unconditionally throws herself at a total loser, sleeps with him until he dozes off, and does it all for nothing. Just think about it! But even though otaku are tighter with their wallets than fujoshi, there are still some suckers with more money than sense, so many eroge makers deliberately cater to them, scamming otaku out of their cash. Look, here’s another game that pops up with a clear goal: draw a cute girl, then tell you—buy our game and this cute girl will sleep with you! The game is called Soine Kano Gyutto Dakishimete, which means “close-up girlfriend, hugging you super tight.” Buy it or not?! We’re asking you, buy it or not! With Ameda Yuki on art and Natsumi Wako as the lead heroine’s voice actress, such an insane lineup—buy it or not! Just buy it!

I’ve had this feeling for a while now: Alcot is done for. Looking back, Alcot’s peak was probably around the time of Clover Days. Their sub-label Alcot Honeycomb was doing well too, and Clover Days itself had the art advantage from the start. On top of that, other stuff like Spring Limited and the “ignore the future” sister-complex games carved out their own style. From any angle, it looked like they were about to take off. But that didn’t happen. I don’t know the exact reason — I just heard Clover Days sold poorly and counted as a loss. After that, Alcot honeycomb’s later titles seemed to lose their soul, at one point they even brought in a landmine specialist to write the story, and their main artist left too. They put out LoveRec — honestly I think it’s okay, but it still got middling reviews. And then it just kept getting worse. That mom-goddess whatever game Alcot put out last year — I couldn’t even be bothered to look at it. I couldn’t even find any reviews. It got completely treated like air… Alcot’s own Twitter account posts stuff every day, and it all gives off this “company is going bankrupt, everything must go” vibe — it’s all Clover Days merch and other ancient junk. That feeling, man, it keeps making me think they’re about to fold any minute. And so Alcot has a new title out this year, with the tagline “the proper sequel in the Alcot lineup.” I took one look and thought, yep, they’re really about to go under. Because the last company that pulled this “true sequel” move was Lass, and they ended up putting out a “long-delayed true sequel” too, and then they croaked. What actually bugs me more is — since when the hell does Alcot even have a “proper sequel” to anything? So your LoveRec was just a throwaway? Your Clover Days was fudged together too? Then I looked a bit closer and it clicked: they probably mean a proper sequel within that old “parody isekai half-sci-fi” series style of theirs. 《幼なじみは大統領》, Onigokko!, and 中の人などいない! are all roughly that style, and their later stuff seems to have drifted away from that direction. So this so-called “proper sequel” is basically just them going back to that original direction. And so we got the title of the new game: Shogun-sama wa Otoshigoro (将軍様はお年頃).

I personally recommend Kage no Umi no Apeiria because it’s full of surprises and genuinely novel. Unfortunately, despite all my hype, it seems the game didn’t sell well last year — apparently it couldn’t even beat some other game’s FD. Still, Kage no Umi no Apeiria announced a sequel. Except it’s really just an FD, as you can tell from the title and cover art: Kage no Umi no Apeiria Casablanca no Kishi — the suffix is “Casablanca no Kishi” (The Knight of Casablanca). Normally, a fan disc gives you after-stories for the original cast plus new routes for characters who didn’t have one. That’s what I assumed Casablanca no Kishi would be, especially since the cover features those two side characters. Calling them side characters isn’t entirely fair — they did interact a lot with the protagonist in the main game, and one of them is the nurse connected to another main heroine, Mashiro. But in the virtual world, they’re two female knights. After playing it, though, I’d say this is less a fan disc and more an append disc.

Last October in Beijing, when Fengniu Jushi Zhu Niubi treated me to guanchang at the Dongsi Minfang restaurant, he asked me a question: “Your blog’s pretty badass these days, huh?” “Badass my ass. There’s exactly one badass thing about my blog.” “Where?” “Open Google, search for the keyword ‘妹ぱらだいす2’, and see who’s first.” “Search for what? Ichimoto… what?” “It’s Japanese!” So I guided Zhu Niubi through searching “妹ぱらだいす2”, and after seeing the first result, even Zhu Niubi couldn’t help but marvel: “Badass, badass, badass. Truly badass.” “Right? That’s the one badass thing about my blog, though I don’t know how to explain it.”

Clockup is a company that often puts out “very serious” games, even though most of the time that’s not the impression it gives. Because Clockup’s breakout work was euphoria, and I think you can figure out what kind of thing that game is if you look it up yourself. Ever since then, most of the games Clockup has released give off an impression of being “unvarnished.” By “unvarnished” I don’t just mean the “directness” and “brutality” of the game content, but more the way they embody the characteristics of “18+” games. What is “18+” anyway? It’s adult content, right? And what is adult content? It’s not just pornography, it’s also violence. So these two elements get splashed around to the fullest in a lot of Clockup’s games. Clockup has made a lot of nukige that express a lot of “erotic” intent, and at the same time it’s also made a lot of “story-driven” games that tell some very interesting stories. Of course, these stories don’t just have “eroticism”—they also have explicit “violence.” Even more absurdly, Clockup has also put out some baffling comedy nukige with a style completely different from its usual dark style. But all these wildly different games come from the same company brand, rather than doing what other companies do and spinning off a sub-brand to keep things categorized. It always feels so haphazard, which is exactly why I said at the start that Clockup always leaves you with some weird impression. That said, you can’t deny that Clockup still puts out a good game with real depth every now and then. Not just the early Natsu no Kusari, which had a bit of an art-film vibe—Maggot baits from a few years ago was also memorable. It depicts a story of hope being born once again in an utterly hopeless world, yet the game is still packed with very hardcore erotic and violent elements. Those elements aren’t gratuitous; they highlight the game’s themes very well. The game never seems to compromise for the sake of avoiding “extreme” elements—whatever CG is needed, it shows. No beautification at all. Sometimes I feel there’s even a touch of “aesthetics of violence” in there. Another game that reminds me of this style is DOOM. A lot of people have opposed violence. They’re all dead. So the original team behind Maggot Baits got back together at Clockup and brought us Nenurenu Hitsuji to Kodoku na Ookami, still with a slightly dark style, which naturally made me look forward to it.