Since I started playing eroge I’ve eaten a fair amount of shit, and my standards have kept dropping. At this point I figure a game just has to tell one story without being brain-dead, draw the characters decently, and not have some Sendai oba-san for a voice actress — that’s a good game. Fine, a “not-bad game.” Japanese people like to call an unexpectedly garbage game a “landmine.” You go in hyped, the drop is enormous, it doesn’t just fail to meet expectations, it’s a turd — like stepping on dog shit, like hitting a landmine, you just explode. Pretty apt, honestly. I haven’t played many landmines, to be fair. Maybe I just don’t want much, so I don’t expect much, and I’m easy to please. No matter how ridiculous a game gets, I figure it’s at least dumb in an amusing way, at least it’s got something. Whether a game is dumb or garbage mostly depends on the dev team. Some games, I think the devs could’ve just played them once themselves and known what level they were at — no need to let the players judge, judging it themselves would’ve been enough. One thing puzzles me though: some eroge are clearly made with zero care in every department. The dev team has to know it’s a slapdash rush job. And they still ship it and sell it. In other words: you know it’s a turd, you put it on sale anyway, you won’t make money, you’ll only make enemies. Why insist on releasing it? Today’s subject is a game called Aoiro Note.

Back when I played World of Warcraft, I’d always run into these “casual guilds.” They didn’t have any strict raid schedule. Anyone could join, and the guild leader would help out the newbies a bit, and the atmosphere was relaxed. Every now and then they’d run a raid, but most of the time there were no rules at all — just people screwing around. A lot of the hardcore players wanted the kind of guild with a rigid hierarchy and harsh rules that could push into better raids for better gear. They had nothing but contempt for the “casual guild” type. Most of them couldn’t wrap their heads around what the point of such a lazy, ambitionless guild even was. But the members of those casual guilds didn’t care. They just quietly lived their lives. I’ve had my own hardcore phase too. I used to not get casual guilds either — until I got old, until I no longer had the time to dump into a game as a hardcore gamer, and I joined a casual guild, because no other guild would take me. Once I was in, I understood. The guild looked like it was just “a tag for people who don’t have a guild,” but it wasn’t that simple. The core of a guild like that is almost always the leader. The leader is very likely a middle-aged guy — good-tempered, easygoing, doesn’t get angry. Because the guild takes all comers, the leader is constantly playing peacemaker. Members might rub each other the wrong way, but most of them have no complaints about the leader. Plenty of members leave when they find a new guild, and the leader wishes them well. Some people complain that the guild has no events, can’t down bosses, can’t get gear, and all the leader can do is apologize and say he’s useless. For a casual guild like this, lose the leader and it’s done for in a heartbeat. But these leaders have a hell of a lot of willpower, and they always manage to keep the guild alive. Once I was chatting with a guild leader and asked him out of curiosity: “Why do you pour so much energy into keeping a guild like this running?” “A game is like society,” he answered. “There are always people out there who don’t belong anywhere, who have no home. They need something like a family to take them in, to give them a harbor that feels like home.” I still think about that line a lot. It makes a lot of sense. Whether our parents are around or not, we always feel lonely — that loneliness of “nobody is here with me” — so we need something like a “family” to let us escape and rest for a while, a harbor for the heart. That’s why you see people trying to do this in real life too — adopting orphans and whatnot. In fiction there are even more of these characters: the ones who take in lost children, the “hopeless good guy” setup, that’s everywhere. Like this game, Ouchi ni Kaeru made ga Mashimaro desu (お家に帰るまでがましまろです).

Kage no Umi no Apeiria (景の海のアペイリア)… This is a game built on deception.

These days most galge are locked into a mold — standard school romance, over-the-top bloodbath, or the “playable” kind. “Playable” means the game has some actual game to it, unlike a traditional visual novel. Maybe lots of choices, maybe combat, maybe investigation. Right, investigation. The easiest thing to bolt onto an AVG is an investigation and deduction system. Throw together a Danganronpa-style investigation screen, then pile up a bunch of choices during the deduction phase — points for right answers, deductions for wrong ones. Compared to building an RPG with combat, this is as simple as it gets, and it’s the go-to for any studio trying to inject “gameplay” into an AVG. So this month we got a game called Tantei Seven (タンテイセブン), which is just “Detective Seven” (I’ll call it Detective Seven from here on). The marketing pushed the “mystery detective” angle hard, and the promo art was so over-the-top cool that it instantly reminded us of a certain game called Persona 5. The OP is genuinely hype too — gives off a “there’s something big here” vibe. I happen to like this kind of setup, so I gave it a spin this month. And after playing it, I was fully satisfied… (on multiple levels)

Haruoto Alice＊Gram, also known as My Daily Life With the Black-Tights, White-Tights, and Blonde Big-Tittied Girls in the Mental Hospital, comes from the Japanese eroge company Nanawind. It assembles star artists Nanao Naru and Takanae Kyourin giving it their all. A luxurious voice cast: the 36-year-old Sendai auntie who can’t find work and begs eroge companies on Twitter to no avail voices a heroine, the nearly-30-still-unmarried Ishihara Mai gets picked as a side heroine, and Ozaki Mami — the professional seiyuu who landed one lead in Girls und Panzer and then never got another anime gig — does a typecast brain-dead foreign ojou-sama performance. After several delays and repeated script polishing, it finally launched with much fanfare this month, with PlayDRM standing guard, leaving countless otaku sighing at the mysterious 300 and unable to play. Two weeks after release, it hit fifth place on ErogameScape’s most controversial games of the month, right behind that bug-ridden mess Tantei Seven.

Someone once left a comment on one of my blog posts expressing contempt for PULLTOP. Honestly, my own feelings about PULLTOP are fine — they’ve put out some games I like, what with the plane-making one, the country romance, and the stargazing one. But PULLTOP has definitely also released some mediocre and even mind-numbingly sleep-inducing games. Most of those were the work of their sub-brand, though. PULLTOP LATTE was literally built as a nukige label, so if it’s boring, whatever — at least the main brand is fine, right? Like the guy in the comments said, he thinks PULLTOP itself is stupid, and sometimes I agree. Take the plane-making game — it was probably one of the first Japanese eroge to make the jump to STEAM. The publisher was a company called MoeNovel. I looked into MoeNovel, and the registered asset info lists it as a sub-brand of willplus. And willplus is the parent company of the PULLTOP brand. willplus is actually pretty big, with a bunch of labels under it — plenty of nukige, some normal stuff too. The old Propeller, PULLTOP, ensemble, all of them were willplus labels. I know guilty too — they do NTR. A company that big should be doing well, right? Yet I keep watching them make one dumb move after another. Some of their decisions are just braindead. How braindead, specifically? Back to the earlier topic. Since PULLTOP = MoeNovel, that means PULLTOP chose to publish its own games overseas itself — no licensing agent involved. Should be fine, right? The plane-making game had a great reputation, plenty of Western otaku wanted to play it, a fan translation was already finished, and lots of people said they’d buy it the moment it hit STEAM. Heaven and earth and man were all aligned. PULLTOP probably didn’t even need to translate anything — just grab the English translation license and lie back collecting STEAM money…

Marriage is happening later and later in Japan, and more and more people can’t find a partner at all. So the country keeps cranking out “get married already” content — dramas, music, anime, manga… games — all trying to sell you on the romance-and-matrimony package and get you dreaming about wedded bliss. Kekkon Shugi Kokka (結婚主義国家) is one of those games. Originally it looks like it was a small doujin title; by the time I played it, it had been polished up and turned into… a mobile game. It’s also been split into several volumes. Volumes one and two are free, the rest cost money — about 250 yen a pop. I only tracked it down out of curiosity, and I couldn’t even finish volume one. Once I heard the later volumes are just parallel-world stories, I shelved it. So this is a view through a keyhole — volume one only.

Years ago, The Fruit of Grisaia blew up as Frontwing’s anniversary title, and it’s not hard to see why. The game itself is rock solid, and it nails the mix of “daily-life comedy” and “plot-driven drama” — the 30-hour common route is all slice-of-life gags, while the other 30 hours of heroine routes lean hard into wild plot twists. A game that goes “grab both handles and grip them both tight” like that was never going to escape glowing reviews. The Fruit of Grisaia: possibly a masterpiece After that, Frontwing struck while the iron was hot and put out sequels in the series, including The Labyrinth of Grisaia and The Eden of Grisaia, plus several DLCs for the game. By the time the last DLC, The Melody of Grisaia, came out, the whole Grisaia series was complete, and the game series even got an anime adaptation. Looks like Frontwing put a period at the end of the Grisaia saga and moved on to making new anti-American propaganda spectacles…

Confucius, Jesus, Guang Liang and Shinjou Yuu all said it: “first love is infinitely beautiful.” Especially in Japan, a country with an especially deep complex about “初めて” (the first time), “first love” means a sweeter, more awkward, even slightly painful memory you can’t stop chewing on. “First love” is the first time someone’s heart stirs, the first time they taste what romance is, the first time they start to mature emotionally and learn the playbook. After going through it, a person might turn into a smooth operator or a cynical old hand who no longer gets moved by the simple stuff. Seen that way, first love really is precious.

Back in high school I read web novels every day. A lot of them were… okay, I guess. Some were way too terminally online, but at least they told a coherent story with a distinct flavor. If it was entertaining I didn’t nitpick the literary quality, and if it was actually serious I wouldn’t treat it like a power fantasy. Man, though, seriously written web novels are rare. Most are drowning in internet slang and come with their own snark. A little self-aware snark in a literary work isn’t necessarily bad—it can add flavor—but overdo it and it gets ugly. I remember two web novels I read: one called Sanguo Houhei Zhuan and another called How I Picked Up the Campus Belle. The latter is actually decent—I’d recommend it, it’s solid for a school romance. The former just made me shake my head… I bring them up because they share a trait: both love their own snark.