Someone once said that in a highly mature market, to raise production efficiency and lower costs, everything gets strictly standardized — even put on an assembly line. Which is why Japan, that special place where eroge still actually sells, is no exception for something like the visual novel. Before I started RSS-subscribing to various release sites, I wouldn’t have believed it — turns out there are a shitload of new eroge coming out in Japan every single week. The release lists alone are a sea of stars, like falling into an ocean of porn where one mouthful of semen-flavored seawater chokes you until you feel like you’re drowning in it. Lots of releases doesn’t mean high quality. Aside from the monthly big releases, most are small productions or just selling pure porn appeal, not much quality to speak of — the kind of thing you play for a bit and move on. It’s like liking horror novels: you can camp out at the bookstore for new releases, or you can wallow in 5ch horror threads chasing web serials. Different taste, different flavor. But once you’ve seen enough, you start noticing patterns — especially in a market as mature as Japan’s… Uh… I mean, even for eroge there’s a “basic formula” baked in. Most studios that want to play it safe follow that formula. Sales might not explode, but they sure won’t tank either… Games like that have passable art, passable voice acting, passable writing, a passable price tag, and end up being a passable eroge… Which brings us to Koi wa Yumemiru Mouretsu Girl! (恋は夢見る妄烈ガール!) — one of those “about right” eroge.

I’ve never had hemorrhoids, so I have no idea how much they hurt. And since I’ve never had them, I don’t really get how you’re supposed to treat them either. Someone told me it’s basically your asshole rotting, and only suppositories will do… okay, maybe that’s crude, but it’s the truth. Internal, external, mixed — I never bothered learning the difference, which is why I’m saying all this: I genuinely don’t know whether a person can shove a suppository up their own butt. And since I don’t know that, some game premises just leave me lost… like this one, Nukige Imouto ga Ji ni Natta node Zayaku o Irete Yatta Ken (妹が痔になったので座薬を入れてやった件).

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this more than once, but I’ve got a bad habit: I find games by listening to music. This time I stumbled onto the song Octave Rain, thought it was solid… looked it up, turns out it’s a game OP, so I went and grabbed the game… The game is called PARA-SOL. If your English isn’t terrible, you can tell that PARASOL means sunshade/parasol, so the title literally means “parasol.” When I downloaded it I wasn’t expecting it to be in Chinese. Fired it up and — holy shit, it’s translated. Didn’t see that coming… Before playing I checked what Japanese players thought. Most of them said the game “starts out insanely good and then goes insanely stupid later.” In the Chinese community the go-to explanation is more like “I literally have no idea what I just read!” Plenty of things I don’t understand. I’m the best at reading crazy-people works, so I opened the game without hesitation… A few days later I finished it… There’s only one route, and I had zero desire to touch a second one… The reason is simple: it’s way too insane!

I found this album completely by accident. A while back I followed a link recommended by the socialite Fubuki Hoshino on Google Plus, ended up wandering around SoundCloud, and discovered a whole new world. SoundCloud really does have a lot of musicians active on it — though of course there are even more music fans. Plenty of remixers and musicians choose to release their work on SoundCloud. Most of it, well… personally I think it’s pretty slapdash, but at the same time there are quite a few tracks with something going for them too. Most of the remixes and original tracks on SoundCloud are electronically produced music — not everyone can afford to put a band together, after all. That means the music there tends to have a strong beat and a thick electronic flavor. Once you accept that premise it’s actually pretty catchy. I personally found some interesting tracks, like this one by aiobahn — the latest, 永久の宴, is quite distinctive and leans into a flavor that suits Western tastes. Western listeners call that move where the chorus suddenly drops in a massive bassline to deepen the rhythmic drive Drop the beat. If you look closely you can see in the comments on 永久の宴 just how satisfied the Westerners are with that beat drop… Of course, SoundCloud isn’t only this boom-tish music. There’s some more Japanese-leaning stuff too, though most of it is still electronic. A few doujin circles attach SoundCloud preview links to their promo pages — that’s another route in. And that’s where I found this little album, ゆのみっくにお茶して…

Some eroge studios, to make their games’ themes clear, put together projects tied to the seasons. But sometimes those projects get a little ambitious, and they do a “four seasons series”… meaning four games, each set in a different season, each telling a different story. Wake up. Put away that kitchen knife and those razor blades you were about to mail to Japan—they didn’t even make it through customs. I’m not talking about Shinji Nii, I’m not talking about Natsuyume Nagisa, and I’m not talking about Hatsuyuki Sakura. I’m talking about the “Season Kana ABB” series put together by Watanabe Ryoichi and Kio Nachi.

For a lot of people whose entire knowledge of Japan stops at the Second Sino-Japanese War and at the level of Aoi Sora and Matsushima Kaede, the impression they have of the country is basically this: “perverted,” “off-the-wall,” “all kinds of fetishes,” “twisted,” and so on and so forth. It’s not hard to see why. At least in mainland China, the Japanese social news you come across is nothing but some foot fetishist sipping a Coke while licking a stranger’s feet for 30 minutes, some ear-cleaning massage parlor, all sorts of weird services, those utterly pointless but deeply disgusting otaku fleshlight things, people who eat a girl’s shit, people who drink her holy water, and on and on… By any reasonable standard Japan should be a country with very strict moral restraints, but that’s exactly why people cut loose harder when they do… Then again, is anywhere else any less twisted? I flipped through mainland social news and there’s no shortage of twisted stories. I know a girl I went to middle school with — she posted on social media that she ran into a purebred “foot fetishist” on the streets of Zhengzhou, who politely asked to photograph her feet specifically… and to kiss them… and she said yes. Hard to say whether that’s real “twisted” or “perverted,” but my point is that these people who clash so hard with social norms exist everywhere in the world. Japan just likes to drag them out under the spotlight. “Otaku” and “ACG” culture have seemed stuck in the swamp of “pornography” from the very start. Most of the content is about sex, even though most of the people consuming it have never had any… so the impression they give others isn’t great either. Which is why when a classmate introduced me to someone, they’d add helpfully, “Don’t worry about him, he’s a 2D person, he’s not interested in you.” and I’d sit there dying inside. Thanks to the bigger imagination that ACG culture spawned, Japan has a fun hobby: “moe-fication” and “girl-ification.” Can’t find a girl? Just turn the stuff around you into girls. Trains become girls — when you ride the train, it’s like you’ve entered the girl’s body. Pens become girls — when you grip the pen, it’s like you’re stroking the girl’s slender fingers… Cola becomes a girl — when you squeeze the bottle, it’s like you’re caressing black tights. Pocari Sweat becomes a girl — when you… okay, never mind. So whether it’s Anime, Comic, or Game (though the term ACG probably wasn’t coined by the Japanese — they say マンガ, not Comic), there’s always a game where some object gets turned into a girl and becomes the protagonist. Especially in visual novels. I’ve seen an alpaca turned into a girl, a whale turned into a girl, a robot turned into a girl, a camcorder turned into a girl, a train turned into a girl, a cursed sword turned into a girl, not to mention all the non-human ghosts and gods… and animals and whatever else. So at this point, if you told me there’s a game where a girl is a smartphone turned human, I wouldn’t even be surprised. Honestly, it feels less like surprise and more like “well, obviously.” I stroke my phone for half an hour every day. Was I subconsciously treating it as a girl all along?

So I played a shitload of Japanese adult games again this year, but compared to last year there’s actually some progress. Last year I think I played 80. This year I counted… 77. See, fewer than last year. That proves I’m one step closer to becoming a normie, right??

I was already suspicious of Hatsukoi Sankai-me from the moment I saw the promo material. The title literally means “third-time first love.” First love is supposed to emphasize the first, right? Once you’re past the first time, the second one can’t be called a first love anymore. So how the hell do you get three of them? I wasn’t interested in the game to begin with. The promo looked whatever, the lead heroine was voiced by Sendai-baasan, and I didn’t recognize anyone else in the cast. The only reason I wanted to play it was the little sister voiced by Uehara Aoi… And no, I’m not a siscon. I need to make that clear. What I didn’t expect was that after playing it, it actually exceeded my expectations. Hell, it might be the first game this year I’ve seen that “gets its story completely straightened out.” At the very least it’s at the level of a good title, right? The only real mystery for me was why the protagonist’s romance is called a “third first love.” Honestly, I went in expecting the game to give me a proper explanation.

I do have a soft spot for LASS — probably obvious from how much I shit on it. 11eyes was probably the first game I ever really grinded through back in the day. Honestly, a great experience. The part where 劫の眼 kicks in at the end still gets me hyped, and the protagonist’s cheat abilities are pretty damn sick — it blows away all the gloom from earlier and just feels good. Also, the 1v1 between Kusakabe-senpai and Kusakabe Misao — wait, I mean the Kusa… anyway, that was written really well. At least, I’d put it up there with the best battle writing I’ve played. And so, as you probably know, LASS fell straight into a slump after 11eyes. They put out Shoujo Shin’iki, which was way too far up its own ass, then came Mayoi no Futari, which was pretty badly written, and after that they started cranking out short nukige this year — one about getting married, one about ninja training… I figured the company was doomed, and then out of nowhere they announced Liber_7. Liber_7 was originally supposed to come out as a follow-up to the 11eyes series, but Shoujo Shin’iki bombed so hard that LASS ran out of money, so it got delayed, and delayed, and delayed again — and only now have they finally squeezed this thing out. The president of LASS (I think that’s who he is): the freshly married fatass Kenji Mana said, “Liber_7 shares the same worldview as 11eyes and 3days, and it will surpass them.” Of course nobody’s buying that bragging, right? Given what LASS can actually do these days, just telling one story properly would already be an achievement… And so Liber_7 got delayed, delayed, and delayed again. All of which was exactly what I expected, so it finally came out on the last game release day of 2016. Honestly, by the time I got to it I wasn’t really expecting this thing to surpass 11eyes anymore — I’d already played the trial version, and some of it was pretty cringe. So after playing the full release… it just felt even more awkward.

A lot of things in life come out of nowhere. You can’t sort them out by sheer personal effort — mostly it comes down to the course of history. Plenty of things happen out of the blue. Say you’re a shut-in otaku, and suddenly someone tells you they’ve got a new match lined up for you.