There are all kinds of “what if I could go back to school again” hypotheticals online, and plenty of discussions built on top of them. Not that I haven’t had the same thought. I’ve talked about the possibility with friends too. In high school I was a waste of space. Every exam I barely scraped a pass, teetering on the edge of the bottom of the year, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. I just kept going out to find internet cafes, or hitting up relatives’ places, or classmates’ houses that had a PC, dicking around on forums to see what was playable. I think I even saved up and bought a Pocket PC, kept refreshing the same few forums, and ended up a moderator on one of them. Young me was pretty garbage at studying, honestly. Chinese I learned by reading newspapers; English I learned by playing games. Math wasn’t that I didn’t get it — the teacher just never taught you how to derive anything. He’d shove the process at you, tell you to memorize it, and next time you see this kind of problem, do it like this. Physics I thought I knew, but the problems always came out wrong somehow. Chemistry I had zero interest in. My biology teacher looked at me like I was brain-damaged. Sometimes at night, when I’m studying Japanese and all sorts of stuff, I sigh at how good the internet is now. Never mind whether you can use Google — even if you hit a problem, you can search Quora and find plenty of people explaining the principle in plain terms. Back in my high school days, even getting online was a pain in the ass. And even though I could use Google freely back then, I couldn’t search up anything, because Chinese resources were far too scarce and my English wasn’t good enough yet. So to me the internet now is more like a “library” — quickly look up whatever knowledge you need. You don’t even need a textbook’s explanation. With some judgment, you can learn basically anything through the internet. And now I’m always sighing that I don’t have enough time to study, work is full of bullshit, and when I try to read a book my attention gets shredded by the internet after a while. If I could be sent back to school to study, I’d definitely be way more goated than the waste of space I used to be. So this “what if” — I’ve argued it with people. “You know what, if you put me back in school now to study, I’d absolutely kill it.” Haozhi across from me drained his beer after hearing my bragging. “Bullshit!” He dropped those two words… And left me sitting there dumbfounded. ………………

Kinda embarrassing to admit, but for someone who thinks of himself as a tough guy, my first time on a roller coaster was only 4 years ago. My workplace organized a free trip to some place in Zhengzhou called “Fantawild,” so that’s where I rode a roller coaster for the first time in my life. The feeling… hard to describe. All I know is it made my prostate very uncomfortable.

When I was a kid, I loved watching Disney animated films—stuff like Mulan, Tarzan, Aladdin. Those movies weren’t just well-made; they were fun to watch, and sometimes they’d break into song-and-dance numbers. So when the teacher asked us to write a review of a film we’d seen, I wrote about those. My feelings were pretty genuine—about as genuine as the game impressions I write now. And unsurprisingly, the teacher tore me a new one. She said I was shallow, criticized a bunch of things I’ve long since forgotten (this was primary school), but one line stuck with me. “American movies are all about commercialization. They have zero artistic value. What’s there to even write a review about?”

Asa Project, a company that used to be pretty damn good. They’re under Hook, I think. They made a name for themselves with Renai 0 Kilometer, then kept the style going with ひとつ飛ばし恋愛 and later Purumai Wars… and then this year they put out Suki to Suki de Sankaku Renai. Before I get into the new one, let’s walk through how Asa Project’s games have evolved…

You’re a 42-year-old middle-aged guy. You’ve got a family, a wife, and a daughter in middle school. Your days never change. One after another, and somewhere in there you’ve forgotten that time is even passing. Sometimes you shoot the shit with coworkers about nothing in particular. You’ve forgotten what the world out there even looks like. Work is a two-point commute with nothing in between — no fun, no passion. Your coworkers are all hooked on one thrill or another, chasing kicks online, hunting for strangers. You figure none of it means anything. Maybe you still love your wife. Sometimes you want to get intimate with her, and you get the cold shoulder. “You’re 42 already. What are you even doing this for? Aren’t you tired enough as it is?” Your wife has zero interest in the bedroom. It’s depressing. Sometimes you have to take care of it yourself. But sometimes your eyes drift toward your daughter. She’s nearly grown now, and she’s beautiful — sometimes she even reminds you a little of your wife. She’s completely unguarded at home, and sometimes you see things you shouldn’t. Sometimes, you even start to react to your own daughter… That’s dangerous.

I once saw some otaku girls who play otome games complaining: “In most visual novels the heroine kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat, and in otome games the heroine also kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat. Man, male-oriented or female-oriented, the heroine always has it rough. You get used to it.” Thinking about it, that’s pretty much true. In a lot of stories women are painted as fragile things that need a man to protect them. Even the “senpai” type in visual novels tends to get a later scene revealing she’s not actually that strong and is secretly fragile inside. It feels like something baked into the gender roles themselves. But every so often a game tries to change that. Sure, seeing the heroine carry the hero the whole way through in a male-oriented game is unrealistic. Everyone knows the protagonist is “the weakest” by default, and, well, by the end he’s always some broken-ass cheat character anyway. So all we can do is look at female-oriented games and see if any of them dare to make the heroine the strongest. So 断罪のマリア (Maria of Condemnation) might be one of those games. Not entirely, but it’s close — at the very least, the heroine’s combat power is the strongest in the game.

Kareni Sekai to Owaru Hana is a game I had mixed feelings about from the start — both anticipation and a bit of fear. Anticipation because the premise is intriguing, almost giving away nothing about what kind of story it’ll tell, and the art, character designs, and even the voice cast all felt really comfortable. A bit of fear because of the planner/scenario writer: Yukihito. Who is this Yukihito? You might not have heard of his other works, but there’s one you definitely know… Nekopara. English title Nekopara, and I don’t know the Chinese name, but I know its nickname: “Catgirl Porn” — it sold like crazy on Steam. He also did two nukige with Sayori, an artist from China, so when a writer like that suddenly drops a new title with what looks like a very abstract, artsy premise, how could you not suspect it might be a landmine? But after playing the trial last month, my doubts got even worse. Because the trial still explained almost nothing — what the game is trying to say, what the theme is, all still unclear… The world setting feels like a fantasy, and while that’s not uncommon in games, it’s everywhere in Japanese anime. The most recent example is Kowareta Sekai to Garasu no Hana — and the title format is suspiciously similar, which only deepened my suspicion that it might just be pretentious bullshit that ends up saying nothing at all… Of course, after playing it, those worries vanished. Or rather, I had it wrong — this isn’t some “artsy pretentious” game, it’s more like a fairy tale. Yeah, a fairy tale — the kind a mother tells her kid before bed, the “Long Long Ago,” “むかしむかし,” “once upon a time” kind… No wonder the world and scenery in this game feel so “fairy tale.”

Your Diary is a game by CUBE, and about… two years ago, I played the Chinese-patched version… Holy shit, it’s already been two years!!! I swear it felt like no time at all!!! Of course the impression that game left on me was still pretty good. Whenever someone who’s just getting into visual novels asks me for recommendations, I recommend this one. Reason’s simple: good art, good music, the story is a bit clichéd but not toxic, and it’s still a very orthodox, wholesome story — isn’t that perfect to hand to a newbie trying to get into visual novels! Back then I didn’t really look at what Japanese players thought of the game. Later, while reading up on CUBE, I checked it out, and found Your Diary doesn’t rate that high in Japan. I originally thought a story like this should get an 80, but it barely held onto a 70. What’s funny is some Japanese players called the game “boring.” Boring… that’s a hard one to call. My thinking at the time was that Japanese otaku probably love those “wild twists” and see Your Diary’s story as all formula, so they’d find it boring. Of course, if you asked me to look back on Japanese opinions now, I’d say they actually have a point…

I don’t know how other people chase that “immersion” feeling when they read a story. Let me just say what I think. Most of the time, when I come across a story, I notice some plot point that mirrors something that happened to me. Maybe the ending lines up with a stretch of my own life, maybe it only shares the same beginning but not the same end, maybe some character reminds me of a friend or an acquaintance, maybe the protagonist is a lot like me, and so on. Whenever I hit a story like that, I start thinking about my own stuff. Sometimes I even feel a bit of regret or wistfulness because the story went differently than reality did. That’s it. Yeah, that’s all. I’ve never imagined myself as the protagonist. I’ve never imagined the girls the protagonist meets as my girlfriend. I might think a character is cute, but that’s it. Anyone who knows me has probably noticed: I’ve never called a game girl “waifu,” I’ve never said “XXX is mai waifu” or anything like that. I like a character because I like her story, her personality, the things she says. As for looks… come on, Japanese art styles are all basically the same handful of templates, and one artist’s characters all look mass-produced. Everyone looks the same. So personality and story carry way more weight. One principle I hold: characters become full through their stories. And that’s not just true in fiction. In real life too, someone who’s been through a lot, who has a complicated past, naturally has a certain charm in how they talk and carry themselves. Hell, anyone can pull out some old war stories to impress people. Look at me, a washed-up old fuck, still bringing up the past to show off. So I rarely look at standalone artist illustrations. On Twitter I might like an artist’s style, glance at it, share it, sigh about how cute or pretty it is, but I don’t save it. Sometimes I’ll use one as an avatar, but I switch it out pretty quickly—it feels kind of rude, somehow. Right—without a story to prop them up, an empty character means nothing. Someone just standing there, and you don’t know their personality, their voice, their mannerisms—you know basically nothing about them. Saying you like them is almost empty talk. I don’t collect character art, but after playing this many games, I do have a collection of sorts. Mostly game music. Same style as before: the game songs I listen to are almost always from games I’ve actually played through. Especially OSTs—when I hear a track, I remember the story and the characters in it. If I happen to hear a good song from some game, I’ll listen for a while and then pick up the game, wanting to see what story is behind that song. So one day I heard “永遠の魔法使い.” I got curious. What kind of story produces a person who’s a jack-of-all-trades (八面玲瓏), who even with magic can’t grant a single wish and almost gives up…? So I played “魔女こいにっき” (Majo Koi Nikki).

I’m a person with some integrity. Mostly this shows up as my OCD. If I say I’ll do something, I’ll finish it, and if I don’t finish it I feel guilty, worried someone will call me out and roast me over it. Taken a step further: if I’ve opened the full release of a VN, I won’t drop it. One day I’ll finish it, no matter what. Note I said “full release.” Translation: if it’s just a trial version, yeah, I can absolutely bail. Magical☆Dears is one of those games I left sitting forever… one of many…