Although I enjoyed Saga Planets’ game from last year, HanaSaki Work Spring! (man, the katakana part of that title is a pain to remember), and considered it a well-rounded game with “no real flaws in the story,” “very entertaining daily conversations,” “cute heroines,” “some standout music,” and “art definitely worth checking out,” I had a bad feeling about the company’s new release this year, Floral Flowlove, from the very start. So, at first it was described as a “ojou-sama-related” game, which already sounded boring to me. After all, when you hear “ojou-sama,” you think of the kind of thing from Note company—gorgeous style, cultured ladies, and the protagonist either infiltrates or lives a luxurious high-society life as a young master. I had no interest in that kind of setup. Then the full title, character designs, and setting were revealed, and I was completely let down… “あの日、俺は天使を見た” “That day… I saw an angel.” And then the story was the usual cliché setup: the protagonist at an elite school surrounded by all kinds of ojou-samas, especially the main heroine who reeked of desperate affection. I saw the scenario was by Tōta, a regular for Yuzusoft, and I even thought about ignoring this game entirely… Later the OP movie was released. Honestly, it was several orders of magnitude worse than HanaSaki Work Spring!’s. Many of the girls didn’t do anything for me; it was pure moege vibes, the simplest and most粗暴 kind of moege. But then I thought, I didn’t want to give up on Saga Planets just yet, so I tried the trial version. It turned out there was some substance there, including quite a bit of religious content. And I suddenly realized that the one who shone in the trial wasn’t the heroine who looked laughably desperate, but the foreign princess, Aa-chan. As for the other characters, they seemed just as dumb as expected. “If the full game digs into this religion and princess theme, maybe it’ll be salvageable.” With that thought, I played the full version, intending to “just do the princess route and stop.” I had zero interest in the other characters, and they didn’t seem to have much screen time anyway. But man, once I started, I couldn’t stop. I did the princess route, then went through all the other routes, and finally stayed up all night to finish the True End. And my opinion of the game during that playthrough was like a roller coaster—low to high, high to low, then low to high again… This is the first game that gave me such a wild ride and made me slap my own face repeatedly. ISLAND was similar, but that was the writer deliberately showing off, so it’s a different type.

前一阵玩nukige太多了，然后nukige玩多了又玩了一票废萌キャラゲー，觉得自己还是应该回到“故事导向”的基本路线上来，搜了下看到了我个人非常喜欢的《紙の上の魔法使い》的脚本师的一个早期作品，叫做《運命予報をお知らせします》,简单看了下日本人在中二空间对它的评价，觉得应该没问题，也就开始玩了。 The game is supposed to be only a dozen hours or so, but it felt longer than I expected. I came away pleasantly surprised, maybe because it’d been a while since I’d played something with writing this good. It got to the point that after finishing it, I booted up the newly released Floral Flowlove (フローラル・フローラブ) and just couldn’t take the gap in prose quality between the two. The former reads like something a college student would write; next to it, the latter is straight-up middle-schooler level…… Anyway, probably because my Japanese has gotten better, I’ve started finding a lot of really dumb phrasing genuinely stupid — it’s not just about clawing my way to understanding the meaning anymore.

I got into HookSoft games pretty early — back when I was still a virgin. I remember the one I played was called HoneyComing. I actually found it on the school FTP out of boredom, and it was one of those green install versions with no translation. I couldn’t understand the text back then, but the game did have a manga scanlated by Sumisora! I flipped through it out of boredom. Fortunately the setup was simple enough that after reading the manga, I could roughly follow the dialogue from the tone, the character sprites, and the occasional kanji. Something about an idiot protagonist taking a class on how to pick up girls at school… all that nonsense. I do remember there was this one girl with a chopstick stuck in her hair who was pretty cute. I liked her. Can’t remember her name now — something-gaya, I think. Anyway, I thought the game was pretty good at first. Mostly because the art was nice and the girls were cute. I wasn’t watching much anime back then, but this game really sparked something in me — activated my inner moe pig genes, I guess. Kind of nostalgic to think about. Oh, and it was definitely the 18+ version. First time I saw a girl gobbling down mosaic censorship, it scared the shit out of me so hard my dick got hard. Took me a while to calm down. But time flies. Nearly ten years later, that virgin who first touched a Hook game has grown up into an old virgin. Really makes you sigh — Time flies, huh. Though I don’t know why my eyes are watering as I sigh…

I honestly have no idea how to translate the title Yome Sagashi ga Hakadorisugite Yabai, because of that ヤバい in there. According to some Japanese department professor’s explainer article, writing yabai in katakana is a trend among young Japanese people, and it means the thing has the opposite meaning. やばい originally meant “oh no,” while ヤバい carries the same double-edged opposite sense as badass, meaning “so good it’s kind of alarming.” Honestly, translating this やばい as “insane” fits better, because whether something good or bad happens to you, you can just say “well, that’s insane.” So at first Yome Sagashi ga Hakadorisugite Yabai should mean something like “the wife hunt is going so well it’s insane.” Then I played the game and realized I’d overthought it. Better not jump to conclusions about that やばい.

“Why did it end up like this… A perfectly good moe nukige brand, just like that, dead…”

I downloaded Koiken Otome (恋剣乙女) ages ago, heard the story was pretty mid, and never finished it. Then recently I was startled to hear that Shimura Yumi is retiring from voice acting for good… Which reminded me that Inoue Hana is also in Koiken Otome, so I grabbed it to wallow in nostalgia for a bit. So how is this game… yeah, exactly as expected, pretty mid. Not that it has zero bright spots. Worth mentioning in passing: Koiken Otome has an FD called Koiken Otome Sainen (恋剣乙女～再燃～). My personal advice is to play both together, because if you only play the main game the story just ends on a wet fart…

Alcot is supposedly on its deathbed. First the pillar of the studio, illustrator Yushi Ninomura, up and quit — went home to play gacha games. So this year Alcot put out nothing but a cash-grab FD for LoveREC with a handful of new CGs, plus an even more blatant cash-grab, Clover Days Plus, which is just the HCGs converted to Emote. The Chinese patch shipped same-day, if that tells you anything. But even if the main studio is finished, they’ve still got the sub-label Alcot Honey Comb, which tends to put out bolder stuff. I’ve played plenty of theirs — Shunkai Gentei, Mujikaku Mirai, that sort of thing — and this time we get something with a very different flavor: Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta. I say “different flavor” because most Alcot games give off a slice-of-life, comedy-heavy vibe. Genuinely sad ones are rare (not that they don’t exist — that Shinigami no Kiss thing at the start probably counts as sad too). So Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta shows up waving the banner of “a romance between predator and prey.” Everything up to here was made up. I can’t keep it going, so I’ll just be honest: the reason I’m playing a 2014 game is that I was bored listening to music on YouTube, heard the OP, thought it sounded interesting, and picked it up.

Around November last year, ensemble (Ongaku-ka) put out a game called Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata, and I thought it was pretty good at the time. The story is whatever, but there are so many characters that you’re bound to like at least one of them — picking a route and going through it isn’t a bad way to spend time. So as everyone knows, Japanese devs are great at squeezing out surplus value. The moment something gets a decent reception, they’ll immediately crank out a sequel or an FD to milk another round of cash. Visual novel or Shirouto Zukan 7, doesn’t matter — if there’s confirmed demand, they’ll keep selling. On that front Japanese devs have even less shame than Baidu. So less than two months after release, ensemble announced an FD for Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata, and the FD’s name is appropriately FD-ish: Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata Kasaneta Omoi o Zutto. Forever overlapping feelings, or whatever… It finally came out last month. The game isn’t big, only about 2 GB. Honestly I went in expecting the usual FD stuff — prequels, sequels, maybe a new hook. That might be because the ones I’ve played are things like Wheel Country and the Grisaia series. But really, an FD is basically an After Story: a forced extension of life for a story that already ended. For a character-driven game like this, an FD can only ever be garnish for the sex scenes. I was fully prepared to just skim through it. Didn’t expect this FD to actually have a few things that exceeded my expectations.

One of the writers on Harumade, Kururu is a guy named Watanabe Ryoichi. His latest work is Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, but before that he and his buddy Kio Nachi worked on a bunch of eroge, including some with seriously weird premises. I looked into it way back, and eventually noticed these works tend to share one thing: They love a mindfuck twist. Right at the end they tell you the protagonists were living in a dream, or that the world wasn’t the real one. One of the better-known Watanabe Ryoichi and Kio Nachi collaborations is Sukima Sakura to Uso no Machi. No prizes for guessing, that game ends with exactly that kind of reveal. Though the two weren’t the planners on that one, so who knows if it’s their fault. Anyway, Harumade, Kururu is one of these two madmen’s joint projects. Why’d I play it? Because the OP hooked me again, obviously. Harumade, Kururu… the art’s got those twisted faces again, but it’s not the full NekoNeko Soft crew so it’s not a total disaster. According to the reviews on Chuuni Space, the game wins on story, and I’m a story guy, so I figured I’d give it a run. That run took half a year. More precisely, I did the pre-OP and a chunk of the post-OP stuff first, then only recently finished the rest. How do I put this… the story is genuinely insane, tons of imagination. But this game should not be… this long.

Goddammit, ever since I started playing eroge I’ve learned a bunch of words that never showed up in any textbook. Stuff like yarichin, yariman, and then a while back I ran into yarisā. I’m sitting there wondering what the hell a yarisā even is, and of course I had to look it up, and of course that cost me an entire night of my youth. Everyone knows (don’t even say you don’t, I won’t believe you) that yariman is the word for a slut, and yarichin is the male version (hell, I don’t know what the good Chinese equivalent is, you can’t exactly call it “black foreskin”), so by analogy, yarisā is a sā of dare demo yareru, where sā is, of course, sākuru—circle in English—which in Japanese katakana means a “club” or “circle.” So put it together and a yarisā is a circle where anyone can get laid, or to spell it out plainly, a “hookup orgy club.” And while I was looking up yarisā, I found a couple of explanatory posts on Quora. That’s when I learned this word has way more going on under the hood than I thought. Quora: Some scandals involving Japanese university students Quora: Why do Japanese tennis clubs have such a bad reputation?