I’m personally a huge fan of horror-mystery stuff. Honestly, that’s the genre that got me into reading in the first place. Why? Because horror-mystery always dangles a hook in front of you and pulls you along, feeding your curiosity about what happens next. Compared to other works where you have no idea where the plot or story is headed, that’s already way better. It completely saved me in middle school, when I’d just read a few modern novels and gotten my face utterly wrecked by all that fantasy nonsense with no discernible main storyline.

What does it actually mean to love someone? Everyone has their own take, but from start to finish, “love” and “sexual desire” are tangled together. Straight or gay, if looking at someone doesn’t get you hard, you probably don’t love them enough—unless something’s wrong with you. Plenty of philosophers have mulled over matters of the heart, and they’ve praised or sneered at love in roughly equal measure. Most took a free and open attitude toward it, which is how we ended up with a lot of books that are, frankly, a bit “lewd.” None of that is the point. What I’m getting at is that “love” ultimately needs “sex” to express itself—but what if there’s a massive wall in the way? Like, say, the taboo of blood relation? Some say, “If you love her, make her happy.” But if you’re a real brother and sister with no chance of a future together, does loving her mean you should hand her over to someone else? To a normal person, that’s insane. And “エロ本を捨ててから兄の様子がおかしい” is exactly that kind of insane game.

“The world is big, but everyone is equal. Scoring with girls isn’t the exclusive right of the rich and handsome. Even a loser with nothing has the right to get girls.” “There are two ways to get a girl. One is to win her affection, fight for the boyfriend position, and finally score.” “The other way… is to be a girl hunter—let’s just call it hunting for short.”

My grandma says I’m a train enthusiast. Not that I have any memory of it. So she started digging up old stories, saying that when I was little I’d cry over nothing, so she’d push me in a stroller to some riverbank in downtown Zhengzhou, park me where I could see a railway bridge crossing the river, and just watch the trains go by. Only in that environment would I stop crying. That actually makes sense, but I have zero recollection of any of it now.

When we’re little, we all read fairy tales. Funny thing is, in fairy tales the protagonist is almost always a little girl. And the story is usually about a frail girl and the prince who protects her. Boys read them and want to become the prince, guarding their princess. Girls read them and want to become the princess, searching for a prince to protect them. I tried to remember the fairy tales I knew as a kid, and was surprised to find they don’t really have a clear gender bias. In other words, boys and girls read the same stories—explorations of strange worlds, the prince-and-princess tales passed down through generations. But time moves on, boys and girls grow up, and maybe they’ve quietly accepted that the fairy tales they heard were lies. Most boys no longer believe there’s a princess worth protecting, and most girls don’t really dream of a prince coming to save them. Looking back on those old tales brings a wry smile—can’t tell if it’s nostalgia, or just thinking how ridiculous I was to believe that stuff. Still, fairy tales never stop. They keep telling the story of princes and princesses, for anyone willing to listen.

I’d already made up my mind to play ワールド・エレクション (World Election) long before, and I remember it was the winter of 2015. Surrounded by one landmine visual novel after another, I couldn’t find more than a couple of decent CVs in a sea of games featuring Akino Hana — which, for a seiyuu nerd, is pure agony. Like a plant deprived of sunlight. Like an earthworm deprived of soil. Like a shut-in deprived of instant ramen. Like Four Leaf Clover deprived of TFboys. Then Whirlpool announced their new title, World Election, with heroine No. 1 Kururu voiced by Sawasawa Sawa — a beacon in the darkness that lit up this ugly bastard and left me so hyped I couldn’t even find my bearings. There’s no such thing as story supremacy anymore, no such thing as art supremacy anymore, no such thing as industry blockbuster supremacy anymore. As long as it’s Kiritani Hana, and she’s the main heroine, that’s the absolute best. But by the time this game actually came out, several months had passed, and honestly I’d lost most of my interest. You can pretty much guess where the plot’s headed just from the setup: a destroyer god drops out of the sky, a fictional world where multiple races coexist, an election between those races, and the ugly-ass protagonist is of course gonna bang all the non-humans too, plus you know he’s gotta drag the destroyer god herself into bed and teach her who’s boss. Still, I remembered this game had given me hope back last winter when I was in despair, finally letting me escape that sea of suffering where shitheads and Akino Hana were fucking everywhere, and I’m such a loyal, faithful guy, so considering Whirlpool keeps putting out games with decent premises that fall way short in the end, I picked it up in the educational spirit of improving my Japanese reading comprehension.

Last year I played the fortissimo series, and my personal feelings about it were complicated. Content-wise, the fortissimo series has some seriously melodramatic plot. Basically the world gets destroyed, and the one destroying it might even be your dad. Your dad destroys the world because he’s given up on it, so you, as the protagonist, go off to fuck up your dad. After a bunch of cheat-code showdowns you successfully fuck up dad and establish a new world. No real twists—just cheat vs. cheat, shouting louder, forced hot-bloodedness, justice always wins. Another big feature of this game is that fight mode and non-fight mode are two different worlds. During slice-of-life scenes everyone’s goofing around like a normal game, but the moment a fight starts it’s kill or be killed. Completely inconsistent… But despite all that, experience-wise the fortissimo series is a blast. There’s so much combat, and the atmosphere during fights is genuinely great. Especially that feeling of “shouting each other’s names at the top of your lungs and then busting out a cheat-code ultimate”—it’s genuinely hot-blooded, it’s hype, it’s satisfying. So for the previous fortissimo games, I’d say they’re ultimately not bad at all. I mean… When the hype kicks in, who cares about details.

Honestly, I didn’t want to play this at first. The trial version had been out for ages and I kept putting it off, and I had my reasons: First, the OP just didn’t grab me. I’ve been burned by a good OP more times than I can count—that’s one of my weaknesses when picking games. Second, the premise is way too light-novel-ish. A princess from the underworld comes to the surface to destroy the world—how many times have we seen that? A girl drops out of nowhere and meets the protagonist? A dime a dozen. Third, the art style is just too… sultry. I really didn’t like the character designs. Every girl looks like a sexually frustrated rapist. Maybe I’m better off as a simple moe pig—cute art appeals to me more. So for these pretty flimsy reasons, I kept ignoring the game. But it kept making moves—anime adaptation announced, ads everywhere, constant sales. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of backer the company had. Eventually I couldn’t take the flood of Twitter bombardment anymore, so I thought I’d check out the trial… And then I was hooked. How should I put it? The game is far, far, far, far better than I expected. Actually, it’s a gem.

Ryuuyoku no Melodia (竜翼のメロディア) is an old Uzumaki-sha game, built around singing and dragons — same half-fantasy flavor as usual for them. How do I put this… it’s very… long-winded?

There’s a fairly distinctive phenomenon in Eastern cultures: the “reincarnation” setup. Of course, it isn’t culture that decided this — it’s religion. Reincarnation gets preached a lot in Buddhism, and plenty of Eastern countries are big on Buddhism, so naturally the idea caught on with more people. What is “reincarnation”? Pretty much what it sounds like: a person dies and their soul is reborn in someone else’s body, sometimes with memories of the past life, sometimes without. There’s a bit of a “law of conservation of souls” vibe to it. In most literature, reincarnation tends to get tied to romance. Lovers from a past life fall in love again in the next cycle, cycle for thousands of years, meet hundreds of times, either end up together or never truly do, tossing and turning through infinite loops — and we, the audience, are left sighing. Why sigh? Because fate plays games with people, and you can’t help feeling that this is just how it is.