Lately the games I’ve been playing have been a bit unusual — either hand-chopping, big meat grubs, or hookup stuff. After wandering down the non-traditional path for so long, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for the old moe-charage, so when January rolled around and I was picking games, I found myself wanting something light and fun to play. So among the January releases, while I was downloading Toukyou NECRO, I spotted this game called Hanikami Clover. Compared to whatever Toukyou NECRO was doing, Hanikami Clover was clearly on the traditional cute-bishoujo game route. I got hyped, saw it was by Green Tea Soft, figured Green Tea Soft wouldn’t screw anything up — Minamijuujisei Renka seemed to have decent reviews, so this one probably wouldn’t be too bad either. Then I checked the official site for the CVs. The first heroine sounded like Gotou Mai right away, and the others — Akino Hana, Sendai Eri — were all solid voice actresses. But the absolute most explosive thing was when I later checked out the game’s OP. Deredere student council president, a sweet-loving senpai, an erotic girlfriend, a little sister who’s a useless-brother-manufacturing machine — paired with that seductive, intensely rhythmic footage. The game’s tagline was “a love story with a slightly H her.” Honestly, while the OP looked a bit like a moe-nukige, it still had to be better than hand-chopping meat grubs or hookup games, right? Based on my years of experience, this had to be a fun-filled moe-selling work — even if it was a nukige, it’d be a comedic one, a light entertainment nukige with no fancy effects. Playing it would definitely be fun. My feelings at the time were:

A while back — though looking at it now, maybe not that long ago — I was having dinner with some friends, and they asked me why I still didn’t have a girlfriend. I’d already lost the weight, so was I still hung up on that fujoshi who screwed me over, or was I just not into women? At first I refused to answer. But refusing only makes things worse — getting pegged as some loser who’s still simping for a batshit girl, or as a guy who turned gay because he got dumped, both look pretty bad. So after thinking it over, I gave a careful answer. “Because, uh, I don’t really know how to act around women. They’re hard to figure out, it’s stressful, and kind of a hassle.” My friend blinked, then burst out laughing.

LOVEREC. -Mini Theaters- is the fan disc for LoveRec. Actually LoveRec is a pretty good game, but this fan disc is just… cheap. Like, painfully cheap. The story picks up right where the original ended: the protagonist is about to graduate, and the white-haired little sister plans to sell the film she shot at the new C90, so the whole crew has to pitch in. That’s the setup. Except that’s only the prologue. The movie-making thing never actually happens.

Maggot baits was made by Clockup. If you know them—or if you made the mistake of looking them up—you’ll know they’ve put out a few fucked-up games. So for Maggot baits, the title alone tells you what you’re in for. Maggot: maggot baits: bait Put together, it’s bait for maggots. And that fits the story perfectly. The game’s got tentacles, giant bugs, and humans—witches, hunters, whatever—getting swallowed and chewed up by them.

I’m pretty open-minded. If a game’s supposed to have an interesting story, I’ll give it a shot—moe, otome, BL, mystery, guro, whatever. Tokage no Shippo Kiri is a guro game. Actually, everything this developer puts out is guro. And there’s this weird pattern: most guro and hardcore games get surprisingly high praise. They should make you uncomfortable, but a lot of people sing their praises anyway. Plenty of them even say “Yeah it’s guro, but the story is so healing.” I don’t get that. Guro is just a device. The story underneath is what matters. A kid helps an old lady cross the street, the same kid gets hit by a car and still helps her cross on crutches, the same kid with a vibrator up his ass still helps her cross—it’s all saying the same thing. Sometimes obsessing over the details is pointless. It’s seasoning. The main dish is the same. So how’s the story in Tokage no Shippo Kiri? How’s the seasoning? How’s the main dish? Short version: it’s pretty bad.

Honestly, I left this one sitting unfinished for almost a year. I’ve got this bad habit: whenever everyone else is playing something, I look at their impressions, their screenshots, and my brain just fills in the plot on its own. Which gives me a rough idea of the game. And having that idea means… unless there’s literally nothing else to do, or some other factor kicks in, I won’t prioritize it. Most of the time I’d rather spend the hours breaking new ground somewhere else. That’s just how it goes. So it wasn’t until the anime was about to air that I remembered, oh right, I still haven’t finished this. I started pushing through it then, and because the game itself was too damn engaging, I ended up taking it slow — slow enough that the anime had already aired two episodes by the time I actually finished. Hm? What did I just say? The game itself was too engaging? Yes. This is a good game packed with positive energy, bright life-affirming values, and genuine psychological healing capability. (adjusts glasses)

Never thought I’d have anything worth bragging about, though honestly this probably just proves the guy is beyond saving. So at the end of the year I figured I’d count how many visual novels I’d played over the past twelve months. Big mistake — 80 titles. Sure, if you merge the split-release games the number drops a bit. Frankly, I don’t like visual novels. I feel like I’ve said this more than once. The reason I play them is that I hate half-finished anime adaptations, hate the brain-dead plots of light novels, hate the endless circular serialization of light novel and manga stories. The only place I can find something that satisfies my love of the Japanese aesthetic while also cleanly and quickly showing me a story’s ending is the visual novel. I’ve rarely seen a visual novel end with “wait for the next volume.” Put bluntly: in a game, the protagonist is going to bang a girl, rather than wobble indecisively among an ever-growing harem of heroines. I hate being called a “landmine reviewer,” and I hate it when people respond to my impressions by telling me they like big dicks and big tits and that if I’m playing an adult game anyway I should stop acting all high and mighty. But somehow I still ended up playing this many. Someone said, you’ve played so many games, you could at least recommend a few, right? Thinking back on my gaming history, genuinely excellent games — ones you could call 面白い — are really few and far between. Most suffer from slapdash art and nonsensical stories. Recommending a few better ones serves a dual purpose: spreading the gospel, and saving people from wasted detours. There’s meaning in that, I think. I’ve already eaten shit. Sure, I’d enjoy watching others fall into the cesspit and laugh at their misfortune, but what I’d enjoy even more is watching the ugly bastards who know I called it shit still charge in and eat it anyway. So let’s begin. No particular order, just whatever comes to mind.

I’ve dabbled in a fair number of Chinese-made visual novels, and most of them honestly aren’t great—heavy on the imitation, with that forced Japanese flavor. I can’t read Japanese, but I still play the originals in my head every day. To me, a Chinese-made visual novel ought to have more of its own local elements; it’s not like it can’t survive without copying the Japanese formula. After all, Chinese RPGs proved that much ages ago. With most of those chuuni-as-hell, Japan-aping Chinese visual novels, I usually just read the blurb and hit Pass. Setting quality aside for a second—if you’re going to imitate the Japanese stuff that hard, why would I even bother playing yours? I’d just play the actual Japanese version. Right?

Back in school I liked to show off when writing essays, always trying to pull off some big twist — start off plain and then suddenly swerve at the end to surprise the reader. But the teacher never gave me the chance in regular assignments. Every topic was something like “A Meaningful Day,” “A Meaningful Event,” “The Wall Clock at Home” — all required to be positive and wholesome. I couldn’t write about helping an old lady cross the street and then having her suddenly leer, drop her pants, and reveal she was actually an old man with a huge dick all along. Nor could I end an essay about the clock at home by turning it into a vibrator. Then one day, an exam gave us a topic essay that let me go wild: how to express the hypocrisy between people. Just as I was excitedly plotting out a story about a righteous-seeming hypocrite with a big twist at the end revealing he’s actually a vile, cunning bastard, I ran into a problem: I ran out of grid paper! With less than half a page left, my plot was only just getting started… The exam paper didn’t exactly have extra space to write either. After weighing it for a while, I started compressing the ending — compress, compress, compress — until it was crammed into a few sentences and just ended. The final piece read as utterly baffling: a guy who’d been proper and serious the whole time suddenly turned into a piece of shit, with exactly one line of explanation in between… The teacher looked at me with a mocking eye and consoled me, telling me not to be so presumptuous writing this kind of boring stuff next time, and to stick with argumentative essays which are more reliable. Sure, her words were very tactful and encouraging, but that look was clearly the look you give someone who just failed spectacularly at showing off. Anyway, years later I don’t have to worry about length limits anymore. But I never imagined I’d get to experience that same look and attitude from the teacher again.

Play enough visual novels and you end up talking about plot, and when it comes to scenario structure there are basically two directions. One is the suspenseful gamble-until-you-die route: cook up a big news event, a big twist, build a seriously killer mystery up front, then line up some killer developments and a grand reveal. The other is plain old school-life romance, maybe with a little friction over life, studies, and club activities, resolved on the way to the ending. Personally I like the first one, but not everyone can pull off big news, and running faster than everyone else doesn’t mean you can pull it off either. Mystery and grand-reveal stories demand serious scenario chops: pacing, laying the groundwork for the mystery, arranging the different routes—all of it is interlinked, and one wrong step leads to every step after it being wrong. Plenty of people have wiped out on the first type, drawing a tiger and ending up with a dog, or the story is passable but the writing can’t carry it, so the mystery lands with no effect and you can’t even follow it. Good settings and good stories, wasted. The second type is way easier—at least you won’t cause a disaster just by writing it. It can produce great stories too, provided you’re a gag writer who can dig the fun out of everyday life; Yukikoi Melt and The Shepherd of the Great Library are among the better examples of the latter. And it’s actually hard to completely ruin the second type. Compared to walking the tightrope of a mystery, slice-of-life is safer. Daily-life games don’t even ask much of the plot anymore—a lot of people are really in it for the character designs and the CV performances. It’s not just games; anime mostly runs on the same rhythm. Some live on plot, some live on slice-of-life, and you can see how hard the former is to get right. Kantai Collection went for a grand reveal and got called “feeding you shit”; Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka? went slice-of-life moe and got called “healing.” The difference in their settings isn’t even that big—they just picked different scenario routes. Of course, for some studios, botching a grand-reveal scenario naturally leads to learning from the burn and retreating to slice-of-life for safety. Like Parasol’s QUINTUPLE☆SPLASH!.