Onii-chan Teacher Himitsu no Jugyou o Kibou Shimasu! is the latest entry in the Onii-chan Migite no Shiyou o Kinshi Shimasu! lineage, so it’s still one brother and a pile of sisters. As another siscon title, though, the cast is completely different — at best you could call it a spiritual sequel…

Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o is PullTop’s year-end release. I haven’t really touched this company’s games before—well, that’s not quite true, I’ve played stuff from their sub-brands, like Natsuiro Recipe, or Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort… They did have that one pretty famous game, If My Heart Had Wings (この大空に、翼を広げて), but I never got around to playing it. The selling point from the start was that it’s made by the same team behind If My Heart Had Wings, themed around looking up at the night sky and stargazing. Unlike the earlier plane-building thing, this one’s set in winter around Christmas, which lines up nicely with a December release. Ah—actually I wrote a long intro but realized I’d accidentally turned it into erotica again, so let’s just get to the impressions. Keep going like this and I’ll never find my way back from the path of filth. Put simply: as a visual novel, this game is pretty good. But as a game about “stargazing,” it falls a bit short.

As a proud LASS hater, I’ve played basically every LASS (拉屎社, “Poop-sha”) game except the early Nanako series — 3Days, 11eyes, Shoujo Shin’iki, Mayoeru Futari, plus their fandiscs and all the different versions and so on and so forth. Honestly, ever since Shoujo Shin’iki where LASS pulled a massive blunder and took a setting with real potential and turned it into a self-indulgent landmine of epic proportions, I’ve been thinking: when the hell is this studio going to go under? So I waited, and waited, and then Mayoeru Futari got announced, delayed, delayed again, delayed some more. And in the end, after finishing it, it wasn’t the landmine I expected — just dumb and flavorless. The art was weak too: every girl’s tits bigger than the last, every gaze more seductive, every H-scene moaning louder than the last. Man, was I happy… I was practically quivering with joy, overflowing with arousal. Ah, not because I have a thing for big tits — but because I finally saw it. This studio is done for.

Boku wa Kimi dake o Mitsumeru I gaze at only you isn’t exactly a new game — strictly speaking, it’s a remake. What’s a remake, you ask? Think of it like a TV drama or movie reboot. There’s actually a pretty solid reason for Innre to remake this one: the original came out in 2006, and both the art style and the production were pretty rough. Go look it up if you don’t believe me. This 2015 remake, on the other hand, is a completely different beast in terms of artwork, coloring, and music. Same artist, sure, but you can really see how far they’ve come. The coloring even gives me a SAGA PLANETS vibe. They got Elements Garden for the music, Ayane for the OP, and the ED is sung by the heroine herself, Mishiro Mako — if you don’t know who that is, go look up Yonezawa Madoka. Most importantly, the original had no voice acting at all, while the remake naturally has full voicing. At first I figured remakes were just a quick cash grab, but this one felt like too big a leap to be that. The devs said outright that this went well beyond a simple “visual upgrade” and that the story got a major overhaul too — no way it’s just milking the fanbase. So I dived in. The setup was what pulled me: the protagonist gets hired to protect a heroine targeted by an assassination syndicate. That’s it. I was sick of boring school romance plots.

Japanese doujin games are, generally speaking, a dime a dozen. Huge variety, sure. But aside from the ones with no story that you just play for the gameplay, the plot-driven ones tend to be short, the art is mediocre, the music is whatever, the voice acting is amateur. The one thing they can usually win on is the story, because stories are cheap to make. Good artists, good voice actors, good composers? Those don’t come easy. Put simply, most doujin game circles don’t have money. They can only afford small-scale stuff. If they actually had cash, they’d just found a proper company and sell real games instead of hovering in doujin limbo. But there are exceptions. I’ve played some genuinely impressive doujin games. Even doujin visual novels can be loaded. Take Untō’s Hakoniwa no Gakuen, for instance. First off, the character art for Hakoniwa no Gakuen is by Kuwabara Riko. That alone is enough to sell it. And on top of that, the voice cast is absurd: Hidaka Rina, Tokui Sora, Kakihara Tetsuya, Numakura Manami… Everything’s in place. All it needs is a halfway decent script and this game could stand shoulder to shoulder with proper company releases. And yet… reality is cruel. The story ruins everything.

When I was on a blind date with a music teacher, she asked me one question: “What was your youth like?” I have to admit, there aren’t many questions in this world that leave me completely speechless, but this one definitely does.

Let’s talk about Lump of Sugar first. Back when I didn’t know Japanese (still don’t, obviously), I thought this studio was hot shit — mostly because the name sounded nice, and everyone and their mom kept talking about them. And whenever I hear “Lump of Sugar,” I picture an elegant girl sitting on an afternoon street corner, watching the crowd drift under the eaves, delicately dropping a sugar cube into her coffee with pale fingers. Very aesthetic. Aesthetic or not, Lump of Sugar is just a company that makes eroge. Yeah, the kind where otaku happily lap up giant tits in mosaic and flesh-colored straws spraying white goo. It’s like the elegant girl takes a sip of her coffee, then suddenly shudders, flushes red — because there’s a vibrator up her crotch controlled by the black guy running the shop next door. Everything changes in an instant…

When I first became a web editor, I thought it was a sacred job. After all, so many people are reading what you write. You have a responsibility to them. No garbage content, no half-baked opinions, no wishy-washy wording. I don’t remember what the story was about—probably browsers, let’s say Chrome. There was a foreign report that day saying some version of Chrome had worse security than IE9. So I compiled a news piece: “Chrome Version XX Less Secure Than IE9.” It got pulled by the editor-in-chief pretty quick, followed by a special one-on-one talk. “The news is fine, but there’s no hook. Your headline is too bland.”

Play enough visual novels and you start noticing patterns. For instance, most visual novel plots follow the same track when it comes to love: the girl likes the guy, keeps it bottled up, drops hints. Every time she wants to say something, the protagonist plays dumb, she stays reserved, he keeps stumbling around, until some specific event arrives and he realizes he’s actually in love with her — confession, dating, sex, End. Honestly, that formula is pretty orthodox and there’s nothing wrong with it. But even if salty tofu pudding is delicious, even if five-nut mooncakes are tasty, eat them every year, every month, every day and you’ll get sick of them. So some visual novel studios started throwing in all sorts of weird stuff — the girl isn’t human but a god, the girl gets tortured to death, the setting is the future, the setting is the past, time travel this way~ changing the future that way~ Rinse and repeat, and eventually visual novel — short for Girl and Love Game — stopped living up to its own name. No wonder foreigners always call these things Visual Novels. Some stories have basically become novels already, and yet they still slap an 18+ sticker on the box, just to attract more people, awkwardly cramming in so-called “romance elements” that don’t fit, and while they’re at it throwing in some porn scenes, praying they can pull in a few more sales — at least from players who don’t care about story and just want to watch people fuck.

I wonder if anyone else is like me and loves fairy tales. Sure, fairy tales are supposed to be stories for kids. I’m not a kid anymore, but I still crave that kid-style kind of story… Ancient legends, gods in the sky, princes and princesses, forests and sunlight, and cute flat-chested skinny twintail little girls you just want to scoop up into your arms… So yeah, I like fairy-tale-style stories, and visual novels too. Of course this has nothing to do with being a lolicon. Nothing at all. Really, nothing.