Honestly, Natsuiro Recipe (なついろレシピ) wasn’t the game I was most looking forward to this month. I’d originally planned to play Pure X Connect and Sumire first, but Natsuiro Recipe leaked early, so I had no choice but to play it first—and what a surprise it turned out to be.

It’s been years since I played Love, Election and Chocolate (恋愛と選挙とチョコレート). I actually got into it through the anime — the anime itself is okay, nothing great, nothing terrible. What’s worth mentioning is that while the anime was airing, it went all out to advertise a certain game, and that game was Ima Sugu Oniichan ni Imouto da tte Iitai (いますぐお兄ちゃんに妹だっていいたい — “I Want to Tell My Brother I’m His Little Sister Right Now”). I’d had my eye on this one for a long time. Back when I couldn’t read Japanese at all, and then when I could read a little, all I knew was: it’s all-ages, the voice cast is stacked, the music is good, and the art is… decent. So when I got around to it before playing Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, I thought… “might as well clear this one first, at least it’s got Ai-chan.” Honestly, I didn’t finish it. I cleared the main sister route and Ai’s Mao route, and the rest I just couldn’t push through… Not for any other reason — the story is just too… flat… The plot can be summed up in one sentence: the protagonist’s mother dies, his father remarries, and he falls in love with his stepsister, who’s been pretending to be a boy. And the whole game reeks of what I’d call “all-ages galgame inferiority complex.” Everyone knows 18+ is where the money is in the galgame market. Plenty of companies have tried all-ages and died horribly; at best most of them release the 18+ version first and then port to consoles for an all-ages cash grab. So as a game trying to move units in the 18+ field while being all-ages, Ima Sugu Oniichan ni Imouto da tte Iitai had to show its sincerity some other way. In a nutshell: if you can’t fuck, you’d better bring something that can compete with fucking.

There’s a certain writing style I’ve always hated, but I’ve never been able to put my finger on what to call it. Put simply, it’s when someone can’t just say a thing directly — they have to wrap it up first, so you have to squint at it for a second. Like the cafeteria lady serving your rice: she doesn’t just scoop it onto your plate, she digs the ladle in, does a little fairy pose in front of you, and then flings it into your bowl. If the lady happens to look younger than you and is wearing a sexy black-stocking getup, or if the rice is free and comes with three big pork chops, fine. Otherwise you just think the lady in front of you is sick in the head, and after a while you start to find her downright disgusting… …even if she gives you five pork chops. So when a story dresses up its wording or its pacing, if the payoff turns out to be worth the dressing-up, whatever. But if it’s some trivial bullshit dressed up like the apocalypse and a blood feud… that just pisses me off.

One big reason I play visual novels is that I want to see all kinds of stories. Light novels and anime rarely give you a strict narrative—mostly they hand you a premise and an opening, then it’s expand, expand, expand. You’re just getting into it and suddenly you’ve caught up with the latest release, so you’re stuck waiting week by week while the author drags it out until the heat death of the universe. By the time you finally get an ending, it’s either an open-ended nothingburger or a total trainwreck that leaves a bad taste. I went through that with two manga and decided never again. Most visual novels at least have a clear main storyline. Even if the first half is all tea parties and slice-of-life, there’s a necessary main arc and climax that drives the ending. That’s why a lot of moe-focused games I’ve played eventually throw in some plot development—no matter how well it’s written, at least they make a token effort, tell you the story is over, and give you a Happy Ending. Well… Yukikoi Melt (ゆきこいめると) is a complete outlier. The whole game has basically no obvious main plot—it’s a pure slice-of-life work, so slice-of-life that there’s nothing but slice-of-life. How pure are we talking? Have you seen GJ-bu? Have you seen Non Non Biyori? Have you seen Yuru Yuri? Beyond a premise and a setting, do any of them have a main storyline? No, right!? That’s exactly the style of Yukikoi Melt. If I had to describe it, I’d call it “four-panel manga” style.

11eyes: Resona Forma is the fan disc for 11eyes. I actually played it a long time ago, but only went through Kuraki Misuzu’s and Tachibana Kikuri’s routes — at the time the patch was incomplete and I couldn’t read Japanese, so the rest was a wash. Picked it back up recently and found that more of it has been translated, plus I’ve got enough Japanese reading ability now to sort of fumble my way through. So here we are. I’m genuinely attached to 11eyes. It was my first visual novel with gory blood-spraying and dimension-hopping magic battles — before that everything I played was pure romance, mostly straight-up moe stuff. And I really do think 11eyes has a lot of unique ideas in its setup and structure, the fight descriptions especially, the sheer variety of magic writing — sword styles, sorcery, the later scientific magic, hand-to-hand combat. It covers basically all of it and never really fumbles any of it. The most interesting thing to me now is the Void Boundary chapter bundled with the Xbox version and its take on modern magic: magic chant code stored on a server, magicians connecting via phone and remotely loading curses to cast, with magical duels including big-data attribute analysis and network-layer attack and counterattack. Even now I haven’t seen a battle written with that kind of idea again. “For friends and tomorrow” is 11eyes’ theme. For friends and tomorrow — maybe because 11eyes was popular enough that a fan disc was inevitable. The fan disc is called Resona Forma, which is Latin, or should be Resonating Form — you can read it as “resonant form” or “resonance mode,” hinting at the various resonances between the Eye of Aeon and its bearers, and also signaling that the game is an IF, Before, After structure presenting all sorts of possibilities.

Clover Heart’s is an old 2003 game. As one of Alcot’s early works, it got a commemorative sequel ten years later in Clover Days. Looking at it now, Clover Heart’s has a surprising number of strong points for a 2003 visual novel — some of it even ahead of its time.

Playing games, the most important thing is to have fun. You can’t force every new game to be a masterpiece. Finishing a game and feeling like you ate shit—that’s the dev team flexing, and nobody wants that to happen. So hey, I’ve got a title here that’s guaranteed to put you in a good mood when you’re done. Wanna take a look? Puramai Wars (プラマイウォーズ) is the new game from Asa Project. The studio’s trademark—I mentioned it over here—is messing around plus face gags. It looks chaotic on the surface, but it gives you this happy vibe. I figure plenty of you have played Renai 0 Kilometer and know the deal: surface-level chaos, but the story has a bit of substance, and amid all the noise you can still feel each girl’s full feminine charm. So the dev team probably figured that formula was popular and went full copy-paste, putting out a brand-new game with basically the same setup: this one, Puramai Wars. As for what the name means, I have no idea. “Puramai” should be Japanese, “wars” is war, and the main premise is a showdown between two families sharing a house. One side is the protagonist’s “good behavior” family; the other is the “bad behavior” family. The official site’s description is literally “the story begins with a war between the well-behaved family and the ill-behaved family.” I need to clarify something here: this so-called “war” basically doesn’t exist in the game… It’s mostly pretty harmonious. If we’re grading this like a school essay, it’s off-topic.

Liking niche stuff makes you feel superior. Same goes for visual novels. That’s why I’ve always figured that compared to the tight, length-constrained assembly line of TV anime, visual novels have way more freedom when it comes to storytelling, and they just do it better. Plus, original anime is pretty rare—most adaptations come from light novels, manga, or visual novels. So at least in terms of originality, VNs should have a slight edge over TV anime… But there’s always an exception… I never thought a visual novel would actually choose to go the light novel route… And a knockoff light novel route at that…

The keyboard critics on Quora once debated a question: Is a galgame literature? The question is itself a problem. Asking whether a game is literature is like asking whether “humans” are “perverts.” Sure, there are humans who can’t get through a day without licking something, and there are also normal people like me who have zero interest in that stuff. A galgame is still a game. Games have plots, and most non-nukige galgames lean heavily on theirs. There may be some “literary” elements in there, but on the strength of those elements alone you can’t begin to put it on the same level as literature. So as a game genre that carries “literary elements,” plenty of galgames try to break new ground in their plots. These days, if you don’t have foreshadowing and a shocking twist, people will call you boring. Which has led many to believe that only “suffering,” “dying,” “flying off the rails” and the like deserve to be called a god-tier scenario, while anything focused on the everyday gets sneered at. On this point I’m fond of the 2007 Chinese college entrance exam essay prompt: unexpected, yet inevitable. What it means is that no matter how your plot unfolds, no matter how high it flies or how wild the ideas get, as long as you can justify it and give people that “unexpected yet inevitable” feeling, your story is a success. Even slice-of-life, if written vividly and every character’s personality also lands as “unexpected yet inevitable,” is a success too. At the very least the story keeps you in suspense, is easy to follow, and doesn’t feel too far-fetched. Put more bluntly: write it however you want, but at minimum it has to be logical. That’s the baseline. Without logic, the whole story looks nonsensical — exactly like Haru nochi Kitto Nanohana Biyori (晴のちきっと菜の花びより).

The reason I paid attention to Hana no Aruji (花の野に咲くうたかたの) is first, because of the scenario writer Kirizuki, and second, because of the coloring style. 桐月 wrote Tasogare no Sinsemilla (黄昏のシンセミア — the forbidden medicine at dusk, or dusk’s weed, call it whatever you like), and the game’s coloring style reminds me of [Clover Day’s] 1. Same artist as dusk’s weed, sure, but the coloring is way better than the old work — the girls are cuter and fresher. Honestly, I didn’t even want to play this one at first. I never played Tasogare no Sinsemilla either—people just hype it up to the heavens, and I figured a writer who’d produced at least one readable work couldn’t be all that bad. Then I took one look at the art style, fell in love with it, and played the thing. If I had to sum up this game in one sentence, it’s like a cup of gongfu tea carefully brewed by a soft-spoken girl — mild in flavor, nothing like the instant jolt of coffee or hard liquor, but it won’t leave you feeling bad, and if you sip it slowly you’ll find something uniquely its own.