The past few years have brought a wave of “retro.” People start missing the “old” stuff, and more and more content with a “retro” flavor gets dug out of the historical junk pile and put back into production. Keyboards with last-century styling, computers, handhelds, all sorts of odds and ends. FiiO recently put out a “cassette player,” not cheap, and chunky as hell. And yet people were falling over themselves to buy it. Even with the “retro” tax that steep, there’s still a market—at least enough of one to keep the manufacturers churning out reshelled products alive and well. Which gets me thinking about another industry soaked in the same “retro” smell: the beautiful-girl dating simulation game, commonly known as galgame. Anyone with a bit of history knows the earliest galgames weren’t like today’s mainstream products. The universally acknowledged granddaddy is the Tokimeki Memorial series—I remember it also being called Jun’ai Techou, though back in the day I kept reading the pirated disc as Jun’ai Techou… anyway, not important. What matters is that Tokimeki Memorial was a deadly serious game about “simulation,” “romance,” and “raising.”

There’s a classic meme about Intel releasing the 11th-gen i7-11700K, which benchmarks showed was not only worse than cheaper competitors but even worse than the previous generation—a pure reverse toothpaste squeeze. Gamers Nexus famously called it a “waste of sand.” After playing Lump of Sugar’s so-called “new” 2023 release, I had a similar thought, and it led to the question in the title: If selling a CPU with reverse toothpaste squeeze is a waste of sand, what does developing a completely pointless galgame count as?

I vaguely remember it — a night about eleven years ago, back when I was still a pure, innocent little 2D virgin. I’d followed the Mashiroiro Symphony anime all the way to the end, and like most of the fat otaku who watched it back then, the redhead’s crying at the end was where it all began. And at the end of the anime, they told you a PSP version with an added route for the redhead was coming out. I had a PSP at the time, but my Japanese wasn’t good enough, so I did what everyone else does — waited for a fan translation. That wait turned into two years.

In recent years the term “open-source handheld” has basically drifted away from what it originally meant. Originally “open-source handheld” referred specifically to retro handhelds running open-source systems. Some were commercial products flashed with third-party firmware, like the early Subor RG97; others were open by design from the start, like the later Odroid Game series. But what comes to mind now when someone says “open-source handheld”? Generic molds, RK3566 SoCs, and a pile of messy emulators. Lately Android comes standard. Never mind whether the shell infringes on anyone’s design—the SoC’s own attitude toward the open-source community is questionable. That’s why overseas these products were never called “Opensource Handheld” but “Retro Handheld.” A handheld for playing retro games, so retro handheld. Makes sense. Today I’m talking about two retro handhelds you could call “closed-source handhelds”: the RG35XX from Anbernic (Zhou-ge), and the Miyoo Mini Plus from Miyoo, Zhou-ge’s nemesis.

Thinking back, Sakura no Uta (サクラノ詩) was eight years ago now. I rated it pretty highly at the time, and it resonated with me on a personal level given some of my own experiences. It genuinely taught me a lot too, especially about the relationship between “mathematics” and “art” — the correspondence between the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence had me half-convinced that a “Creator” and “God” might actually exist, and made me instantly understand why so many scientists end up turning to mysticism. Because there’s just too much in this world that’s strange, mysterious, and completely unexplained. All that to say, I got a lot out of Sakura no Uta, and even purely as narrative it’s plenty gripping — honestly it’s that gripping story that kept me reading, and along the way I picked up all sorts of interesting trivia. I figured the story was over, since the ending really didn’t leave any obvious room for a sequel. Then I heard about Sakura no Toki (サクラノ刻). There’s a sequel? What would it even be about? I genuinely had no idea. The female students who barely registered in the original main plot? Or forcing a route onto Ms. Ai, who was already perfectly complete as she was? The protagonist’s relationship with her was lovely precisely because it wasn’t family but might as well have been — were they really going to shoehorn a romance in just so she’d be “routeable”? No way, right? There’s no need to be that tacky… doing that would drag down the whole game’s prestige and even wreck the protagonist’s character. I already thought him getting with Misono Rin was a stretch — that was already a concession to “R18 game sales” — no need to go that far, surely? And then with the release of Totono no Sora Remake (终の空 Remake), I became even more confident about Sakura no Toki. I figured it absolutely wouldn’t be some unnecessary sequel milking the name, nor a rushed product made just to pander to players by forcing a route onto some character. Well, Sakura no Toki came out anyway, and you can probably guess the rest. I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.

Honestly, when I heard ハッピーライヴショウアップ！ was getting a sequel, I was both surprised and not surprised at all. Surprised because the original story was already complete enough that there was basically no room for a sequel. The protagonist marries Sofia and they even have a kid. What’s left to say? Were they going to have him go back to school as a teacher, hang around a bunch of female students, and fall in love with the daughter of one of the previous heroines? That’s a nasty setup. And the not-surprised part is obvious: Miyabi, who had a decent amount of screen time in the original, was never a romanceable heroine. Her presence was too captivating, her charm impossible to resist — half the time she was stealing the show. I’m a diehard Natsuwa Komachi fan, but I think she already had enough screen time in this game. There was absolutely no need to force a “romanceable route” just to satisfy some straight-guy OCD, especially when it makes the whole story feel inconsistent. But it’s not my call. F-chan needs to make money, so ハッピーライヴ ショウアップ アンコール！！, a new release with a brand-new Miyabi-exclusive route, hit the shelves anyway.

Anyone familiar with my past blog posts knows I’m not exactly a Yuzusoft hater, but I’m definitely not a fanboy either. I’ve always kept a measuredly critical stance toward Yuzusoft’s (ゆずソフト) past works. With Sora-iro I called them moege; with Witch I said they needed to get serious; with Senren * Banka I said they were too formulaic; by Riddle Joker and that all-ages title whose name I can’t even remember I was already mocking them as washed up; and by Shinigami no Butterfly I was flat-out saying they’d crashed and burned. So yeah, my feelings on Yuzusoft are pretty negative across the board. Even if deep down I think they’re already better than their peers, they never quite hit that point I’m looking for, never triggered any real desire in me to praise them. Fast forward to 2023: Yuzusoft is still alive, still putting out a new game every 1–2 years. This one’s called Tenshi Souzou (天使騒々). Honestly, the name is terrible, gives off major Tenshi Ranman vibes. And after reading the game’s synopsis, I pretty much assumed this was Yuzusoft returning to their roots — by lying flat on their face.

A while back I was bored out of my mind, so on a whim I decided to play a roleplay game with ChatGPT. The kind where I have it play, you know… a little-sister type who keeps calling me “onii-chan,” hopelessly in love with me on the inside but acting all cold on the surface — a veteran tsundere, that push-and-pull, playing-hard-to-get kind of conversation. People online have already said you can chat about all sorts of lewd stuff with ChatGPT, as long as you feed it enough preconditions and declarations first. That’s obviously no obstacle for me, so I charged right in. Getting ChatGPT to accept the identity I gave it wasn’t hard, and soon we were deep in conversation. It’s just that the conversation felt… really weird.

I’m not from the Northeast, but I know plenty of Northeasterners. Back when World of Warcraft was huge, Zones 2 and 6 were the China Unicom servers, and they were basically northerners’ territory. And among northerners, Northeasterners made up a wildly high proportion of the player base. It was pretty much: join any random raid, hop on voice chat, and there’s a good chance the raid leader is speaking with a Northeastern accent. Combined with the old sitcom Northeast Family (东北一家人) being a hit, I’ve picked up the dialect by osmosis. The Northeastern dialect is a branch of Northern Mandarin, with a lot of Beijing influence in the pronunciation. Anyone who understands Standard Mandarin can follow it without much trouble, and it carries this weird mix of “comic” and “gangster” energy. A lot of people assume Northeastern guys are all hard cases, but honestly the Northeastern girls are worse. Fun fact: the only domestic violence shelter in all of China that protects men is in Shenyang, Northeast China. Meaning out there, the girls will chase the big Northeastern lads around and beat the crap out of them.

I started building websites back in middle school. I remember it clearly — the summer of eighth grade. I applied for a free forum and domain and threw together an extremely crude “class website.” I figured it was just for fun, but it somehow took off across the whole class, then the whole grade. It wasn’t just my own class. Kids from the neighboring classes signed up and started posting too, and all kinds of conversations got going. That chatter later moved to the school’s official forum, and after that to the class Discord group. I think I was the one who created and ran that Discord group, for the simple reason that I was one of the few users who had permission to create Discord groups at the time. So I made the group for the class, and I’m still listed as admin to this day, even though nobody’s said a word in it for years. Later I went to college and started making all kinds of websites and forums again, but honestly nothing ever took off the way it did, and I could never recapture that middle-school glory. In one of the forums I’d rebuilt God knows how many times, I once wrote this line: “Some dreams you only dream at eighteen, and some dreams you only understand once you’ve grown up…” There were a few more lines after that, I don’t remember them now — something with that whole “forcing yourself to feel sad for the sake of a poem” vibe. I didn’t really know what I was trying to say. I just thought it sounded cool, so I went with it. Sure enough, a classmate came along and criticized it right away, saying I’d taken the wrong medicine and that it was so pretentious it gave him goosebumps. I thought he had a point, so I made that line my Discord signature so he’d have to see it every day. Years later I thought of that line again, and I have to say, I now think it actually makes sense. Because there really are things you only do when you’re young, and dreams you only understand when you’re young at heart.