Finally got around to writing up everything I played last year. Turns out I went through 31 games, same as 2021. That said, I can already feel 2023’s number dropping off a cliff — not because I don’t have time, but because the industry is just cooked. Look at May: barely a handful of titles worth mentioning. By year’s end I’ll be lucky to count ten on my fingers. Looks like my dream of “watching the galgame sunset industry finally die” is about to come true. Last year’s quality was honestly nothing to write home about. If you asked me to list my “personal best,” I doubt I could even fill ten slots. So let’s do it differently this year — alongside the usual recommendations, I’ll throw in some roast-flavored awards. “Worst,” “dumbest,” that sort of thing… just for fun. Helps people dodge landmines.

Taiwanese rapper MC HOTDOG shows up in a lot of movies too, but he’s a bit different — he only does “low-budget,” “rough around the edges,” the kind of thing you look at and think, yeah, this is gonna be a mess. He’s worked with the likes of Xiao Shenyang, Da Peng, Yue Yunpeng. Sometimes he even pops up in Taiwanese horror films by directors nobody’s heard of. The results are about what you’d expect: most of these movies got panned. Basically everything he’s been in is a stinker. A lot of people, me included, were puzzled. The guy is arguably the face of Chinese-language rap. Eminem made 8 Mile. Hotdog should at least have the ability and the resources to make something decent — even a vanity project shouldn’t turn out to be a “bad movie.” But in a later interview he brought this up himself, and his answer stuck with me. Hotdog explained that he doesn’t like so-called “big productions.” He prefers that “cheap” B-movie feel. And he laid out all the upsides of B-movies: because they’re niche, the subject matter can be sloppy but also way more unhinged; because they’re niche, the content can be bolder, more willing to shitpost, even touching sensitive territory that “big” films won’t go near; because they’re niche, the style gets more exaggerated — horror gets scarier, gore gets bloodier, comedy gets to cut loose. And because it’s a B-movie, niche audience, niche marketing, nobody’s really watching, so it’s just more free. There’s a decent-sized crowd of B-movie lovers out there going nuts over films that “don’t belong in polite society.” That idea hit me, and it reminded me of when I first got into visual novels. For a market that’s been called a sunset industry for years, the B-movie approach works just as well — in both subject matter and plot development, visual novels are freer, and a lot of the “masterpieces” were born inside that freedom. No wonder so many people find “healing” in themes of darkness, death, torture, even training. So finally some developer remembered the common ground between visual novels and B-movies. Like CUBE’s Same to Ikiru Nanokakan (サメと生きる七日間), “Seven Days Living with Sharks.”

When I first saw the announcement for this new Lump of Sugar title, Arcana Alchemia (アルカナ・アルケミア), I genuinely couldn’t hold back a laugh. What year is it, and they’re still making traditional “alchemy” stories? The moment you say “alchemy” it’s always “human transmutation” this and that — at least bring up how alchemy was a precursor to modern medicine, philosophy, and chemistry, would you? Then I read the premise. Oh boy, of course it’s “transmuting a living beast-eared girl.” No idea if that was on purpose or an accident. When the game came out at the end of December, I couldn’t shake the association — seeing “shark” reminds me of that Osaka black-veil otaku, which then reminds me of jerking off, and that’s just uncomfortable. So I got around to this one first. And it turned out to be surprisingly decent. Honestly I’d even say Arcana Alchemia is the best thing Lump of Sugar has put out recently, good enough to squeeze into my year-end ranking.

Honestly, when I first played Hamedashi Creative, I was completely baffled. First off, the story made no sense. The game is packed with “instantly fake” elements: a little sister who’s deep into 2D culture, a brocon, and loaded enough to support her worthless older brother; a 2D artist who loves drawing lewd art, enjoys hanging out with fat otaku without being gross like them, and is willing to date one; a cold, sharp-tongued, self-absorbed black-haired beauty who flip-flops between tsundere and queen just to throw herself at a fat otaku; and a Vtuber who looks totally ordinary—the kind who’d graduate in a month in the V-tuber world—yet somehow becomes a top earner without relying on insults or dirty jokes, and still falls for the otaku… In this game’s world, it’s as if every woman sees the protagonist and wants to sleep with him. Their insults are just tsundere, their rejections are just playing hard to get, their “NO” actually means “YES,” they say one thing but mean another, and deep down they’re always craving to be conquered by him… Unless you tell me the setting is that only one man is left in the world and women can only survive by mating, I still can’t buy into this story.

One of the hottest topics lately is AI. ChatGPT blowing up again at the start of this year left the masses stunned—“it’s already this powerful?"—and also a little scared. “If computers keep getting this strong, it’s only a matter of time before they replace us, right?” Along with that fear comes every sci-fi plot about machines ruling humanity, as if in a few years we’ll all be jacking cables into the backs of our heads and entering a metaverse called the matrix, while our bodies form a resistance underground against the mighty robots. The crisis always arrives fast and sudden. But is that really how it goes?

I actually finished Jewelry Hearts Academia a while ago and just couldn’t be bothered to write about it. Main reason: I’d already done the commercial piece, where I dissected the plot front to back, went through the details, and gave the damn thing a thorough evaluation from every angle. It wore me out. The thought of writing a second version for the blog made me want to throw up, so it just sat there. Still, for the year-end roundup and review, I have to write about it eventually. No escape. I really can’t be bothered to lay out the plot. It’s too fucking long and too fucking complicated. Let’s keep it brief, just a summary, and skip the details.

More and more Japanese studios have figured out just how much money the overseas otaku crowd is sitting on, so we keep seeing visual novels pop up on Steam—including a whole crop of “Steam exclusives” planned specifically for the overseas market, with the domestic audience written off entirely, all in the name of moving units and making a buck. Most of these games sell like crap. Maybe it’s that Japanese “don’t cause trouble for others” instinct, but they always try to read overseas players’ minds using their own assumptions. They figure anything “too Japanese” or “too hardcore” won’t land with foreigners, and they unilaterally decide that what overseas weebs want out of Japan is ninjas, cherry blossoms, JK, school festivals, and so on. This kind of presumptuous pandering reliably produces results that are deeply, painfully cringe. If you need a reference point, look at how Japan “localizes” for overseas markets: they assume Chinese users want to hear Japanese anime girls speak Chinese, so they record exclusive Chinese theme songs, and some games even rewrite the scenario for overseas players. Nobody buys any of it. Back then the Japanese side genuinely couldn’t understand why so many Chinese users who don’t speak a word of Japanese insist on the Japanese voice track—like, does not understanding it not bother you?

Earlier this year I read a business plan from Visual Arts, Key’s parent company. The president, Baba Takahiro, turned out to have a surprisingly complete read on the industry—he knows how huge the overseas market is, especially the Chinese-speaking one, and he’s been actively registering local trademarks there, looking for local agents and partners. He also gets that the traditional “galgame” era is basically over, that selling on sex appeal alone can’t grow the market anymore, so the only way forward is all-ages. Raise the quality of the games themselves, and build IP across anime, manga, novels, and music. Rather than making games, make IP—that’s how you actually milk the 2D girls for money. At the end he said he’s extremely interested in the “metaverse,” and if they have the means, he’d like to explore whether the company can get in early on it. Reading this plan actually surprised me. My impression of Japanese companies, especially ones that got their start making Galgame, was that most of them are hopelessly stuck in their ways, utterly immune to reason, clinging to the same ancient engine until the day they die, at best peddling overpriced merch to scam people, and just shutting down outright when they can’t keep going. But Visual Arts is surprisingly clear-headed about the fact that the core of the “2D character” market is “IP” and “characters.” Be it story, music, games, or novels, every medium exists mainly to build the IP, and that IP then gets sold worldwide. That really is the kind of marketing strategy a cultural/creative company ought to have. Whether that roadmap is just bullshit or not, I honestly don’t know — but I did for sure notice this one thing: 『終のステラ』, the final chapter of the robot trilogy that began with 『planetarian』 and 『Harmonia』, written by Tanaka Romeo, scheduled for a spring 2022 release, aiming for a theatrical-film scale… And as you can all see, it’s already autumn and the game only just showed up. As for the “anime adaptation”—yeah, nobody brings that up anymore. Anyway, back to the game itself.

Hooksoft’s earlier Houkago Cinderella (After School Cinderella) was a huge hit. I thought it was a decent game, but I never expected it to be popular enough to get an official sequel… so here’s Houkago Cinderella 2. The original was a pure school romance setup: the protagonist picks different after-school routes, runs into different heroines, and each one spins out into a different love story. The only real gameplay hook was the “fortune telling”: every day after school you can hit up two bros for a reading, they hint at where each heroine might show up, and you pick your route based on that to clear each girl’s route.

There’s a weird phenomenon in the visual novel scene: a lot of works that advertise themselves as “telling a story” keep getting more and more horny and “practical,” while plenty of titles that come right out the gate branding themselves as “hardcore” suddenly start telling stories for no apparent reason. This isn’t unique to visual novels, either—Japan’s adult film industry is the same. That’s exactly why I love watching stuff directed by “Maeda the Literary Giant.” You get the visceral impact of flesh, sure, but also plenty of food for thought. It’s like how we judge people. We always slap the label of good guy or bad guy on them based on some kind of “contrast.” A guy who does ten thousand good deeds becomes a bad person after one bad one, while a total scumbag becomes the representative of conscience because he did one good thing. So some game producers deliberately go down this route, trying to cram something more humanistic into a nukige that’s supposed to be pure fap material. It’s one of the easiest ways to birth a so-called “masterpiece.” Of course, it doesn’t always work.