Years back there was a game called Study § Steady (a.k.a. “Study and Steady”), from a company called Marmalade (“Orange Marmalade”). I’ve always had a soft spot for this studio’s stuff — the early “Primal” series, and later Marshmallow. The vibe they give off is “solid”: no shitposting in the plot, just ordinary school romances with a little heartstring-tugging. Straight-up orthodox work. But for some reason, with the previous Study § Steady they lost their damn minds and changed the whole production style, pivoting hard into engine R&D. They poured what looks to me like a shitload of effort into a not-particularly-novel Emotion tech, and sacrificed most of the game’s content for it. So Study § Steady ended up feeling weird as hell. The story was dead simple, the pacing was a bore, and the only bright spot was the “animated heroine sprite” wobbling around like a balloon. But the tech wasn’t mature, so not only did the sprite look stiff and yank you out of the story, the game’s specs were absurdly high — no top-tier PC and you couldn’t hold a stable 30fps. Sure, plenty of people were praising the heroine’s black-tights CGs, and the game had a ton of HCGs, but those HCGs weren’t “animated” at all, which made them a total snooze… In my book, Study § Steady is a complete failure. The weird part is it still got Fandiscs, and the even more baffling part is it got a sequel… Study § Steady 2!

Not gonna lie, my X account and 茉宮祈芹 mutually follow each other. I think I followed her back when she wasn’t that well known, sent her a greeting message, and got a reply. Occasionally she’ll like some lewd art I retweet, and I’ve written a paid piece hyping her up too. I used to think the stuff she draws was too explicit, but then I figured, as a freelance illustrator, drawing it a bit more H for sales is pretty understandable. When I reviewed Ninja Girl and the Mysterious Army of Urban Legend Monsters! Hunt of the Headless Horseman, I said that 茉宮祈芹 is an illustrator who can raise the quality of an entire visual novel single-handedly. One reason is that her drawing and coloring style leans toward flat, digital-game visuals, which means the character art in any visual novel she works on stays consistent — no awkward art shift from a different colorist stepping in. No matter which other artists she’s paired with, her characters always stand out. And even when she isn’t drawing characters with heavy exposure, she still nails the heroine’s cuteness. So here’s a new game: FLIP＊FLOP 〜INNOCENCE OVERCLOCK〜, put out by a DMM Game shadow brand, with 茉宮祈芹 on art, Houmori Kei on planning and scenario, and Kitakoji Yuki voicing the lead heroine. With a lineup like that, there’s no reason not to give it a shot.

Lu Xun once said: Moonstone Cherry is a good company. They put out a famous series called 妹ぱらだいす!, and that series is the reason this blog ever got any traffic at all — go look at “most popular on the site” in the sidebar, the title’s sitting right there in plain sight. Course, Manbara Paradise isn’t loved just because it’s a sister-type nukige. It’s the “usability” upgrade. The character designs had nothing going on, but the HCGs went hard. They were already using Emotion ten years ago, plus a “countdown to launch” feature, so you and the heroine can reach each other across the screen in mutual fashion. I’ll say it: that game wore me out back in 2011. The sequels went two more rounds. Not as striking as the first, but they swapped in the best voice actresses available at the time and kept the old usability tradition. The third one even upped the music quality. Classic, re-pressed. But apparently Moonstone Cherry figured hanging from one tree wasn’t great, so they stopped making 妹ぱらだいす! and started pushing out games under planner “Wu Lao’er” that look weirder the longer you stare at them… “Welcome to the sex open world,” “welcome to the sex underworld” — what the hell is any of that. And now we get Yūnagisō no S-Kyū no Kanojo-tachi (夕凪荘のＳ級の彼女たち).

Generally speaking, the “cross-dressing” games enesemble puts out have painfully contrived premises. Most of them go like this: the male lead has some unavoidable reason to dress as a girl and transfer into a girls’ school, where he proceeds to whip it out and go on a rampage. Even though the protagonist is nominally a cross-dresser, the HCG in these games is genuinely lewd, and he’s the lewdest one of all despite being a guy. And the lewdest guy still fights at full power in the HCG, as if following the principle of “treat every shot like it’s your last, and don’t be afraid of going impotent” — which bumps up the usability a lot. For a while I just mentally filed these games under the nukige subcategory. But enesemble clearly shifted direction after last year’s cross-dressing title. It started caring about plot coherence, even going for crazy twists. Last year’s game felt like a Frankenstein’s monster of ideas, but willingness to change is always good. So this year enesemble brings us a new cross-dressing game: Hana wa Mijikashi, Odore yo Otome (華は短し、踊れよ乙女).

For years now, SMEE’s main scenario writer Yu Hayase has been getting cozy with Azarashi Soft. After a few “collab mini-games,” they’ve stopped pretending and just merged, with Hayase even spearheading Azarashi’s new title Amanatsu. The game looks weird no matter how you slice it. The title and art style are pure Azarashi, but the side characters and dialogue style scream SMEE. Probably to boost sales, they brought in a bunch of VAs old players know by heart. And goddammit, they dragged out my most hated one, Yukary Aoyama, to voice the main heroine. Every role she’s done except Kazuki Kazami gives me PTSD. The second heroine is Akinohana, who’s currently on permanent vacation, and the third is Mai Gotou. That’s a stacked cast spanning three generations of eroge VAs. If this game had a press conference, the fat otaku in the audience would’ve been screaming. I was actually hyped for this one, but less than five minutes in, I felt this weird sense of disappointment.

Hey! Friend, have you had COVID? Are you worried about long COVID? Are you scared of getting quarantined? By now it’s been confirmed over and over that COVID is a “self-limiting disease” — which basically means there’s no silver bullet against the virus, and all you can do is boost your immune system and tough it out. But nobody ever tells you how to boost your immune system, or what counts as a way to significantly boost it. But one eroge recently gave a clear answer.

Years ago, when I first started playing eroge, I had plenty of reasons for it. I was sick of light novels, anime, and manga dragging their “serials” on for years without end, and sick of their bloated, convoluted stories. So I went with galge. One of the reasons that satisfied me most back then was this: “Visual novels are different from other ACG works — in a single game, you always get to see the story’s ending.” But times change, and that line has drifted further and further from reality. My view of visual novels has swung to the opposite end too — from weariness to outright hatred. Never mind that visual novels have all learned the light-novel “split-volume” sales model. What wears on me most is the “advance or regress” market development of the genre over the years. Visual novel players always call themselves “subculture enthusiasts” and take pride in their supposedly niche hobby. They’re always finding ways to recommend visual novels to others, or personally jumping into making them, or introducing their favorites in ACG discussion forums. Most of these so-called “enthusiasts” will admit it’s a niche market, in a gray zone, not something you can show in broad daylight — but they keep praying that one day the market will evolve and become accepted by more people. And as a niche game category, visual novels have far too many flaws that most people clearly reject, yet the so-called enthusiasts ignore and tolerate them, year after year for over a decade. That’s what I never expected.

A while back, “Bro of Bros” Tony Daiki finally dropped a new album after six years, with a ridiculously flashy title: Greatest Works of Art. But when I actually listened to it, something felt off: “It’s just a pretty ordinary album—honestly, a lot of it feels outdated, it’s lost that forward-looking edge it used to have. How can you call this ’the greatest works of art’ with a straight face?” Then the MV came out, I watched it, and it hit me. Oh. So “Greatest Works of Art” isn’t the whole album—it’s just the lead single. And the song isn’t saying it’s great; it’s just name-dropping and mashing up all the “greatest works” from art history. So the album is called Greatest Works of Art because that’s the lead single. And the lead single is called “Greatest Works of Art” because its content pays tribute to those “greatest works”—not because the song itself is great. Once you get that, the title actually makes sense. No real problem, just a bit of deliberate clickbait. To me, Jay Chou’s new album feels more like a Frankenstein—stitching together everything he thinks is “the sickest” or “the greatest,” and that’s it. This kind of tribute-and-stitch approach to “great works” happens in plenty of fields, and in the almost-ignored world of eroge, it’s practically the norm. Take Neko to Joshiryou seyo! (ネコと女子寮せよ!), the game I’m talking about here.

I actually downloaded this game a long time ago, and I honestly don’t remember why. I just saw someone upload it on Nyan. I had no idea who made it, where it came from, or when it released. Then I downloaded it and, like most of the visual novels gathering dust on my hard drive, never touched it again. Not out of burnout—just a total lack of interest. I’d say I’ve played quite a few so-called “Chinese text adventure” games, and most of them left me disappointed. It’s like China’s music industry: full of copycats with nothing of their own. What made me finally play this one was when the game’s producer posted a “blind date / fishing expedition” on the “Save the Older Otaku” account. He pulled off a piece of performance art in the most absurd way possible, and I instantly thought: this guy’s got ideas. Fine, he’s legit! So I decided to give his game a shot.

Honestly I don’t even remember when I played this one. I’ve been way too busy and tired lately — I’ve played a ton of stuff but haven’t had time to write anything up, so I’m just piecing it back together while sorting through screenshots. As I recall, this is one of those “sold in volumes” little nukige. Most of you are probably already familiar with the racket. The first volume, Ichizu na (Shojo→) Kanojo to Koi shitai, came out last year and I thought it was fine. Apart from me griping pretty hard about how blatantly it panders to otaku, there wasn’t much wrong with it. Its biggest strength was the absolutely gorgeous CG and the stunning, heart-fluttering heroine art — solidly middle-of-the-road as far as visual novels go. A year and change later, the series put out a second volume, and they couldn’t even be bothered to change the name: 《一途な（処女→）彼女と恋したい ver.広橋るな》 Also, I have no idea if putting the “ver” up front like that is even correct. If you’ve decided “ver” is the prefix for the different volumes, then you didn’t add it to the first one either. Setting aside the inconsistent naming, how does a simple little romance thing like this take you a whole year to develop? So I was getting ready to give this a quick look, and it turned out to be nothing like what I expected.