In Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue, the character Misaki Tobisawa gets called “Best Girl” by a whole lot of Western players. Sure, everyone knows Best is a superlative, but Western otaku are all DDs — every girl they see is Best Girl. You can just read Best Girl as waifu. Put it this way: in the Western otaku aesthetic, they lean toward girls like Misaki Tobisawa — relatively real, emotionally driven, a little fragile, and if she’s got a bit of pride buried in there too, even better. Everyone knows Sprite, the developer of Aokana, has been dead for years. Back in the day they voluntarily walked away from the Galgame market, ditched the sequel they’d been planning, and citing “the shrinking industry market” went off to do mobile and browser games. Turns out mobile didn’t work either, so they slunk back to making Galgame… merch. Yeah, after Sprite came back from the dead they didn’t exactly rush to make games again — they started selling merch, just like they were doing right before they went under. Maybe merch really does pay, because Sprite was having a grand old time with it. Right when players couldn’t take it anymore, Sprite finally announced their new title… Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue Extra 2. So after all that buildup, they made a fandisc. Of course it came bundled with plenty of merch — this shitty company clearly has selling merch down to a routine. The game came out a while back, it’s not a short read, so let’s just talk about how it is.

The Hokenshitsu no Sensei to… series has put out three games so far. The first one came out over a year ago: Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Shabondama Chuudoku no Joshu. The second was last month: Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Goth Loli no Koui. And not even a month later, here’s the third, Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Koakuma na Kaichou. As the title says, this one’s heroine is the student council president, Tsukimori Rin. Rin’s setup was already laid out pretty clearly in the first two games. Her bloodline is weird — she’s the mixed-race child of a “soul person” and a human, with a soul person’s powers and a human’s body. That’s her biggest advantage, and also where most of her grief comes from.

After the middling reception to last year’s title, Saga Planets once again tapped Sakaki Kasa (さかき傘) to write the main scenario, hoping he could rescue the new game’s reputation. The game is called Ambitious Mission (アンビシャスミッション), and it’s set in Sapporo, Hokkaido (though the game deliberately renames the place). The protagonist grew up in an orphanage, and one day he stumbles onto the fact that the school’s untouchable beauty, Arise Kaguya, is secretly moonlighting as a righteous phantom thief. With her identity blown, Arise Kaguya also notices the protagonist is no slouch himself—fast runner, high jumper—so she strong-arms and sweet-talks him into joining her crew, training him up as a fellow thief to lighten her own workload. Meanwhile, one of Sapporo’s oldest families, the Ishikawa, have also caught wind of the phantom thief running around pulling jobs across the city. The Ishikawa family tradition is to protect the city’s safety in a manner not unlike the ninja, so they send out the family’s sixteenth-generation successor, Ishikawa Yae, to apprehend the thief. In the end the protagonist still gets caught during one of his operations, nabbed by Ishikawa Yae—but she’s shocked to find that the so-called phantom thief is actually the guy living next door to her. Then comes another round of the carrot-and-stick routine, and Ishikawa Yae gets pulled into the phantom thief crew too. There’s also a gyaru makeup artist on the team, Hongou Nijimu, plus some servants from the Arise Kaguya household, and together they make up the crew. Once the “phantom thief crew” is complete, the game starts explaining why the team was formed in the first place. Turns out there’s a legend passed down in Sapporo about something the Ainu left behind: an Ainu dial called “Ambitious” that archaeologists dug up, with 12 slots on it. Collect the matching 12 gemstones and set them in, and you can summon the legendary “god of medicine” — a cure for any illness. Aruse Kaguya’s older sister, Athena, was originally supposed to be the family heir, but a car accident when she was little left her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, so Kaguya ended up next in line as the family’s successor — though she’s been carrying the guilt ever since. Back then, there was a phantom thief in Sapporo called Fantom who pulled off exactly that kind of heist — and vanished after the job was done. So Arise Kaguya decided to follow in Fantom’s footsteps: steal the gems, and cure her sister’s illness.

Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Shabondama Chuudoku no Joshu came out at the end of 2020. My reaction back then was mostly pity. You could tell at a glance that the thing was unfinished — a common route that dragged on forever, a pile of introduced characters, and then the actual story went to the main heroine and nobody else. Everyone else might as well have been set dressing. So I figured it was a half-baked cash-in shoved out the door with whatever scraps were lying around. Then 2022 rolls in and the game gets a sequel. Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Gothic Lolita no Koui. Right. That was when it clicked — this is another one of those sold-in-volumes deals, and the company was so broke that volume two got pushed back almost two years.

In the happy homeland of Black Shark Otaku, there is an unwritten custom: If a man cheats, his wife picks up a kitchen knife and chops off his dick. Don’t think I’m bullshitting you—go search for it, news like this is everywhere, and there’s a lot of it. Some guys get it chopped off and it can still be reattached; others are extra ruthless and just chop it off and toss it in the river. This simple, brutal method of treating scumbag cheaters has also earned the approval of female teachers, who have spoken on behalf of most women: scumbags deserve to be chopped. Maybe it’s a bit extreme, and maybe one day Black Shark Otaku will get sent to China, get caught not paying for a repair job, and get chopped too, but this method also expresses the common people’s disdain for “two-timing” behavior. No matter how you slice it, having a girlfriend and still going after someone else is really not a moral thing to do.

CUBE released a game called Kamisama no You na Kimi e back in 2020. It’s about a protagonist who’s a top-tier hacker and the AI robot he ends up with. That game had solid art and decent sales, but the story left a lot to be desired. The most ridiculous part is that the protagonist is supposedly a “hacker” yet has zero hacker instincts—he just lets an AI-powered internet-connected robot from a tech giant live with him, not caring at all about privacy. Also, a lot of the routes feel like they just cut off abruptly. The main heroine, Tsukuyomi, doesn’t get main-heroine treatment; the detective billed as “the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes” relies on a brain chip and turns into an idiot; and the female hacker avenging her brother just keeps raging impotently the whole time. The premise is good, but the whole game feels like it’s missing something. Later came news that the game was being ported to Switch and PS4, and it was even getting a new heroine. That caught me off guard. Sure, the whole “port it all-ages and add a new heroine” playbook has been around since roughly a decade ago, but lately it’s practically unthinkable. The industry’s already circling the drain, after all. CUBE going ahead and bucking the trend like this pretty much proves they’ve got real confidence in the supervisor’s art. I looked at the added character content too, and it didn’t seem like a big deal — probably just a story about some random side character. Later word got around that the port also changed some of the original story, which was honestly expected. The original has that “raping a mentally disabled girl” politically incorrect bit, so tweaking it makes sense. What I actually cared about was how to get my hands on this “all-ages version” with the new heroine added. I originally wanted to grab a Switch cartridge, then found out it goes for over 6000 yen and never drops in price. As a broke-ass, I stared at it for a while and gave up. But when I saw the new heroine was voiced by a CV who’s a regular in eroge, I had a feeling: someday I’ll definitely get to play this one for free. And wouldn’t you know it, the heavens rewarded my patience — just as I predicted, CUBE did the exact same thing they pulled with Your Diary back in the day: a reverse port. They put out Kamisama no You na Kimi e Extended Edition, and it doesn’t just bundle in the new heroine’s story, it also gives her HCG scenes (one look at the CV and you already know what’s up). So I wasted no time hunting down the game to check out the added content. And hoo boy, the results were eye-opening — this game is nowhere near as simple as I expected. If anything, compared to the version that came out two years ago, this so-called “expanded edition” feels more like the actual proper release.

I first saw the key visual for SMEE’s new game at the end of last year, when someone sent it to me. My reaction was immediate: this has to be fake. The reason was simple: It looks like absolute shit! And what’s worse, this ugly-ass art was still done by the “same team” — no artist change, still the same “Taniyama-san.” There have long been rumors that this “Taniyama-san” isn’t one person but a team name. But come on, everyone knows the saying: water flows downhill, people strive upward. If drawing is your profession, you should only get better over time. How the hell do you get worse!!

I remember a few years back, before Google+ shut down, some helpful guy online told me the thing he hated most was when a character in certain anime/game works says one specific line — the moment that line comes out, he instinctively writes the whole thing off as garbage. “Humans, huh~ they’re just that kind of creature” 其实一开始我不能理解这种想法，直到我后来玩的 Galgame 越来越多，接触的所谓“神作”越来越多，我也就开始越来越明白，这样开口闭口都是“人間とは……”的角色…… I fucking hate this! What I hate isn’t the line this character says, it’s the tone he says it in—all high and mighty, like he’s above it all. He’s still a “human” himself, yet he’s always judging humans from God’s-eye view. You could call it self-mockery, but that air of superiority doesn’t look like it. What annoys me even more is that everything he does fits the mold of the “complainer who never offers a solution” type. For example, this kind of character always rants like a lunatic about how ugly humans are, how selfish humans are, how goddamn stupid humans are—and then goes right on doing ugly, selfish, goddamn stupid things himself, while never once advocating truth, goodness, or beauty. It looks more like he’s making excuses for his own stupid behavior than actually criticizing anything.

When Red: Cherish was announced I wasn’t exactly hyped. My first reaction was “what the hell is this?” The legendary “cyberpunk” premise welded onto “running a restaurant day to day” — that reeks of a planning meeting where nobody had any ideas left and somebody just blurted out the first thing that came to mind. Still, I was glad the studio managed to put out something new at all. I’d been convinced they were going to milk the white-haired Tsubaki from the previous game until the lights went out, so credit where it’s due for stepping out of the comfort zone. I played the trial, and it was surprisingly good. Bought the full version too — and then the smile slowly slid off my face. How do I put this. It’s not that the game is bad. It’s that it’s way too different from what I expected.

Like most teenage boys, at the age when “sex” hits hardest, I opened the door to “sex.” The trigger was a little ad I saw on the street, telling the story of a dick pill. It went like this: a “mistress” gets abandoned, then runs into a homeless guy on the street. He’s asleep, but still standing tall, so to speak. So the “mistress,” thirsty as hell, sits right down on him in broad daylight, and the wording that follows—I can’t decide if it’s absurd or inspired. Stuff like “jade stalk slides into jade gate,” “flower branch trembling,淫水 overflowing”—anyway, the ad ends by telling you this homeless guy is so godlike because he took their brand of dick pills. Even as an ad it’s total nonsense and makes no sense. For one, how does a homeless guy afford a box of fake dick pills at 98 RMB? And no woman on the street is gonna get bored and sit on a beggar. Do you people not own vibrators? Later, my more absurd education on “sex” came from a series of jokes called Professor Huang Xialiu. I found them in a pile of old newspapers—no idea which street rag printed them. A lot of the jokes were ridiculous, but sometimes they carried real satire of the era, including some absurdity from the Cultural Revolution. You can still find some traces of “Huang Xialiu” online, though supposedly anyone who’s seen this stuff is already 50.