I keep seeing posts like this online:

“Looking for a device to play Gal.”

“Which tablet is good for eroge?”

“This handheld is great, a perfect eroge-dedicated machine.”

…

Sometimes I’m confused too. The visual novel category has been a dying industry for ages, so why does it look like there are still so many fans online, willing to spend real money on a pricey dedicated device just for it?

Actually, long-time readers of my blog probably know that about 10+ years ago I wrote a similar article. I briefly laid out some of my own views back then; some hold up now, some were incomplete.

After all these years I’ve built up a fair amount of visual novel experience and cycled through a lot of devices for playing them. Maybe we should sit down and talk about this again, and share some of my experience.

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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.

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Preface: my history of buying Windows handhelds

The first Windows handheld I bought was probably back in 2015 — also the industry’s first Windows handheld, the first-generation GPD Win.

I backed it on Indiegogo. Honestly, I knew it was made by a company in Shenzhen, China, but I had no idea it would later go on sale in the domestic market. I paid in converted USD, and the shipping date was half a year out.

What happened next a lot of people probably know already: GPD brought the machine into mainland China, put it up for preorder on JD.com, created a Discord group, and kicked off all kinds of shameless marketing.

I was in the first batch of people to join the Discord group, and I even added the two founders on Discord — one was “Wangcai,” the other “Lao Zhu.” I told them I was an Indiegogo backer but physically in mainland China, so could they just ship domestically. Lao Zhu said no problem, and sent it by SF Express.

The machine arrived quickly and I wrote a short review. I was actually fairly satisfied with it — mainly because it was small and had everything you’d expect. There were some QC issues, but nothing major. What dissatisfied me most was the screen’s severe color shift, basically no calibration, and the low resolution — a lot of visual novels couldn’t show the full picture.

Later I backed the first-generation GPD Pocket. That product’s build quality was far better than the Win’s: all-metal body, genuinely nice to use as a tiny computer. But I have to say, for performance’s sake GPD set very aggressive power limits on many of its products, which made battery life pretty poor.

After that I went on to buy GPD Pocket 2 MAX, Chuwi minibook, GPD Pocket 3, and recently even picked up an Ayaneo Air Plus at a low price…

So I’ve used a fair number of portable Windows devices, and they always had something unsatisfying. Even with the GPD Win, I never actually finished a single game on it — too hot, battery life too bad, and too much fiddling required. Many times I’d spend a whole day getting one game to run, and by the time it worked I’d lost interest in playing.

There was a time I thought Windows handhelds — or X86 handhelds in general — would just always be like this. Then I met the Steam Deck, and it got me to finish several AAA titles, even got me willing to spend a decent chunk of money buying games on Steam.

It also cemented one belief and opinion of mine:

The Steam Deck is currently the only X86 handheld worth buying.

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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.

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A long time ago I used Logitech’s trackball line — the much-praised M570. For a while it was my daily driver; I bought several of them and even swapped in a fancier microswitch.

Then… at some point I just gradually stopped using it. Maybe I got tired of cleaning the ball every day, or maybe it was the lack of Bluetooth, which always meant giving up a USB port — either way, “trackball” quietly dropped off my peripherals list.

Later I heard Logitech had put out a new trackball with some kind of electromagnetic scroll wheel, but the price was absurd. Then came the M575. It’s the M570 with Bluetooth added and a slightly reworked shape, and that seems to be about it.

Filling in the old model’s Bluetooth gap took Logitech at least five years. Impressive stuff.

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Not long after I sold off my HP Chromebook X2 11, I regretted it badly. I couldn’t find a tablet that met my needs anymore. Sure, that knockoff Surface from HP had all sorts of crappy problems, but compared to Android tablets that can only play games and watch videos, its advantages were pretty obvious.

Then I saw this thing on eBay:

Lenovo Chromebook 10e

Another Chromebook tablet. Performance-wise it’s about the same as the Duet, but the difference is it actually has a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and it comes with a keyboard cover that looks pretty solid. The only catch is it has no trackpad, but who cares—it’s a tablet, it has a touchscreen!

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I’ve said before that ChromeOS tablets might be the future of “productivity”. But the Duet’s performance and RAM were just too weak, so I eventually sold it. Not long after, I saw this new product:

HP Chromebook X2 11

A 3:2 screen, 8GB of RAM, a Snapdragon 7c processor, a detachable keyboard, a magnetic charging stylus…

This was exactly what perfect “productivity” looked like. Doesn’t that seem cool… I forgot the rest.

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Last year I messed around and bought a FiiO Q7, barely listened to it, then sold it.

Honestly I can’t be bothered with this portable DAC business anymore, but then I noticed the Chord Mojo 2 had come out, and the price had dropped quite a bit, so I got tempted again.

I have a deep fondness for the Mojo series, mainly because I think it’s a DAC made from an FPGA design, fundamentally different from the traditional parts-stacking of domestic “DAC+AMP” units. After all, FPGA counts as “hardware simulation,” and in theory it has far more unlimited potential.

Don’t you think that’s cool? As a loser guy, I think this is way too cool, perfectly in line with my imagination of future life, technology with a bit of fun.

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Gateron released their new low-profile 2.0 series, claiming longer key travel. A breakthrough, supposedly.

So naturally I had nothing better to do and wanted to try it. Conveniently, my NuPhy Air 75 already runs Gateron low-profile switches, so it’s a straight swap — all you need is a switch puller.

Gateron’s official puller is absurdly expensive, more than a whole set of switches. Unless you’re swapping switches constantly, don’t buy it. The Air 75 ships with one, and that’s plenty.

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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.

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