Asa Project, a company that used to be pretty damn good.
They’re under Hook, I think. They made a name for themselves with Renai 0 Kilometer, then kept the style going with ひとつ飛ばし恋愛 and later Purumai Wars… and then this year they put out Suki to Suki de Sankaku Renai.
Before I get into the new one, let’s walk through how Asa Project’s games have evolved…
You’re a 42-year-old middle-aged guy. You’ve got a family, a wife, and a daughter in middle school.
Your days never change. One after another, and somewhere in there you’ve forgotten that time is even passing.
Sometimes you shoot the shit with coworkers about nothing in particular. You’ve forgotten what the world out there even looks like. Work is a two-point commute with nothing in between — no fun, no passion. Your coworkers are all hooked on one thrill or another, chasing kicks online, hunting for strangers. You figure none of it means anything.
Maybe you still love your wife. Sometimes you want to get intimate with her, and you get the cold shoulder.
“You’re 42 already. What are you even doing this for? Aren’t you tired enough as it is?”
Your wife has zero interest in the bedroom. It’s depressing. Sometimes you have to take care of it yourself.
But sometimes your eyes drift toward your daughter. She’s nearly grown now, and she’s beautiful — sometimes she even reminds you a little of your wife.
She’s completely unguarded at home, and sometimes you see things you shouldn’t. Sometimes, you even start to react to your own daughter…
That’s dangerous.
Terminix is a GTK3-based terminal emulator, similar to the old Ternimator, though this one feels a bit more fancy.
Honestly, Terminix has most of what Ternimator has, but overall Terminator is still the more powerful of the two. Terminix just looks nicer, so take your pick.
One thing worth mentioning: Terminix integrates a bit better with Nautilus, with right-click support for opening a path directly.
I once saw some otaku girls who play otome games complaining: “In most visual novels the heroine kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat, and in otome games the heroine also kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat. Man, male-oriented or female-oriented, the heroine always has it rough. You get used to it.”
Thinking about it, that’s pretty much true. In a lot of stories women are painted as fragile things that need a man to protect them. Even the “senpai” type in visual novels tends to get a later scene revealing she’s not actually that strong and is secretly fragile inside. It feels like something baked into the gender roles themselves. But every so often a game tries to change that.
Sure, seeing the heroine carry the hero the whole way through in a male-oriented game is unrealistic. Everyone knows the protagonist is “the weakest” by default, and, well, by the end he’s always some broken-ass cheat character anyway. So all we can do is look at female-oriented games and see if any of them dare to make the heroine the strongest.
So 断罪のマリア (Maria of Condemnation) might be one of those games. Not entirely, but it’s close — at the very least, the heroine’s combat power is the strongest in the game.
Kareni Sekai to Owaru Hana is a game I had mixed feelings about from the start — both anticipation and a bit of fear.
Anticipation because the premise is intriguing, almost giving away nothing about what kind of story it’ll tell, and the art, character designs, and even the voice cast all felt really comfortable.
A bit of fear because of the planner/scenario writer: Yukihito. Who is this Yukihito? You might not have heard of his other works, but there’s one you definitely know…
Nekopara. English title Nekopara, and I don’t know the Chinese name, but I know its nickname: “Catgirl Porn” — it sold like crazy on Steam.
He also did two nukige with Sayori, an artist from China, so when a writer like that suddenly drops a new title with what looks like a very abstract, artsy premise, how could you not suspect it might be a landmine?
But after playing the trial last month, my doubts got even worse. Because the trial still explained almost nothing — what the game is trying to say, what the theme is, all still unclear… The world setting feels like a fantasy, and while that’s not uncommon in games, it’s everywhere in Japanese anime. The most recent example is Kowareta Sekai to Garasu no Hana — and the title format is suspiciously similar, which only deepened my suspicion that it might just be pretentious bullshit that ends up saying nothing at all…
Of course, after playing it, those worries vanished. Or rather, I had it wrong — this isn’t some “artsy pretentious” game, it’s more like a fairy tale.
Yeah, a fairy tale — the kind a mother tells her kid before bed, the “Long Long Ago,” “むかしむかし,” “once upon a time” kind…
No wonder the world and scenery in this game feel so “fairy tale.”
Ruri Yakushi (薬師るり) is a singer I was kind of curious about.
First off, her singing is actually solid — at least on CD it is, and without much obvious pitch-correction smeared over it. She switches styles freely too: she can sing just about anything. No-holds-barred stuff, hentai anime stuff, totally shameless stuff, tear-jerking stuff, plain love songs, denpa songs — she covers basically everything.
From what I read, she still works as a pharmacist on the side, which is why she took the stage name “Yakushi Ruri” (yakushi being the word for pharmacist).
Anyway, the music’s good, so I picked up the new album.
Apparently first-press orders came with a signed copy — except I can’t read a damn thing on this signature besides “ありがとう”…
My father said he wanted a Bluetooth speaker, to pair with his phone and listen to music.
Sure, when he’s home he blasts music from his phone at some ungodly hour every morning and wakes me up with all that boom-tss boom-tss, but since it’s my tsundere old man asking, and he’s wearing that face of “if it’s convenient for you you can just casually buy me one, of course if you don’t I can buy it myself, it’s not like I’m asking you to buy it or anything”—no reason not to buy it. Money spent on your parents is money well spent.
But since this was my first time buying one of these, I didn’t want to go too expensive. Buying a Bose felt like a bit much for him—start with something with good value for money, so it won’t hurt if Dad accidentally loses it.
After looking around, I settled on the Sounder Honeycomb 2S+. It happened to be on special at JD, 299 - 100, and with a BaiTiao savings coupon it came to 169 in the end.
Got some time to write dumb code again recently, so I opened Vim. First order of business was updating plugins, using Vim-plug.
And right after the update, problems showed up…
What the hell is this cursed color scheme?
Your Diary is a game by CUBE, and about… two years ago, I played the Chinese-patched version…
Holy shit, it’s already been two years!!! I swear it felt like no time at all!!!
Of course the impression that game left on me was still pretty good. Whenever someone who’s just getting into visual novels asks me for recommendations, I recommend this one. Reason’s simple: good art, good music, the story is a bit clichéd but not toxic, and it’s still a very orthodox, wholesome story — isn’t that perfect to hand to a newbie trying to get into visual novels!
Back then I didn’t really look at what Japanese players thought of the game. Later, while reading up on CUBE, I checked it out, and found Your Diary doesn’t rate that high in Japan. I originally thought a story like this should get an 80, but it barely held onto a 70. What’s funny is some Japanese players called the game “boring.”
Boring… that’s a hard one to call. My thinking at the time was that Japanese otaku probably love those “wild twists” and see Your Diary’s story as all formula, so they’d find it boring.
Of course, if you asked me to look back on Japanese opinions now, I’d say they actually have a point…
