I’ve always thought the Japanese eroge industry should learn some new tricks. Try new game styles, beef up the interaction systems, expand the settings and worldbuilding, and open up more distribution channels — Steam, say, with a Simplified Chinese launch on day one. Boost sales on one hand, improve quality on the other. But things never go the way I imagine. The Japanese eroge industry learned the first half and threw away the second. In other words, they started caring more and more about sales and profit. Improve quality? Doesn’t exist. Once in a while there’s a seemingly sincere “big-budget production,” and it’s still some baffling wildcard where the writer runs wild, it bombs, and the whole brand vanishes. Unlike those wildcards, most of the old brands that “can’t afford to lose” went for steady, solid… scamming. So we get more and more volume splits and Steam releases, plus all kinds of blunt, simplistic premises. They honestly don’t care what the story’s like — as long as it sells and makes money, that’s fine. This quick-cash approach naturally left the companies that “actually tell a good story” half-dead. But some of them learned a new trick: crowdfunding.

Tsukikage no Simulacre is a free game. I was pretty surprised when it got announced. My first thought: when a Japanese company suddenly announces a free game, 99% of the time it’s a card game. Turns out nope, not a card game — it’s basically galge-style content. Then I figured, if you’ve got the balls to make it a galge, are you gonna charge me for every choice? And then the bastards went and slapped “完全無料（ゲーム内課金無し）” on it in giant letters. So now I’m even more confused. Everyone says the eroge industry in Japan is dying — since when did they start doing charity? And isn’t the standard playbook for disruptive low-price launches to hold a press conference like Meizu used to? Whatever. Just download it and see. It’s free anyway. Gotta hand it to those dumbasses in Japan and their bargain-bin servers — the official site went down almost immediately, the Dropbox links blew through their traffic cap right after, and only the Google Drive one still worked. As expected of the almighty Google. Is it really that hard for you Japanese to rent a VPS??