A lot of visual novels try to stir up buzz by making themselves “contrasty,” though this kind of contrast isn’t the same as what an Osaka black shark otaku sees on Twitter — close enough, though. Basically: some games look like moe-bait on the surface but are secretly pitch black inside, while others look like an empty nukige but end up preaching some profound truth… This game isn’t just superficially “contrasty,” but it’s contrasty enough. I’m talking about Amairo Chocolata 2 (あまいろショコラータ 2). The previous game even got a Chinese release on Steam under the name 巧克甜恋 — so the Chinese name for this one should probably be 巧克甜恋 2, right? But I haven’t seen any news about a Chinese localization for this one.

The protagonist is your average corporate drone slash illustrator. By pure chance he boards a steam train at night and sets off on a journey with no known destination. He’s not alone on the train. There’s a foreigner from Sweden, a squinty-eyed guy, a pretty older sister type, a black cat loli, and of course a conductor who knows absolutely nothing about anything. The trip passes through a lot of places. The dark forests of Northern Europe, an island in southern Japan, the Hakodate planetarium in Hokkaido, and the place where the protagonist used to live. Yeah, you can guess where this is going. The train exists across time and space, and it carries its passengers to the place they once yearned for most. For the foreigner that’s the dark forests back home, for squinty-eyes it’s the island, for the pretty sister it’s Hokkaido, and for the protagonist it’s naturally his own place.

Whenever I tell someone new that I play visual novels, I hear the same thing: “Oh, galge? Yeah I’ve played those, Nekopara, right? Man, that stuff is something else, heh heh.” Sure, Nekopara technically counts as a visual novel, but every time someone treats “visual novel” and “Nekopara” as the same thing, I get annoyed. Simple reason: I don’t like Nekopara. Unlike certain other Nekopara-hating keyboard-warrior otaku, I don’t hate it because the artist flip-flops politically, or because the devs are milking Steam. I hate it because the game just isn’t very good. First off, Nekopara is a nukige, and a pretty mediocre one. The everyday dialogue and setup have nothing going for them—throw it on DLsite and it’d be one of a thousand. Its only real edge was using Emote, which made it look fancy, and one of the biggest reasons it blew up was that it launched with “official non-Japanese language support.” There are otaku all over the world stuck not knowing Japanese, staring at squiggles with no idea what’s being said, refreshing forums every day waiting for a fan translation—it’s agony. Then suddenly there’s a Steam game with an anime art style, Japanese voice acting, localization support, and a cheap price, and it was the only way to play a visual novel on Steam. So it sold like crazy… Yeah, if I remember right, when Nekopara hit Steam, the only other thing on there was some Willplus game with an English-only release. It was your only option. So Nekopara’s success was just timing and circumstance. The era made it, not the quality.

Everyone knows I’m not a moe-otaku. Even so, I still look up to moe-otaku. Years ago — probably five or six by now — I was dead set on becoming one. Back then I was still watching anime, and when it comes to the stuff that was big around then, it’s gotta be K-On, right? At the time the Bilibili homepage was still wall-to-wall muscle bro memes, so if you wanted to watch shows you had to go to Acfun. But Acfun’s shitpost section was full of K-On MADs — the Cagayake!GIRLS MADs alone were everywhere, completely out of hand lol… I listened to it so much I could sing it. So sometimes when I saw that crowd spamming “My great Kon!” over the song, I couldn’t help feeling a little like I didn’t get it… There’s a reason I can’t wrap my head around it — I watched K-On! for real, seriously, but I just couldn’t keep going.