Tearjerker stories, everyone thinks they’re so moving. So the moment you say tearjerker, naturally someone’s gotta die. There are a thousand ways to kill someone off, but the handiest is terminal illness. Blaming it on terminal illness is super convenient—everyone can just curse how unfair the heavens are. So of course visual novels use terminal illness too. One fairly well-known one was Dekinai Watashi ga, Kurikaesu.. What did I think of that game… one word: trash. So the same staff went and made a new one, still about terminal illness: Inochi no Spare I was born for you. What did I think of this one… still trash. Actually, it’s even worse than the last one…

できない私が、くり返す。 left a decent impression on me, and not because of the art or anything like that — mostly it was a bunch of people saying it’s a “tearjerker” and “the best.” Generally a game that most people approve of can’t be that bad, so I played it during June when there was nothing else out. The title is weird. Going by my Japanese level of a one-year-old infant, I think it’s trying to say that no matter how many times I go back, I can’t change a damn thing. Early on, the protagonist gets a pocket watch from a big-sister type named Ren, who tells him it can travel through time and return to the past. “But there’s no point in going back, because the future can’t be changed.” A time leap that can’t change the future is basically useless, and Ren hammers it in every time she talks about the watch: 未来は変えられない So the story begins five years after big sis Ren dies, at the moment the watch-holding protagonist meets a girl named Shino.