Honestly, at first I figured HARUKAZE was dead as a studio, that they’d gone full-time into all-ages TokyoToon stuff. Didn’t expect them to come back from the dead with a brand-new title. The game’s called “Monkeys!¡,” and that double inverted exclamation mark at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Combined with the premise, it gave me the feeling they were about to do a crossdressing bit. I haven’t touched many crossdressing VNs. Most of them follow the same playbook, and the ones that actually do something interesting with it are rare. The one that stuck with me was Maria†Holic from back in the day, and even that didn’t have much to do with crossdressing, really. I’ve always appreciated HARUKAZE’s talent for shitposting, so I was looking forward to this one bringing something new. After playing it, though, all I can say is this game brought plenty of “surprises”—and even more disappointment.

Hato, the writer who got famous off the Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart series, went quiet for a while and then came back — this time on Steam. A game called Marco & the Galaxy Dragon (マルコと銀河竜) showed up, and it had that “we’re not hurting for cash” look about it, plus the standard day-one Simplified Chinese, so it read like a cash grab from every angle. By that point my opinion of Hato had already soured pretty badly, because with Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart 2 he’d started going way too sappy and way too self-indulgent. You couldn’t even tell what the main plot was about anymore, and the jokes were getting harder and harder to follow. My personal take is that he’d gone full “mentally ill genius” like certain other famous scenario writers — call it “too artsy to understand” if you’re being polite, “can’t write a straight sentence” if you’re not. I still wasn’t happy with the game, but Mayuge flat-out refused to gift it to me, so I had to go get it and play it myself. Pretty simple reason: “How am I supposed to dunk on it if I don’t play it?” Anyway, after playing this “scam game,” I feel like I underestimated Hato. Sure, I think he’s a bit unhinged now, but I forgot that he’s got a real gift for doing big things on a shoestring — something he’d already made obvious with the ultra-low-budget galge-to-anime adaptation he spearheaded. Put simply, Marco & the Galaxy Dragon is exactly that kind of “big things on a shoestring” game.