When this game was first announced I was hyped as hell. Madsoft at the helm, so you know the production values are solid. Yuzuna on art, easy on the eyes. And the premise—a “comeback story”—was exactly my shit. The writer had previously done all sorts of training-and-humiliation eroge, which made it even more promising. Pair that with the absolutely fire OP from the initial promo, and my expectations were through the roof. Then the game dropped. I dove in full of hope, and pretty quickly something started feeling off. The “play dumb, crush the elite” / “poor dude climbs to the top” power fantasy I was promised? Nowhere to be found. Instead the whole game turned into the usual Otome-soft style routine—the protagonist becomes the school’s incubus, every woman goes crazy for him, and he even gets a direct invite to join the student council. The story then headed in the direction I was most familiar with but had zero desire for. The protagonist says he wants to climb the ladder, but his method for crossing class lines is to bang some upper-class young lady—works out great whether you’re talking bloodline or marrying in. He even starts fantasizing—oh, he’s fantasizing again—about becoming the school’s stud horse, every woman becoming his wife, and he’s already picked out how many kids they’re gonna have… What kind of Shandong peasant logic is this…

Honestly, when I first played Hamedashi Creative, I was completely baffled. First off, the story made no sense. The game is packed with “instantly fake” elements: a little sister who’s deep into 2D culture, a brocon, and loaded enough to support her worthless older brother; a 2D artist who loves drawing lewd art, enjoys hanging out with fat otaku without being gross like them, and is willing to date one; a cold, sharp-tongued, self-absorbed black-haired beauty who flip-flops between tsundere and queen just to throw herself at a fat otaku; and a Vtuber who looks totally ordinary—the kind who’d graduate in a month in the V-tuber world—yet somehow becomes a top earner without relying on insults or dirty jokes, and still falls for the otaku… In this game’s world, it’s as if every woman sees the protagonist and wants to sleep with him. Their insults are just tsundere, their rejections are just playing hard to get, their “NO” actually means “YES,” they say one thing but mean another, and deep down they’re always craving to be conquered by him… Unless you tell me the setting is that only one man is left in the world and women can only survive by mating, I still can’t buy into this story.

Back when I first became an otaku, I had this weird sense of superiority. I don’t know where it came from, but I just felt one step above everyone else. It was like 2D culture was the ultimate goal of life, and all those people around me who didn’t get it were just aimless walking corpses. In a world of black and white, only 2D culture made me colorful. So I boldly changed my profile picture to a moe girl, set my desktop wallpaper to a big-breasted girl, and wore the strange looks from others like a badge. The whispered gossip behind my back actually made me prouder. “Anyone who loves 2D culture is a friend.” At the time I thought I was insanely cool, like the one sober person in a room full of drunks.

Some guy with a screw loose once laid out the whole “old school” vs. “new school” thing. Of course, a guy with a screw loose doesn’t talk like a human being, so what he meant was Old School and New School. Put bluntly: “new type” and “retro type.” You see this pattern in other games, you see it in music genres, so naturally you also see it in the eroge space. Remember what the earliest eroge were like? You’d have a male lead meet a pretty girl, and after about two lines they’d start fucking, and then it was over. Same as what Carmack the Great said about FPS games: “The game is the porn, the story is superfluous.” The subtext: games exist to make you feel good, so why the hell bother with plot and authorship? If it doesn’t get you off, why the hell are you playing it? Normal games are already pigeonholed that clearly, so what about eroge? What’s an eroge for? So you can watch it like porn! So why the hell go through all that asinine setup and payoff? Just drop the pants and get to it!