Two years on, after a run of teasers early in the year, Japan’s galgame powerhouse Yuzusoft has finally put out its full-price R18 proper new release for the year: LimeLight Lemonade Jam (the Chinese title roughly reads as “Spotlight and Lemonade Performance,” since “Jam” can mean fruit jam or a band’s set). And to everyone’s mild surprise, it’s a girl-band story. From announcement to launch the whole thing ran like classic Yuzusoft: no long gap in between, and they put out a free online demo download well ahead of time — the kind most of today’s so-called “super blockbusters” won’t bother with. Credit where it’s due: no offline demo event, no flying out KOLs on the company dime to say nice things in advance. Just traditional marketing, step by step, and the release didn’t slip. You can smell the mature project management.

Anyone familiar with my past blog posts knows I’m not exactly a Yuzusoft hater, but I’m definitely not a fanboy either. I’ve always kept a measuredly critical stance toward Yuzusoft’s (ゆずソフト) past works. With Sora-iro I called them moege; with Witch I said they needed to get serious; with Senren * Banka I said they were too formulaic; by Riddle Joker and that all-ages title whose name I can’t even remember I was already mocking them as washed up; and by Shinigami no Butterfly I was flat-out saying they’d crashed and burned. So yeah, my feelings on Yuzusoft are pretty negative across the board. Even if deep down I think they’re already better than their peers, they never quite hit that point I’m looking for, never triggered any real desire in me to praise them. Fast forward to 2023: Yuzusoft is still alive, still putting out a new game every 1–2 years. This one’s called Tenshi Souzou (天使騒々). Honestly, the name is terrible, gives off major Tenshi Ranman vibes. And after reading the game’s synopsis, I pretty much assumed this was Yuzusoft returning to their roots — by lying flat on their face.

Back at the start of the year, someone told me Yuzusoft was putting out a new title this year. Sure enough, it dropped a while ago — except nobody saw it coming that it would be an all-ages release. Yuzusoft launched a sub-brand called Yuzusoft Sour, i.e. “Sour Yuzusoft.” Which is a bit of a redundant name, honestly — yuzu is already sour… And the important part: the game itself, Parquet. Most Yuzusoft fans instantly lost their minds when they saw the new title was “all-ages,” but I’m fine with it. Yuzusoft can tell a decent story — Senren Banka alone proves that much. If they drop the low-effort “horny” and “fanservice” angle and go story-driven, that’s not automatically a bad idea. If the writing and direction are strong, this could be a good moment to pivot… “If the writing and direction are strong,” though… So is this game actually any good?

I’ve always been waiting for Yuzusoft to crash, but unfortunately their games have always been stable—it’s hard for them to crash because their production process is practically an assembly line. Pick a theme/setting for the game Design characters based on the theme Then get scenario writers to split the story, write each part, and stitch it together Start the hype campaign, release countdown animations every day Release character songs, keep building hype Remix the character song tracks and use them as the game’s OST Game ships Also, Yuzusoft’s artists are almost always the same, so the art style is guaranteed, and the voice actors they hire are all competent. After playing, you basically never feel like it’s a “landmine”—at worst you think “the story is just okay,” “too formulaic,” “the setting is a bit childish”—not outstanding, but definitely not bad. This level of quality has also bred a lot of “irrationally devoted Yuzu fans.” I vaguely remember saying on social media that Riddle Joker had a dumb story, and someone tracked me down on Telegram to rant at me, practically saying “I’m so mad I’m so mad I’m so mad.” That shows how powerful Yuzusoft’s magic is. But precisely because of the nature of their games, most Yuzu fans are quite young, many still minors. I remember seeing a post on Twitter about a minor who broke down after being rejected from a Yuzu live event. So I have mixed feelings about Yuzusoft: I love them because they’re genuinely one of the benchmarks of the visual novel genre, and they always manage to cast voice actors I like, I hate them because they’ve always been an assembly line producing moe-feed with zero innovation. The impact of Yuzusoft’s lack of innovation isn’t just on themselves. As a cult company where “every new release tops the annual sales chart,” if they can keep making easy money off the assembly line, other companies will inevitably copy them. I really don’t want every visual novel company to become like Yuzusoft—if that happens, the industry is truly doomed. But this year’s Yuzusoft seems to have actually tried something different… And they crashed…

Around 2010, in my last semester of college. I’d already landed a job, but graduation was closing in and I still had to finish my thesis defense. I’ve actually forgotten the whole process of writing my thesis by now. I just remember that while I was working on it, it got so boring that I started looking for anime to watch online. I was looking for anime and saw some shitpost compilation blowing up on AcFun, so I went and tracked down the source material, and that’s how I found this thing called Toaru Majutsu no Index (A Certain Magical Index). Looking back now it’s got plenty to poke fun at, but for me at the time I thought it was a pretty interesting watch. The interesting part is its setting: battles between scientific ESPers and magicians, with the male lead caught right in the middle as a third-party existence. Even more absurd is that this so-called “third party” male protagonist is actually the strongest one of all, and the story unfolds in the most formulaic way possible: some Boss suddenly pops out saying he’s gonna take out the protagonist, the protagonist fires off a bunch of trash talk, kills the Boss in one punch, keeps the guys around as bros, and adds the girls to his harem…… Of course, after finishing A Certain Magical Index, I went ahead and checked out its spin-off too — the famously well-known Toaru Kagaku no Railgun (A Certain Scientific Railgun). Frankly, the story in Railgun is way better than in Index. Most of it has nothing to do with magic — it’s all about espers. The heroine is a fairly strong esper, and she’s constantly running around with her friends solving all sorts of incidents, from espers losing control of their powers to crimes happening in the shadows. Honestly, the reason A Certain Scientific Railgun is the better watch comes down more to its story and character setups just being way cooler.

Back in school I took a course called Software Engineering, taught by an old lady who could not stop singing the praises of the Indian and Japanese software industries. She’d go off on long tangents in the middle of lectures, and you can probably guess the gist: strict adherence to “standards” in the development process, “modularization” with “high cohesion and low coupling,” that sort of thing. Some of it was honestly overblown, borderline bullshit. “India’s software industry is very advanced. Their professional programmers write code so standardized that a hundred people all produce the exact same thing—even the comments look identical.” “The more standardized and regulated things are, the faster you can throw together solutions when requirements come in, like stacking building blocks…” “Once everything is standardized, every person is like a cog in the machine, running efficiently and fast…” She kept escalating into more and more mystical territory, piling on the bullshit, and since I was always late to that class I ended up sitting in the front row. The old lady kept fucking asking me questions, and sometimes I’d push back… “But wouldn’t programming be super boring like that? Everyone turns into a robot.” “That’s called efficiency. The efficiency of a big company delivering solutions fast. You want to be an individual, go work solo…” Back then I only had a vague grasp of this stuff. I figured “standardization” and “assembly line” were indeed probably very efficient… But after starting work and dealing with some small and mid-sized domestic software companies (not internet companies), I found that my contrarian comment actually had some truth to it… The people there really are boring… the stuff they make is boring too… but it does “work.” The assembly line can solve problems, but it always feels like it’s missing passion and fun, like it lacks color… Of course, work doesn’t need color, right… It’s just that games can’t be like that, can they… Yuzusoft’s game from last year, Sanoba Witch, I thought was pretty good—just missing that certain something. The main issue was that Nene’s route wasn’t particularly fleshed out; otherwise there wasn’t much to complain about. So when they announced this year’s new title, Senren * Banka, my first reaction was still disappointment…