I thought about opening with a look at how this new MELLOW studio connects to the old MME, but the more I turned it over the more pointless it seemed. MME is dead. Better to just talk about the game. The game comes from “Tareka,” the most shitpost-happy scenario writer MME ever had — the one who’d casually write orgies and compensated dating, though every now and then he’d turn out something decent. So even before release, this one reeked of “he’s doing a bit again.” アサガオは夜を識らない。 The title reads downright literary in Japanese. アサガオ is written 朝顔 in kanji and refers to a purple… trumpet-shaped flower. In English, a morning glory. Literally translated, the title is “The Morning Glory Doesn’t Know the Night.” But the game reads 夜 as あい — the character for love, 愛. Which turns the title into “The Morning Glory Doesn’t Know Love.” Conveniently, the heroine is also named Asagao, so the pun lands: on paper it’s “the morning glory doesn’t know the night,” in practice it’s “the heroine doesn’t know love.” From the very first promo, the game kept insisting: this is a true “pure love” story. Anyone with experience knows what it means when a writer keeps hammering on “pure love.” Didn’t Gen Urobuchi call himself the “warrior of love” while claiming he was writing pure love too? Looking at the key art — the heroine cradling a bleeding rabbit — I steeled myself, felt a flicker of anticipation, and opened the game. Which, as it turned out, was the start of my disappointment.