The Japanese love telling stories, and they especially love telling legends. Unlike Chinese legends, which mostly “stick to a certain framework,” a lot of Japanese legends go completely off the rails. This has to do with the Japanese idea of “eight million gods” — everything is a deity, so who isn’t a little kami? On top of that, many Japanese myths have a certain “Buddhist” flavor, mostly built on the idea of reincarnation. They love telling a legend about a god, and the legend also involves reincarnation — no matter how things develop, it always becomes a circle connected end to end, all to create some kind of thought-provoking effect. But play that trick too many times and it numbs you. At least it numbed me. I usually call this kind of plot “Japanese-style melodrama that refuses to speak like a human being.”

Clockup is a company that often puts out “very serious” games, even though most of the time that’s not the impression it gives. Because Clockup’s breakout work was euphoria, and I think you can figure out what kind of thing that game is if you look it up yourself. Ever since then, most of the games Clockup has released give off an impression of being “unvarnished.” By “unvarnished” I don’t just mean the “directness” and “brutality” of the game content, but more the way they embody the characteristics of “18+” games. What is “18+” anyway? It’s adult content, right? And what is adult content? It’s not just pornography, it’s also violence. So these two elements get splashed around to the fullest in a lot of Clockup’s games. Clockup has made a lot of nukige that express a lot of “erotic” intent, and at the same time it’s also made a lot of “story-driven” games that tell some very interesting stories. Of course, these stories don’t just have “eroticism”—they also have explicit “violence.” Even more absurdly, Clockup has also put out some baffling comedy nukige with a style completely different from its usual dark style. But all these wildly different games come from the same company brand, rather than doing what other companies do and spinning off a sub-brand to keep things categorized. It always feels so haphazard, which is exactly why I said at the start that Clockup always leaves you with some weird impression. That said, you can’t deny that Clockup still puts out a good game with real depth every now and then. Not just the early Natsu no Kusari, which had a bit of an art-film vibe—Maggot baits from a few years ago was also memorable. It depicts a story of hope being born once again in an utterly hopeless world, yet the game is still packed with very hardcore erotic and violent elements. Those elements aren’t gratuitous; they highlight the game’s themes very well. The game never seems to compromise for the sake of avoiding “extreme” elements—whatever CG is needed, it shows. No beautification at all. Sometimes I feel there’s even a touch of “aesthetics of violence” in there. Another game that reminds me of this style is DOOM. A lot of people have opposed violence. They’re all dead. So the original team behind Maggot Baits got back together at Clockup and brought us Nenurenu Hitsuji to Kodoku na Ookami, still with a slightly dark style, which naturally made me look forward to it.

Play enough galgames, step in enough pitfalls, eat enough shit, and looking back you start to notice a lot of interesting things. Most galgame fans got their start with fan-translated versions. First it’s anime and manga, then they hear some games have lewd stuff in them, so they go try those out. A few end up stumbling into plot-heavy galgames that way, but the majority just permanently equate galgame with porn. Even today, if you ask someone what a galgame is, probably 80% will say “Nekopara”… another 18% might say Steins;Gate, and only that remaining 2% might actually bring up Memories Off. Yes, I’m saying right here that Nekopara is trash. It’s a pure porn game with zero substance and nothing worth discussing, and personally I don’t even like the art style—can’t even jerk off to it, which is why I’ve played maybe 2 minutes total. What’s more depressing is how many newbies get drawn in by Nekopara and straight-up equate it with galgame as a whole. Makes me sigh just thinking about it. Sure, plenty of galgames have porn elements, but a galgame with nothing but H has no legs to stand on. If you want to understand galgames, you need some more interesting works to break you in. The Memories Off series is a solid entry point. It’s also the most honest, unpretentious example of what makes galgame its own genre—the music is fine, the story’s actually decent, not exactly massive waves but plenty of ups and downs, and it genuinely suits most people’s first exposure. If someone gets interested in galgames because of it and goes looking for “more games like that,” that’s when the problems start piling up.

I’m not really a fan of “guns, cars, and balls” games—I find they get old fast. After all, run-and-gun always boils down to the same few formulas, so even during the years when CS was huge, I didn’t play it for long. If I had to name what I genuinely enjoyed playing the most, it’d be Chinese RPGs. Like everyone else, my first was the Xianjian series. Before RPGs I never read the story — the run-and-gun stuff wasn’t translated back then anyway, but it had GPS-style navigation: open the map, follow the route, kill whoever you run into. RPGs don’t let you skip the story, though. It’s a narrative, and no walkthrough is gonna sit there and recap the plot of every game you’ve played the way I stupidly do. So starting with the “Xianjian” series, at first I was mashing Enter to skip every conversation with anyone in Yuhang County, until I got to Suzhou City, where I started actually reading the story properly. Bit by bit I settled into it, and felt the pull of “game plot” for the first time. Of course you can’t say the “guns, cars, balls” games of that era had no plot — it’s just that games back then didn’t say much about their plots. How was I supposed to know that Delta Force 3 Land Warrior had a cute little sister character named Mako who nearly got killed off… the game didn’t mention a damn thing about it. What I’m actually getting at is this: riding that wave of Chinese RPGs, I started playing games “as stories to read,” and somewhere along the way RPGs drifted apart from the whole “guns, cars, and balls” crowd. The latter chases a “rush”; the former chases a “read.” Chinese RPGs had a golden age once. Plenty of them, even now, could wipe the floor with a lot of Japanese visual novels — China’s history is longer than Japan’s, after all, and there’s a lot more material worth showing off. Even if the cultural climate on the mainland keeps getting worse, at least the Chinese-speaking world still has Taiwan. The Xuanyuan Sword (轩辕剑) series counts as a pretty unique presence in Chinese-language RPGs: it was the first to fuse “history” with “mythology,” and the side stories in particular weave “emotion” into the mix.