I don’t know when I bought a Chinese-made galgame (for lack of a better word) called Migratory Bird on Steam. I strongly suspect I meant to buy Qingxiang and misclicked, but whatever — it’s bought, no refunds, might as well take a look. From top to bottom, the production values on this thing are relatively “serious.” The whole work gives off this dead-earnest vibe. That’s not a dig, and it’s not a joke — I mean it in a mostly positive way. The story’s theme is the one we always see when former high schoolers look back on the Gaokao years: the Gaokao sucks, but youth is forever. It follows an utterly unremarkable male student who loses his sense of direction, meets the top-of-the-class heroine, finds a reason to try, grinds through high school, watches his grades climb, and promises her they’ll get into the same school. He fails the first Gaokao, but resolves to repeat the year for her sake and his own future — and it works out.

神待ち 読み方：かみまち 「救いの手を差し伸べてくれる人を待つ」といった意味であるが、特に、家出した女性が自分を泊めてくれる男性を電子掲示板などで探すことを意味する表現。 Read as: kamimachi Literally “waiting for someone to reach out and save you,” but these days it usually means a runaway girl hunting the internet for some guy who’ll put her up for the night.

For a lot of people whose entire knowledge of Japan stops at the Second Sino-Japanese War and at the level of Aoi Sora and Matsushima Kaede, the impression they have of the country is basically this: “perverted,” “off-the-wall,” “all kinds of fetishes,” “twisted,” and so on and so forth. It’s not hard to see why. At least in mainland China, the Japanese social news you come across is nothing but some foot fetishist sipping a Coke while licking a stranger’s feet for 30 minutes, some ear-cleaning massage parlor, all sorts of weird services, those utterly pointless but deeply disgusting otaku fleshlight things, people who eat a girl’s shit, people who drink her holy water, and on and on… By any reasonable standard Japan should be a country with very strict moral restraints, but that’s exactly why people cut loose harder when they do… Then again, is anywhere else any less twisted? I flipped through mainland social news and there’s no shortage of twisted stories. I know a girl I went to middle school with — she posted on social media that she ran into a purebred “foot fetishist” on the streets of Zhengzhou, who politely asked to photograph her feet specifically… and to kiss them… and she said yes. Hard to say whether that’s real “twisted” or “perverted,” but my point is that these people who clash so hard with social norms exist everywhere in the world. Japan just likes to drag them out under the spotlight. “Otaku” and “ACG” culture have seemed stuck in the swamp of “pornography” from the very start. Most of the content is about sex, even though most of the people consuming it have never had any… so the impression they give others isn’t great either. Which is why when a classmate introduced me to someone, they’d add helpfully, “Don’t worry about him, he’s a 2D person, he’s not interested in you.” and I’d sit there dying inside. Thanks to the bigger imagination that ACG culture spawned, Japan has a fun hobby: “moe-fication” and “girl-ification.” Can’t find a girl? Just turn the stuff around you into girls. Trains become girls — when you ride the train, it’s like you’ve entered the girl’s body. Pens become girls — when you grip the pen, it’s like you’re stroking the girl’s slender fingers… Cola becomes a girl — when you squeeze the bottle, it’s like you’re caressing black tights. Pocari Sweat becomes a girl — when you… okay, never mind. So whether it’s Anime, Comic, or Game (though the term ACG probably wasn’t coined by the Japanese — they say マンガ, not Comic), there’s always a game where some object gets turned into a girl and becomes the protagonist. Especially in visual novels. I’ve seen an alpaca turned into a girl, a whale turned into a girl, a robot turned into a girl, a camcorder turned into a girl, a train turned into a girl, a cursed sword turned into a girl, not to mention all the non-human ghosts and gods… and animals and whatever else. So at this point, if you told me there’s a game where a girl is a smartphone turned human, I wouldn’t even be surprised. Honestly, it feels less like surprise and more like “well, obviously.” I stroke my phone for half an hour every day. Was I subconsciously treating it as a girl all along?

Honestly, at this point I’ve basically turned into a pure moe-otaku. What’s a moe-otaku? It means I no longer care about plot or story direction. As long as the girls are cute and the voices are nice, I’ll fucking say the game is good, and if someone says it’s not, I’ll fucking find excuses to say it is, and so on and so forth… But you can’t really blame me, right? This is a world that judges by looks.

前一阵玩nukige太多了，然后nukige玩多了又玩了一票废萌キャラゲー，觉得自己还是应该回到“故事导向”的基本路线上来，搜了下看到了我个人非常喜欢的《紙の上の魔法使い》的脚本师的一个早期作品，叫做《運命予報をお知らせします》,简单看了下日本人在中二空间对它的评价，觉得应该没问题，也就开始玩了。 The game is supposed to be only a dozen hours or so, but it felt longer than I expected. I came away pleasantly surprised, maybe because it’d been a while since I’d played something with writing this good. It got to the point that after finishing it, I booted up the newly released Floral Flowlove (フローラル・フローラブ) and just couldn’t take the gap in prose quality between the two. The former reads like something a college student would write; next to it, the latter is straight-up middle-schooler level…… Anyway, probably because my Japanese has gotten better, I’ve started finding a lot of really dumb phrasing genuinely stupid — it’s not just about clawing my way to understanding the meaning anymore.

When Onii-chan, Kiss no Junbi wa Mada desu ka came out, it looked hella familiar. First off, the title has the exact same sentence pattern as Onii-chan, Migite no Shiyou o Kinshi Shimasu. Looked it up—same planner, same artist in the mix, plenty of the same voice actors too. Only the company’s different. I remember Galette’s siscon series… oh wait, family series—the next one was supposed to be Onii-chan Teacher, but Onii-chan, Kiss no Junbi wa Mada desu ka is by Tinkle Position. Yeah, say that company name in katakana and you’re dangerously close to “chinbo.” Their mascot is literally a yellow dick with a smiley face. The promo and premise gave me massive déjà vu—it’s basically the head-pat gimmick from Onii-chan Teacher but with kissing. So I played it out of curiosity. Not because of the premise or content. Trust me. So how is it? All I can say is this game made me start reflecting on my life.

Let me start with a true story. It’s kinda long.