The reason I had my eye on this one is simple: IROTORI’s previous game, Sakura no Saiten, was genuinely good. It kept the story fun and built a unique system on top of it. Sure, it can’t match the “proper” mystery games, but within the visual novel niche it’s in a league of its own, good enough to step outside and trade blows with other text adventures. And they did exactly that. Sakura no Saiten landed on a bunch of consoles, eventually hit Steam too, and picked up plenty of praise along the way. So when Hachikenden was announced I was already looking forward to it, hoping for something that was “really story-driven.” Never mind that I’m not especially into Japan’s take on history.

I’ve had this feeling for a while now: Alcot is done for. Looking back, Alcot’s peak was probably around the time of Clover Days. Their sub-label Alcot Honeycomb was doing well too, and Clover Days itself had the art advantage from the start. On top of that, other stuff like Spring Limited and the “ignore the future” sister-complex games carved out their own style. From any angle, it looked like they were about to take off. But that didn’t happen. I don’t know the exact reason — I just heard Clover Days sold poorly and counted as a loss. After that, Alcot honeycomb’s later titles seemed to lose their soul, at one point they even brought in a landmine specialist to write the story, and their main artist left too. They put out LoveRec — honestly I think it’s okay, but it still got middling reviews. And then it just kept getting worse. That mom-goddess whatever game Alcot put out last year — I couldn’t even be bothered to look at it. I couldn’t even find any reviews. It got completely treated like air… Alcot’s own Twitter account posts stuff every day, and it all gives off this “company is going bankrupt, everything must go” vibe — it’s all Clover Days merch and other ancient junk. That feeling, man, it keeps making me think they’re about to fold any minute. And so Alcot has a new title out this year, with the tagline “the proper sequel in the Alcot lineup.” I took one look and thought, yep, they’re really about to go under. Because the last company that pulled this “true sequel” move was Lass, and they ended up putting out a “long-delayed true sequel” too, and then they croaked. What actually bugs me more is — since when the hell does Alcot even have a “proper sequel” to anything? So your LoveRec was just a throwaway? Your Clover Days was fudged together too? Then I looked a bit closer and it clicked: they probably mean a proper sequel within that old “parody isekai half-sci-fi” series style of theirs. 《幼なじみは大統領》, Onigokko!, and 中の人などいない! are all roughly that style, and their later stuff seems to have drifted away from that direction. So this so-called “proper sequel” is basically just them going back to that original direction. And so we got the title of the new game: Shogun-sama wa Otoshigoro (将軍様はお年頃).

Almost nothing worth playing came out in the second month of 2017 in the adult game space—except for one title called Ouka Saki (桜花裁き). Strictly speaking, Ouka Saki isn’t a pure “eroge.” It’s a “bugyō mystery” game. Plenty of games wave the mystery flag. The famous early one is Ace Attorney, and later there’s Danganronpa. Lump of Sugar also put out a mystery-ish game, though its story was more of a comedy. But come on—was Danganronpa’s story not a comedy either? Word is Danganronpa 3’s plot has gone so dumb it can’t even help itself, the final twist like tossing a grenade into a squat toilet and spraying shit everywhere, leaving players in a fury like burning-sea mad maggots. So I wisely didn’t play it. I couldn’t even be bothered to buy it. Even for Danganronpa 2, my verdict back then was: stop caring about that dumbass main plot and just enjoy the minigames. So for Ouka Saki, at first I figured it’d be some Danganronpa-imitating goofball game—claims to be mystery but is really just bullshitting, and in the end it’s a forced verdict. But after playing the trial version, it was actually surprisingly good. At least its case descriptions have something like a real mystery core. I can’t vouch for anything else, but compared to Danganronpa’s goofball motives, Ouka Saki is way better.

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.