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…