This post shouldn’t exist. I originally wanted to make a video to trash this game—I even had the style mapped out, something like AVGN or Ao Changzhang doing lighthearted snark. I had shots and camera angles in my head and everything. But then I thought about it and couldn’t decide whether to make my YouTube debut, so I shelved the video. Plus it’s a hassle. Typing is easier. The game I’m trashing today is called “Timepiece Ensemble.” And honestly, I didn’t play it because of Kiritani Hana, nor because I had a good impression of the studio Glace from before—I played it because of the artist, Sesenaau. Sesenaau is a female artist, and her characters always have this element of feminine “cuteness” that male artists just can’t capture. I’ve always thought that’s a big advantage of female artists: male artists can only draw girls that are super erotic, while female artists can draw cuteness on a spiritual level. It’s not that male artists can’t draw cute things—it’s just that it always feels fake, like it has no soul. So I saw this game called Timepiece Ensemble, and it was announced it’d be ported to PSV soon, so I skimmed the intro. It’s simple: the protagonist is preparing for the school culture festival and stumbles upon a mysterious shop. The shopkeeper says she can sell him “time”—the ability to rewind time. He doesn’t know what use that ability has, but that’s how the story begins.

Sometimes I think about this: so many scenario writers in Japan do original drafts for anime and games — are they just mass-producing the same thing over and over? …………I mean, whatever a given writer puts out, doesn’t it always follow one pattern no matter how you look at it? Code Geass, Guilty Crown, Valvrave, and the latest one — what was it called? Kabaneri? I’m not saying Ichiro Okouchi is bad; the man won a best screenplay award, didn’t he? I’m talking about visual novels — whether some writers end up reusing the same套路 across multiple games. I noticed this pretty early on. For example, the Shiiba route in Yuzusoft’s Sanoba Witch overlaps heavily with the Riru route in Kujira Kami no Tiastila, which came out not long after. I don’t know if that’s Tota’s doing or just coincidence. But a “competent scenario” shouldn’t have the problem of “can’t adapt, only ever writes one path” — otherwise you’re just showing how tapped out you are. But man… for Hoshi Koi * Twinkle… I don’t even know what to say anymore…

There are all kinds of “what if I could go back to school again” hypotheticals online, and plenty of discussions built on top of them. Not that I haven’t had the same thought. I’ve talked about the possibility with friends too. In high school I was a waste of space. Every exam I barely scraped a pass, teetering on the edge of the bottom of the year, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. I just kept going out to find internet cafes, or hitting up relatives’ places, or classmates’ houses that had a PC, dicking around on forums to see what was playable. I think I even saved up and bought a Pocket PC, kept refreshing the same few forums, and ended up a moderator on one of them. Young me was pretty garbage at studying, honestly. Chinese I learned by reading newspapers; English I learned by playing games. Math wasn’t that I didn’t get it — the teacher just never taught you how to derive anything. He’d shove the process at you, tell you to memorize it, and next time you see this kind of problem, do it like this. Physics I thought I knew, but the problems always came out wrong somehow. Chemistry I had zero interest in. My biology teacher looked at me like I was brain-damaged. Sometimes at night, when I’m studying Japanese and all sorts of stuff, I sigh at how good the internet is now. Never mind whether you can use Google — even if you hit a problem, you can search Quora and find plenty of people explaining the principle in plain terms. Back in my high school days, even getting online was a pain in the ass. And even though I could use Google freely back then, I couldn’t search up anything, because Chinese resources were far too scarce and my English wasn’t good enough yet. So to me the internet now is more like a “library” — quickly look up whatever knowledge you need. You don’t even need a textbook’s explanation. With some judgment, you can learn basically anything through the internet. And now I’m always sighing that I don’t have enough time to study, work is full of bullshit, and when I try to read a book my attention gets shredded by the internet after a while. If I could be sent back to school to study, I’d definitely be way more goated than the waste of space I used to be. So this “what if” — I’ve argued it with people. “You know what, if you put me back in school now to study, I’d absolutely kill it.” Haozhi across from me drained his beer after hearing my bragging. “Bullshit!” He dropped those two words… And left me sitting there dumbfounded. ………………

Kinda embarrassing to admit, but for someone who thinks of himself as a tough guy, my first time on a roller coaster was only 4 years ago. My workplace organized a free trip to some place in Zhengzhou called “Fantawild,” so that’s where I rode a roller coaster for the first time in my life. The feeling… hard to describe. All I know is it made my prostate very uncomfortable.

Asa Project, a company that used to be pretty damn good. They’re under Hook, I think. They made a name for themselves with Renai 0 Kilometer, then kept the style going with ひとつ飛ばし恋愛 and later Purumai Wars… and then this year they put out Suki to Suki de Sankaku Renai. Before I get into the new one, let’s walk through how Asa Project’s games have evolved…

I’m a person with some integrity. Mostly this shows up as my OCD. If I say I’ll do something, I’ll finish it, and if I don’t finish it I feel guilty, worried someone will call me out and roast me over it. Taken a step further: if I’ve opened the full release of a VN, I won’t drop it. One day I’ll finish it, no matter what. Note I said “full release.” Translation: if it’s just a trial version, yeah, I can absolutely bail. Magical☆Dears is one of those games I left sitting forever… one of many…

I once came up with a concept. It was about dreams, and there were people with a job kind of like “private detective” who specialized in entering people’s dreams. They’d go on adventures inside someone else’s dream, and ultimately change that person’s view of something. And of course, they get paid for it. Sounds a lot like Inception, I know. But I had a slightly different idea. I figured that since you’re entering “someone else’s dream” as a kind of “detective” or “hunter,” the setting and environment of the dream would all be tied to the dreamer. As the “intruder,” you’d need to adapt to the environment fast and exploit “the dreamer’s own internal logic” to get the advantages you need to finish the job. Say the dreamer is a hopeless MMO addict. You enter his dream and you’ll probably get dropped into some game-like world. You’d have to quickly adapt to the role the dreamer assigned you in that world, and also disguise yourself so you don’t stick out. That means you need to know the dreamer—their tastes, their personality, even their innermost thoughts. Walk blindly into someone else’s turf and you’ll definitely fail, maybe even lose your chance to ever wake up again… I thought this setup was cool as hell, and I even wrote a crappy short story based on it. If you’re willing to dig, you can find it on this blog. Though if I went back and read it now I’d spot a million problems—too embarrassing to even look at. Still, I’m thinking about dusting off that concept and rewriting it into a proper piece. Depends on whether I get the time and inspiration.

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.

Lately the stuff I’ve been playing has been a bit unusual — either hand-chopping, big meat grubs, or hookup — and after wandering the non-traditional aisle for so long, I couldn’t help but miss plain old moe. So when I was grabbing January releases, I figured I’d look for something light and fun. That’s how, among the January titles, while downloading Toukyou NECRO, I stumbled on this thing called Hanikami Clover. Compared to whatever Toukyou NECRO is doing, Hanikami Clover is obviously on the classic cute-girl-game track. So I got hyped, saw it was Ryokucha-soft, figured Ryokucha wouldn’t screw anything up — Minamijuujisei Renka (南十字星恋歌) got decent reviews, so this probably wouldn’t be a disaster either. Then I checked the official site for the cast: the first heroine is obviously Gotou Mai, and Hanikami Clover also has Akinohana, Sendai Eri, all solid voices. The most explosive part, though, was when I later watched the game’s OP. The dere-dere student council president, the sweet senpai, the lewd girlfriend, the little sister who’s a failure-of-a-brother manufacturing machine — all wrapped in a tempting, rhythm-heavy montage. The tagline was “a love story with a slightly H her.” Honestly, that OP makes it look like a moe-nukige, but hey, at least it beats hand-chopping big meat grubs and hookup games, am I right? Going by years of experience, this had to be a cheerful charmer of a moe game — and even if it’s a nukige, it’d be a comedy nukige, a light and fun one with no special effects. Playing it would definitely be a good time. My reaction at the time was:

Twin Paradox (双子座のパラドクス) is another Cotton Software title. Why’d I play it? Mostly because its predecessor, Sekai ga Owaru Basho to Birthday, left such a strong impression on me. So even though the character designs are still shit as always, I was willing to give it a go. No other reason — I just wanted to see a story that could stand shoulder to shoulder with Birthday. That’s all. But before I get into the game, I want to talk about something else: the science and pseudoscience elements in stories.