Girls Book Maker announced a series of cash-grab DLCs half a year after the base game shipped. Cash-grab, sure, but honestly this is standard practice by now. We’ve seen too much of this over the years. This DLC is called ガールズ・ブック・メイカー ～グリムと三人のお姫さま～, which translates to Girls Book Maker: Grimm and the Three Princesses, so naturally it’s about the world-famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Since Grimm’s Fairy Tales is itself an anthology, you can’t really sum it up with one character, so they just carved out the princesses and split them into three volumes sold separately. Sound familiar? Yeah, classic milking scheme. The three princesses are Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

The word “youth” shows up everywhere. But what is it, really? You see people saying this all the time: “That TV drama ended, and my youth ended with it.” “That anime finished, and my youth finished with it.” “So-and-so got married, and my youth is over.” If “youth” is just a state you’re in while you’re young, then it ends on its own as you get older. It doesn’t depend on some person, anime, or TV drama. For different people, “youth” means different things.

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…

Maybe everyone gets this illusion — that when you meet someone, or hit some particular moment, your brain flashes “wait, have I seen this scene／this person in a dream before?” Plenty of people have researched and argued this phenomenon, and most land on a few possibilities: memory misplacement, an illusion of similarity between scenes, or some blurry subconscious memory of a scene. One of the Steins;Gate games even explains it as “déjà vu across worldlines.” And then there’s the one factor that’s never certain but can’t be ruled out: dreams. Which is to say, it’s entirely possible that the familiar thing you just ran into really was something you saw in a dream. Dreams are funny like that. Humans can never control their dreams, yet the dream is something the person themselves created. So when we go adventuring in a dream, the dream is something we wrote ourselves. There’s a bit of “playing with yourself” to it. Some say a normal person creates one to three dreams every night, and over the course of growing up, all those assorted dreams pile up to a terrifying number. Among them, one or two scenes are bound to resemble something you run into in reality, and that produces the so-called “déjà vu.” This is probably the most reliable explanation for the “I keep seeing it in dreams” feeling — but compared to that cold reality, we’d rather accept the romantic explanation: “You and I are connected by something heaven ordained, so we met in a dream long ago, and that dream scene guided us to meet in reality…” Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? uh?

Around this time last year… a game came out… called 9-nine- Kokonotsu Kokonoka Kokonoiro. I didn’t rate it highly back then, because honestly there wasn’t much to rate. The story barely moved at all, it just laid out the setting. That game was really just the start of a series. 9nine is a project sold in volumes, and my initial guess is there are three heroines, one volume each, so at least three volumes total. I already talked about the first volume here: the protagonist gets dragged into a battle between espers. There are villainous espers, and righteous ones like the protagonist and heroine. Some people kill, and someone else stops them, that kind of thing… Except in the first volume the esper murderer was never unmasked at all. It just ended unresolved, so a year later the second volume shows up again. The main romanceable character in volume two is the protagonist’s little sister: Niimi Sora (新海天), so the title changed to something built around her name, Sorairo Sorauta Soranooto.

If you listen to a lot of erotic audio… oh wait, I mean ASMR, dummy head recording, whatever you call those drama tracks for stress relief and sleep, you’re probably familiar with the word “soine”. Even if you don’t know Japanese, you recognize the character for “sleep,” so you can guess it means “sleeping together” recordings. So yeah, Sizhai is truly disgusting. Can’t find a partner, so he relies on games to get him a girl; and when he does find a girl in a game, he just stands there waiting for her to throw herself at him; and even when she does, he’s picky about her; and not just picky—his criteria are absurd: too ugly, no; bad voice, no; not a virgin, no; non-human but doesn’t end up with the protagonist, no; damaged goods, no; a ghost that gets exorcised, no. Most importantly, she has to bang the protagonist quickly no matter what. And not just bang—some even demand she sleep with him. Kidney-level isn’t enough; it has to be heart-level. And heart-level isn’t enough; the service has to be perfect. So as Sizhai gets pickier, games get more complex, and the ideal moe girl is born: one who unconditionally throws herself at a total loser, sleeps with him until he dozes off, and does it all for nothing. Just think about it! But even though otaku are tighter with their wallets than fujoshi, there are still some suckers with more money than sense, so many eroge makers deliberately cater to them, scamming otaku out of their cash. Look, here’s another game that pops up with a clear goal: draw a cute girl, then tell you—buy our game and this cute girl will sleep with you! The game is called Soine Kano Gyutto Dakishimete, which means “close-up girlfriend, hugging you super tight.” Buy it or not?! We’re asking you, buy it or not! With Ameda Yuki on art and Natsumi Wako as the lead heroine’s voice actress, such an insane lineup—buy it or not! Just buy it!