Back in school I took a course called Software Engineering, taught by an old lady who could not stop singing the praises of the Indian and Japanese software industries. She’d go off on long tangents in the middle of lectures, and you can probably guess the gist: strict adherence to “standards” in the development process, “modularization” with “high cohesion and low coupling,” that sort of thing. Some of it was honestly overblown, borderline bullshit. “India’s software industry is very advanced. Their professional programmers write code so standardized that a hundred people all produce the exact same thing—even the comments look identical.” “The more standardized and regulated things are, the faster you can throw together solutions when requirements come in, like stacking building blocks…” “Once everything is standardized, every person is like a cog in the machine, running efficiently and fast…” She kept escalating into more and more mystical territory, piling on the bullshit, and since I was always late to that class I ended up sitting in the front row. The old lady kept fucking asking me questions, and sometimes I’d push back… “But wouldn’t programming be super boring like that? Everyone turns into a robot.” “That’s called efficiency. The efficiency of a big company delivering solutions fast. You want to be an individual, go work solo…” Back then I only had a vague grasp of this stuff. I figured “standardization” and “assembly line” were indeed probably very efficient… But after starting work and dealing with some small and mid-sized domestic software companies (not internet companies), I found that my contrarian comment actually had some truth to it… The people there really are boring… the stuff they make is boring too… but it does “work.” The assembly line can solve problems, but it always feels like it’s missing passion and fun, like it lacks color… Of course, work doesn’t need color, right… It’s just that games can’t be like that, can they… Yuzusoft’s game from last year, Sanoba Witch, I thought was pretty good—just missing that certain something. The main issue was that Nene’s route wasn’t particularly fleshed out; otherwise there wasn’t much to complain about. So when they announced this year’s new title, Senren * Banka, my first reaction was still disappointment…