Not sure if it’s the pandemic or what, but the number of visual novel releases has dropped off a cliff this year, and a lot of veteran studios seem to have slowly lost their original passion for the craft. Take HOOKSOFT for example—they and SMEE have planned a pile of new titles this year, but… those titles are hard to describe in polite company. For instance, Hook’s “Yubisaki” is basically an SMEE game, and SMEE’s new title feels more like a Moonstone Cherry game. But both of those games (including the Hook one that isn’t out yet) have nearly identical promotional styles, down to the website intros. Put it bluntly: these three games are “obviously off the same assembly line.” I’ve been shitting on assembly-line products ever since I first trashed Yuzusoft’s stuff years ago. Sure, an assembly line boosts efficiency, cuts costs, speeds up production, and raises profits. But games aren’t cold commodity goods—they’re vessels for narrative and, to some extent, culture. Churning that kind of thing out on a production line lowers costs, speeds things up, and maybe increases revenue, but the games themselves naturally become boring as hell.