Straight to the point: me buying this game, and even playing it, has honestly not that much to do with the game itself. First off, I played the previous entries. To be blunt, only the first one, Memories That Don’t Exist (不存在的夏天), is something I actually understood. The storytelling is weird as hell, full of deliberately contrived “trick narration” and prose soaked in anime-isms — enough that even a veteran otaku like me has to go “damn, the flavor is strong.” But the game also, unusually, has a genuinely beautiful passage in the back half that I still remember to this day, so I walked away thinking it was pretty good. Then the second game came along and the story started getting strange. Probably because the first one got so much praise, the writer got a bit full of himself and decided the “dregs” from part one were actually correct, so he doubled down. The result is something that looks deeply odd to me: the core is packed with Chinese elements, but the prose isn’t written the way Chinese people actually write, so reading it feels off — like a West Coast gangsta rap track performed entirely on traditional Chinese instruments, with heroes pulling pistols out of their crotches to ganggang each other while dealing mystery pharmaceuticals on the side.

I started building websites back in middle school. I remember it clearly — the summer of eighth grade. I applied for a free forum and domain and threw together an extremely crude “class website.” I figured it was just for fun, but it somehow took off across the whole class, then the whole grade. It wasn’t just my own class. Kids from the neighboring classes signed up and started posting too, and all kinds of conversations got going. That chatter later moved to the school’s official forum, and after that to the class Discord group. I think I was the one who created and ran that Discord group, for the simple reason that I was one of the few users who had permission to create Discord groups at the time. So I made the group for the class, and I’m still listed as admin to this day, even though nobody’s said a word in it for years. Later I went to college and started making all kinds of websites and forums again, but honestly nothing ever took off the way it did, and I could never recapture that middle-school glory. In one of the forums I’d rebuilt God knows how many times, I once wrote this line: “Some dreams you only dream at eighteen, and some dreams you only understand once you’ve grown up…” There were a few more lines after that, I don’t remember them now — something with that whole “forcing yourself to feel sad for the sake of a poem” vibe. I didn’t really know what I was trying to say. I just thought it sounded cool, so I went with it. Sure enough, a classmate came along and criticized it right away, saying I’d taken the wrong medicine and that it was so pretentious it gave him goosebumps. I thought he had a point, so I made that line my Discord signature so he’d have to see it every day. Years later I thought of that line again, and I have to say, I now think it actually makes sense. Because there really are things you only do when you’re young, and dreams you only understand when you’re young at heart.