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.

There’s this stock setup you see all the time in Japanese anime and games: the protagonist has no known origin, gets treated like a freak and pushed around, and then it turns out he’s actually some kind of savior. Of course Japanese works rarely say “savior” — nine times out of ten they call him a kamisama. Honestly, back when I first started consuming this stuff, hearing “kamisama” still commanded some respect from me. A god, right? Omniscient, omnipotent. Obviously possessed of a towering intellect, ample charisma, and virtues we mere mortals could never hope to reach — the kind of being who can look down on us and address us as “mortals,” bellow Die Mortal! and take a deep, smoldering breath. But then I noticed how utterly saturated anime and games are with kamisama, and I finally wised up: the so-called “god” in Japan is about as valuable as a shared bike. Shrines dedicated to them are, by the Japanese’s own snark, as commonplace as public toilets (and in reality Japanese public toilets are not fucking commonplace at all — half the time I can only find one in a subway station). As for the “gods” set up in these stories, you don’t need to take them seriously at all. Most gods in anime and games are more useless than ordinary people. And so along comes yet another game waving the “god” banner, from everyone’s old acquaintance Lump of Sugar.

FAVORITE games generally give off a certain impression: artsy, fantastical, and long-winded. Especially that one they put out before, Sakura, Moyu. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “nothing but filler,” but saying it’s “long and stinky” seems fair enough. The prose itself isn’t really the problem — it’s that there’s way too much of that “Japanese-style” circular beating around the bush. Sometimes you’ll be seriously following a two-person conversation for half an hour with zero story progress, and sleepiness hits you fast. Older FAVORITE games had this trait too, but nowhere near this bad, which is exactly why I could get through the Irotoridori no Sekai and AstralAir no Shiroki Towa series but have never been able to finish Sakura, Moyu. And FAVORITE as a company gives off this really mysterious vibe — their release pace is absurdly slow. But later I figured it out: they’ve got a “sub-label” under them called ωstar. As for what “masterpieces” ωstar has put out, well, if you know, you know. Considering the popularity and sales of those “masterpieces,” FAVORITE’s revenue probably isn’t doing too badly — at the very least, they’re a long way from going under. But clearly FAVORITE wasn’t content to just sit back and live off past glories. They wanted to expand further. In 2021, they quietly ditched the old logo they’d used for years and swapped in a more direct new trademark, tacking an even more direct slogan underneath it: The Next Generation. At the same time, they announced a new title: ハッピーライヴ ショウアップ! This new game left a lot of traditional “F-company” fans confused. Tsukasa wasn’t the main artist anymore, and both the scenario and planning no longer had Yukito Ushihara involved. The setting and story synopsis also looked “pretty ordinary” no matter how you sliced it — just a bunch of girls wanting to put on a show on stage. A change like this is going to disappoint a lot of old fans, but it also makes plenty of people curious: will the new-generation-focused FAVORITE really go mid just like that?

Lately Key seems to have lost its mind, suddenly dropping a bunch of projects, mostly short and quick little pieces. And the weird thing is, Jun Maeda — Key’s star player — is nowhere to be seen. After his latest anime blew up in his face, maybe his ass really did split in half and he retired for good. Either way, this is a good thing for Key. I’ve been sick of Maeda for a while now. Every story he writes follows the exact same pattern: set up something super compelling, some really interesting premise, then once the premise is laid out he starts padding the daily-life scenes, and finally he realizes he’s running out of time and can’t hold it together, so he slams the accelerator on a roller-coaster super-twist, wraps it up in a hurry, and leaves the Key fans who watched it shit the bed screaming impotently into the void. Anyone who’s seen Angel Beats and Charlotte knows exactly what I’m talking about. Good news is, none of Key’s recent projects have that dumbass Maeda in them～ Fantastic. This month they even released the first one, and I was instantly hyped. It’s called Loopers, and the scenario is by Ryukishi07. I don’t particularly like Ryukishi either, but hey, better than that dumbass Maeda! Plus the artist for this game is seriously good, so I dove right in. And then… after playing it, I’ve got a bone stuck in my throat. I have to talk about this.

Seeing this title, let’s first define what counts as a “failure” according to the usual forum argument rules. Everyone knows a visual novel goes through a process from “planning” to “production.” You could say the “planning” is the game’s goal and determines its direction. Following that logic, if the game’s production completely runs counter to the “planning,” or if the game itself never even fulfills the planning’s original goal, then the game can be considered a “failure.” So today, let’s talk about one such “failed” game.

Visual novel blurbs have gotten seriously dishonest in recent years. Like, if a game claims it’s “pure love,” watch out. 90% chance it isn’t. If a game tells you it’s “a very quiet, uneventful story,” be suspicious. It won’t be uneventful. If a game tells you it’s yuri, there’s a good chance it’ll inform you the heroines are a bunch of guys’ cum dumpsters. If a game says “Now on sale to great reviews,” it already got shredded. Today I’m talking about a game that’s honest in every conceivable way. Seriously, in all my years of playing these things, I’ve never seen a game this honest. Umi to Yuki no Cyan Blue (海と雪のシアンブルー), from CUBE.

The Japanese love telling stories, and they especially love telling legends. Unlike Chinese legends, which mostly “stick to a certain framework,” a lot of Japanese legends go completely off the rails. This has to do with the Japanese idea of “eight million gods” — everything is a deity, so who isn’t a little kami? On top of that, many Japanese myths have a certain “Buddhist” flavor, mostly built on the idea of reincarnation. They love telling a legend about a god, and the legend also involves reincarnation — no matter how things develop, it always becomes a circle connected end to end, all to create some kind of thought-provoking effect. But play that trick too many times and it numbs you. At least it numbed me. I usually call this kind of plot “Japanese-style melodrama that refuses to speak like a human being.”

I. A while back, my workplace went through a pretty brutal stretch of overtime. The work itself wasn’t much — just a system upgrade. Once the main system was upgraded, we had to debug the software and interfaces that talk to it. After that, we could go home. Sounds simple, right? The catch: the main system upgrade had to happen in the middle of the night and took several hours. The estimate was that the main system would finish upgrading around 2 a.m., and our auxiliary systems could only start testing after 2. By the time we wrapped up, it’d be 3–4 a.m. The original plan was to upgrade on Saturday, then use Sunday—when fewer people are on the system—to test and fix issues, so everything would be ready for Monday. That plan fell apart fast. Saturday’s upgrade went terribly.

That one Aonatsu Line everyone hyped to hell and back got a spiritual successor a little over a year later: Yukiiro Sign (ユキイロサイン). Why “spiritual successor”? Same writer, same artist, different company — some outfit called wonder fool. I’m all for them ditching the shitshow that is GIGA, but wonder fool isn’t exactly a saint either. Look at the garbage they’ve put out. Feels like they’re just publishing leftovers nobody else wanted. Anyway, I was still hyped, because Aonatsu Line was goated, so this had to be goated too. A bunch of otaku were dying to feel their youth again through this game (even though they never had one). Then it came out and I played it, and I have to say, unfortunately: this game does not deliver what most people wanted.

Rukuru’s first new game in two years, and honestly, from the moment 冥契のルペルカリア’s setting was announced, I felt very… uncomfortable. First off, the title alone looks like people are going to die. Then the character designs straight-up contain elements from 紙の上の魔法使い, which had me suspecting the game was trying to coast on past glories. That said, neither the synopsis nor anything else explicitly states what 冥契のルペルカリア has to do with 紙の上の魔法使い — just a bunch of plausible-sounding edge-balling. Even the CVs don’t line up; I remember the witch being voiced by 小倉結衣, not メイ大姐. I took a look at the plot summary and it turned out to be stage-play focused, which killed my interest even more. But the scenario writer’s skill is still there, and last year had basically nothing with a decent story, so I went ahead and played it on faith in Rukuru. The whole playthrough was a mess — at one point I lost my eroge machine, then it broke down again, and I finally stumbled my way to the end. Hmm… how should I put it. The quality was about what I expected, but there were some disappointing parts too. So let me just run through it briefly.