So here’s the thing — playing this game was a complete mistake. I don’t even know when I downloaded it. I didn’t know what the premise was, who voiced the heroine, basically nothing about it. I just found it sitting on my hard drive while I was cleaning things up. My guess is the developer name, Prekano, threw me off, since there’s a million games out there called “XX Kano” these days. But through sheer coincidence, I ended up playing it anyway.

A long, long time ago, a game caught my eye: Suite Life, put out by MME before they went under. My English is trash. Back in high school I used to pronounce “Suite” as “Suit,” and it took me forever to realize I’d been saying it wrong the whole time. That’s part of why the title stuck with me. Suite Life, literally “packaged life.” There’s an American TV show with the same name, but this game seems to have nothing to do with it. Honestly, I played Suite Life not long after it came out, and then… I dropped it. Dropping it wasn’t my intention, I was genuinely interested. The main reason was that the game was just too boring. And years later I went back and finished it. The main reason was pretty much the same as why I dropped it: I was too bored.

Feeling empty, lonely, and a bit chilly lately, I decided I needed something “short and sweet,” “gets to the point fast,” “heroine’s got big tits,” “preferably that kind of plot” — in short, the “you know what I mean” kind of game. Which is how I ended up with QUALIA Yakusoku no Kiseki. The premise is about as obvious as it gets: the protagonist is a scientist, he builds a big-titted robot girl, and then there’s that soulful look in her eyes. Sure, this year is drowning in shitty “AI robot romance” visual novels, but this one clearly isn’t like those dime-a-dozen ones. What kind of game this is — you get it, right? Let’s go! My guy!

When ANIPLEX.exe was throwing money at visual novels, aside from ATRI -My Dear Moments-, they also put out Utsuro no Utage (徒花異譚), which has a seriously weird art style. It was made in collaboration with Liar-Soft, which immediately told everyone these people know what they’re doing, and plenty of eroge fans went “based.” Also, you can pretty much guess that ANIPLEX.exe’s two releases were aimed at different audiences. ATRI -My Dear Moments- was clearly for the “casual moe-blob otaku,” while Utsuro no Utage comes off as a bit more hardcore. Of course, that “hardcore” label is just my own wishful thinking. After finishing this fairly short game, all I can say is that Utsuro no Utage isn’t really a game so much as a genuine “short fantasy novel.” This “novel” won’t lecture you about life’s great truths; what it gives you is more of an emotional jolt. I’m not going to go into detail about what Utsuro no Utage is actually about. Getting hold of the game isn’t that hard for most people, and although the scenario was written by Nozomu Kaihara, who previously wrote Uso kara Hajimaru Koi no Natsu (尋蝶者), once it steps outside the “romance game” frame, the story feels all the more comfortable in its own skin.

A lot of fiction likes to play with the “end of the world” theme. I can’t really say why. Maybe it’s that “even after the world ends, I still love you” feeling that comes off as romantic? Or maybe everyone’s got a little bit of wasteland fever in them. An endless wilderness, nothing left but the male lead and the heroine, wandering the ruins looking for some reason for humanity to keep going. That does sound pretty coool. Use it too many times, though, and it stops being coool.

I often regret some of my past articles. The main reason isn’t anything else—it’s that when I was younger I went on huge rants, trashing a lot of games I thought were terrible at the time. First and foremost among them: Lump of Sugar. I still remember that Unmei Senjou de Suika wo Kiru—I called its plot retarded. And Rensou Kankei—I said its system was dumb as shit. And yet, faced with Lump of Sugar’s new game Nekotsuku, Sakura. (ねこツク、さくら。)… I couldn’t help but shed tears. I deeply realized I was wrong.

Girls Book Maker (ガールズ・ブック・メイカー) is an eroge developed by Yumemiru, a new label from some big Japanese company. But compared to your average eroge, this one’s pretty unusual—it’s got a bizarre “setting” and “worldview,” with a dash of “cultural depth” thrown in. The plot: the protagonist is a bookworm who gets summoned by chance to a “library in another world,” where he works as the librarian and helps the head librarian exterminate the “bookworms” hiding inside books. Thanks to this setup, our hero can easily hop between “stories” with different worldviews, interact with “the heroines within those stories,” and go on all sorts of wild adventures. The books referenced are almost all classics: The Little Match Girl, Alice in the Mental Hospital, The Sino-Japanese Co-Production Journey to the West, The Phantom Thief Weak-Ass Gentleman Lupin, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter Goes to the Moon, Gay Faust, and so on. These stories are not only familiar but should be no strangers to most eroge players—Alice, Kaguya-hime, Faust, Lupin have all been done to death in Japanese ACG works.

The game I’d been hyping up all last year, the one bro kept dumping on — Pieces / Wataridori no Somnium — got a sequel after a whole year… Sure, they call it a sequel, but it’s a fandisc any way you look at it — Pieces/揺り籠のカナリア, the canary in the cradle. Honestly, the fact that it got a fandisc surprised me. The original story was already over — if you’re making a fandisc, there’s basically no room for an after-story. Every protagonist wakes up from that “dream world,” and when the male lead and the heroine meet again, they’ve both lost their old memories. It’s just a fated reunion. What else is a fandisc supposed to say? Are they gonna have another go at it in the real world? Real life already has enough of that boring-as-hell “take a humblebrag, swallow it” type of douchebag like Chiku-niu. Not me, no thanks! Then the game got a demo, and I looked at it and immediately started roasting it.

Anyone who knows a thing or two about Japanese people knows they get “particular” when telling a story. That particularity is baked in — the kind of small-mindedness that lacks any grand scale, constantly getting weepy over the most trivial shit. There’s actually a word for this in Japanese: mono no aware, which Chinese renders as 物哀. Basically, you see anything at all and get inexplicably sad. For pretentious artsy kids that’s maybe OK, but if it’s the only register you ever play, you’ve run out of tricks. Mono no aware isn’t just in the usual stories — it’s more in how Japanese people tell stories. Endlessly wistful and mournful, a hundred twists and turns, and after a hundred laps around the track you still haven’t gotten back to the starting point. The reader gets anxious, and all that circling still lands you on some utterly unremarkable ending, which easily leaves you feeling embarrassed and angry. Yes, I’m embarrassed and angry again. Miss Wang, bring me my Italian cannon, I’m opening fire.

So here’s the thing—this game has been sitting in my hard drive gathering dust for ages. I’ve always had mixed feelings about it. I want to play this game because its premise and art style are actually pretty good I don’t want to play this game because I already know how it plays out without even having played it This game comes from Campus, a label that got shut down and sold off. Campus was actually a sub-brand of Light, set up specifically to crank out quick cash-grab mini-games. The formula was basically: find a decent artist, push out a single-route or two-route short game, keep the budget low, sell it cheap, and hope it pumps some blood back into the parent company Light. Honestly, Campus’s intent to recoup some cash by selling these games is way too obvious. Just look—every single one of them is a “multi-platform release,” with iOS and Android versions and everything else they can slap it on, not a single one left out. There are also free non-18+ versions, and only the 18+ content costs money. It’s basically a “we’re not making games to make money, we’re just here to make friends” stance, as if they think their game quality is so solid that surely some player—or some otaku who wants to see the lewd art—will shell out for the physical edition, and then they can pull a reverse play and rake it in, revive the company, and return to the old capital… Except that didn’t happen. Light still died, and Campus got sold off too.