The Japanese eroge maker CUFFS has a whole pile of sub-brands — Sphere, CUBE, miniCUBE, SONORA, and HULOTTE, which looks unrelated but apparently isn’t. I hadn’t touched a CUFFS game in ages. CUFFS games are all basically the same: same engine, same font, same choice-navigation UI, same Duca songs covering everything, same marketing playbook, same coloring style, and… the only thing that really differs is the artist. So CUFFS games get old fast, because there’s just too much that’s identical. Sure, sometimes they roll out a “story premise” that looks decent, but the actual execution always disappoints. Well, not disappoint exactly — it’s more that there’s just nothing interesting there. CUFFS announces a new title, you look at the character setup and you can already guess how the plot will unfold. Beat the game and sure enough, it played out exactly as you expected. No surprises. If anything it’s less exciting than what you imagined… Which leaves you with disappointment… emptiness… and self-loathing for wasting your time on this game.

I. I’m a 20-year-old virgin. The no-sex kind. A friend invited me to a Christmas party and, beating his chest to pieces, swore he’d introduce me to all sorts of cute girls there. But as a great virgin, how could I possibly hold court at such an event? So I made a decisive choice! I chickened out… again.

I have to admit it now: that August title I’d been dunking on for ages, Sen no Hatou, Tokihana Iro no Kouki (千の刃濤、桃花染の皇姫), is actually a really, really goated game. What makes it so good? The good part is that its setting is absurd on the surface, yet still rings true. Back then I was shitposting about it: “How can a world have a theocratic feudal monarchy on one side and a republic on the other, living side by side in peace, with the monarchy’s upper-class kids even going to school in the republic? That’s complete bullshit!” Obviously I don’t think that anymore. And I don’t think you do either. This kind of arrangement really does exist in the world.

I. My name is Sofia. Full name Sofia Kugel Westrin, but it’s so damn long I can’t even remember it myself, so everyone just calls me Sofia. I came to Japan as an exchange student, in my capacity as princess of the country of Elideurone. Of course, maybe my country’s status is just too pathetic, because here I am, a bona fide princess, and I show up at some ordinary Japanese school as a “transfer student.” And to make it worse, I have to rent my own apartment and live there by myself. Not exactly the treatment a princess should get! Of course, I know why. In our country Elideurone, every person actually has two forms — an animal form and a human form. And no, our country isn’t sponsored by the Cenarion Expedition and I’m not a druid. It’s just that everyone in my country has the bloodline to “transform,” switching freely between animal and human shapes. Except I don’t have that ability.

Maybe you like KFC. Maybe you’ve seen the commercial success of that smiling old man with the white beard, Colonel Sanders. But I can guarantee you don’t know about his past, or the things he got up to in his younger days at culinary school. And that’s exactly what I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator on Steam is here to tell you: that mysterious, dreamlike, enigmatic, untold story. Young Colonel Sanders is a student at a mysterious culinary school. It’s a weird school—there are monsters, ghosts, and a gay guy named Van Van. After he transfers in, he becomes the center of attention. Every day he rides a beautiful little pony to class, wins the praise of Teacher Dog (yes, literally a dog teacher), and at lunchtime, Sanders busts out his homemade fried chicken, which earns unanimous praise from his classmates. Why is his fried chicken so good? “Because I carefully selected 11 secret spices, and together they create this irresistible flavor.”

You wake up in darkness. You’re in a dark mansion, and a maid is standing in front of you. She calls you “the master of this mansion” and gives you a warm welcome back. You can’t remember who you are. The maid understands this, but as your servant she decides to help you recover your memories. She’ll tell you a few stories — stories about this mansion’s past. Once you’ve heard them all, you’ll naturally remember who you really are. The maid leads you to one of the mansion’s doors, opens it, and tells you what happened behind it.

Purumai Wars (プラマイウォーズ) is an Asa Project game from 2015. Its position in the Asa Project catalog is honestly kind of awkward — it landed right in the middle of a transition period, where they hadn’t fully given up on the gag humor and the crazy facial expressions yet, but were also trying to lean a bit more into pure romance. That said, the older sister’s route in the base game is still decent, and as far as I remember, Asa Project is one of those rare “conscientious porting houses” — when their games get ported to all-ages handheld platforms, they generally not only promote existing side characters to heroines but also add entirely new character routes, and the new characters’ VAs tend to be “whatever anime voice actor is hot right now.” That’s a fair amount of effort. Some examples: Renai 0 Kilometer PSP version: promotes two heroines, adds two more, voiced by Kana Asumi and Yukari Tamura respectively. Hitotsu Tobashi Renai PSV version: adds two heroines, voiced by Ayane Sakura and Sakura Tange. Which brings us to the game we’re talking about here: Puramai Wars V: promotes one heroine, adds one more, voiced by Aya Suzaki. Looking at how much effort went into these ports, you can see the official releases getting lazier and lazier — and this game is lazier still.

Usually with games like this I write a first-person piece, make up some story, and call it a day. But this game genuinely put me off doing that. If I wrote it that way, I’d end up sounding like a rapist myself. That said, even though this one looks like plain nukige, it’s the same as that earlier title from the same label — “even a nukige can have something under the surface.” So let’s focus on what’s under the surface. Games rarely touch on this kind of criminal motive / psychology stuff. The protagonist is a guy living alone in the big city. He goes to school, works part-time, and supports himself. Now and then he tutors his distant relative’s younger cousin; at school he’s polished, polite, well-mannered — by any measure, a “fine young man of the new era.” Then one day his little sister from back home shows up. She says she’s planning to take the entrance exam for a school in his city and needs a place to stay over winter break, so she wants to crash at his place. The moment he hears this, he gets angry. Every trace of the “fine young man” evaporates. He even calls home and asks why the hell they had to send this burden his way. The same thought repeats in his head: “I hate my little sister more than anything!”

A few years back, Asa Project’s games seemed to have lost their way. Their stuff used to be all about the laughs, and nearly every release had that one character with the insane facial expressions. Then something changed—no idea what they were smoking—and the games started getting more restrained, pivoting to all these “searching for pure love” themes, like the earlier 三角恋爱 and 寄宿恋爱. But no matter how they went about it, those games just felt off to me. It’s like some guy who’s normally a total goofball, never serious for a second, suddenly sits you down and gets all earnest—what even is that? Some kind of advanced dark comedy? And the two Asa Project games before this weren’t all that great either. They just threw out a premise — either a love triangle or a cohabitation setup — with nothing really noteworthy underneath. Take away that half-baked premise and I don’t think it’d change much. On top of that, the “face-meme king” that used to be the main selling point has had its presence steadily erased, and it hurts to watch a label that once had real character turn more and more into “just another face in the crowd.” And it doesn’t stop there. Asa Project’s game titles have gotten lazier and lazier too — they just slap an adjective in front of “koi” and call it a day. What kind of idiot work puts “this one’s a love triangle” and “this one’s a boarding-school romance” right in the title? Even White Album didn’t pull that. Did you guys just give up on naming things? And then 2019 rolls around and the title gets even more blatant: “恋愛、借りちゃいました.” Just look at it. Does that read like a proper “title” to you? It’s a whole sentence, and it’s got this painfully awkward punctuation mark stuffed in the middle. What the hell! Have you ever seen a work named something like I, Ate My Fill, You, Farted, or She, Crossdressed? This is one of the few games where the title alone was enough to make me not want to play it. But because I was bored out of my mind, I figured I’d give it a look anyway — and it turned out… this game is actually surprisingly good?! You could say that. Title aside from being dumb as hell, this game at least has clawed back a good chunk of the level of Renai 0 Kilometer. We’re happy Asa Project finally figured out what kind of “reinvention” it actually wanted.

CLOCKUP is back, and Kono Tatsuya is back too. After that last game about “wolves and sheep,” the two have joined forces again for a new title. Though honestly I think CLOCKUP carries more weight here… Kono Tatsuya? Who even are you? The game is called DEAD DAYS. The initial promo material reminded me of a certain well-known manga and its adaptation, “Highschool of the Dead” — my head was full of images of “zombies running wild in the streets while the protagonist and his group keep fleeing.” Then I opened the game and cleared it, and I had to slap my thigh and shout: “Damn, I got played!” Strictly speaking this isn’t a “zombie apocalypse survival game” at all. It’s more of a “petty thug goes straight” game, dressed up in a slightly sci-fi coat at most.