There was once a god-tier game called Onii-chan, Migi-te no Shiyou o Kinshi Shimasu (お兄ちゃん　右手の使用を禁止します). The gimmick, the marketing, the selling points, the story and art — all of it had real punch. Even people who can’t read Japanese see that title and their imagination runs wild. Combined with that cursed OP, the game hit a height that year, even though it looks like a nukige on the surface… Honestly I don’t think it’s a nukige at all — it’s a pure love game. It even gives every heroine her own route and ending theme. Nukige don’t get that treatment… The company behind Onii-chan, Migi-te no Shiyou o Kinshi Shimasu is Galette, a sub-brand built specifically for siscon games. But this company is… how do I put it. Unlucky. First, two brands to keep straight: Galette and GLace. Galette exists to put out siscon games, GLace exists to put out story-driven ones. Going by the lineup, the company’s real focus is clearly the latter — making nukige is just a desperate cash grab to stay afloat. Who wouldn’t rather be highbrow… But the games GLace puts out are kind of tragic… I never played that Koikami thing they released earlier, no idea. I did play Timepiece Ensemble, and in short: a pile of shit. Later GLace hyped up their new title Amanosora Retrospect (天ノ空レトロスペクト), and after playing it I thought… it’s okay. The setup up front is interesting, but the entire second half has plenty of problems. Worse, even though I thought it was passable, the Japanese didn’t agree — ErogameScape tore it apart and panned it into a landmine. After that the brand was basically poison, so they put on a disguise and kept releasing, putting out Amanatsu Adolescence (甘夏アドゥレセンス). That game has… some redeeming qualities, but overall it’s still pretty garbage… So GLace, the brand supposedly dedicated to building a reputation with story games, has had every release panned into a landmine from day one, even under a new name. Zero reputation to speak of. Did GLace ever put out anything good? Yes! 1/2 summer! But unfortunately 1/2 summer was filed under the Alcot label, and although it later came back to GLace, nobody remembers it as a GLace game anymore. So in most of the industry’s memory, GLace games = landmines…

Ever run into someone like this in real life? Their mouth is vicious, every word dripping with nitpicking. But they also read the room, and the moment they sense you’re about to blow up they shut it down fast. Sensitive and perceptive enough to know if you’re genuinely pissed or just in a bad mood. They care what you think of them, adjust their talk based on your mood, yet they never actually back down—still keeping up that sharp-tongued high ground. They cut themselves off from others, from every little circle, from socializing altogether. But they’re scared of being alone, scared of being misunderstood, they want friends, yet they can’t let go of whatever’s stuck in their craw………… They want to get close to people, but they’re afraid of being gotten close to too easily. Contradictory creatures, through and through………… Japanese has a word for this: porcupine syndrome (ヤマアラシ症候群). Because they’re afraid of getting hurt, they hurt others. Their inherent kindness makes them not want to hurt anyone, but they can’t stop hurting people anyway. So they sink into self-blame and contradiction, sometimes doing ridiculous, absurd things that cause even more damage. That’s the so-called bad side of porcupine syndrome. In modern society there are actually quite a lot of these people. But they’re pitiful too, because deep down most of them aren’t bad at all—they’re kind. It’s just that fear of being hurt turned them into the “vicious loudmouth villain” on the surface, carrying a reputation they don’t deserve. Like a porcupine: afraid of getting hurt, so it stabs others, curls up and refuses to show itself, leaving nothing but spines for everyone else. Actually, these people can be saved. They can shed others’ preconceptions—all they need is someone willing to pull them out. And that person needs the capacity to withstand the “porcupine’s” attacks. Put bluntly: they have to get hurt, and not be afraid of getting hurt. So Zannen na Ore-tachi no Seishun Jijou. (残念な俺達の青春事情。) is, roughly, that kind of story.

I only signed up out of boredom, and then I actually got invited. I’d almost forgotten about it, glanced at my phone and remembered, so I hopped on my bike and went.

The Nintendo Switch finally arrived before my birthday. Honestly, after buying a 2DS I already felt like the Switch was inevitable, and after thinking it over I went ahead and bought one. I bought it locally in Zhengzhou, picked it up in person to avoid unnecessary hassle. When I checked it over at pickup, it turned out the three serial numbers all matched, so it should be fine. I picked up Breath of the Wild and Splatoon 2, and I’m currently playing Breath of the Wild. Most of the time I use it as a handheld. I haven’t run into any of those weird problems people complain about online, so I’m pretty happy with it.

More isn’t really a studio that specializes in galge, honestly. It looks more like… “A bunch of music people who make galge on the side so they have an excuse to put out albums.” The company name is MME — MORE MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. Which is my whole point: their center of gravity is clearly music. Making galge, a cheap kind of game dev, probably isn’t the day job for them. More like a hobby? Hobby or not, they’ve put out a decent number of games, and they don’t look like they’re doing a “one and done” bit. If anything they keep branching out, spawning more and more sub-brands… Sometimes I wonder if registering a new brand in Japan is just free. Why else does every eroge company change its skin every other year… This time the new More brand is called Niko, and their game is Golden Hour (ゴールデンアワー). I mean, More already had two brands running fine — More for pure-love stuff, Pure More for nukige — and now there’s a pile of sub-labels: Chelseasoft, which looks like it’s going for moege, DOLCE, which put out the little flower of Casablanca, and now Niko. God knows what style this one is supposed to be.

Wagamama High Spec (ワガママハイスペック) did pretty well for itself last year. It even got a short-form anime, and a way better one than that princess stray cat got — word is the latter ran out of money entirely. And when a game sells, a sequel is inevitable. So Madsoft sat on it for nearly a year and put out Wagamama High Spec OC. At first I assumed it was a sequel, and Madsoft’s own copy sort of implies that. In this “sequel,” the class rep who wasn’t a route before, April 1st Kanade, the protagonist’s editor-in-charge Takatsukasa Chitose, and his homeroom teacher Iwakuma Yukari all get promoted to heroines — while the original cast stays available too. No trial version. Straight to the full release. Which made me wonder — is this just a fandisk? Then I saw the price. Nearly 10,000 yen. You can’t be that brazen. Booted it up. Holy shit. It’s a fandisk.

I was using a ThinkPad X250 before this, and I upgraded it bit by bit over time, but I had a few complaints about that laptop: Cooling was terrible. Hook it up to a dock and it hits 90°C in no time, and breaking 100°C was routine. I tried modding it, but it was basically useless. Performance was lacking. With the dock running dual 1080p displays, it just couldn’t handle it—open YouTube and performance explodes. Build quality was so-so. The ThinkPad X250 was a step back from the X230 in terms of build. It’s all fiberglass, even though every media outlet hypes it as carbon fiber. It’s not, and there’s no metal either. Fiberglass, plainly put… is plastic. Overall, the laptop was okay at first, but later it started to annoy me, so I planned to upgrade after two years. This time I looked at the X270, but found nothing new, and it seems the ThinkPad series has given up on the X200 line. So my targets were the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Yoga.

I used to wear a Xiaomi Mi Band on my right wrist. Honestly there’s nothing really wrong with it, but I bought it at launch, my mom wore it for a year, then I wore it for another year, and then the strap snapped and the charger went missing… I figured I’d just buy a replacement part, only to find the official store had discontinued every accessory for it, and the prices on Taobao were somehow higher than a brand-new one cost back then. Forget it, I got my money’s worth, so I gave up. But wearing something on my right wrist had become a habit, so I thought I’d get something else to wear. What though? Maybe something that actually looks good? That’s how I came across the Misfit Ray.

Looking back on some of my old Gal impressions, I always want to laugh bitterly. The old me thought a game had to have a good story to be good. And what counts as a good story? It has to have a big twist, but not too absurd a twist — explode the plot while staying coherent, plant a pile of foreshadowing and pick every bit of it back up. Best if it also works in a little life wisdom and the truth of the world. That’s a good game. Now I see that what I was after was just the “good” games within the story-driven category. But like how a cinema shows more than Hollywood blockbusters, visual novels aren’t only the story-driven kind. I’ve also thought that if a game can make its characters cute enough, that’s fine too — I just always felt that kind of game was a tier below the story-driven ones. Because those are the big titles, and this is just selling moe character writing, tea-party-slice-of-life level. Like holding up Death Note against Yuru Yuri, or a AAA title against Minecraft — most people figure the two aren’t even on the same level.

Obviously I’m a handheld nut, and my love for handhelds outweighs any other kind of console gaming. In some ways I even use the Surface Pro 4 as a handheld, even though it’s not remotely “handheld” sized. A while back I got my hands on the GPD Pocket. It’s great in every way except that gaming on it is a hassle — compared to the GPD Win it has no built-in gamepad buttons, and the default keyboard is just painful. So pairing it with an 8BitDo portable gamepad does the trick.