The reason I had my eye on this one is simple: IROTORI’s previous game, Sakura no Saiten, was genuinely good. It kept the story fun and built a unique system on top of it. Sure, it can’t match the “proper” mystery games, but within the visual novel niche it’s in a league of its own, good enough to step outside and trade blows with other text adventures. And they did exactly that. Sakura no Saiten landed on a bunch of consoles, eventually hit Steam too, and picked up plenty of praise along the way. So when Hachikenden was announced I was already looking forward to it, hoping for something that was “really story-driven.” Never mind that I’m not especially into Japan’s take on history.

I first heard about Inverted Angel because I’m a fan of Nakamura Sanso—she sings the theme song (ED) for it. At first I figured it was just a simple little romance piece, or maybe one of those indie things with a bit of meta and philosophy tossed in, the usual slightly-deep-bait template. Then I actually played it, and I couldn’t help but say out loud: “What the hell is this?!”

I bought this game ages ago but never had time to actually play it. Finally got around to finishing it recently. Same familiar flavor as when I played Zanghua: Anhei Taohuayuan (葬花·暗黑桃花源), but improved in a lot of places. Overall it left me genuinely pleased, and even surprised me a few times. Let me state my stance up front: Efu: Mingmo Qianlixing (饿殍：明末千里行) is a very good game. Building on its predecessor Zanghua: Anhei Taohuayuan, it fixes a lot of the weak points, and honestly it’s the most “correct” game I’ve seen this year in terms of production choices. The studio has found the right approach, and sticking with it will definitely lead to bigger success.

This game is a real pain to talk about. If you think Nanakamai’s work on Frontwing titles is “insane” and figured this one at least reaches ATRI or GINKA levels, you’re dreaming. It’s not even half of Corona Blossom. And yeah, the problems aren’t just the art and story… though those are problems too.

Last year SMEE put out a game with a seriously baffling title. I mean the title itself is baffling. Hajilove -making*lovers- See, the actual title is Hajilove—first love—while the subtitle is borrowed from another well-known SMEE work, Making Lovers. Making lovers… as in making girlfriends, I guess. Why call it baffling? Because at a glance it looks like a Making Lovers sequel when it isn’t one at all. The reason for the naming is simple: riding the coattails. They want you to think this new title—which shares neither artist nor writer nor production team with Making Lovers—is the spiritual successor to the Making Lovers series. Buy it, and the sales go up. So why not just make an actual Making Lovers sequel? Here’s the kicker: Hajilove -makinglovers-* is really SMEE’s first attempt at the nukige space. SMEE has always stuck to a vaguely societal “pure love” lane, mostly matchmaking games, and nobody ever expected to fap to a SMEE title. So their “practicality” push this time is shy and embarrassed—still insisting over and over that it’s “pure love,” even after hiring several nukige artists… The reception to Hajilove turned out better than expected. A lot of old fans said they weren’t comfortable with the sudden nukige pivot, but the body doesn’t lie, and sales don’t either. With SMEE’s successful borrowing, its sister brand HOOK naturally had to take the same step, and so we got Secret Love (Kari).

Everyone goes through a chuuni phase. When I was young I loved collecting “really deep, philosophical” lines, treated them as gospel, and quoted them constantly to look like I had some kind of inner depth. Stuff like “humans are all selfish,” “humans are just animals driven by primal urges,” “society is dark,” “the world is one big conspiracy”… and so on. Guess everyone’s got their own personal Black Myth going on. Say that stuff now and it just feels embarrassing. It’s not that those lines are wrong—a lot of them are straight-up facts—but they’re all “correct nonsense.” “Humans are ugly, selfish, profit-driven…” (sounds even better in Japanese, some 人類とは…… type shit) Yeah, and? No shit. Does repeating it let you exploit these “human weaknesses” to make money? Or do you have some way to free humans from those “weaknesses”? If anything, the guy who keeps chanting about them is himself living inside them 24/7. Once you’re an adult and you’ve seen enough, most of this stops surprising you. What you care about is how to make yourself feel good, in a more practical sense. If something pisses you off, either change it, accept it, or put up with it. Anything else is just noise. That’s reality, sure, but in games and films this kind of material still sells. In reality we’re powerless, but in a virtual world we can fantasize about saving the world. So even in the visual novel space, the “become a creator god” premise is popular—parallel worlds popping up everywhere, giving you that high-tier-being experience of watching the seas turn to mulberry fields, a thousand years in a glance. Which brings us to Uzumaki-sha’s Hajimeru Sekai no Risouron (はじめるセカイの理想論).

I actually played this game a while ago — I even wrote a commercial piece on it — but I never got around to blogging about it, mostly because I forgot. I’ve forgotten almost the entire plot too. If I hadn’t been sorting through files today, I’d have pretty much erased the fact that I ever played it. So what kind of game is this? According to SMEE, it’s not just any game — it’s a commemorative game. Commemorating what, exactly? First, it’s SMEE’s 15th anniversary title. Second, it commemorates SMEE’s cumulative sales hitting 150,000 across all its games. The first time I saw those two “commemorations,” I nearly lost it. What kind of commemoration is this? Since when does 15 years even warrant one? And it’s not even a real “15th anniversary” — look closer and it turns out the project was conceived during the 15th anniversary… holy shit, that counts too. And this is the first time I’ve ever seen “cumulative sales” used as a reason to commemorate something. It reads like someone forcing out content when they’ve got nothing left.

Last year, I think, Qingzhou Xiaoxiong—the online seller most respectful of electronic waste—listed a batch of e-ink devices: the first-generation Remarkable, at a very lovely price, probably under 600 yuan, brand new. I got excited and grabbed one, and I’ve been using it on and off as a reading and e-paper device ever since. Here are some quick thoughts.

Years ago — don’t ask me where, probably the Google Play Store — I came across a game called Boku no Kanojo wa Ningyo Hime!? (My Girlfriend Is a Mermaid Princess!?). It was a mobile game, but it looked like a visual novel. I didn’t have time for it back then, so it went on the pile. Later I found out it had actually been ported to PC and put up on Steam, complete with a bunch of language options. So at some point it ended up in my Steam library… Well, I have to admit it: I’ve been “cleaning out” the visual novels in my Steam library lately, so this Mermaid Princess became the next target. I did finish it, and picked up all the achievements along the way. But when it comes to actually reviewing it, I find it hard to say anything.

Around 2016, I think. Google+ was still alive back then, and I had this massive urge to express myself—I just really wanted to write something. I was super active in a Google+ community that had these “three-topic snacks” prompts, where they’d give you three related or unrelated words and you’d write a story around them. Eventually I got it into my head to write this insanely badass novel, serialized. I was still deep in my chuuni phase, and I’d played way too many visual novels, so the stories in my head naturally took on that shape. The idea was a story about an edgy male lead and a heroine at school. Students start dying mysteriously, but it turns out they all killed themselves, and the mastermind behind it is the cute, cheerful, harmless-looking heroine who has a hidden dark side. Using her secret identity, she lures students online, draws out their inner darkness, and talks them into suicide or into hurting each other—all for fun. She keeps her identity perfectly hidden, and since she never directly kills anyone, she can’t really be held responsible. The male lead keeps investigating because of a friend’s death, and the heroine hides who she is and investigates alongside him. The final boss is right next to you—that kind of feeling. Looking back now, that story is chuuni as hell, and a lot of it is immature and childish. But I still don’t think the subject matter is bad. If anything, it’s something you can always write, because I firmly believe that so-called “demonic whispering” really can drive a person to death. Everyone in modern society is under a ton of pressure, facing all kinds of pain, and it’s not uncommon to be unable to take it and momentarily lose hope. But what I want to talk about isn’t the story itself. Recently I realized that someone actually wrote the story I wanted to write back then, and turned it into a game… It’s this Steam hit, Seven Days Until the Protagonist Dies.