I do have a soft spot for LASS — probably obvious from how much I shit on it. 11eyes was probably the first game I ever really grinded through back in the day. Honestly, a great experience. The part where 劫の眼 kicks in at the end still gets me hyped, and the protagonist’s cheat abilities are pretty damn sick — it blows away all the gloom from earlier and just feels good. Also, the 1v1 between Kusakabe-senpai and Kusakabe Misao — wait, I mean the Kusa… anyway, that was written really well. At least, I’d put it up there with the best battle writing I’ve played. And so, as you probably know, LASS fell straight into a slump after 11eyes. They put out Shoujo Shin’iki, which was way too far up its own ass, then came Mayoi no Futari, which was pretty badly written, and after that they started cranking out short nukige this year — one about getting married, one about ninja training… I figured the company was doomed, and then out of nowhere they announced Liber_7. Liber_7 was originally supposed to come out as a follow-up to the 11eyes series, but Shoujo Shin’iki bombed so hard that LASS ran out of money, so it got delayed, and delayed, and delayed again — and only now have they finally squeezed this thing out. The president of LASS (I think that’s who he is): the freshly married fatass Kenji Mana said, “Liber_7 shares the same worldview as 11eyes and 3days, and it will surpass them.” Of course nobody’s buying that bragging, right? Given what LASS can actually do these days, just telling one story properly would already be an achievement… And so Liber_7 got delayed, delayed, and delayed again. All of which was exactly what I expected, so it finally came out on the last game release day of 2016. Honestly, by the time I got to it I wasn’t really expecting this thing to surpass 11eyes anymore — I’d already played the trial version, and some of it was pretty cringe. So after playing the full release… it just felt even more awkward.

A lot of things in life come out of nowhere. You can’t sort them out by sheer personal effort — mostly it comes down to the course of history. Plenty of things happen out of the blue. Say you’re a shut-in otaku, and suddenly someone tells you they’ve got a new match lined up for you.

As someone who’s already “retired” from the audiophile hobby, I’m not really interested in mysticism anymore. Mostly I just look for songs to listen to—following arrangers, following singers, seeing which singers look good… oh, I mean sing well. I used to use the Dunu DN20000J as my retirement IEM, but lately my tastes have gotten a bit heavier. That IEM, well… you know how it is. Back then I fell for the bullshit those KOLs were peddling, chasing after “female poison” and transparency. Who’d have thought I’d end up liking EDM and Hip-Hop? And even when it’s not EDM or Hip-Hop, ordinary pop just lacks something through the Dunu… So in the end, I guess I just prefer that dynamic driver feel? Finally I saw the JVC FX1200 on sale for JD Double Eleven, so I just bought it. As the flagship of dynamic drivers, I figured I’d experience its charm.

I’ve wanted to listen to a tube amp for ages. Everyone says tube amps are super classy, mostly because they supposedly have this amazing “flavor.” So I got together with a high school buddy to figure out how to put one together. He said the circuit and soldering should be fine—schematics are all over the internet—and the tubes are no problem either, you can just buy ready-made ones. Solder it up using the public mold designs online… So I placed the order. We’d agreed to do the soldering together, but last month his master’s thesis defense was such a pain and kept him so busy that I let him start on his own. When he finished, he said: after soldering it with someone else’s board, someone else’s case, someone else’s power supply, and someone else’s tubes, it ended up exactly the same as the finished units other people sell. So why not just buy a finished one? Yeah… for something this cheap, why not just buy a finished one?

There are all kinds of “what if I could go back to school again” hypotheticals online, and plenty of discussions built on top of them. Not that I haven’t had the same thought. I’ve talked about the possibility with friends too. In high school I was a waste of space. Every exam I barely scraped a pass, teetering on the edge of the bottom of the year, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. I just kept going out to find internet cafes, or hitting up relatives’ places, or classmates’ houses that had a PC, dicking around on forums to see what was playable. I think I even saved up and bought a Pocket PC, kept refreshing the same few forums, and ended up a moderator on one of them. Young me was pretty garbage at studying, honestly. Chinese I learned by reading newspapers; English I learned by playing games. Math wasn’t that I didn’t get it — the teacher just never taught you how to derive anything. He’d shove the process at you, tell you to memorize it, and next time you see this kind of problem, do it like this. Physics I thought I knew, but the problems always came out wrong somehow. Chemistry I had zero interest in. My biology teacher looked at me like I was brain-damaged. Sometimes at night, when I’m studying Japanese and all sorts of stuff, I sigh at how good the internet is now. Never mind whether you can use Google — even if you hit a problem, you can search Quora and find plenty of people explaining the principle in plain terms. Back in my high school days, even getting online was a pain in the ass. And even though I could use Google freely back then, I couldn’t search up anything, because Chinese resources were far too scarce and my English wasn’t good enough yet. So to me the internet now is more like a “library” — quickly look up whatever knowledge you need. You don’t even need a textbook’s explanation. With some judgment, you can learn basically anything through the internet. And now I’m always sighing that I don’t have enough time to study, work is full of bullshit, and when I try to read a book my attention gets shredded by the internet after a while. If I could be sent back to school to study, I’d definitely be way more goated than the waste of space I used to be. So this “what if” — I’ve argued it with people. “You know what, if you put me back in school now to study, I’d absolutely kill it.” Haozhi across from me drained his beer after hearing my bragging. “Bullshit!” He dropped those two words… And left me sitting there dumbfounded. ………………

Kinda embarrassing to admit, but for someone who thinks of himself as a tough guy, my first time on a roller coaster was only 4 years ago. My workplace organized a free trip to some place in Zhengzhou called “Fantawild,” so that’s where I rode a roller coaster for the first time in my life. The feeling… hard to describe. All I know is it made my prostate very uncomfortable.

When I was a kid, I loved watching Disney animated films—stuff like Mulan, Tarzan, Aladdin. Those movies weren’t just well-made; they were fun to watch, and sometimes they’d break into song-and-dance numbers. So when the teacher asked us to write a review of a film we’d seen, I wrote about those. My feelings were pretty genuine—about as genuine as the game impressions I write now. And unsurprisingly, the teacher tore me a new one. She said I was shallow, criticized a bunch of things I’ve long since forgotten (this was primary school), but one line stuck with me. “American movies are all about commercialization. They have zero artistic value. What’s there to even write a review about?”

Asa Project, a company that used to be pretty damn good. They’re under Hook, I think. They made a name for themselves with Renai 0 Kilometer, then kept the style going with ひとつ飛ばし恋愛 and later Purumai Wars… and then this year they put out Suki to Suki de Sankaku Renai. Before I get into the new one, let’s walk through how Asa Project’s games have evolved…

You’re a 42-year-old middle-aged guy. You’ve got a family, a wife, and a daughter in middle school. Your days never change. One after another, and somewhere in there you’ve forgotten that time is even passing. Sometimes you shoot the shit with coworkers about nothing in particular. You’ve forgotten what the world out there even looks like. Work is a two-point commute with nothing in between — no fun, no passion. Your coworkers are all hooked on one thrill or another, chasing kicks online, hunting for strangers. You figure none of it means anything. Maybe you still love your wife. Sometimes you want to get intimate with her, and you get the cold shoulder. “You’re 42 already. What are you even doing this for? Aren’t you tired enough as it is?” Your wife has zero interest in the bedroom. It’s depressing. Sometimes you have to take care of it yourself. But sometimes your eyes drift toward your daughter. She’s nearly grown now, and she’s beautiful — sometimes she even reminds you a little of your wife. She’s completely unguarded at home, and sometimes you see things you shouldn’t. Sometimes, you even start to react to your own daughter… That’s dangerous.

I once saw some otaku girls who play otome games complaining: “In most visual novels the heroine kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat, and in otome games the heroine also kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat. Man, male-oriented or female-oriented, the heroine always has it rough. You get used to it.” Thinking about it, that’s pretty much true. In a lot of stories women are painted as fragile things that need a man to protect them. Even the “senpai” type in visual novels tends to get a later scene revealing she’s not actually that strong and is secretly fragile inside. It feels like something baked into the gender roles themselves. But every so often a game tries to change that. Sure, seeing the heroine carry the hero the whole way through in a male-oriented game is unrealistic. Everyone knows the protagonist is “the weakest” by default, and, well, by the end he’s always some broken-ass cheat character anyway. So all we can do is look at female-oriented games and see if any of them dare to make the heroine the strongest. So 断罪のマリア (Maria of Condemnation) might be one of those games. Not entirely, but it’s close — at the very least, the heroine’s combat power is the strongest in the game.