Kareni Sekai to Owaru Hana is a game I had mixed feelings about from the start — both anticipation and a bit of fear. Anticipation because the premise is intriguing, almost giving away nothing about what kind of story it’ll tell, and the art, character designs, and even the voice cast all felt really comfortable. A bit of fear because of the planner/scenario writer: Yukihito. Who is this Yukihito? You might not have heard of his other works, but there’s one you definitely know… Nekopara. English title Nekopara, and I don’t know the Chinese name, but I know its nickname: “Catgirl Porn” — it sold like crazy on Steam. He also did two nukige with Sayori, an artist from China, so when a writer like that suddenly drops a new title with what looks like a very abstract, artsy premise, how could you not suspect it might be a landmine? But after playing the trial last month, my doubts got even worse. Because the trial still explained almost nothing — what the game is trying to say, what the theme is, all still unclear… The world setting feels like a fantasy, and while that’s not uncommon in games, it’s everywhere in Japanese anime. The most recent example is Kowareta Sekai to Garasu no Hana — and the title format is suspiciously similar, which only deepened my suspicion that it might just be pretentious bullshit that ends up saying nothing at all… Of course, after playing it, those worries vanished. Or rather, I had it wrong — this isn’t some “artsy pretentious” game, it’s more like a fairy tale. Yeah, a fairy tale — the kind a mother tells her kid before bed, the “Long Long Ago,” “むかしむかし,” “once upon a time” kind… No wonder the world and scenery in this game feel so “fairy tale.”

My father said he wanted a Bluetooth speaker, to pair with his phone and listen to music. Sure, when he’s home he blasts music from his phone at some ungodly hour every morning and wakes me up with all that boom-tss boom-tss, but since it’s my tsundere old man asking, and he’s wearing that face of “if it’s convenient for you you can just casually buy me one, of course if you don’t I can buy it myself, it’s not like I’m asking you to buy it or anything”—no reason not to buy it. Money spent on your parents is money well spent. But since this was my first time buying one of these, I didn’t want to go too expensive. Buying a Bose felt like a bit much for him—start with something with good value for money, so it won’t hurt if Dad accidentally loses it. After looking around, I settled on the Sounder Honeycomb 2S+. It happened to be on special at JD, 299 - 100, and with a BaiTiao savings coupon it came to 169 in the end.

Your Diary is a game by CUBE, and about… two years ago, I played the Chinese-patched version… Holy shit, it’s already been two years!!! I swear it felt like no time at all!!! Of course the impression that game left on me was still pretty good. Whenever someone who’s just getting into visual novels asks me for recommendations, I recommend this one. Reason’s simple: good art, good music, the story is a bit clichéd but not toxic, and it’s still a very orthodox, wholesome story — isn’t that perfect to hand to a newbie trying to get into visual novels! Back then I didn’t really look at what Japanese players thought of the game. Later, while reading up on CUBE, I checked it out, and found Your Diary doesn’t rate that high in Japan. I originally thought a story like this should get an 80, but it barely held onto a 70. What’s funny is some Japanese players called the game “boring.” Boring… that’s a hard one to call. My thinking at the time was that Japanese otaku probably love those “wild twists” and see Your Diary’s story as all formula, so they’d find it boring. Of course, if you asked me to look back on Japanese opinions now, I’d say they actually have a point…

I don’t know how other people chase that “immersion” feeling when they read a story. Let me just say what I think. Most of the time, when I come across a story, I notice some plot point that mirrors something that happened to me. Maybe the ending lines up with a stretch of my own life, maybe it only shares the same beginning but not the same end, maybe some character reminds me of a friend or an acquaintance, maybe the protagonist is a lot like me, and so on. Whenever I hit a story like that, I start thinking about my own stuff. Sometimes I even feel a bit of regret or wistfulness because the story went differently than reality did. That’s it. Yeah, that’s all. I’ve never imagined myself as the protagonist. I’ve never imagined the girls the protagonist meets as my girlfriend. I might think a character is cute, but that’s it. Anyone who knows me has probably noticed: I’ve never called a game girl “waifu,” I’ve never said “XXX is mai waifu” or anything like that. I like a character because I like her story, her personality, the things she says. As for looks… come on, Japanese art styles are all basically the same handful of templates, and one artist’s characters all look mass-produced. Everyone looks the same. So personality and story carry way more weight. One principle I hold: characters become full through their stories. And that’s not just true in fiction. In real life too, someone who’s been through a lot, who has a complicated past, naturally has a certain charm in how they talk and carry themselves. Hell, anyone can pull out some old war stories to impress people. Look at me, a washed-up old fuck, still bringing up the past to show off. So I rarely look at standalone artist illustrations. On Twitter I might like an artist’s style, glance at it, share it, sigh about how cute or pretty it is, but I don’t save it. Sometimes I’ll use one as an avatar, but I switch it out pretty quickly—it feels kind of rude, somehow. Right—without a story to prop them up, an empty character means nothing. Someone just standing there, and you don’t know their personality, their voice, their mannerisms—you know basically nothing about them. Saying you like them is almost empty talk. I don’t collect character art, but after playing this many games, I do have a collection of sorts. Mostly game music. Same style as before: the game songs I listen to are almost always from games I’ve actually played through. Especially OSTs—when I hear a track, I remember the story and the characters in it. If I happen to hear a good song from some game, I’ll listen for a while and then pick up the game, wanting to see what story is behind that song. So one day I heard “永遠の魔法使い.” I got curious. What kind of story produces a person who’s a jack-of-all-trades (八面玲瓏), who even with magic can’t grant a single wish and almost gives up…? So I played “魔女こいにっき” (Majo Koi Nikki).

I figure everyone’s got a dream, but it keeps shifting with age and circumstances. The very first one we ever had—aside from those endless dumbass questions teachers ask, “what do you wanna be when you grow up”—was probably always school-related, deep down. A buddy of mine, Crab Boss, his dream was to open an internet cafe right across from the school. “I’ll open a net cafe right across from school, rig it with the sickest machines, run the sickest membership perks, pull in the sickest kids, and piss off every last one of those dumbass teachers.” Crab Boss really loved hanging out at net cafes back then. Hmm… sometimes he’d drag me along too. Another friend, Tao-san, his dream was to bang every woman on earth.

Everyone step aside, I’m telling a story again! This time it’s in parts!

No idea what those Japanese eroge developers were smoking this year, but most of this year’s new releases felt like… a huge step backwards compared to before. From Hinakami Clover at the start of the year, through all the weird stuff in between — Sakura no Mori † Dreamers with its strong opening and weak follow-through, Kimi to Yume Mitsu which was so baffling it made me sick, even the well-received Maitetsu had that self-indulgent political show dragging it down, and Saga Planets’ new game had a creative final ending but couldn’t hide how boring the common route was. August I can’t even be bothered to talk about anymore. The more I think about it, the worse it gets. Every so often I genuinely want to see if those double-standard Japanese would dare to review-bomb this game below 80. Broadly speaking, the story-driven games have all clearly regressed. Not a single one gave me that from-start-to-finish high like smoking weed. I had to go back to older games to numb myself. Every time I play a new story-focused release it just feels like getting shit smeared all over my face.

Honestly, at this point I’ve basically turned into a pure moe-otaku. What’s a moe-otaku? It means I no longer care about plot or story direction. As long as the girls are cute and the voices are nice, I’ll fucking say the game is good, and if someone says it’s not, I’ll fucking find excuses to say it is, and so on and so forth… But you can’t really blame me, right? This is a world that judges by looks.

For a long time, one of the big reasons visual novels get doubted and looked down on by a bunch of hardcore princess-type players is this: the damn thing doesn’t count as a game. Honestly, I don’t think it counts as a game either. At best it’s an audiobook. I’ve said more than once that when Westerners talk about Japanese eroge, the word they use is always Visual Novels. When our local Japanophile shut-ins are solemnly announcing “I’m playing eroge again this month,” the Westerners are all saying What are you reading?. Of course, visual novels themselves have increasingly become novelized, gradually turning into commercial products that sell purely on art, story, music, porn, or even just first-press bonuses. Development costs aren’t high either—plenty of small doujin circles start out as visual novel companies, and it has that vaguely Chinese-youth-startup vibe. But this thing wasn’t like that in the past.

Last year Lump of Sugar put out two games… And each was worse than the last. The first, Renai Relation, had a baffling system and not a single interesting thing in the plot. The second, Kodomo no Asobi, maybe had slightly better writing, but the art was absolutely terrible! Funny thing, I looked back at the studio’s older stuff—back in 2014 and even earlier they were still doing two titles a year, and the premises were just as dumb as ever, but at least the art was decent. I played Unmei Senjou no Phi too; the system was actually pretty flashy, but for a game billed as a mystery, the story was a total joke… So I’ve always figured Lump of Sugar pumps these out assembly-line style: someone grabs a premise, holds a meeting, rounds up a few writers (they don’t even have a fixed writing team), the artist is at least consistent with Moekibara Fumitake, the music is whatever, and the only real muscle in the company is the programming side—they’ll cobble together any weird gimmick you can think of. Keyword hunting, fruit slicing, timed hidden third options. Going by that Japanese expose on the eroge industry, Lump of Sugar probably just leans on Moekibara to push the first wave of limited-edition sales and then calls it a day. The stories aren’t really that interesting; it’s mostly carried by the voice acting, art, and programming. So honestly, I don’t play their games all that seriously (same as how I play crap from that shit-tier studio), I just skim through and move on… This year’s Lump of Sugar feels different though. Maybe they finally got their act together, maybe it’s because it’s their tenth anniversary and they figured holding yet another press conference to announce a new title would be stupid—better to sit down and make a proper commemorative game. So they took their biggest hit from ten years ago, Tayutama -kiss on my deity-, and made a sequel using the same setting. Plenty of people probably remember Tayutama—there was an anime, called Yuu On (Tayutama), and back in the day the studio even did a crossover between the anime and Yuzusoft’s Tenshin Ranman. Pretty nuts, right? They really went all-in. So bringing back the old setting for a sequel has a bit of that Alcot-doing-Clover Day’s vibe—look back at history, look forward to the future, carry on the legacy, march steadily forward. The sequel is called Tayutama 2 -you’re the only one-, and it continues from the first game. The first game was about the conflict between humans and Tayutai; the second takes place in a town where the heroes of the first game have established a place where humans and Tayutai can coexist peacefully. The protagonist, Kusakabe Sora, runs into Kohaku, a Tayutai adopted daughter raised by the first game’s heroine, Izumo Mashiro. He helps her out, the girl decides he’s a good guy, and drags him home to tell her mother she’s going to marry him.