I downloaded Koiken Otome (恋剣乙女) ages ago, heard the story was pretty mid, and never finished it. Then recently I was startled to hear that Shimura Yumi is retiring from voice acting for good… Which reminded me that Inoue Hana is also in Koiken Otome, so I grabbed it to wallow in nostalgia for a bit. So how is this game… yeah, exactly as expected, pretty mid. Not that it has zero bright spots. Worth mentioning in passing: Koiken Otome has an FD called Koiken Otome Sainen (恋剣乙女～再燃～). My personal advice is to play both together, because if you only play the main game the story just ends on a wet fart…

Honestly, the OnePlus 3 doesn’t interest me much, even though foreigners keep hyping it up overseas like it’s the best thing ever—to the point where I wonder if they’re all getting paid. Fortunately, there’s still one Korean who keeps trashing the OnePlus 3, saying it doesn’t deserve the flagship title at all, and that he wouldn’t recommend buying it unless your budget is really tight. That guy raised my opinion of Koreans quite a bit. But this isn’t about the OnePlus 3 phone—it’s about the OnePlus sling bag. Some of you might know that when the OnePlus 3 launched, they also released a OnePlus sling bag. It looked pretty nice, but the price was a bit steep. What’s even dumber is that the first batch apparently required an invite code. I heard the OnePlus backpack was impossible to buy before too… I wasn’t planning to buy this thing originally. It’s just that a classmate wanted one, said he was a OnePlus fan, had two codes, and asked if I wanted one… After much deliberation, I still ended up chopping off my hand.

Alcot is supposedly on its deathbed. First the pillar of the studio, illustrator Yushi Ninomura, up and quit — went home to play gacha games. So this year Alcot put out nothing but a cash-grab FD for LoveREC with a handful of new CGs, plus an even more blatant cash-grab, Clover Days Plus, which is just the HCGs converted to Emote. The Chinese patch shipped same-day, if that tells you anything. But even if the main studio is finished, they’ve still got the sub-label Alcot Honey Comb, which tends to put out bolder stuff. I’ve played plenty of theirs — Shunkai Gentei, Mujikaku Mirai, that sort of thing — and this time we get something with a very different flavor: Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta. I say “different flavor” because most Alcot games give off a slice-of-life, comedy-heavy vibe. Genuinely sad ones are rare (not that they don’t exist — that Shinigami no Kiss thing at the start probably counts as sad too). So Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta shows up waving the banner of “a romance between predator and prey.” Everything up to here was made up. I can’t keep it going, so I’ll just be honest: the reason I’m playing a 2014 game is that I was bored listening to music on YouTube, heard the OP, thought it sounded interesting, and picked it up.

Around November last year, ensemble (Ongaku-ka) put out a game called Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata, and I thought it was pretty good at the time. The story is whatever, but there are so many characters that you’re bound to like at least one of them — picking a route and going through it isn’t a bad way to spend time. So as everyone knows, Japanese devs are great at squeezing out surplus value. The moment something gets a decent reception, they’ll immediately crank out a sequel or an FD to milk another round of cash. Visual novel or Shirouto Zukan 7, doesn’t matter — if there’s confirmed demand, they’ll keep selling. On that front Japanese devs have even less shame than Baidu. So less than two months after release, ensemble announced an FD for Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata, and the FD’s name is appropriately FD-ish: Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata Kasaneta Omoi o Zutto. Forever overlapping feelings, or whatever… It finally came out last month. The game isn’t big, only about 2 GB. Honestly I went in expecting the usual FD stuff — prequels, sequels, maybe a new hook. That might be because the ones I’ve played are things like Wheel Country and the Grisaia series. But really, an FD is basically an After Story: a forced extension of life for a story that already ended. For a character-driven game like this, an FD can only ever be garnish for the sex scenes. I was fully prepared to just skim through it. Didn’t expect this FD to actually have a few things that exceeded my expectations.

Goddammit, ever since I started playing eroge I’ve learned a bunch of words that never showed up in any textbook. Stuff like yarichin, yariman, and then a while back I ran into yarisā. I’m sitting there wondering what the hell a yarisā even is, and of course I had to look it up, and of course that cost me an entire night of my youth. Everyone knows (don’t even say you don’t, I won’t believe you) that yariman is the word for a slut, and yarichin is the male version (hell, I don’t know what the good Chinese equivalent is, you can’t exactly call it “black foreskin”), so by analogy, yarisā is a sā of dare demo yareru, where sā is, of course, sākuru—circle in English—which in Japanese katakana means a “club” or “circle.” So put it together and a yarisā is a circle where anyone can get laid, or to spell it out plainly, a “hookup orgy club.” And while I was looking up yarisā, I found a couple of explanatory posts on Quora. That’s when I learned this word has way more going on under the hood than I thought. Quora: Some scandals involving Japanese university students Quora: Why do Japanese tennis clubs have such a bad reputation?

I’d had my eye on Sakuranomori†Dreamers (サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ) ever since before its release — the premise was dark as hell, the OP absolutely slapped, and going by the description it looked like it was going the horror route. Unfortunately the release got delayed, so I had to push it back on the list. I can’t say playing it felt bad, but it definitely wasn’t pleasant either — though half of that “not pleasant” is in the good direction. If I could get enjoyment out of a horror game, I’d probably be one step away from a jail cell… This game’s hard to rate. I lean positive, but I honestly can’t point to anything that absolutely backs that up. Maybe it’s just that I personally like this style of game, and it falls “just a hair short” in every direction…

I bought a 9-yuan VR headset.

I’ve always figured I don’t really go for that whole “character design” thing. Which is to say, whether a character is cute doesn’t hinge solely on her looks, or on the artist—building the actual person still takes a CV and a story with some meat on it. So I’m generally not the type to see a girl in a picture and start shouting “I’d bang that” like some kind of animal. And I’ve never really gotten the “moe-otaku” crowd, for the reasons above—whether a girl in a game is cute isn’t just about appearance; it’s her experiences, her way of talking, all of it added up that makes her feel like a real flesh-and-blood girl. It’s a shallow world, but looks alone won’t cut it… That’s what I thought.

Every month there’s a visual novel that gets pushed hard. Neko-Nin exHeart (ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート) a while back, last month’s Wagamama High Spec—that whole “buy the sales numbers with money” school of release. Except Noratoto was actually good, and Wagamama rode a full-court marketing blitz to outsell ISLAND and Chaos;Child last month. So apparently in the visual novel market, if you’re willing to push, you can still move a respectable number of copies. This month’s most-promoted title is probably Seiken Tsukai no Meidai (聖鍵遣いの命題). I kept seeing news and updates about it in Dengeki Hime every time I turned around, but oddly enough, very few Japanese readers had anything nice to say after the demo dropped… I got curious and looked at the setting, and it’s kind of RPG-ish, but it doesn’t really reek of landmine either. The OP is genuinely great—there’s even proper animation—so clearly they spent real money on this thing. By all logic, a game made with real money shouldn’t get torn apart too badly unless the story pulls some spectacular self-destruct maneuver. So I decided to trust in the quality and went and played it.

A while back I was reading some anecdotes on a blog by someone claiming to be an eroge industry insider, and I came across this line: つまりシナリオとは発売後に作品を支える要素であり、昔から初動の売り上げにおいてはイラストの方が重要であった。 (A game’s opening sales mostly come down to the character designs and art style; the scenario is just one element that keeps a game going after release.) And then an even better one: だから打ち合わせでは「キャラとイチャイチャしていれば話の中身なんてなくていい」と本当に言われるし、「○○先生に原画を担当してもらえる時点で売り上げは確保できているから、シナリオなんてクソにならない限りどうでもいい」とさえ言われてしまったりする。 (So at planning meetings people really do say things like “as long as the characters are flirting with each other, it doesn’t matter if the story has any substance,” and even “the moment you’ve got Sensei XX doing the original art, sales are guaranteed, so the scenario can be whatever as long as it doesn’t turn to shit.”) Of course, none of that beats this one: ゲームの傾向も変わってきていて、２００４年頃は「エロなんかいらねぇシナリオの質が重要」なんて一部で言われていたりもしたが、今企画会議でそんなことを言おうものなら袋叩きにされる。 理由は簡単で、シナリオを重視した作品よりもキャラクター性を重視した作品の方がグッズの売り上げがいいからである。 (The direction of games has shifted too. Around 2004 some people were saying “who needs the ero, what matters is the quality of the scenario,” but if you said that in a planning meeting today you’d get the shit beaten out of you. The reason is simple: character-driven works sell more merch than scenario-driven ones.) Man… what can you say? That’s just how it is, I guess?