Today I’m going to talk about a game… First, the story takes place in Japan proper… Then, the protagonist is a black guy… Next, he’s also a samurai… And he’s an orphan, taken in by a leader and serving that leader… Yes, the game I’m talking about is… CRYSTALiA’s new cash-grab: Setsuna ni Kakeru Koi wa Hanabi!

Kamigami no Kuni no Mahoutsukai (神の国の魔法使い) Another China-Japan co-produced visual novel, another Nekoneko Soft, another Kataoka Tomo. Nothing about its existence surprised me. Honestly, I half-wondered if Kataoka Tomo and his company had run out of ways to survive in Japan and now had to lean on Chinese money to keep making games. The premise didn’t grab me at all — a Chinese brother and sister go sightseeing in Japan, get swept up in some incident or other. At one point I was convinced this was basically Toshimaen Winter Scenery Mark II. And the weirdest part: the first release wasn’t even the full game. The story got pushed out in episodes. I still can’t understand that decision, and I think it’s one of the reasons the game flopped. Anyway, after half a year of stop-and-start updates the story was finally complete, and reading it straight through, it’s not as low as I expected. Plenty of it is actually pretty creative, and it overturned my fixed impression of Kataoka Tomo as a scenario writer who likes to whine for no reason.

A while back, while I was working on a commercial piece, the editor hit me with a request: could I write something about Amairo Chocolata 3 (あまいろショコラータ 3)? As a former internet editor who got canned over a decade ago, writing this kind of article is no problem. The problem is: why? Why write about this game? Amairo Chocolata 3 is the kind of game where you can see the ending from the first glance, and its marketing was pretty mediocre too. I honestly don’t even get why Cabbage Soft (きゃべつそふと) would push this thing out to a third installment. And the other “why”: does anyone actually want to buy this game? So, to write a better commercial piece, I looked up the relevant data—and got a very unexpected result.

As most people probably expected, the staff behind Kanata no Ningyo Hime (彼方の人魚姫) is the same crew carried over from Yukiiro Sign and even further back, Aonatsu Line—same artist, same writer. So naturally this one inherits that same “youthful air.” Though “youthful air” isn’t quite the right phrase. Starting with Yukiiro Sign, this little lineage shifted from “youth” to “melodrama.” When I heard Kanata no Ningyo Hime was coming out, I had a bad feeling—I figured that melodrama would carry right on over. But this time the setting had moved from “school” to “fantasy,” so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Turns out I was wrong.

Dear readers, good afternoon, good morning, good evening — somehow it’s already April and I still haven’t posted my 2023 Galgame wrap-up. I originally wanted to finish writing up last year’s backlog of impressions before posting, but looking at my pace, I probably won’t finish. Whatever — the games I didn’t write about aren’t worth recommending anyway, so I’ll just post the annual summary. For the ones I played but didn’t write about, I’ll leave links here to hold the spot and update them slowly in the future. I went through last year’s screenshots and found that in 2023 I played, all told, only 19 games related to “dating simulation.” I even fully cleared a 2024 game and wrote a commercial article for it, and I still couldn’t be bothered to write a blog post…… You can find the list of commercial articles here. There are many reasons for this. On one hand, I’m busy with life and need to take care of kids, so I have less time; on the other hand, in 2023 I’d basically switched over to playing all kinds of console games, and my Steam playtime has been rising day by day. These increasingly dumb Galgames I look down on more and more, and I can’t bring myself to play them anymore; and another reason is that the Galgame market in 2023 was just this sluggish. In some months mid-year, you couldn’t even find a so-called “proper release” released that month — nukige and nothing but nukige. Even the “proper releases” were half re-releases, half garbage…… So this isn’t my fault. The responsibility lies entirely with Japan. The games are made so assembly-line and so abstract — how the hell am I supposed to keep playing? So let’s just get to the games I recommend this year. I’ll probably struggle to even scrape together 10……

Your Desperate Attempt to Be Praised Really Makes It Hard for Me to Praise You Years ago, when ANIPLEX.EXE entered the Galgame market as a Sony brand, a bunch of people were shouting “the big one is coming.” I sourly wrote a piece for Dimensional Fanaticism, roughly arguing that Sony was just dabbling and never had much expectation for this market anyway—that the day ANIPLEX.EXE stops putting out products purely through outsourced white-labeling and actually becomes a so-called “first-party developer” is when “the big one” truly arrives. And you’ve seen the results. “The big one” never came, and ANIPLEX.EXE went nearly two years in obscurity, until this year it started rolling out new titles again—still “outsourced” and “white-labeled,” except this time the label says “Looseboy.” The most famous title under ANIPLEX.EXE is of course ATRI (ATRI -My Dear Moments-). The game is a thoroughly formulaic Japanese sci-fi-future work—which doesn’t mean it’s bad. Clichéd stories can still land well, just like how we keep getting moved by formulaic hot-blooded action. Maybe to replicate ATRI’s success, the original team regrouped outside ANIPLEX.EXE and put out GINKA (GINKA). The art style, the scenario writer, the studio, even the title all scream “tribute to the predecessor.” So does GINKA deliver the same feeling as ATRI? Objectively speaking, yes—it even delivers far more content than ATRI. But is “more” good? That I’ve always doubted, and it’s exactly what I find most baffling and worth criticizing about this game.

When I heard Asa Project’s new game Koibana Renai (コイバナ恋愛) had been slapped with the “landmine” label, I was genuinely shocked. Sure, I think their games have been on a downward slope compared to those old meme-face classics, but there’s no way it deserves “landmine” status. Asa Project has always made these “politically incorrect” games where the whole point is unhinged nonsense. You can force a guy into a girl’s body, you can stumble into BL endings without trying. Their audience is mostly shitposters who know exactly what to expect and have the mental fortitude for it. No way they’d get got by Asa Project’s antics and slap a “landmine” label on it. Besides, from what I remember, their 2023 release Koibana Renai was billed more as a “youth ensemble drama” — basically boys and girls bumping into each other, and the title spells it out. コイバナ means “love talk,” so Koibana Renai feels like a big pile of lovesick brains. Tell me how that premise could possibly be a landmine. Unless the protagonist joins a youth-themed swinger club or something. So out of curiosity I checked the game out. My first impression: yeah, it’s not good. I also get why people call it a landmine. But the reason it’s bad isn’t the landmine — it’s something else entirely.

The past few years have brought a wave of “retro.” People start missing the “old” stuff, and more and more content with a “retro” flavor gets dug out of the historical junk pile and put back into production. Keyboards with last-century styling, computers, handhelds, all sorts of odds and ends. FiiO recently put out a “cassette player,” not cheap, and chunky as hell. And yet people were falling over themselves to buy it. Even with the “retro” tax that steep, there’s still a market—at least enough of one to keep the manufacturers churning out reshelled products alive and well. Which gets me thinking about another industry soaked in the same “retro” smell: the beautiful-girl dating simulation game, commonly known as galgame. Anyone with a bit of history knows the earliest galgames weren’t like today’s mainstream products. The universally acknowledged granddaddy is the Tokimeki Memorial series—I remember it also being called Jun’ai Techou, though back in the day I kept reading the pirated disc as Jun’ai Techou… anyway, not important. What matters is that Tokimeki Memorial was a deadly serious game about “simulation,” “romance,” and “raising.”

There’s a classic meme about Intel releasing the 11th-gen i7-11700K, which benchmarks showed was not only worse than cheaper competitors but even worse than the previous generation—a pure reverse toothpaste squeeze. Gamers Nexus famously called it a “waste of sand.” After playing Lump of Sugar’s so-called “new” 2023 release, I had a similar thought, and it led to the question in the title: If selling a CPU with reverse toothpaste squeeze is a waste of sand, what does developing a completely pointless galgame count as?

I vaguely remember it — a night about eleven years ago, back when I was still a pure, innocent little 2D virgin. I’d followed the Mashiroiro Symphony anime all the way to the end, and like most of the fat otaku who watched it back then, the redhead’s crying at the end was where it all began. And at the end of the anime, they told you a PSP version with an added route for the redhead was coming out. I had a PSP at the time, but my Japanese wasn’t good enough, so I did what everyone else does — waited for a fan translation. That wait turned into two years.