I keep asking myself one question: when is Lashi-sha gonna croak. Then last time they shoved out some half-assed cobbled-together nukige, and instead of dying they went and opened a new label. Lass Pixy, dedicated to putting out Lashi-sha’s pure-love stuff. Like this new one, Pure Marriage Akai Ito Monogatari, all about pure love and brides. Completely different from that ninja training thing they did before. Then I looked closer. The game has three heroines, and the first release is titled “Pure Marriage ~Akai Ito Monogatari Madoka-hen.” They’re selling it split by heroine? Price is cheap at least, a bit over 1,400 yen. Cheaper than some singles. What does that remind me of? Isn’t there some X no Seiiki? Probably eroge just don’t sell anymore, and eroge companies are having a rough time of it, so everyone’s trying the low-budget, sell-in-pieces approach. Not just Feng—Frontwing is doing the Neko-para thing on Steam, and there’s light’s Four Seasons lie series. But do the math on Lashi-sha’s plan: three heroines, and the whole game still ends up cheaper than the usual 9,000 yen for an eroge. I know Lashi-sha is dying and flailing. At that price, can you even break even? Make any money? So out of curiosity I played it. And after playing it, I understood. I can tell you responsibly: this piece of crap from Lashi-sha really would recoup its costs with more sales. It’s cheap as hell to make.

There was this weird new show in the April anime lineup called Wagamama High Spec. The Chinese title got rendered as something like “Wagamama High-Spec” — the thing has almost no content, runs incredibly short, and makes absolutely no sense to watch. Turns out it’s an eroge adaptation, and the game hadn’t even come out yet when the anime started airing, so it’s basically a promo ad for the game. Whether it’s a short-form anime or not doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, what this thing is worth comes down to the game. A while back I saw someone saying DOOM was going for a retro route. I don’t buy that. DOOM just went back to the essence of games — that’s not retro, that’s what games should be in the first place. Speaking of retro, I’d say Wagamama High Spec is closer to a kind of retro — a retro of eroge.

Picked up another Chromebook recently, off Taobao. Probably some factory leak or whatever. An Asus Chromebook Flip, the ARM CPU version. The upside is obvious: IPS screen, 1280x800, convertible, touch, long battery life. The last Chromebook I bought got sold off. Reason being I never actually used Chrome OS — I wiped it and installed Ubuntu the moment it arrived. It felt exactly like a ThinkPad, and a worse ThinkPad at that, so what was even the point. This time I decided to actually give Chrome OS a fair shake. Problem is, I’m in mainland China. For certain reasons this thing is obviously not going to be as smooth as in the US, there’ll be plenty of hurdles — though that was the story around 2014. How is it now? Answer: not bad.

When Onii-chan, Kiss no Junbi wa Mada Desu ka came out, I looked at it and thought, holy shit, this looks familiar. First off, the title. It’s the exact same sentence pattern as Onii-chan, Migite no Shiyou o Kinshi Shimasu. I looked it up — same planner, one of the same artists, and a good chunk of the same voice cast. Only the company is different. I remembered Galette’s siscon series… no, wait, its family series. The next entry was supposed to be Onii-chan Teacher, and this Onii-chan, Kiss no Junbi wa Mada Desu ka thing is by Tinkle Position. Yeah, that company name, read out in katakana, is uncomfortably close to “chinbo.” Their mascot is literally a yellow dick with a smiley face. The promo and the premise gave me wall-to-wall déjà vu, and the gimmick is basically the same head-pat setup from Onii-chan Teacher, except now it’s kissing. So I played it out of curiosity. Not because of the premise or the content. Trust me. So how is it? All I can say is this game made me start reflecting on my life.

The reason ISLAND caught my attention is that everything else releasing around the same time was way too easy to read. I was going to say those other games were “boring,” but Wagamama wasn’t really that boring—it’s more that most titles, just from their intro blurbs, obviously aren’t going to pull anything unexpected. So ISLAND came charging out with tags like “all ages,” “story-driven,” “high-end foreshadowing payoff,” and announced an anime adaptation not long after reveal. For someone who loves plot developments, that should be unmissable. But after a long and frankly painful playthrough, I realized it wasn’t the kind of game I imagined at all. Not that it’s bad—if anything, the rigor of its plot is taken to some kind of extreme. It’s just not for me. Maybe the EVER17 / Steins;Gate time-loop crowd will eat this up. In other words, there aren’t many game types I hate, but one of them is exactly the kind of development ISLAND pulls. So no, this game didn’t give me even a little joy. Only pain.

First off, my coworkers and my friends and classmates basically have no idea that I spend my time like a total degenerate binging Japanese porn games. If they had to wrap their heads around it, they’d probably just think I watch anime and play Japanese RPGs. They don’t really know anything about Japanese adult games — I figure they imagine it’s all at the level of stuff like Tail Walk and Artificial Girl. Of course, there was one adult game title that recently became common knowledge… Purely x Cation. Thanks to Ali213, thanks to the diligent reposting by sites like Chunan Beta, the news that “a Japanese adult game maker will use industry-leading Denuvo anti-piracy tech” became known far and wide. I get that AKBsoft president Kei Misumi hates piracy, but this kind of penny-wise pound-foolish move is still something I can’t wrap my head around. Honestly, when Purely x Cation was first promoted and I watched the intro on YouTube, I thought it looked pretty good — the E-Mote effects in particular were spot-on, way above whatever Maitetsu is doing. But the president always rushes out to flex and beg for a slap in the face. Last time that game Office Worker’s Hookups… oh sorry, Romance Situation got cracked half a day after launch and got slapped, and I felt kinda bad for him. But this time he comes out provoking again, and I really don’t know what to say. Doesn’t he know the best move is to keep your head down and quietly make bank? Besides, I’d actually considered buying the legit version of this game, because Denuvo isn’t that easy to crack — if it really came out and I couldn’t play it, that’d be a shame. But then I looked at the game’s official site bonuses and I was just floored. Aside from one illustration, there’s basically nothing. I don’t know if the president spent all the money on the encryption. Given the universally known fact that “buying the game = buying the bonuses,” the president being this stingy, how could this game possibly sell? Even someone like me, raring to play it, lost all desire to buy… I figured if there’s no crack, then whatever, I’ll leave it for later. But reality is truly dramatic — the game got leaked and cracked two days after launch, and the cracker gleefully said the game didn’t use Denuvo encryption at all; the crack just bypassed the so-called online authentication. After all, this is an eroge with those engines everyone’s seen to death… Anyway, the president got slapped again. I don’t know what the president is thinking now, I just hope it doesn’t affect future games. Adding more bonuses is the real way. So back to Purely x Cation itself — how is it? I’d say it absolutely lives up to the promotional expectations: a romance-raising game that lets you experience the beauty of first love.

I was in a bad mood a while back and figured I’d play something that’d cheer me up, which is how I ended up seeing the OP of Shunki Gentei Poco a Poco! (春季限定ポコ・ア・ポコ!) on YouTube. Actually, that OP sounded way too fucking familiar, because it was on some Angel Note music collection CD I bought, and I’d listened to it plenty of times. I just didn’t know it was this game’s OP. The OP is really damn melancholic. You can tell the protagonist lost someone important and can’t climb out of that shadow. But then I looked up reviews and they were all, every single one of them, cheerfully insisting this is a happy fun-time game. Whatever. I happened to want some comedy anyway, and once I saw the little sister’s CV, I was in. So how was it, you ask… Is this game melancholic like its OP, or cheerful like the internet says? Both are correct, honestly.

I’m personally a huge fan of horror-mystery stuff. Honestly, that’s the genre that got me into reading in the first place. Why? Because horror-mystery always dangles a hook in front of you and pulls you along, feeding your curiosity about what happens next. Compared to other works where you have no idea where the plot or story is headed, that’s already way better. It completely saved me in middle school, when I’d just read a few modern novels and gotten my face utterly wrecked by all that fantasy nonsense with no discernible main storyline.

What does it actually mean to love someone? Everyone has their own take, but from start to finish, “love” and “sexual desire” are tangled together. Straight or gay, if looking at someone doesn’t get you hard, you probably don’t love them enough—unless something’s wrong with you. Plenty of philosophers have mulled over matters of the heart, and they’ve praised or sneered at love in roughly equal measure. Most took a free and open attitude toward it, which is how we ended up with a lot of books that are, frankly, a bit “lewd.” None of that is the point. What I’m getting at is that “love” ultimately needs “sex” to express itself—but what if there’s a massive wall in the way? Like, say, the taboo of blood relation? Some say, “If you love her, make her happy.” But if you’re a real brother and sister with no chance of a future together, does loving her mean you should hand her over to someone else? To a normal person, that’s insane. And “エロ本を捨ててから兄の様子がおかしい” is exactly that kind of insane game.

I’d been wanting a hybrid for ages, but kept going back and forth: K3003, or the DUNU DN2000J? Some people say just go K3003, no hesitation. But the K3003 is way too fucking expensive. Others say the DN2000J matches the K3003 on sheer technical chops, and only sells low because it’s made in China. W from the office, who loves trains and has actually heard the K3003, says it’s just okay — too bright, too floaty, too sharp, not a good buy. Especially once he learned I listen to everything. “Honestly, for your taste, an Audio-Technica IM03 plus a Sennheiser IE80 would be plenty. Don’t you already have the ER4P? Rotate those and you’ve got everything covered.” But I still wanted a hybrid, just to feel one out. At least something above the 100-yuan tier — under 100 yuan I’ve already got the Xiaomi hybrid. Thanks to a JD sale and 12 months of interest-free Bai條, the dream came true.