One big reason I play visual novels is that I want to see all kinds of stories. Light novels and anime rarely give you a strict narrative—mostly they hand you a premise and an opening, then it’s expand, expand, expand. You’re just getting into it and suddenly you’ve caught up with the latest release, so you’re stuck waiting week by week while the author drags it out until the heat death of the universe. By the time you finally get an ending, it’s either an open-ended nothingburger or a total trainwreck that leaves a bad taste. I went through that with two manga and decided never again. Most visual novels at least have a clear main storyline. Even if the first half is all tea parties and slice-of-life, there’s a necessary main arc and climax that drives the ending. That’s why a lot of moe-focused games I’ve played eventually throw in some plot development—no matter how well it’s written, at least they make a token effort, tell you the story is over, and give you a Happy Ending. Well… Yukikoi Melt (ゆきこいめると) is a complete outlier. The whole game has basically no obvious main plot—it’s a pure slice-of-life work, so slice-of-life that there’s nothing but slice-of-life. How pure are we talking? Have you seen GJ-bu? Have you seen Non Non Biyori? Have you seen Yuru Yuri? Beyond a premise and a setting, do any of them have a main storyline? No, right!? That’s exactly the style of Yukikoi Melt. If I had to describe it, I’d call it “four-panel manga” style.

11eyes: Resona Forma is the fan disc for 11eyes. I actually played it a long time ago, but only went through Kuraki Misuzu’s and Tachibana Kikuri’s routes — at the time the patch was incomplete and I couldn’t read Japanese, so the rest was a wash. Picked it back up recently and found that more of it has been translated, plus I’ve got enough Japanese reading ability now to sort of fumble my way through. So here we are. I’m genuinely attached to 11eyes. It was my first visual novel with gory blood-spraying and dimension-hopping magic battles — before that everything I played was pure romance, mostly straight-up moe stuff. And I really do think 11eyes has a lot of unique ideas in its setup and structure, the fight descriptions especially, the sheer variety of magic writing — sword styles, sorcery, the later scientific magic, hand-to-hand combat. It covers basically all of it and never really fumbles any of it. The most interesting thing to me now is the Void Boundary chapter bundled with the Xbox version and its take on modern magic: magic chant code stored on a server, magicians connecting via phone and remotely loading curses to cast, with magical duels including big-data attribute analysis and network-layer attack and counterattack. Even now I haven’t seen a battle written with that kind of idea again. “For friends and tomorrow” is 11eyes’ theme. For friends and tomorrow — maybe because 11eyes was popular enough that a fan disc was inevitable. The fan disc is called Resona Forma, which is Latin, or should be Resonating Form — you can read it as “resonant form” or “resonance mode,” hinting at the various resonances between the Eye of Aeon and its bearers, and also signaling that the game is an IF, Before, After structure presenting all sorts of possibilities.

Clover Heart’s is an old 2003 game. As one of Alcot’s early works, it got a commemorative sequel ten years later in Clover Days. Looking at it now, Clover Heart’s has a surprising number of strong points for a 2003 visual novel — some of it even ahead of its time.

Playing games, the most important thing is to have fun. You can’t force every new game to be a masterpiece. Finishing a game and feeling like you ate shit—that’s the dev team flexing, and nobody wants that to happen. So hey, I’ve got a title here that’s guaranteed to put you in a good mood when you’re done. Wanna take a look? Puramai Wars (プラマイウォーズ) is the new game from Asa Project. The studio’s trademark—I mentioned it over here—is messing around plus face gags. It looks chaotic on the surface, but it gives you this happy vibe. I figure plenty of you have played Renai 0 Kilometer and know the deal: surface-level chaos, but the story has a bit of substance, and amid all the noise you can still feel each girl’s full feminine charm. So the dev team probably figured that formula was popular and went full copy-paste, putting out a brand-new game with basically the same setup: this one, Puramai Wars. As for what the name means, I have no idea. “Puramai” should be Japanese, “wars” is war, and the main premise is a showdown between two families sharing a house. One side is the protagonist’s “good behavior” family; the other is the “bad behavior” family. The official site’s description is literally “the story begins with a war between the well-behaved family and the ill-behaved family.” I need to clarify something here: this so-called “war” basically doesn’t exist in the game… It’s mostly pretty harmonious. If we’re grading this like a school essay, it’s off-topic.

Liking niche stuff makes you feel superior. Same goes for visual novels. That’s why I’ve always figured that compared to the tight, length-constrained assembly line of TV anime, visual novels have way more freedom when it comes to storytelling, and they just do it better. Plus, original anime is pretty rare—most adaptations come from light novels, manga, or visual novels. So at least in terms of originality, VNs should have a slight edge over TV anime… But there’s always an exception… I never thought a visual novel would actually choose to go the light novel route… And a knockoff light novel route at that…

The keyboard critics on Quora once debated a question: Is a galgame literature? The question is itself a problem. Asking whether a game is literature is like asking whether “humans” are “perverts.” Sure, there are humans who can’t get through a day without licking something, and there are also normal people like me who have zero interest in that stuff. A galgame is still a game. Games have plots, and most non-nukige galgames lean heavily on theirs. There may be some “literary” elements in there, but on the strength of those elements alone you can’t begin to put it on the same level as literature. So as a game genre that carries “literary elements,” plenty of galgames try to break new ground in their plots. These days, if you don’t have foreshadowing and a shocking twist, people will call you boring. Which has led many to believe that only “suffering,” “dying,” “flying off the rails” and the like deserve to be called a god-tier scenario, while anything focused on the everyday gets sneered at. On this point I’m fond of the 2007 Chinese college entrance exam essay prompt: unexpected, yet inevitable. What it means is that no matter how your plot unfolds, no matter how high it flies or how wild the ideas get, as long as you can justify it and give people that “unexpected yet inevitable” feeling, your story is a success. Even slice-of-life, if written vividly and every character’s personality also lands as “unexpected yet inevitable,” is a success too. At the very least the story keeps you in suspense, is easy to follow, and doesn’t feel too far-fetched. Put more bluntly: write it however you want, but at minimum it has to be logical. That’s the baseline. Without logic, the whole story looks nonsensical — exactly like Haru nochi Kitto Nanohana Biyori (晴のちきっと菜の花びより).

The reason I paid attention to Hana no Aruji (花の野に咲くうたかたの) is first, because of the scenario writer Kirizuki, and second, because of the coloring style. 桐月 wrote Tasogare no Sinsemilla (黄昏のシンセミア — the forbidden medicine at dusk, or dusk’s weed, call it whatever you like), and the game’s coloring style reminds me of [Clover Day’s] 1. Same artist as dusk’s weed, sure, but the coloring is way better than the old work — the girls are cuter and fresher. Honestly, I didn’t even want to play this one at first. I never played Tasogare no Sinsemilla either—people just hype it up to the heavens, and I figured a writer who’d produced at least one readable work couldn’t be all that bad. Then I took one look at the art style, fell in love with it, and played the thing. If I had to sum up this game in one sentence, it’s like a cup of gongfu tea carefully brewed by a soft-spoken girl — mild in flavor, nothing like the instant jolt of coffee or hard liquor, but it won’t leave you feeling bad, and if you sip it slowly you’ll find something uniquely its own.

The Fruit of Grisaia has sequels — two of them, actually. One is The Labyrinth of Grisaia, and the other is the finale, The Eden of Grisaia. The Fruit of Grisaia already got a TV anime adaptation, and since the Labyrinth and Eden anime are both airing on the 12th of this month, skip this if you’re worried about spoilers.

11月のアルカディア was one of March’s new releases. I’d figured there was nothing worth playing that month, then I saw the OP — looked like a mystery/plot-driven thing — so I tried the demo. And surprise, the protagonist actually has a CV. No idea who it is, but he sounds a bit like Yuuichi Nakamura. Going on the principle that “if an eroge bothers to voice its male lead, the story probably isn’t a total trainwreck,” I dove in without hesitation. And sure enough, it didn’t let me down. This is the first thing since Paper no Ue no Mahoutsukai that I can praise without a single reservation.

I haven’t played that many Yuzu (Yuzusoft) games. Counting on my fingers, just Tenshin Ranman and Natsuzora Kanata. Most of the others I’ve only glanced at — “oh, a Yuzusoft one, I remember that face” — and then never got around to them. Still, I owe Yuzusoft some thanks: Tenshin Ranman was the first 18+ game I ever touched. Sure, I played the PSP version, but up to then everything I’d played was Ever17, MO2, MO4 and other genuine all-ages stuff. Thinking back to the first time I imagined Chitose Sana’s H scene still gets me a little excited… Ahem, that’s a bit off track. Actually I do have some feelings for Yuzusoft games, I just rarely play them. Mostly because I kept hearing people shit on them — that Yuzusoft games are pure moege, and trending toward nukige. And honestly, judging by the premises, that’s true. Whether it was the later vampire one or Sensei of the Sky Colors, the utilitarian angle got more and more blatant. Then at the end of 2014, a new title called サノバウィッチ just popped out of nowhere, and I didn’t read any of the intro — I just saw the word “heat.” Then I looked at the plot summary… oh boy… have they completely thrown away all decency? The heroine goes into heat on a schedule, the protagonist secretly sees it, and the story builds from there… what else could it be but fucking? A victory for the utilitarian crowd, a sob for the story crowd. For me, one glance at the premise and I’d already lost interest. I can stage a little fantasy in my head anytime about fucking a girl, and each one would be better than this. Is there any need to play the game specifically for that? But then I played the trial version and found it was nothing like that. The heat thing is just a gimmick; the story itself is actually decent… of course, I mean the trial version’s story. So after finishing the full game I figure I should seriously talk about a few things in this game.