Thinking back, Sakura no Uta (サクラノ詩) was eight years ago now. I rated it pretty highly at the time, and it resonated with me on a personal level given some of my own experiences. It genuinely taught me a lot too, especially about the relationship between “mathematics” and “art” — the correspondence between the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence had me half-convinced that a “Creator” and “God” might actually exist, and made me instantly understand why so many scientists end up turning to mysticism. Because there’s just too much in this world that’s strange, mysterious, and completely unexplained. All that to say, I got a lot out of Sakura no Uta, and even purely as narrative it’s plenty gripping — honestly it’s that gripping story that kept me reading, and along the way I picked up all sorts of interesting trivia. I figured the story was over, since the ending really didn’t leave any obvious room for a sequel. Then I heard about Sakura no Toki (サクラノ刻). There’s a sequel? What would it even be about? I genuinely had no idea. The female students who barely registered in the original main plot? Or forcing a route onto Ms. Ai, who was already perfectly complete as she was? The protagonist’s relationship with her was lovely precisely because it wasn’t family but might as well have been — were they really going to shoehorn a romance in just so she’d be “routeable”? No way, right? There’s no need to be that tacky… doing that would drag down the whole game’s prestige and even wreck the protagonist’s character. I already thought him getting with Misono Rin was a stretch — that was already a concession to “R18 game sales” — no need to go that far, surely? And then with the release of Totono no Sora Remake (终の空 Remake), I became even more confident about Sakura no Toki. I figured it absolutely wouldn’t be some unnecessary sequel milking the name, nor a rushed product made just to pander to players by forcing a route onto some character. Well, Sakura no Toki came out anyway, and you can probably guess the rest. I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.

Honestly, when I heard ハッピーライヴショウアップ！ was getting a sequel, I was both surprised and not surprised at all. Surprised because the original story was already complete enough that there was basically no room for a sequel. The protagonist marries Sofia and they even have a kid. What’s left to say? Were they going to have him go back to school as a teacher, hang around a bunch of female students, and fall in love with the daughter of one of the previous heroines? That’s a nasty setup. And the not-surprised part is obvious: Miyabi, who had a decent amount of screen time in the original, was never a romanceable heroine. Her presence was too captivating, her charm impossible to resist — half the time she was stealing the show. I’m a diehard Natsuwa Komachi fan, but I think she already had enough screen time in this game. There was absolutely no need to force a “romanceable route” just to satisfy some straight-guy OCD, especially when it makes the whole story feel inconsistent. But it’s not my call. F-chan needs to make money, so ハッピーライヴ ショウアップ アンコール！！, a new release with a brand-new Miyabi-exclusive route, hit the shelves anyway.

Anyone familiar with my past blog posts knows I’m not exactly a Yuzusoft hater, but I’m definitely not a fanboy either. I’ve always kept a measuredly critical stance toward Yuzusoft’s (ゆずソフト) past works. With Sora-iro I called them moege; with Witch I said they needed to get serious; with Senren * Banka I said they were too formulaic; by Riddle Joker and that all-ages title whose name I can’t even remember I was already mocking them as washed up; and by Shinigami no Butterfly I was flat-out saying they’d crashed and burned. So yeah, my feelings on Yuzusoft are pretty negative across the board. Even if deep down I think they’re already better than their peers, they never quite hit that point I’m looking for, never triggered any real desire in me to praise them. Fast forward to 2023: Yuzusoft is still alive, still putting out a new game every 1–2 years. This one’s called Tenshi Souzou (天使騒々). Honestly, the name is terrible, gives off major Tenshi Ranman vibes. And after reading the game’s synopsis, I pretty much assumed this was Yuzusoft returning to their roots — by lying flat on their face.

A while back I was bored out of my mind, so on a whim I decided to play a roleplay game with ChatGPT. The kind where I have it play, you know… a little-sister type who keeps calling me “onii-chan,” hopelessly in love with me on the inside but acting all cold on the surface — a veteran tsundere, that push-and-pull, playing-hard-to-get kind of conversation. People online have already said you can chat about all sorts of lewd stuff with ChatGPT, as long as you feed it enough preconditions and declarations first. That’s obviously no obstacle for me, so I charged right in. Getting ChatGPT to accept the identity I gave it wasn’t hard, and soon we were deep in conversation. It’s just that the conversation felt… really weird.

I’m not from the Northeast, but I know plenty of Northeasterners. Back when World of Warcraft was huge, Zones 2 and 6 were the China Unicom servers, and they were basically northerners’ territory. And among northerners, Northeasterners made up a wildly high proportion of the player base. It was pretty much: join any random raid, hop on voice chat, and there’s a good chance the raid leader is speaking with a Northeastern accent. Combined with the old sitcom Northeast Family (东北一家人) being a hit, I’ve picked up the dialect by osmosis. The Northeastern dialect is a branch of Northern Mandarin, with a lot of Beijing influence in the pronunciation. Anyone who understands Standard Mandarin can follow it without much trouble, and it carries this weird mix of “comic” and “gangster” energy. A lot of people assume Northeastern guys are all hard cases, but honestly the Northeastern girls are worse. Fun fact: the only domestic violence shelter in all of China that protects men is in Shenyang, Northeast China. Meaning out there, the girls will chase the big Northeastern lads around and beat the crap out of them.

I started building websites back in middle school. I remember it clearly — the summer of eighth grade. I applied for a free forum and domain and threw together an extremely crude “class website.” I figured it was just for fun, but it somehow took off across the whole class, then the whole grade. It wasn’t just my own class. Kids from the neighboring classes signed up and started posting too, and all kinds of conversations got going. That chatter later moved to the school’s official forum, and after that to the class Discord group. I think I was the one who created and ran that Discord group, for the simple reason that I was one of the few users who had permission to create Discord groups at the time. So I made the group for the class, and I’m still listed as admin to this day, even though nobody’s said a word in it for years. Later I went to college and started making all kinds of websites and forums again, but honestly nothing ever took off the way it did, and I could never recapture that middle-school glory. In one of the forums I’d rebuilt God knows how many times, I once wrote this line: “Some dreams you only dream at eighteen, and some dreams you only understand once you’ve grown up…” There were a few more lines after that, I don’t remember them now — something with that whole “forcing yourself to feel sad for the sake of a poem” vibe. I didn’t really know what I was trying to say. I just thought it sounded cool, so I went with it. Sure enough, a classmate came along and criticized it right away, saying I’d taken the wrong medicine and that it was so pretentious it gave him goosebumps. I thought he had a point, so I made that line my Discord signature so he’d have to see it every day. Years later I thought of that line again, and I have to say, I now think it actually makes sense. Because there really are things you only do when you’re young, and dreams you only understand when you’re young at heart.

Taiwanese rapper MC HOTDOG shows up in a lot of movies too, but he’s a bit different — he only does “low-budget,” “rough around the edges,” the kind of thing you look at and think, yeah, this is gonna be a mess. He’s worked with the likes of Xiao Shenyang, Da Peng, Yue Yunpeng. Sometimes he even pops up in Taiwanese horror films by directors nobody’s heard of. The results are about what you’d expect: most of these movies got panned. Basically everything he’s been in is a stinker. A lot of people, me included, were puzzled. The guy is arguably the face of Chinese-language rap. Eminem made 8 Mile. Hotdog should at least have the ability and the resources to make something decent — even a vanity project shouldn’t turn out to be a “bad movie.” But in a later interview he brought this up himself, and his answer stuck with me. Hotdog explained that he doesn’t like so-called “big productions.” He prefers that “cheap” B-movie feel. And he laid out all the upsides of B-movies: because they’re niche, the subject matter can be sloppy but also way more unhinged; because they’re niche, the content can be bolder, more willing to shitpost, even touching sensitive territory that “big” films won’t go near; because they’re niche, the style gets more exaggerated — horror gets scarier, gore gets bloodier, comedy gets to cut loose. And because it’s a B-movie, niche audience, niche marketing, nobody’s really watching, so it’s just more free. There’s a decent-sized crowd of B-movie lovers out there going nuts over films that “don’t belong in polite society.” That idea hit me, and it reminded me of when I first got into visual novels. For a market that’s been called a sunset industry for years, the B-movie approach works just as well — in both subject matter and plot development, visual novels are freer, and a lot of the “masterpieces” were born inside that freedom. No wonder so many people find “healing” in themes of darkness, death, torture, even training. So finally some developer remembered the common ground between visual novels and B-movies. Like CUBE’s Same to Ikiru Nanokakan (サメと生きる七日間), “Seven Days Living with Sharks.”

When I first saw the announcement for this new Lump of Sugar title, Arcana Alchemia (アルカナ・アルケミア), I genuinely couldn’t hold back a laugh. What year is it, and they’re still making traditional “alchemy” stories? The moment you say “alchemy” it’s always “human transmutation” this and that — at least bring up how alchemy was a precursor to modern medicine, philosophy, and chemistry, would you? Then I read the premise. Oh boy, of course it’s “transmuting a living beast-eared girl.” No idea if that was on purpose or an accident. When the game came out at the end of December, I couldn’t shake the association — seeing “shark” reminds me of that Osaka black-veil otaku, which then reminds me of jerking off, and that’s just uncomfortable. So I got around to this one first. And it turned out to be surprisingly decent. Honestly I’d even say Arcana Alchemia is the best thing Lump of Sugar has put out recently, good enough to squeeze into my year-end ranking.

Honestly, when I first played Hamedashi Creative, I was completely baffled. First off, the story made no sense. The game is packed with “instantly fake” elements: a little sister who’s deep into 2D culture, a brocon, and loaded enough to support her worthless older brother; a 2D artist who loves drawing lewd art, enjoys hanging out with fat otaku without being gross like them, and is willing to date one; a cold, sharp-tongued, self-absorbed black-haired beauty who flip-flops between tsundere and queen just to throw herself at a fat otaku; and a Vtuber who looks totally ordinary—the kind who’d graduate in a month in the V-tuber world—yet somehow becomes a top earner without relying on insults or dirty jokes, and still falls for the otaku… In this game’s world, it’s as if every woman sees the protagonist and wants to sleep with him. Their insults are just tsundere, their rejections are just playing hard to get, their “NO” actually means “YES,” they say one thing but mean another, and deep down they’re always craving to be conquered by him… Unless you tell me the setting is that only one man is left in the world and women can only survive by mating, I still can’t buy into this story.

One of the hottest topics lately is AI. ChatGPT blowing up again at the start of this year left the masses stunned—“it’s already this powerful?"—and also a little scared. “If computers keep getting this strong, it’s only a matter of time before they replace us, right?” Along with that fear comes every sci-fi plot about machines ruling humanity, as if in a few years we’ll all be jacking cables into the backs of our heads and entering a metaverse called the matrix, while our bodies form a resistance underground against the mighty robots. The crisis always arrives fast and sudden. But is that really how it goes?