Hey! Friend, have you had COVID? Are you worried about long COVID? Are you scared of getting quarantined? By now it’s been confirmed over and over that COVID is a “self-limiting disease” — which basically means there’s no silver bullet against the virus, and all you can do is boost your immune system and tough it out. But nobody ever tells you how to boost your immune system, or what counts as a way to significantly boost it. But one eroge recently gave a clear answer.

Years ago, when I first started playing eroge, I had plenty of reasons for it. I was sick of light novels, anime, and manga dragging their “serials” on for years without end, and sick of their bloated, convoluted stories. So I went with galge. One of the reasons that satisfied me most back then was this: “Visual novels are different from other ACG works — in a single game, you always get to see the story’s ending.” But times change, and that line has drifted further and further from reality. My view of visual novels has swung to the opposite end too — from weariness to outright hatred. Never mind that visual novels have all learned the light-novel “split-volume” sales model. What wears on me most is the “advance or regress” market development of the genre over the years. Visual novel players always call themselves “subculture enthusiasts” and take pride in their supposedly niche hobby. They’re always finding ways to recommend visual novels to others, or personally jumping into making them, or introducing their favorites in ACG discussion forums. Most of these so-called “enthusiasts” will admit it’s a niche market, in a gray zone, not something you can show in broad daylight — but they keep praying that one day the market will evolve and become accepted by more people. And as a niche game category, visual novels have far too many flaws that most people clearly reject, yet the so-called enthusiasts ignore and tolerate them, year after year for over a decade. That’s what I never expected.

Lately I’ve been feeling empty, lonely, and a little cold, so I started spending money on stuff. Nothing fancy—just junk. A while back I bought a really good-looking mechanical keyboard, but for some reason I suddenly felt unsatisfied. It was too heavy. And then a question hit me: Why do I have to buy a mechanical keyboard? Isn’t a membrane one good enough? Somewhere along the way, mechanical keyboards became the so-called optimal solution for people who write for a living—even though membrane keyboards were invented to solve the problems mechanical keyboards had. So I turned my attention to “finding a cheap, easy-to-use membrane keyboard that feels good and is lightweight.” I can’t find the old BenQ Sea Shell anymore, and eventually the “A4Tech FBK11” caught my eye. The moment I saw “FBK” in the name, I ordered it before I’d even finished reading the description.

A while back, “Bro of Bros” Tony Daiki finally dropped a new album after six years, with a ridiculously flashy title: Greatest Works of Art. But when I actually listened to it, something felt off: “It’s just a pretty ordinary album—honestly, a lot of it feels outdated, it’s lost that forward-looking edge it used to have. How can you call this ’the greatest works of art’ with a straight face?” Then the MV came out, I watched it, and it hit me. Oh. So “Greatest Works of Art” isn’t the whole album—it’s just the lead single. And the song isn’t saying it’s great; it’s just name-dropping and mashing up all the “greatest works” from art history. So the album is called Greatest Works of Art because that’s the lead single. And the lead single is called “Greatest Works of Art” because its content pays tribute to those “greatest works”—not because the song itself is great. Once you get that, the title actually makes sense. No real problem, just a bit of deliberate clickbait. To me, Jay Chou’s new album feels more like a Frankenstein—stitching together everything he thinks is “the sickest” or “the greatest,” and that’s it. This kind of tribute-and-stitch approach to “great works” happens in plenty of fields, and in the almost-ignored world of eroge, it’s practically the norm. Take Neko to Joshiryou seyo! (ネコと女子寮せよ!), the game I’m talking about here.

I actually downloaded this game a long time ago, and I honestly don’t remember why. I just saw someone upload it on Nyan. I had no idea who made it, where it came from, or when it released. Then I downloaded it and, like most of the visual novels gathering dust on my hard drive, never touched it again. Not out of burnout—just a total lack of interest. I’d say I’ve played quite a few so-called “Chinese text adventure” games, and most of them left me disappointed. It’s like China’s music industry: full of copycats with nothing of their own. What made me finally play this one was when the game’s producer posted a “blind date / fishing expedition” on the “Save the Older Otaku” account. He pulled off a piece of performance art in the most absurd way possible, and I instantly thought: this guy’s got ideas. Fine, he’s legit! So I decided to give his game a shot.

I’m not really sure why I bought this keyboard. Probably because it looks good. I kept seeing it pop up in videos and it just looked so nice. Add in the durable PBT keycaps, the low-profile feel that’s completely different from the Keychron K3 series, and the 618 discount, and I couldn’t resist anymore—ended up buying it with interest-free installments. After less than half a day with it, I already felt this keyboard was way better than the Keychron K3 I’d been using. The feel, the overall build quality, and most importantly the connection stability—all much better. NuPhy keyboards also support firmware updates. The latest firmware on the official site claims to fix compatibility issues with Linux, but weirdly, mine worked fine with Linux even without updating. Maybe mine already shipped with the new version.

Honestly I don’t even remember when I played this one. I’ve been way too busy and tired lately — I’ve played a ton of stuff but haven’t had time to write anything up, so I’m just piecing it back together while sorting through screenshots. As I recall, this is one of those “sold in volumes” little nukige. Most of you are probably already familiar with the racket. The first volume, Ichizu na (Shojo→) Kanojo to Koi shitai, came out last year and I thought it was fine. Apart from me griping pretty hard about how blatantly it panders to otaku, there wasn’t much wrong with it. Its biggest strength was the absolutely gorgeous CG and the stunning, heart-fluttering heroine art — solidly middle-of-the-road as far as visual novels go. A year and change later, the series put out a second volume, and they couldn’t even be bothered to change the name: 《一途な（処女→）彼女と恋したい ver.広橋るな》 Also, I have no idea if putting the “ver” up front like that is even correct. If you’ve decided “ver” is the prefix for the different volumes, then you didn’t add it to the first one either. Setting aside the inconsistent naming, how does a simple little romance thing like this take you a whole year to develop? So I was getting ready to give this a quick look, and it turned out to be nothing like what I expected.

In Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue, the character Misaki Tobisawa gets called “Best Girl” by a whole lot of Western players. Sure, everyone knows Best is a superlative, but Western otaku are all DDs — every girl they see is Best Girl. You can just read Best Girl as waifu. Put it this way: in the Western otaku aesthetic, they lean toward girls like Misaki Tobisawa — relatively real, emotionally driven, a little fragile, and if she’s got a bit of pride buried in there too, even better. Everyone knows Sprite, the developer of Aokana, has been dead for years. Back in the day they voluntarily walked away from the Galgame market, ditched the sequel they’d been planning, and citing “the shrinking industry market” went off to do mobile and browser games. Turns out mobile didn’t work either, so they slunk back to making Galgame… merch. Yeah, after Sprite came back from the dead they didn’t exactly rush to make games again — they started selling merch, just like they were doing right before they went under. Maybe merch really does pay, because Sprite was having a grand old time with it. Right when players couldn’t take it anymore, Sprite finally announced their new title… Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue Extra 2. So after all that buildup, they made a fandisc. Of course it came bundled with plenty of merch — this shitty company clearly has selling merch down to a routine. The game came out a while back, it’s not a short read, so let’s just talk about how it is.

The Hokenshitsu no Sensei to… series has put out three games so far. The first one came out over a year ago: Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Shabondama Chuudoku no Joshu. The second was last month: Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Goth Loli no Koui. And not even a month later, here’s the third, Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Koakuma na Kaichou. As the title says, this one’s heroine is the student council president, Tsukimori Rin. Rin’s setup was already laid out pretty clearly in the first two games. Her bloodline is weird — she’s the mixed-race child of a “soul person” and a human, with a soul person’s powers and a human’s body. That’s her biggest advantage, and also where most of her grief comes from.

After the middling reception to last year’s title, Saga Planets once again tapped Sakaki Kasa (さかき傘) to write the main scenario, hoping he could rescue the new game’s reputation. The game is called Ambitious Mission (アンビシャスミッション), and it’s set in Sapporo, Hokkaido (though the game deliberately renames the place). The protagonist grew up in an orphanage, and one day he stumbles onto the fact that the school’s untouchable beauty, Arise Kaguya, is secretly moonlighting as a righteous phantom thief. With her identity blown, Arise Kaguya also notices the protagonist is no slouch himself—fast runner, high jumper—so she strong-arms and sweet-talks him into joining her crew, training him up as a fellow thief to lighten her own workload. Meanwhile, one of Sapporo’s oldest families, the Ishikawa, have also caught wind of the phantom thief running around pulling jobs across the city. The Ishikawa family tradition is to protect the city’s safety in a manner not unlike the ninja, so they send out the family’s sixteenth-generation successor, Ishikawa Yae, to apprehend the thief. In the end the protagonist still gets caught during one of his operations, nabbed by Ishikawa Yae—but she’s shocked to find that the so-called phantom thief is actually the guy living next door to her. Then comes another round of the carrot-and-stick routine, and Ishikawa Yae gets pulled into the phantom thief crew too. There’s also a gyaru makeup artist on the team, Hongou Nijimu, plus some servants from the Arise Kaguya household, and together they make up the crew. Once the “phantom thief crew” is complete, the game starts explaining why the team was formed in the first place. Turns out there’s a legend passed down in Sapporo about something the Ainu left behind: an Ainu dial called “Ambitious” that archaeologists dug up, with 12 slots on it. Collect the matching 12 gemstones and set them in, and you can summon the legendary “god of medicine” — a cure for any illness. Aruse Kaguya’s older sister, Athena, was originally supposed to be the family heir, but a car accident when she was little left her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, so Kaguya ended up next in line as the family’s successor — though she’s been carrying the guilt ever since. Back then, there was a phantom thief in Sapporo called Fantom who pulled off exactly that kind of heist — and vanished after the job was done. So Arise Kaguya decided to follow in Fantom’s footsteps: steal the gems, and cure her sister’s illness.