Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Shabondama Chuudoku no Joshu came out at the end of 2020. My reaction back then was mostly pity. You could tell at a glance that the thing was unfinished — a common route that dragged on forever, a pile of introduced characters, and then the actual story went to the main heroine and nobody else. Everyone else might as well have been set dressing. So I figured it was a half-baked cash-in shoved out the door with whatever scraps were lying around. Then 2022 rolls in and the game gets a sequel. Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Gothic Lolita no Koui. Right. That was when it clicked — this is another one of those sold-in-volumes deals, and the company was so broke that volume two got pushed back almost two years.

In the happy homeland of Black Shark Otaku, there is an unwritten custom: If a man cheats, his wife picks up a kitchen knife and chops off his dick. Don’t think I’m bullshitting you—go search for it, news like this is everywhere, and there’s a lot of it. Some guys get it chopped off and it can still be reattached; others are extra ruthless and just chop it off and toss it in the river. This simple, brutal method of treating scumbag cheaters has also earned the approval of female teachers, who have spoken on behalf of most women: scumbags deserve to be chopped. Maybe it’s a bit extreme, and maybe one day Black Shark Otaku will get sent to China, get caught not paying for a repair job, and get chopped too, but this method also expresses the common people’s disdain for “two-timing” behavior. No matter how you slice it, having a girlfriend and still going after someone else is really not a moral thing to do.

CUBE released a game called Kamisama no You na Kimi e back in 2020. It’s about a protagonist who’s a top-tier hacker and the AI robot he ends up with. That game had solid art and decent sales, but the story left a lot to be desired. The most ridiculous part is that the protagonist is supposedly a “hacker” yet has zero hacker instincts—he just lets an AI-powered internet-connected robot from a tech giant live with him, not caring at all about privacy. Also, a lot of the routes feel like they just cut off abruptly. The main heroine, Tsukuyomi, doesn’t get main-heroine treatment; the detective billed as “the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes” relies on a brain chip and turns into an idiot; and the female hacker avenging her brother just keeps raging impotently the whole time. The premise is good, but the whole game feels like it’s missing something. Later came news that the game was being ported to Switch and PS4, and it was even getting a new heroine. That caught me off guard. Sure, the whole “port it all-ages and add a new heroine” playbook has been around since roughly a decade ago, but lately it’s practically unthinkable. The industry’s already circling the drain, after all. CUBE going ahead and bucking the trend like this pretty much proves they’ve got real confidence in the supervisor’s art. I looked at the added character content too, and it didn’t seem like a big deal — probably just a story about some random side character. Later word got around that the port also changed some of the original story, which was honestly expected. The original has that “raping a mentally disabled girl” politically incorrect bit, so tweaking it makes sense. What I actually cared about was how to get my hands on this “all-ages version” with the new heroine added. I originally wanted to grab a Switch cartridge, then found out it goes for over 6000 yen and never drops in price. As a broke-ass, I stared at it for a while and gave up. But when I saw the new heroine was voiced by a CV who’s a regular in eroge, I had a feeling: someday I’ll definitely get to play this one for free. And wouldn’t you know it, the heavens rewarded my patience — just as I predicted, CUBE did the exact same thing they pulled with Your Diary back in the day: a reverse port. They put out Kamisama no You na Kimi e Extended Edition, and it doesn’t just bundle in the new heroine’s story, it also gives her HCG scenes (one look at the CV and you already know what’s up). So I wasted no time hunting down the game to check out the added content. And hoo boy, the results were eye-opening — this game is nowhere near as simple as I expected. If anything, compared to the version that came out two years ago, this so-called “expanded edition” feels more like the actual proper release.

I first saw the key visual for SMEE’s new game at the end of last year, when someone sent it to me. My reaction was immediate: this has to be fake. The reason was simple: It looks like absolute shit! And what’s worse, this ugly-ass art was still done by the “same team” — no artist change, still the same “Taniyama-san.” There have long been rumors that this “Taniyama-san” isn’t one person but a team name. But come on, everyone knows the saying: water flows downhill, people strive upward. If drawing is your profession, you should only get better over time. How the hell do you get worse!!

I remember a few years back, before Google+ shut down, some helpful guy online told me the thing he hated most was when a character in certain anime/game works says one specific line — the moment that line comes out, he instinctively writes the whole thing off as garbage. “Humans, huh~ they’re just that kind of creature” 其实一开始我不能理解这种想法，直到我后来玩的 Galgame 越来越多，接触的所谓“神作”越来越多，我也就开始越来越明白，这样开口闭口都是“人間とは……”的角色…… I fucking hate this! What I hate isn’t the line this character says, it’s the tone he says it in—all high and mighty, like he’s above it all. He’s still a “human” himself, yet he’s always judging humans from God’s-eye view. You could call it self-mockery, but that air of superiority doesn’t look like it. What annoys me even more is that everything he does fits the mold of the “complainer who never offers a solution” type. For example, this kind of character always rants like a lunatic about how ugly humans are, how selfish humans are, how goddamn stupid humans are—and then goes right on doing ugly, selfish, goddamn stupid things himself, while never once advocating truth, goodness, or beauty. It looks more like he’s making excuses for his own stupid behavior than actually criticizing anything.

When Red: Cherish was announced I wasn’t exactly hyped. My first reaction was “what the hell is this?” The legendary “cyberpunk” premise welded onto “running a restaurant day to day” — that reeks of a planning meeting where nobody had any ideas left and somebody just blurted out the first thing that came to mind. Still, I was glad the studio managed to put out something new at all. I’d been convinced they were going to milk the white-haired Tsubaki from the previous game until the lights went out, so credit where it’s due for stepping out of the comfort zone. I played the trial, and it was surprisingly good. Bought the full version too — and then the smile slowly slid off my face. How do I put this. It’s not that the game is bad. It’s that it’s way too different from what I expected.

Like most teenage boys, at the age when “sex” hits hardest, I opened the door to “sex.” The trigger was a little ad I saw on the street, telling the story of a dick pill. It went like this: a “mistress” gets abandoned, then runs into a homeless guy on the street. He’s asleep, but still standing tall, so to speak. So the “mistress,” thirsty as hell, sits right down on him in broad daylight, and the wording that follows—I can’t decide if it’s absurd or inspired. Stuff like “jade stalk slides into jade gate,” “flower branch trembling,淫水 overflowing”—anyway, the ad ends by telling you this homeless guy is so godlike because he took their brand of dick pills. Even as an ad it’s total nonsense and makes no sense. For one, how does a homeless guy afford a box of fake dick pills at 98 RMB? And no woman on the street is gonna get bored and sit on a beggar. Do you people not own vibrators? Later, my more absurd education on “sex” came from a series of jokes called Professor Huang Xialiu. I found them in a pile of old newspapers—no idea which street rag printed them. A lot of the jokes were ridiculous, but sometimes they carried real satire of the era, including some absurdity from the Cultural Revolution. You can still find some traces of “Huang Xialiu” online, though supposedly anyone who’s seen this stuff is already 50.

I decided to switch to the Pixel 6 Pro a long time ago, because the Pixel 4 XL was just too slow. But this phone somehow sold way better than expected. Normally you’d get a Nexus/Pixel within the first week, but this one was out of stock forever. In the end, a guy who runs a proxy-buying service, “Watermelon Daigou,” generously helped me out, barely charging me any fee, and I got the Pixel 6 Pro 256GB white version at retail price. It’s been a while since I got it, so let me talk about how it feels. I’ll skip the generic stuff and get straight to the real points.

Early 2022 was a mess, so I never found the time to write anything. The biggest problem I have now is that there’s a ton of stuff in my head but no time to get it out — and we’re already almost a third of the way through 2022 and I still haven’t written up last year’s games. I originally felt kind of guilty about it, but then I realized it doesn’t really matter whether I write it or not. Most people don’t play these games anyway; they just like watching the drama. Still, I figure I owe myself some kind of accounting, so here it is. If it turns out useful to anyone, even better. I played 31 games in 2021, a full 10 fewer than in 2020. Honestly, I don’t think it’s because I had less time — it’s that 2021’s games were just that bad, and quite a few were bad in a “very unique” way. With that in mind, after I cover the ones worth recommending, I’ll also roast some of the year’s hotter titles, so people stop asking me “why isn’t XXX on the list?”

I know who Matsuyama Takeshi is, because I read his novel Kimi Shinitamou Ryuuseigun. I’m still not sure whether that series is actually finished—it stopped at volume five, and I got stuck on volume three. The official line is that it’s complete. The plot of that novel is pretty simple: the protagonist’s childhood friend dies, and he spends the entire book getting over it. One idea from that novel stood out to me as genuinely novel: the heroine isn’t actually a “Earthling” in the usual sense—she’s a “space-born,” born in space to a mother who gave birth to her up there. That’s the bit that stuck with me the most. Honestly, I think that novel should have ended after volume one. The whole first volume is already overflowing with inspirational chicken soup, and the protagonist does manage to move past the heroine’s death. But then—surprise—the story pulls a sudden twist and reveals there might be a way to save her. And that’s where I checked out. If I had to guess, the rest of the story involves the protagonist using some supernatural ability (time travel, space hopping, whatever) to bring the heroine back… Lame. So lame.