Last year SMEE put out a game with a seriously baffling title. I mean the title itself is baffling. Hajilove -making*lovers- See, the actual title is Hajilove—first love—while the subtitle is borrowed from another well-known SMEE work, Making Lovers. Making lovers… as in making girlfriends, I guess. Why call it baffling? Because at a glance it looks like a Making Lovers sequel when it isn’t one at all. The reason for the naming is simple: riding the coattails. They want you to think this new title—which shares neither artist nor writer nor production team with Making Lovers—is the spiritual successor to the Making Lovers series. Buy it, and the sales go up. So why not just make an actual Making Lovers sequel? Here’s the kicker: Hajilove -makinglovers-* is really SMEE’s first attempt at the nukige space. SMEE has always stuck to a vaguely societal “pure love” lane, mostly matchmaking games, and nobody ever expected to fap to a SMEE title. So their “practicality” push this time is shy and embarrassed—still insisting over and over that it’s “pure love,” even after hiring several nukige artists… The reception to Hajilove turned out better than expected. A lot of old fans said they weren’t comfortable with the sudden nukige pivot, but the body doesn’t lie, and sales don’t either. With SMEE’s successful borrowing, its sister brand HOOK naturally had to take the same step, and so we got Secret Love (Kari).

Making*Lovers is an older SMEE game, and it got a lot of praise. Lots of reasons, but mainly: Great music Funny skits Cute characters Sweet romance Don’t know about everyone else, but those four are why I loved it. Then SMEE went off and did some messy isekai stuff, finally realized they should get back to basics, and put out this new game. Probably on a tight budget, because it’s wearing the skin of the previous work — same title, Making*Lovers — but to me these two games are fundamentally different.

I. A while back, my workplace went through a pretty brutal stretch of overtime. The work itself wasn’t much — just a system upgrade. Once the main system was upgraded, we had to debug the software and interfaces that talk to it. After that, we could go home. Sounds simple, right? The catch: the main system upgrade had to happen in the middle of the night and took several hours. The estimate was that the main system would finish upgrading around 2 a.m., and our auxiliary systems could only start testing after 2. By the time we wrapped up, it’d be 3–4 a.m. The original plan was to upgrade on Saturday, then use Sunday—when fewer people are on the system—to test and fix issues, so everything would be ready for Monday. That plan fell apart fast. Saturday’s upgrade went terribly.

神待ち 読み方：かみまち 「救いの手を差し伸べてくれる人を待つ」といった意味であるが、特に、家出した女性が自分を泊めてくれる男性を電子掲示板などで探すことを意味する表現。 Read as: kamimachi Literally “waiting for someone to reach out and save you,” but these days it usually means a runaway girl hunting the internet for some guy who’ll put her up for the night.

When I get nostalgic, elementary school inevitably comes to mind. Because back then I felt like an ACG protagonist. People like to reminisce about when they were hot shit, not when they were a dumbass—totally understandable. But my so-called “protagonist” days weren’t about going to Beijing for some “X-Fusion” to brag about “this is so fucking insane,” or riding a bike to get Heytea and chafing my ass, or constantly tearing down laptops and fiddling with Raspberry Pi while saying “how how how amazing I am” in a Shonan accent, or juggling a female teacher, a pigeon girl, and a student I met in Japanese class. It was just that in elementary school my grades were okay, my looks were okay, my conversation was okay—enough that some girls would voluntarily get close to me. But what does an elementary school “protagonist” actually get? You don’t know shit in elementary school, and I didn’t either.

Last October in Beijing, when Fengniu Jushi Zhu Niubi treated me to guanchang at the Dongsi Minfang restaurant, he asked me a question: “Your blog’s pretty badass these days, huh?” “Badass my ass. There’s exactly one badass thing about my blog.” “Where?” “Open Google, search for the keyword ‘妹ぱらだいす2’, and see who’s first.” “Search for what? Ichimoto… what?” “It’s Japanese!” So I guided Zhu Niubi through searching “妹ぱらだいす2”, and after seeing the first result, even Zhu Niubi couldn’t help but marvel: “Badass, badass, badass. Truly badass.” “Right? That’s the one badass thing about my blog, though I don’t know how to explain it.”

Back in high school I read web novels every day. A lot of them were… okay, I guess. Some were way too terminally online, but at least they told a coherent story with a distinct flavor. If it was entertaining I didn’t nitpick the literary quality, and if it was actually serious I wouldn’t treat it like a power fantasy. Man, though, seriously written web novels are rare. Most are drowning in internet slang and come with their own snark. A little self-aware snark in a literary work isn’t necessarily bad—it can add flavor—but overdo it and it gets ugly. I remember two web novels I read: one called Sanguo Houhei Zhuan and another called How I Picked Up the Campus Belle. The latter is actually decent—I’d recommend it, it’s solid for a school romance. The former just made me shake my head… I bring them up because they share a trait: both love their own snark.

Back in high school I used to frequent a site called “Huanhuan Wenyuan”—basically the text-only version of a porn site, with dirty stories updated on the regular. That site kept going until I graduated college, then it vanished. Never came back. There were some genuinely good pieces on there, well-written enough to get your imagination going. The one I remember most was about a female teacher who promised her class that if the slackers all ranked near the top of the grade, she’d let them have their way with her. The writing was actually pretty interesting—the teacher goes through all these psychological hurdles, and when faced with the principal’s coercion she ends up choosing to give herself to the students instead. The ending was a bit unexpected, almost had a Happy Ending vibe. Anyway, I’m getting off track. But some formulas really do deliver results you wouldn’t expect—like this game, PacoMane: Watashi, Kyou kara Meimon Yakyuubu no Seishori Gakari ni Narimasu… (パコマネ わたし、今日から名門野球部の性処理係になります…).

When I was a kid, my father would rigorously review my homework—essays above all. By “review” I mean I had to show him my essays first, he’d give suggestions for revision, and only once he was satisfied and I’d done enough editing could I hand it in. Pretty unreasonable, right? A very paternalistic approach, right? But every coin has two sides—luckily my father happened to be a decent writer himself, so a lot of his feedback was actually useful. The thing I remember most is what he said about narrative essays. Sometimes he’d flat-out call my writing “boring”—meaning it gave you no desire to keep reading. “You should give your story ups and downs, maybe even suspense, so people will want to keep going.” “But the thing I’m writing about was just boring.” I think it was about giving up my seat to an old lady—“A Meaningful Event.” “You can arrange the story a bit—like, you give up your seat but she flat-out refuses to sit at first, and only later explains she thinks she’s not that old yet, or something…” “But that’s just making stuff up…” “And giving up your seat isn’t making stuff up? Have you ever actually given up your seat?” “…………”

Voice actress Matsunaga Rika (Yomogi Kasumi) must be thanking her lucky stars she got cast in Natsuiro Kokoro Log. Why? Because on her Twitter page, the only character she can actually show off is the main heroine from this game. Every other role she’s done is either some jobber or a boss — and if it’s a lead, it’s guaranteed to be the busty heroine of some nukige getting violated, the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to use as an avatar. Actually, the heroine of Natsuiro Kokoro Log, Tokiwa Kuon, is genuinely adorable. Thanks to artist Shirakawa Mochizuki’s moe one-hit-kill, this game is a breath of fresh air among “moe-nukige” titles. Story? Music? Voice acting? None of it matters here — as long as it clears the bar, the art style alone is enough to make moe pigs cry out banzai. But as you all know, I’m not some moe-obsessed fanboy, and I’m not a little-sister complex guy either, so while playing Natsuiro Kokoro Log (ナツイロココロログ), all I really felt was that this game’s protagonist is a total fucking idiot. I said it in a previous post too: this guy is wishy-washy, has zero opinions of his own, and the moment things look bad he immediately tucks tail and runs. When the girl wants nothing from him and all she needs is for him to nod, he instead turns around and goes home. In real life, that’s the kind of scumbag who has a great time banging a girl, then vanishes the second she’s pregnant. And somehow that scumbag is the protagonist of a harem-flavored moe game. I can’t accept it.