Last week in Zhengzhou I met up with a friend from Beijing who works at a well-known internet company with business all over the country. He’s fairly famous on G+ as a road-bike inner-thigh chafing specialist and senior programmer critic, “Neo Slixurd.” Since his name is Neo and he’s gay, I usually call him “Genio,” or just “Genniao” for short. Chatting with Genniao is always a good time. We started by discussing whether “Princess Xiaozhu is actually an idiot,” and quickly reached a consensus. The conversation later drifted to the fact that I play galgames. What Genniao was most curious about was how I learned Japanese so fast. It wasn’t fast at all, honestly — play porn games every day and you’ll learn fast too. My experience with that is documented here. His second question was how many games I actually play. By my own count, I got through about 80 last year. That number isn’t exactly accurate, since I personally treat galgames as novels — meaning I only read “the main ending the game anoints as canon.” Every other ending is just a “possibility” to me. If you’re in love with a heroine you can fantasize about it, but it’s not the real story. So for most games, unless it’s something like Hatsuyuki Sakura that splits the whole story apart, I just take the main route and skim the rest. A single game isn’t that long either — if you clear every route, according to ErogameScape most Japanese players need about 19 hours. That’s not so bad, but who plays this stuff every single day? Finally we got onto where galgame stories are headed. Genniao said the games he’s played are all older ones or the more famous ones, and he has no idea what the newest stuff is like. I explained that most of the newest games are still clichéd as hell — a notch above the current mainstream seasonal anime in overall quality, sure, but that’s just a product of the audience. ErogameScape stats show most eroge players are in the 25–30 age bracket, not the under-20 elementary-schooler tier you get watching anime on Bilibili in this country. “Honestly most eroge plots are pretty stupid. Like the one I’ve been playing recently.” And that’s how I brought up Hataraku Otaku no Renai Jijou.

I’m not an NTR fan and I honestly can’t wrap my head around how NTR fans think. Still, Japanese eroge are packed with NTR subject matter, for better or worse. NTR here doesn’t mean what grade-schoolers mean by “the girl you like doesn’t like you, she likes someone else.” It’s 寝取る — and the meaning is simple: your wife, your spouse, your lover, your girlfriend got slept with by someone else. Put plainly, you got cuckolded. Even if you’ve spent years lurking Reddit, ACFUN, the greening street, and the Thunder Bluff of 5ch, I’ve never once seen a guy discover he’s been cuckolded and feel happy about it. So yeah, the NTR fan mindset is hard to get. And yet NTR games keep coming out. Plenty of companies make them, some even set up a dedicated brand just for NTR titles to chase that specialist credibility. Like this one, Houkago ni Midareru Ane Kyoushi to Tonari no Heya de Aegu Imouto (放課後に乱れる姉教師と隣の部屋で喘ぐ妹 ～恋人になった女の子が、知り合いの嫌な男に寝取られる～), which bills itself as a standard NTR game.

I’ve never had hemorrhoids, so I have no idea how much they hurt. And since I’ve never had them, I don’t really get how you’re supposed to treat them either. Someone told me it’s basically your asshole rotting, and only suppositories will do… okay, maybe that’s crude, but it’s the truth. Internal, external, mixed — I never bothered learning the difference, which is why I’m saying all this: I genuinely don’t know whether a person can shove a suppository up their own butt. And since I don’t know that, some game premises just leave me lost… like this one, Nukige Imouto ga Ji ni Natta node Zayaku o Irete Yatta Ken (妹が痔になったので座薬を入れてやった件).

You’re a 42-year-old middle-aged guy. You’ve got a family, a wife, and a daughter in middle school. Your days never change. One after another, and somewhere in there you’ve forgotten that time is even passing. Sometimes you shoot the shit with coworkers about nothing in particular. You’ve forgotten what the world out there even looks like. Work is a two-point commute with nothing in between — no fun, no passion. Your coworkers are all hooked on one thrill or another, chasing kicks online, hunting for strangers. You figure none of it means anything. Maybe you still love your wife. Sometimes you want to get intimate with her, and you get the cold shoulder. “You’re 42 already. What are you even doing this for? Aren’t you tired enough as it is?” Your wife has zero interest in the bedroom. It’s depressing. Sometimes you have to take care of it yourself. But sometimes your eyes drift toward your daughter. She’s nearly grown now, and she’s beautiful — sometimes she even reminds you a little of your wife. She’s completely unguarded at home, and sometimes you see things you shouldn’t. Sometimes, you even start to react to your own daughter… That’s dangerous.

I’m tired of saying whether LASS should just die already… I’m a bit conflicted. On one hand I want it to croak pronto, on the other I still think it should at least finish Liber 7 before kicking the bucket. Anyway, for now it’s better if it doesn’t die. So this “won’t-die-when-you-want-it-to” LASS has a new game out, and it’s a sequel to that old nukige series. Turbulent Snow, Moon, and Flower Moonlit Lewd Dance, Oath of Madness

Tegokami Nurete no Tenshi (手垢塗れの天使) is probably pretty well known by now. Before release it was marketed as an eroge about a supposedly pure idol who sells her body behind the scenes via casting couch deals, so the “手垢塗れ” in the title is really an abbreviation. The full phrase is “手垢に塗れる” (teaka ni mamireru), which Japanese dictionaries define as: 多くの人に使用されて汚れる. What does that mean… getting dirty because a lot of people have used it. Some people in China translated the game as “The Scarred Angel,” and at first I thought wow, that’s actually got some mood to it, but looking at the actual plot, it really doesn’t fit… Better to call it “The Soiled Angel” or “The Bus Angel”… considering the heroine does have her pitiful moments, let’s skip the latter.

I once came up with a concept. It was about dreams, and there were people with a job kind of like “private detective” who specialized in entering people’s dreams. They’d go on adventures inside someone else’s dream, and ultimately change that person’s view of something. And of course, they get paid for it. Sounds a lot like Inception, I know. But I had a slightly different idea. I figured that since you’re entering “someone else’s dream” as a kind of “detective” or “hunter,” the setting and environment of the dream would all be tied to the dreamer. As the “intruder,” you’d need to adapt to the environment fast and exploit “the dreamer’s own internal logic” to get the advantages you need to finish the job. Say the dreamer is a hopeless MMO addict. You enter his dream and you’ll probably get dropped into some game-like world. You’d have to quickly adapt to the role the dreamer assigned you in that world, and also disguise yourself so you don’t stick out. That means you need to know the dreamer—their tastes, their personality, even their innermost thoughts. Walk blindly into someone else’s turf and you’ll definitely fail, maybe even lose your chance to ever wake up again… I thought this setup was cool as hell, and I even wrote a crappy short story based on it. If you’re willing to dig, you can find it on this blog. Though if I went back and read it now I’d spot a million problems—too embarrassing to even look at. Still, I’m thinking about dusting off that concept and rewriting it into a proper piece. Depends on whether I get the time and inspiration.

Goddammit, ever since I started playing eroge I’ve learned a bunch of words that never showed up in any textbook. Stuff like yarichin, yariman, and then a while back I ran into yarisā. I’m sitting there wondering what the hell a yarisā even is, and of course I had to look it up, and of course that cost me an entire night of my youth. Everyone knows (don’t even say you don’t, I won’t believe you) that yariman is the word for a slut, and yarichin is the male version (hell, I don’t know what the good Chinese equivalent is, you can’t exactly call it “black foreskin”), so by analogy, yarisā is a sā of dare demo yareru, where sā is, of course, sākuru—circle in English—which in Japanese katakana means a “club” or “circle.” So put it together and a yarisā is a circle where anyone can get laid, or to spell it out plainly, a “hookup orgy club.” And while I was looking up yarisā, I found a couple of explanatory posts on Quora. That’s when I learned this word has way more going on under the hood than I thought. Quora: Some scandals involving Japanese university students Quora: Why do Japanese tennis clubs have such a bad reputation?

I keep asking myself one question: when is Lass finally going to croak? And then last time Lass put out some half-assed cobbled-together nukige, and instead of dying it went and opened a new label. Lass Pixy, dedicated to Lass’s pure-love games — like this new release, Pure Marriage Akai Ito Monogatari. Pure love and brides, the polar opposite of that ninja training thing from before. But then I looked closer: the game has three heroines, and the first release is literally called “Pure Marriage ~Akai Ito Monogatari Madoka-hen.” They’re selling it heroine by heroine? The price is cheap enough, though — a bit over 1400 yen, less than some single CDs go for. What does that remind me of? Some X no Seiiki, maybe? Probably eroge just don’t sell anymore, and eroge studios just can’t survive, so everyone’s doing the low-budget split-release thing. Not just Feng — Frontwing is copying Neko%% on Steam with a new game, and light has that Four Seasons of Lies series. But do the math on Lass: finish all three heroines and the game still isn’t expensive, way under the usual 9000 yen. I know Lass is dying and flailing, but at these prices, can you even break even? Are you actually making money? Out of curiosity I played it. And after playing it, I understood. I can tell you responsibly: Lass’s piece-of-shit game really does break even if you sell enough copies. It’s so fucking cheap to make.

What does it actually mean to love someone? Everyone’s got a different answer, but from start to finish the word “love” is tangled up with “sexual desire.” Straight or gay, if seeing someone doesn’t get you hard, you probably don’t love them enough. Unless something’s wrong with you. Plenty of philosophers have chewed over the question of emotion, and most of them either praised love or shit on it at length. Most took a loose, open attitude toward it, which is why we’ve inherited a pile of books that are more than a little debauched. None of that is the point, though. What I’m getting at is that “love” always needs “sex” to express itself. So what do you do when there’s a massive wall that makes that impossible? Say, the taboo of blood relations? Some people say, “If you love her, make her happy.” But for a real brother and sister with no possible future together, does loving her mean handing her off to someone else? To a normal person, that’s insanity. And Erohon o Sutete kara Ani no Yousu ga Okashii (エロ本を捨ててから兄の様子がおかしい) is exactly that kind of insane game.