I often regret some of my past articles. The main reason isn’t anything else—it’s that when I was younger I went on huge rants, trashing a lot of games I thought were terrible at the time. First and foremost among them: Lump of Sugar. I still remember that Unmei Senjou de Suika wo Kiru—I called its plot retarded. And Rensou Kankei—I said its system was dumb as shit. And yet, faced with Lump of Sugar’s new game Nekotsuku, Sakura. (ねこツク、さくら。)… I couldn’t help but shed tears. I deeply realized I was wrong.

Animal Panic (あにまる☆ぱにっく) is a weird game… First off, the premise is weird. It comes from QUINCE SOFT, a Lump of Sugar sub-brand I’d just been praising for Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro.. I figured it was Lump of Sugar’s experimental plot, a place for oddball new games with strange setups. A year and change later, I got slapped in the face. Animal Panic looks like the most generic moege imaginable, and the staff list gives zero reason to expect surprises. Then, even weirder: I actually played the damn thing for some reason, and found it contains stuff way stranger than I expected.

Lump of Sugar. Yes, Lump of Sugar again — the sugar-cube studio. Its new game is here once more. 这次彻底踢掉了其他所有的傻逼画师，只留下了唯一能打的萌木原ふみたけ，而且萌木原作为唯一的画师还进化了画风，简单来说就是看起来更好看了。 I have to say, the game’s promotion came with some big surprises. Beyond what I mentioned earlier about the girls being drawn even better-looking, another surprise was the worldview setting and the game’s overall atmosphere. The game’s marketing leaned heavily on “Momiji,” and combined with the title itself, Enrite Kono Ha wa Kurenai ni, it finally managed to scrape together a bit of literary flair. It’s genuinely hard for an eroge to have a title with any literary flair. Everyone knows that these days, dumbass Japanese ACG titles have all turned into the structure of “kanji noun/adjective” + “katakana foreign-word fragment,” and it’s been going on for way too many years. Like “Hoshifuru Yoru no Farnese,” “Shojo Sprinkle,” “Apeiria of the Sea of Views,” “Haruoto Alice * Gram,” “Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue,” “Istoria of the Water-Burial Silver Coin,” “Simulacrum of the Moon Shadow"—and besides that kind, there are even more dumbass game titles written entirely in katakana or hiragana with no kanji at all, so many I don’t even know what to say. So I’m honestly puzzled: aren’t Japanese people always calling for their own native culture? You can’t pull that off if everything’s in katakana, right? Are you all going to write exclusively in katakana from now on? Even Mimorin tweeted that she was taking a walk, and she wrote ウォーキング instead of 散歩. I don’t know if Japanese people just find typing katakana more convenient than kanji, which is why they’re so hooked on it. All that said, I really like the title “縁りて此の葉は紅に”. I also really like the autumn-leaves mood and the setting. And you can roughly work out what the title means: because of a “connection / fate” premise, “the leaves here have begun to turn red.” Honestly, I thought January’s lineup was pretty mid all around, and this game ended up being my last hope. After playing it, I’d say it’s a decent step up — though there’s still room to grow.

For a long time, one of the big reasons galgames get doubted and looked down on by a bunch of hardcore princess-type players is this: the damn thing doesn’t count as a game. Honestly, I don’t think it counts as a game either. At best it’s an audiobook. I’ve said more than once that when Westerners talk about Japanese eroge, the word they use is always Visual Novels. When our local Japanophile shut-ins are solemnly announcing “I’m playing eroge again this month,” the Westerners are all saying What are you reading?. Of course, galgames themselves have increasingly become novelized, gradually turning into commercial products that sell purely on art, story, music, porn, or even just first-press bonuses. Development costs aren’t high either—plenty of small doujin circles start out as galgame companies, and it has that vaguely Chinese-youth-startup vibe. But this thing wasn’t like that in the past.

Last year Lump of Sugar put out two games… And each was worse than the last. The first, Renai Relation, had a baffling system and not a single interesting thing in the plot. The second, Kodomo no Asobi, maybe had slightly better writing, but the art was absolutely terrible! Funny thing, I looked back at the studio’s older stuff—back in 2014 and even earlier they were still doing two titles a year, and the premises were just as dumb as ever, but at least the art was decent. I played Unmei Senjou no Phi too; the system was actually pretty flashy, but for a game billed as a mystery, the story was a total joke… So I’ve always figured Lump of Sugar pumps these out assembly-line style: someone grabs a premise, holds a meeting, rounds up a few writers (they don’t even have a fixed writing team), the artist is at least consistent with Moekibara Fumitake, the music is whatever, and the only real muscle in the company is the programming side—they’ll cobble together any weird gimmick you can think of. Keyword hunting, fruit slicing, timed hidden third options. Going by that Japanese expose on the eroge industry, Lump of Sugar probably just leans on Moekibara to push the first wave of limited-edition sales and then calls it a day. The stories aren’t really that interesting; it’s mostly carried by the voice acting, art, and programming. So honestly, I don’t play their games all that seriously (same as how I play crap from that shit-tier studio), I just skim through and move on… This year’s Lump of Sugar feels different though. Maybe they finally got their act together, maybe it’s because it’s their tenth anniversary and they figured holding yet another press conference to announce a new title would be stupid—better to sit down and make a proper commemorative game. So they took their biggest hit from ten years ago, Tayutama -kiss on my deity-, and made a sequel using the same setting. Plenty of people probably remember Tayutama—there was an anime, called Yuu On (Tayutama), and back in the day the studio even did a crossover between the anime and Yuzusoft’s Tenshin Ranman. Pretty nuts, right? They really went all-in. So bringing back the old setting for a sequel has a bit of that Alcot-doing-Clover Day’s vibe—look back at history, look forward to the future, carry on the legacy, march steadily forward. The sequel is called Tayutama 2 -you’re the only one-, and it continues from the first game. The first game was about the conflict between humans and Tayutai; the second takes place in a town where the heroes of the first game have established a place where humans and Tayutai can coexist peacefully. The protagonist, Kusakabe Sora, runs into Kohaku, a Tayutai adopted daughter raised by the first game’s heroine, Izumo Mashiro. He helps her out, the girl decides he’s a good guy, and drags him home to tell her mother she’s going to marry him.

Renai Relation (恋想リレーション) is the latest release from Lump of Sugar. I already roasted their previous game, Unmei-sen jou no φ, on account of the plot being flat-out retarded. So does Renai Relation do any better on the story front? Naturally not. Still retarded. Only this time, they’ve gone and built the premise itself as an excuse for it.

A gentle sea breeze blows on this remote little island. Mr. Iori arrives alone and meets a girl. “Sir, this isn’t a place ordinary people visit. So may I ask… what brings you here?” Iori flashes the long sword in his hand. It’s still in its sheath, but it radiates a chill. “Are you… a swordsman, sir?”