Seeing this title, I have to bring up this pair of mysterious, exquisite little pieces of junk I paid a premium for from Japan. What is this thing? I wonder if you can guess. This is something I bought on a whim from Japan last year for 2,000 yen. The way you use it is so abstract that it’s been sitting in my drawer gathering dust for a long time.

The reason I had my eye on this one is simple: IROTORI’s previous game, Sakura no Saiten, was genuinely good. It kept the story fun and built a unique system on top of it. Sure, it can’t match the “proper” mystery games, but within the visual novel niche it’s in a league of its own, good enough to step outside and trade blows with other text adventures. And they did exactly that. Sakura no Saiten landed on a bunch of consoles, eventually hit Steam too, and picked up plenty of praise along the way. So when Hachikenden was announced I was already looking forward to it, hoping for something that was “really story-driven.” Never mind that I’m not especially into Japan’s take on history.

In the 1980s, Japan entered the exceptionally prosperous “bubble economy” period. How prosperous was Japan back then? Roughly this: everyone was trading forex, casually waiting for the yen to appreciate, and the money in their hands would gain value every so often. As long as you weren’t an idiot, as long as you dared to put money in, you could do some random bit of financial business and easily end up rolling in cash. By then, Japanese people had already become synonymous with “the rich.” No longer satisfied with spending at home, they went on the offensive in America, kicking off a lavish overseas spending spree. Their “binge buying” in the US left white Americans stunned—seeing something they liked, they’d snap it up without hesitation, even buying up famous Van Gogh paintings and acquiring ownership of the various billboards in New York’s Times Square. Beyond the overseas frenzy, people back home in Japan threw one last wild party: consumerism and hedonism ran rampant, teenagers sported the latest pagers and brick-sized cell phones, capitalists and the yakuza madly speculated on foreign exchange and real estate, nobody gave a damn about the real economy, and massive amounts of money poured into the property market. Tokyo housing prices soared all the way up—the money to buy one house in Tokyo could even buy several teams in the American baseball league… In such a frenzied atmosphere across Japan, huge numbers of poor people also poured into the neon-soaked city of Tokyo, chasing their own get-rich dreams. Some of these people come from the Japanese countryside, some from overseas, and some even from China. And Bubble De Jing (泡沫冬景) is a game that tells exactly this kind of story.

Lately a lot of eroge makers give off the vibe that they’re about to go under… Alcot, for instance. Aside from peddling expired pillows and illustrations on Twitter every day, you barely see them do anything. I remember last year they put out what they called a proper game, 将軍様はお年頃, and then basically nothing for almost a year. Just when we figured they were about to croak… Alcot announced a new release! And then I look closer and holy shit, the new release is a fandisc. Honestly I’m so sick of fandiscs filling my screen I could puke, but it seems like a lot of studios can’t manage new titles anymore and just repackage old stuff to scrape by. Whatever. If Alcot’s done for, might as well see them off. Alcot’s new release is called 将軍様はお年頃 ふぁんでぃすく -御三家だヨ！ 全員集合. Long as hell and contains zero information… the name itself looks cheap, like a little flyer ad. Fine, fine. Don’t speak ill of the dying. Let’s just look at the game.

I’ve had this feeling for a while now: Alcot is done for. Looking back, Alcot’s peak was probably around the time of Clover Days. Their sub-label Alcot Honeycomb was doing well too, and Clover Days itself had the art advantage from the start. On top of that, other stuff like Spring Limited and the “ignore the future” sister-complex games carved out their own style. From any angle, it looked like they were about to take off. But that didn’t happen. I don’t know the exact reason — I just heard Clover Days sold poorly and counted as a loss. After that, Alcot honeycomb’s later titles seemed to lose their soul, at one point they even brought in a landmine specialist to write the story, and their main artist left too. They put out LoveRec — honestly I think it’s okay, but it still got middling reviews. And then it just kept getting worse. That mom-goddess whatever game Alcot put out last year — I couldn’t even be bothered to look at it. I couldn’t even find any reviews. It got completely treated like air… Alcot’s own Twitter account posts stuff every day, and it all gives off this “company is going bankrupt, everything must go” vibe — it’s all Clover Days merch and other ancient junk. That feeling, man, it keeps making me think they’re about to fold any minute. And so Alcot has a new title out this year, with the tagline “the proper sequel in the Alcot lineup.” I took one look and thought, yep, they’re really about to go under. Because the last company that pulled this “true sequel” move was Lass, and they ended up putting out a “long-delayed true sequel” too, and then they croaked. What actually bugs me more is — since when the hell does Alcot even have a “proper sequel” to anything? So your LoveRec was just a throwaway? Your Clover Days was fudged together too? Then I looked a bit closer and it clicked: they probably mean a proper sequel within that old “parody isekai half-sci-fi” series style of theirs. 《幼なじみは大統領》, Onigokko!, and 中の人などいない! are all roughly that style, and their later stuff seems to have drifted away from that direction. So this so-called “proper sequel” is basically just them going back to that original direction. And so we got the title of the new game: Shogun-sama wa Otoshigoro (将軍様はお年頃).

Clockup is a company that often puts out “very serious” games, even though most of the time that’s not the impression it gives. Because Clockup’s breakout work was euphoria, and I think you can figure out what kind of thing that game is if you look it up yourself. Ever since then, most of the games Clockup has released give off an impression of being “unvarnished.” By “unvarnished” I don’t just mean the “directness” and “brutality” of the game content, but more the way they embody the characteristics of “18+” games. What is “18+” anyway? It’s adult content, right? And what is adult content? It’s not just pornography, it’s also violence. So these two elements get splashed around to the fullest in a lot of Clockup’s games. Clockup has made a lot of nukige that express a lot of “erotic” intent, and at the same time it’s also made a lot of “story-driven” games that tell some very interesting stories. Of course, these stories don’t just have “eroticism”—they also have explicit “violence.” Even more absurdly, Clockup has also put out some baffling comedy nukige with a style completely different from its usual dark style. But all these wildly different games come from the same company brand, rather than doing what other companies do and spinning off a sub-brand to keep things categorized. It always feels so haphazard, which is exactly why I said at the start that Clockup always leaves you with some weird impression. That said, you can’t deny that Clockup still puts out a good game with real depth every now and then. Not just the early Natsu no Kusari, which had a bit of an art-film vibe—Maggot baits from a few years ago was also memorable. It depicts a story of hope being born once again in an utterly hopeless world, yet the game is still packed with very hardcore erotic and violent elements. Those elements aren’t gratuitous; they highlight the game’s themes very well. The game never seems to compromise for the sake of avoiding “extreme” elements—whatever CG is needed, it shows. No beautification at all. Sometimes I feel there’s even a touch of “aesthetics of violence” in there. Another game that reminds me of this style is DOOM. A lot of people have opposed violence. They’re all dead. So the original team behind Maggot Baits got back together at Clockup and brought us Nenurenu Hitsuji to Kodoku na Ookami, still with a slightly dark style, which naturally made me look forward to it.

Almost nothing worth playing came out in the second month of 2017 in the adult game space—except for one title called Ouka Saki (桜花裁き). Strictly speaking, Ouka Saki isn’t a pure “eroge.” It’s a “bugyō mystery” game. Plenty of games wave the mystery flag. The famous early one is Ace Attorney, and later there’s Danganronpa. Lump of Sugar also put out a mystery-ish game, though its story was more of a comedy. But come on—was Danganronpa’s story not a comedy either? Word is Danganronpa 3’s plot has gone so dumb it can’t even help itself, the final twist like tossing a grenade into a squat toilet and spraying shit everywhere, leaving players in a fury like burning-sea mad maggots. So I wisely didn’t play it. I couldn’t even be bothered to buy it. Even for Danganronpa 2, my verdict back then was: stop caring about that dumbass main plot and just enjoy the minigames. So for Ouka Saki, at first I figured it’d be some Danganronpa-imitating goofball game—claims to be mystery but is really just bullshitting, and in the end it’s a forced verdict. But after playing the trial version, it was actually surprisingly good. At least its case descriptions have something like a real mystery core. I can’t vouch for anything else, but compared to Danganronpa’s goofball motives, Ouka Saki is way better.

We’ve always said the Japanese have an island mentality. What does that actually mean? It has two senses. One is the textbook island mentality — a reluctance to take in culture from the outside world. The other is the one we toss around online when talking about Japan, which is sort of the opposite but comes from the same root: the feeling that you’re on a tiny patch of land with no resources and no long history, squeezed on one side by America and on the other by a rising China, with things not exactly peaceful at home either. So you’re always on alert, feeling like you’re at rock bottom in the dark, on the edge of being ruled by someone else, and you’d better be ready to suffer. Honestly that sense of crisis is correct. The old saying goes, “Born in adversity, die in comfort.” Which is why the Japanese work so hard — and at least on that count, I’d say it beats China’s habit of being woken up from its “celestial empire” daydreams by a slap across the face. But “island mentality” isn’t a nice word. It’s distorted, a little forced, and a little delusional, and it shows up in Japanese culture and all sorts of works. You’ve seen it in anime — Japan gets colonized, Japan needs a revolution, Japan gets surrounded like livestock, the world ends with Japan at the center. Etc. Etc. (I’m just talking off the top of my head. I didn’t name Guilty Crown, I didn’t name Code Geass, and I certainly didn’t mention Attack on Titan.) And by extension, of course there are visual novels that display the same mentality. Like the one I played this time… From the Future Undying.

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?