For years now, SMEE’s main scenario writer Yu Hayase has been getting cozy with Azarashi Soft. After a few “collab mini-games,” they’ve stopped pretending and just merged, with Hayase even spearheading Azarashi’s new title Amanatsu. The game looks weird no matter how you slice it. The title and art style are pure Azarashi, but the side characters and dialogue style scream SMEE. Probably to boost sales, they brought in a bunch of VAs old players know by heart. And goddammit, they dragged out my most hated one, Yukary Aoyama, to voice the main heroine. Every role she’s done except Kazuki Kazami gives me PTSD. The second heroine is Akinohana, who’s currently on permanent vacation, and the third is Mai Gotou. That’s a stacked cast spanning three generations of eroge VAs. If this game had a press conference, the fat otaku in the audience would’ve been screaming. I was actually hyped for this one, but less than five minutes in, I felt this weird sense of disappointment.