Parasol has put out another new game. Honestly I don’t expect much from Parasol anymore — their games have lost any real identity or selling point. The last one with actual buzz was Hare nochi Kitto Nanohana Biyori, a.k.a. “Haru na Hana.” That game had serious problems with its narrative logic; calling it a landmine isn’t unfair. After that Parasol felt like it never recovered. Everything since has been a minor throwaway title, made half-heartedly, with painfully generic premises and nothing that stands out. Take last time’s “swimming club” thing, or that one from the start of the year, “My Everyday Romance With My Girlfriend” or whatever — they just slap together a school setting, add a harem with every girl type imaginable, you pick whoever you want, fuck her once, and it’s over. How do I put this… it doesn’t feel like romance. It feels like hiring a prostitute. So this time Parasol is back with Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou (桜ひとひら恋もよう). No idea how to translate the title well. A single cherry petal has the shape of love? Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou? Whatever, you get the idea. But the premise of this new one didn’t interest me at first glance either… except I noticed there’s a nine-year-old loli elementary schooler in the game, and you can’t even get on her route. The setup is that the protagonist is going to school as usual when suddenly the school is going to be merged into another one, due to enrollment rates or bad management or whatever. He refuses to accept it and leads a bunch of classmates in protest. That’s the story. Japan’s declining birthrate is getting worse, so school mergers are a dime a dozen. This premise is just taking the old “a girls’ school gets merged in” setup and flipping it to “we refuse the merger, and it’s not a girls’ school.” What’s the difference? Same soup, different bowl… That’s what I thought at first. Then I found out the game has a lot more going on inside.

Having played a fair number of visual novels, I end up talking about plot, and when it comes to scenario structure there are basically two directions. One is the suspenseful gamble-and-court-death kind, where you manufacture some huge news, some big twist, build up a ridiculously hype mystery at the start, then line up some hype developments and one hell of a reveal at the end. The other is the utterly ordinary school romance slice-of-life, maybe with a little friction over life, studies, and club activities, which gets resolved on the way to the ending. Personally I like the first one, but not everyone can pull off big news, and running faster than everyone else won’t get it done either. Suspense and crazy twists demand a seriously strong scenario writer to handle—pacing, laying the mystery, arranging the different routes, all of it is interconnected, and one wrong step leads to every step being wrong. Plenty of people crash on the first type, drawing a tiger and ending up with a dog, or the story is passable but the writing can’t carry it, so the mystery lands with no impact, or is outright incomprehensible, and a good premise and story go to waste. The second type is way simpler—at least you won’t cause a disaster just by writing it casually. It can produce great stories too, provided you’re a gag writer good at digging up the fun in everyday life; Yukikoi Melt and The Shepherd of the Great Library are pretty solid examples of the latter. Still, it’s actually hard to completely botch the second type. Compared to walking the tightrope of suspense, everyday content is safer. Or rather, slice-of-life games don’t ask much of the plot anymore—a lot of people are probably more into the character designs and the CV performances. It’s not just games; anime mostly runs on the same rhythm. Some live on plot, some live on slice-of-life, and you can see how hard it is to nail the former. Kantai Collection went for a crazy twist and got called “shit-feeding,” while Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka? does daily moe and gets called “healing”—the difference in their setups isn’t even that big, they just chose different scenario routes. Of course, for some studios, botching a twist-heavy scenario naturally makes them think, once bitten twice shy, might as well fall back on slice-of-life for safety. Like Parasol’s QUINTUPLE☆SPLASH!.

The keyboard critics on Quora once debated a question: Is a galgame literature? The question is itself a problem. Asking whether a game is literature is like asking whether “humans” are “perverts.” Sure, there are humans who can’t get through a day without licking something, and there are also normal people like me who have zero interest in that stuff. A galgame is still a game. Games have plots, and most non-nukige galgames lean heavily on theirs. There may be some “literary” elements in there, but on the strength of those elements alone you can’t begin to put it on the same level as literature. So as a game genre that carries “literary elements,” plenty of galgames try to break new ground in their plots. These days, if you don’t have foreshadowing and a shocking twist, people will call you boring. Which has led many to believe that only “suffering,” “dying,” “flying off the rails” and the like deserve to be called a god-tier scenario, while anything focused on the everyday gets sneered at. On this point I’m fond of the 2007 Chinese college entrance exam essay prompt: unexpected, yet inevitable. What it means is that no matter how your plot unfolds, no matter how high it flies or how wild the ideas get, as long as you can justify it and give people that “unexpected yet inevitable” feeling, your story is a success. Even slice-of-life, if written vividly and every character’s personality also lands as “unexpected yet inevitable,” is a success too. At the very least the story keeps you in suspense, is easy to follow, and doesn’t feel too far-fetched. Put more bluntly: write it however you want, but at minimum it has to be logical. That’s the baseline. Without logic, the whole story looks nonsensical — exactly like Haru nochi Kitto Nanohana Biyori (晴のちきっと菜の花びより).