Someone once left a comment on one of my blog posts expressing contempt for PULLTOP. Honestly, my own feelings about PULLTOP are fine — they’ve put out some games I like, what with the plane-making one, the country romance, and the stargazing one. But PULLTOP has definitely also released some mediocre and even mind-numbingly sleep-inducing games. Most of those were the work of their sub-brand, though. PULLTOP LATTE was literally built as a nukige label, so if it’s boring, whatever — at least the main brand is fine, right? Like the guy in the comments said, he thinks PULLTOP itself is stupid, and sometimes I agree. Take the plane-making game — it was probably one of the first Japanese eroge to make the jump to STEAM. The publisher was a company called MoeNovel. I looked into MoeNovel, and the registered asset info lists it as a sub-brand of willplus. And willplus is the parent company of the PULLTOP brand. willplus is actually pretty big, with a bunch of labels under it — plenty of nukige, some normal stuff too. The old Propeller, PULLTOP, ensemble, all of them were willplus labels. I know guilty too — they do NTR. A company that big should be doing well, right? Yet I keep watching them make one dumb move after another. Some of their decisions are just braindead. How braindead, specifically? Back to the earlier topic. Since PULLTOP = MoeNovel, that means PULLTOP chose to publish its own games overseas itself — no licensing agent involved. Should be fine, right? The plane-making game had a great reputation, plenty of Western otaku wanted to play it, a fan translation was already finished, and lots of people said they’d buy it the moment it hit STEAM. Heaven and earth and man were all aligned. PULLTOP probably didn’t even need to translate anything — just grab the English translation license and lie back collecting STEAM money…

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this more than once, but I’ve got a bad habit: I find games by listening to music. This time I stumbled onto the song Octave Rain, thought it was solid… looked it up, turns out it’s a game OP, so I went and grabbed the game… The game is called PARA-SOL. If your English isn’t terrible, you can tell that PARASOL means sunshade/parasol, so the title literally means “parasol.” When I downloaded it I wasn’t expecting it to be in Chinese. Fired it up and — holy shit, it’s translated. Didn’t see that coming… Before playing I checked what Japanese players thought. Most of them said the game “starts out insanely good and then goes insanely stupid later.” In the Chinese community the go-to explanation is more like “I literally have no idea what I just read!” Plenty of things I don’t understand. I’m the best at reading crazy-people works, so I opened the game without hesitation… A few days later I finished it… There’s only one route, and I had zero desire to touch a second one… The reason is simple: it’s way too insane!