Honestly, at first I figured HARUKAZE was dead as a studio, that they’d gone full-time into all-ages TokyoToon stuff. Didn’t expect them to come back from the dead with a brand-new title. The game’s called “Monkeys!¡,” and that double inverted exclamation mark at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Combined with the premise, it gave me the feeling they were about to do a crossdressing bit. I haven’t touched many crossdressing VNs. Most of them follow the same playbook, and the ones that actually do something interesting with it are rare. The one that stuck with me was Maria†Holic from back in the day, and even that didn’t have much to do with crossdressing, really. I’ve always appreciated HARUKAZE’s talent for shitposting, so I was looking forward to this one bringing something new. After playing it, though, all I can say is this game brought plenty of “surprises”—and even more disappointment.

Around this time last year… a game came out… called 9-nine- Kokonotsu Kokonoka Kokonoiro. I didn’t rate it highly back then, because honestly there wasn’t much to rate. The story barely moved at all, it just laid out the setting. That game was really just the start of a series. 9nine is a project sold in volumes, and my initial guess is there are three heroines, one volume each, so at least three volumes total. I already talked about the first volume here: the protagonist gets dragged into a battle between espers. There are villainous espers, and righteous ones like the protagonist and heroine. Some people kill, and someone else stops them, that kind of thing… Except in the first volume the esper murderer was never unmasked at all. It just ended unresolved, so a year later the second volume shows up again. The main romanceable character in volume two is the protagonist’s little sister: Niimi Sora (新海天), so the title changed to something built around her name, Sorairo Sorauta Soranooto.

Kareni Sekai to Owaru Hana is a game I had mixed feelings about from the start — both anticipation and a bit of fear. Anticipation because the premise is intriguing, almost giving away nothing about what kind of story it’ll tell, and the art, character designs, and even the voice cast all felt really comfortable. A bit of fear because of the planner/scenario writer: Yukihito. Who is this Yukihito? You might not have heard of his other works, but there’s one you definitely know… Nekopara. English title Nekopara, and I don’t know the Chinese name, but I know its nickname: “Catgirl Porn” — it sold like crazy on Steam. He also did two nukige with Sayori, an artist from China, so when a writer like that suddenly drops a new title with what looks like a very abstract, artsy premise, how could you not suspect it might be a landmine? But after playing the trial last month, my doubts got even worse. Because the trial still explained almost nothing — what the game is trying to say, what the theme is, all still unclear… The world setting feels like a fantasy, and while that’s not uncommon in games, it’s everywhere in Japanese anime. The most recent example is Kowareta Sekai to Garasu no Hana — and the title format is suspiciously similar, which only deepened my suspicion that it might just be pretentious bullshit that ends up saying nothing at all… Of course, after playing it, those worries vanished. Or rather, I had it wrong — this isn’t some “artsy pretentious” game, it’s more like a fairy tale. Yeah, a fairy tale — the kind a mother tells her kid before bed, the “Long Long Ago,” “むかしむかし,” “once upon a time” kind… No wonder the world and scenery in this game feel so “fairy tale.”

I honestly have no idea how to translate the title Yome Sagashi ga Hakadorisugite Yabai, because of that ヤバい in there. According to some Japanese department professor’s explainer article, writing yabai in katakana is a trend among young Japanese people, and it means the thing has the opposite meaning. やばい originally meant “oh no,” while ヤバい carries the same double-edged opposite sense as badass, meaning “so good it’s kind of alarming.” Honestly, translating this やばい as “insane” fits better, because whether something good or bad happens to you, you can just say “well, that’s insane.” So at first Yome Sagashi ga Hakadorisugite Yabai should mean something like “the wife hunt is going so well it’s insane.” Then I played the game and realized I’d overthought it. Better not jump to conclusions about that やばい.