I’ve made no secret of how much I love Hihou no Mahoutsukai (紙の上の魔法使い), or of how much I praise its writer, Rukuru. Same goes for Unmei Yohou wo Oshirase Shimasu, the game Rukuru put out before it. What makes this writer so strong is that he genuinely knows how to tell a story — the pacing, the dialogue, the word choice and the overall style all give off this elegant, gripping feel. Other visual novel writers, by comparison, read like high schoolers in the middle of a chuuni phase. That gap hits you hard: play a Rukuru game, then go pick up some mainstream VN, and the latter’s dialogue feels stupid and half-witted next to it, while the former actually reads like a story, one with images in it. I guess that’s what you’d call raw skill in a scenario writer. After Hihou no Mahoutsukai, the studio Ugui Sugura went quiet for way too long. A little over a year before, they tweeted that yes, they were properly working on a new game; then at the end of 2016 Suisou Ginkka no Istoria got announced, an early 2017 trial came out, and in March it launched with zero delays. Happiness arrived too fast, and I started playing the moment I got it. (I’d love to buy a legit copy, but I have no idea if standard forwarding will get me a friendly invitation from customs — any veterans with a reliable route, please enlighten me.)

One regret of mine: the game Mahoutsukai no Yoru never got an OST release. Sure, you can extract the OGG files from the game, but those aren’t lossless—I actually ripped a set myself, just couldn’t be bothered to type in the names for the tags. I kept thinking an OST would come out eventually, and, well, you know how it goes. Years pass, the next game is about to launch, and the previous game’s OST is still nowhere. The composer is Meto. This isn’t the first time he’s worked with the writer Rukuru, if I remember right—Unmei Yohou wo Oshirase Shimasu had BGM by him too, so did Mahoutsukai no Yoru, and the composer for Suisou Ginka no Istoria, out next month, is him again. I don’t know if they’re doing it on purpose or what, but none of the games Rukuru and his crew work on ever get an OST release. Even Unmei Yohou wo Oshirase Shimasu was originally supposed to include an OST with the special edition, and then right before release they just… cut it. And Suisou Ginka no Istoria is only getting the theme song Azurite no Hitsugi as a bonus. So I poked around Meto’s personal site out of curiosity and found he’s been composing music on his own all along, and he sells CDs of his own work right there. So I picked up the package versions to show some support. (A few CDs in there are just gate-crashing, please ignore them.)