When ANIPLEX.exe was throwing money at visual novels, aside from ATRI -My Dear Moments-, they also put out Utsuro no Utage (徒花異譚), which has a seriously weird art style. It was made in collaboration with Liar-Soft, which immediately told everyone these people know what they’re doing, and plenty of eroge fans went “based.” Also, you can pretty much guess that ANIPLEX.exe’s two releases were aimed at different audiences. ATRI -My Dear Moments- was clearly for the “casual moe-blob otaku,” while Utsuro no Utage comes off as a bit more hardcore. Of course, that “hardcore” label is just my own wishful thinking. After finishing this fairly short game, all I can say is that Utsuro no Utage isn’t really a game so much as a genuine “short fantasy novel.” This “novel” won’t lecture you about life’s great truths; what it gives you is more of an emotional jolt. I’m not going to go into detail about what Utsuro no Utage is actually about. Getting hold of the game isn’t that hard for most people, and although the scenario was written by Nozomu Kaihara, who previously wrote Uso kara Hajimaru Koi no Natsu (尋蝶者), once it steps outside the “romance game” frame, the story feels all the more comfortable in its own skin.

A lot of fiction likes to play with the “end of the world” theme. I can’t really say why. Maybe it’s that “even after the world ends, I still love you” feeling that comes off as romantic? Or maybe everyone’s got a little bit of wasteland fever in them. An endless wilderness, nothing left but the male lead and the heroine, wandering the ruins looking for some reason for humanity to keep going. That does sound pretty coool. Use it too many times, though, and it stops being coool.

I often regret some of my past articles. The main reason isn’t anything else—it’s that when I was younger I went on huge rants, trashing a lot of games I thought were terrible at the time. First and foremost among them: Lump of Sugar. I still remember that Unmei Senjou de Suika wo Kiru—I called its plot retarded. And Rensou Kankei—I said its system was dumb as shit. And yet, faced with Lump of Sugar’s new game Nekotsuku, Sakura. (ねこツク、さくら。)… I couldn’t help but shed tears. I deeply realized I was wrong.

Anyone who knows a thing or two about Japanese people knows they get “particular” when telling a story. That particularity is baked in — the kind of small-mindedness that lacks any grand scale, constantly getting weepy over the most trivial shit. There’s actually a word for this in Japanese: mono no aware, which Chinese renders as 物哀. Basically, you see anything at all and get inexplicably sad. For pretentious artsy kids that’s maybe OK, but if it’s the only register you ever play, you’ve run out of tricks. Mono no aware isn’t just in the usual stories — it’s more in how Japanese people tell stories. Endlessly wistful and mournful, a hundred twists and turns, and after a hundred laps around the track you still haven’t gotten back to the starting point. The reader gets anxious, and all that circling still lands you on some utterly unremarkable ending, which easily leaves you feeling embarrassed and angry. Yes, I’m embarrassed and angry again. Miss Wang, bring me my Italian cannon, I’m opening fire.

So here’s the thing—this game has been sitting in my hard drive gathering dust for ages. I’ve always had mixed feelings about it. I want to play this game because its premise and art style are actually pretty good I don’t want to play this game because I already know how it plays out without even having played it This game comes from Campus, a label that got shut down and sold off. Campus was actually a sub-brand of Light, set up specifically to crank out quick cash-grab mini-games. The formula was basically: find a decent artist, push out a single-route or two-route short game, keep the budget low, sell it cheap, and hope it pumps some blood back into the parent company Light. Honestly, Campus’s intent to recoup some cash by selling these games is way too obvious. Just look—every single one of them is a “multi-platform release,” with iOS and Android versions and everything else they can slap it on, not a single one left out. There are also free non-18+ versions, and only the 18+ content costs money. It’s basically a “we’re not making games to make money, we’re just here to make friends” stance, as if they think their game quality is so solid that surely some player—or some otaku who wants to see the lewd art—will shell out for the physical edition, and then they can pull a reverse play and rake it in, revive the company, and return to the old capital… Except that didn’t happen. Light still died, and Campus got sold off too.

The 9-nine- series, delayed for God knows how long, has finally reached its fourth volume, bringing us the last routeable heroine, Yuuki Noa, and finally prying open the various secrets buried in the game’s setting. The title is Yukiiro Yukihana Yukinoato.

I vaguely recall that the last time I played a game with Kantoku art was years ago, and I ragged on it pretty hard. Honestly, looking back now… Still deserves a good ragging. Why? Because Kantoku always works with CUBE, and the heroines in CUBE games inexplicably turn into Easy Girls—like, they confess to the protagonist and before you know it they’re spreading their legs. Yeah yeah, I know it’s an eroge, but even for an eroge you can’t keep doing it so bluntly. Nobody watches porn for the plot anymore? Well, a little story goes a long way—it makes it tastier. So after all these years, a new game with Kantoku art drops, and the title alone is high-tier: Kamisama no You na Kimi e I honestly don’t know how to translate it. I feel like in Japanese this kind of sentence could mean “to you, who is like a god,” but a direct translation would be “to you like a god.” The English subtitle is To you like goddess, so I guess it’s the first meaning. But none of that matters. What matters is the scenario lineup—they brought in three guys who specialize in writing toilet paper… oh wait, I mean light novels. Looks like they decided to go all-in on the story. But how did it actually turn out?

This isn’t my first 8BitDo controller, actually, but the one I bought before somehow went missing, so all I’ve got left is one with a bad feel. This time, in order to play some “poorly optimized garbage Unity game,” I had to buy a new 8BitDo controller. Times have changed, though—this thing has evolved. It’s got built-in rumble now, and supposedly a gyroscope too. I’ve used it for about two weeks, so let me share my impressions.

The first time I heard that SMEE — the “matchmaking game maker” — was doing a harem game, I was shocked. SMEE has always emphasized “pure love,” and not just that, but a kind of “realistic romance.” I’ve praised them for doing that well more than once. And then, before they’d even done it well a few times, they got cocky. What’s weirder is that they basically swapped identities with their parent company HOOKSOFT. In other words, HOOKSOFT, which usually pulls settings out of its ass, started doing pure love. And SMEE, which usually does pure love, started doing settings. Sure, both SMEE and HOOKSOFT have done settings plenty of times, with all sorts of gimmicky elements — “gradual conquest,” “a friend of a friend,” “corporate drone matchmaking,” “conquering and being conquered” — but none of that shit ever mattered. What sticks with you is always the bickering between the protagonist and the heroines. So I think the core competitive strength of SMEE, and of the now-SMEE-fied HOOKSOFT, has become “couple bickering skits.” Nobody cares what story you’re telling, nobody expects any wild developments, nobody even thinks you’ll throw in a “memory flashback.” The core is always that “lovers’ quarrel,” and that’s exactly what everyone wants to see. Actually, don’t underestimate “lovers’ quarrels” — not many people can do them well, which is one of the reasons I keep praising SMEE. If I were the president of SMEE, I’d lock in the protagonist and heroine names. Copy-pasting the same template of “unpopular protagonist suddenly hits his popular phase” every time is exhausting. Just use one name, like Wu Laoji or whatever, and put the protagonist’s name in every game title: Wu Laoji’s Country Adventure, Wu Laoji’s Matchmaking Odyssey, Wu Laoji and Miss Wang’s Space Adventure, Wu Laoji and the King of Another World… Keep that up and forget sales — SMEE could become famous overnight, get a theatrical film, and build a national IP. But that pattern feels familiar… Oh right, speaking of “another world,” this time SMEE actually did go with an “isekai” setting. The title is pretty blunt too: Harem Kingdom. The protagonist suddenly gets transported to another world, becomes its king, and gets a harem. To this day I still want to complain that this setting is just so not-SMEE!

In the 1980s, Japan entered the exceptionally prosperous “bubble economy” period. How prosperous was Japan back then? Roughly this: everyone was trading forex, casually waiting for the yen to appreciate, and the money in their hands would gain value every so often. As long as you weren’t an idiot, as long as you dared to put money in, you could do some random bit of financial business and easily end up rolling in cash. By then, Japanese people had already become synonymous with “the rich.” No longer satisfied with spending at home, they went on the offensive in America, kicking off a lavish overseas spending spree. Their “binge buying” in the US left white Americans stunned—seeing something they liked, they’d snap it up without hesitation, even buying up famous Van Gogh paintings and acquiring ownership of the various billboards in New York’s Times Square. Beyond the overseas frenzy, people back home in Japan threw one last wild party: consumerism and hedonism ran rampant, teenagers sported the latest pagers and brick-sized cell phones, capitalists and the yakuza madly speculated on foreign exchange and real estate, nobody gave a damn about the real economy, and massive amounts of money poured into the property market. Tokyo housing prices soared all the way up—the money to buy one house in Tokyo could even buy several teams in the American baseball league… In such a frenzied atmosphere across Japan, huge numbers of poor people also poured into the neon-soaked city of Tokyo, chasing their own get-rich dreams. Some of these people come from the Japanese countryside, some from overseas, and some even from China. And Bubble De Jing (泡沫冬景) is a game that tells exactly this kind of story.