Ranked matches in 王者荣耀 hadn’t been going well lately. Someone suggested I buy a “touchscreen” controller to improve the feel of the controls and boost my win rate, so I did. Taobao has way too many kinds of these things, so I bought every single type. Right now these products fall into three categories…

I read a lot of forums, and there’s this pattern I keep noticing. Women-dominated forums are mostly people dunking on scumbag boyfriends. Men-dominated forums, porn boards aside, are mostly people tearing each other apart and crying about getting cuckolded. Getting cuckolded is a weird phenomenon, yet apparently a really common one. Are that many people actually getting cheated on? Are that many people actually choosing to forgive him or her? Either way, several forums I frequent have picked up new nicknames that don’t even match anymore. Greenery Street. Thunder Bluff. Some people don’t even bother being subtle and just rename the whole forum “Cuckold Forum.” So lately my browsing is nothing but green everywhere. Halal green, betrayed green, green this way and green that way. At first I found it gross, then I got used to it. I can’t even get someone to take me on as a rebound, so what do I care about cuckolding? This “getting cuckolded” setup is common in Japanese eroge too. The Japanese call it 寝取る, NTR. Basically your wife gets slept with, which means you got cuckolded. NTR games have their fans, but most of them are the same: you get a girlfriend, she gets screwed behind your back, and in the end you either forgive her or leave her. But think about it, why is NTR always by convention the woman betraying the man? What about the man betraying the woman? We call that cheating too, but it still can’t compare to the whole green-this-green-that internet culture, can it.

LAMUNATION! came out last year. I honestly didn’t know much about it — watched the OP, looked flashy, music was solid, skimmed the premise and it seemed to be some fictional world. But the setting never explains itself, there’s no visible main plot, so I just dropped it. Plenty of people were actually optimistic about this one, aside from some guy called “Azirayt” — the other being Miss Wang. But Chinese people liking it doesn’t mean shit. The game’s reputation rides on what the Japanese think. So how did the Japanese rate LAMUNATION!? According to Chuuni Space’s scores… 45 points. Basically a landmine. So I’d always assumed it was a landmine too. I’ve seen this type too many times — big budget, stacked staff, flashy OP, massive marketing, and then the scenario writer goes full late-stage psychosis and nobody can follow the story, so the game becomes a landmine. Examples everywhere. But recently, for a certain reason, I got interested in LAMUNATION! again. I think it might not actually be a “landmine.” It’s just that people don’t understand it for a certain reason. That’s a bit of a stretch. Normally, no matter how badly a game’s story is written, no matter how dogshit the author’s storytelling is, if you’re willing to meet the author halfway, you’ll usually find the story is “not bad.” But with LAMUNATION!’s writer, it might be a different situation. Ah… how do I put this? Cultural incompatibility? Something like that. Which means we have to go back to an earlier work by LAMUNATION!’s writer, Kepposhi…

A few days ago someone online was asking which eroge scenario writers people would recommend, and the usual crowd started rattling off the usual names. Urobuchi, Nasu, Maruto, and so on and so forth. Honestly, I’m not especially fond of any of those guys’ scenario work. Some of those names actively make me feel sick when I see them. And besides, a few of them aren’t even eroge writers anymore — plenty of them have moved into anime, where their skill level is, frankly, also trash. In my book they rank below even Mari Okada. Ah, no — the truth is Mari Okada is already a genuinely excellent anime screenwriter. I’ve always had one firm opinion about “screenwriters” and “scenario writers”: if you’re the person telling a story to other people, the first thing you need is to actually know how to tell a story. What does “know how to tell a story” mean? It means that whether or not the story itself is interesting, you should at least do everything in your power to make people able to sit through it — to keep listening, to keep watching. That skill is real. It’s the foundation. It’s the most fundamental thing there is. Unfortunately, a few of the scenario writers that so-called ACG fans hype to the skies simply can’t tell a story. They either wallow in boring lore dumps, or they’re too busy jerking themselves off, or… they only know how to tell one formulaic story. After consuming enough Japanese media, I started noticing something strange. A lot of Japanese works are always the same formula, and the creators themselves know it’s an old formula — but the audience just keeps eating it up. The eternal demon king and hero. The eternal prince and princess. The eternal Kamen Rider. The eternal ally of justice. The eternal childhood friend. The eternal bread-at-the-corner-on-the-way-to-school. The eternal transfer student. The eternal isekai. The eternal magical girl. The eternal idol. And the eternal cute boy. That’s already a decent pile of ingredients. I figure you could grab a few at random, combine them, and get at least a small innovation out of it. But no — Japanese audiences don’t buy it. They prefer formulaic plots. Even when the premise is genuinely novel, the execution stays the same, and eventually it always circles back to the formula, as if that’s the only way the audience can feel “safe.” It feels incredibly stuck in its ways. I don’t know if it’s tied to Japanese national character, but it’s like how Sony has great materials across multiple divisions and still can’t make a good phone. On the scenario level, I’ve never personally liked the “already made it” types. A lot of those successful guys’ follow-up works are complete shit, but because they’re famous, people still read them, and afterward the fans will over-interpret everything just to praise their favorite writer. Yes, I’m fucking talking about that idiot Maruto Fumiaki.

Tayutama 2 -you’re the only one- (タユタマ2 -you’re the only one-) came out last year, and honestly I think it’s pretty good. Why? Because it’s not toxic. Yeah, the bar is low, but almost nobody clears it. Look around—not just games, even anime—barely anything out there doesn’t try to piss you off. Out of nowhere a love triangle to give you heartburn, or they’ll torture some poor girl to make you feel bad, or pull a time loop or isekai twist that makes you spit your drink. Compared to all that, Tayutama 2—a game so positive it’s practically a PSA about humans and Tayutai living in harmony—is a breath of fresh air. Sure, it didn’t sell great on Steam, and the price is a quarter of what you’d pay for 2B after the price hike. But that’s reality: bland positive content isn’t stimulating enough to attract the twisted otaku crowd. Only ass sells.

Back in middle school I read all kinds of web novels, so naturally I ran into power fantasy and harem stuff. Power fantasy needs no explanation—the protagonist shows up, is insanely OP, plays the pig to eat the tiger, and sometimes doesn’t even bother playing the pig and just instakills heaven, earth, and the entire world. As for harem novels, I stumbled on those later; I’ve always thought Chinese web novel romance is pretty terrible, but the “harem” tag in Chinese web fiction really does mean a true harem. The protagonist has several girls around him, and every single one of them is totally fine with him having other women, and they all coexist harmoniously… That’s not weird at all, though—you’ve read The Deer and the Cauldron, right… After that I got into the Japanese “light novel” thing. Japanese light novels also have power fantasy and harem stuff… it just feels completely different from the Chinese version.

Voice actress Matsunaga Rika (Yomogi Kasumi) must be thanking her lucky stars she got cast in Natsuiro Kokoro Log. Why? Because on her Twitter page, the only character she can actually show off is the main heroine from this game. Every other role she’s done is either some jobber or a boss — and if it’s a lead, it’s guaranteed to be the busty heroine of some nukige getting violated, the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to use as an avatar. Actually, the heroine of Natsuiro Kokoro Log, Tokiwa Kuon, is genuinely adorable. Thanks to artist Shirakawa Mochizuki’s moe one-hit-kill, this game is a breath of fresh air among “moe-nukige” titles. Story? Music? Voice acting? None of it matters here — as long as it clears the bar, the art style alone is enough to make moe pigs cry out banzai. But as you all know, I’m not some moe-obsessed fanboy, and I’m not a little-sister complex guy either, so while playing Natsuiro Kokoro Log (ナツイロココロログ), all I really felt was that this game’s protagonist is a total fucking idiot. I said it in a previous post too: this guy is wishy-washy, has zero opinions of his own, and the moment things look bad he immediately tucks tail and runs. When the girl wants nothing from him and all she needs is for him to nod, he instead turns around and goes home. In real life, that’s the kind of scumbag who has a great time banging a girl, then vanishes the second she’s pregnant. And somehow that scumbag is the protagonist of a harem-flavored moe game. I can’t accept it.

Last week in Zhengzhou I met up with a friend from Beijing who works at a well-known internet company with business all over the country. He’s fairly famous on G+ as a road-bike inner-thigh chafing specialist and senior programmer critic, “Neo Slixurd.” Since his name is Neo and he’s gay, I usually call him “Genio,” or just “Genniao” for short. Chatting with Genniao is always a good time. We started by discussing whether “Princess Xiaozhu is actually an idiot,” and quickly reached a consensus. The conversation later drifted to the fact that I play visual novels. What Genniao was most curious about was how I learned Japanese so fast. It wasn’t fast at all, honestly — play porn games every day and you’ll learn fast too. My experience with that is documented here. His second question was how many games I actually play. By my own count, I got through about 80 last year. That number isn’t exactly accurate, since I personally treat visual novels as novels — meaning I only read “the main ending the game anoints as canon.” Every other ending is just a “possibility” to me. If you’re in love with a heroine you can fantasize about it, but it’s not the real story. So for most games, unless it’s something like Hatsuyuki Sakura that splits the whole story apart, I just take the main route and skim the rest. A single game isn’t that long either — if you clear every route, according to ErogameScape most Japanese players need about 19 hours. That’s not so bad, but who plays this stuff every single day? Finally we got onto where visual novel stories are headed. Genniao said the games he’s played are all older ones or the more famous ones, and he has no idea what the newest stuff is like. I explained that most of the newest games are still clichéd as hell — a notch above the current mainstream seasonal anime in overall quality, sure, but that’s just a product of the audience. ErogameScape stats show most eroge players are in the 25–30 age bracket, not the under-20 elementary-schooler tier you get watching anime on Bilibili in this country. “Honestly most eroge plots are pretty stupid. Like the one I’ve been playing recently.” And that’s how I brought up Hataraku Otaku no Renai Jijou.

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.)

This post shouldn’t exist. I originally wanted to make a video to trash this game—I even had the style mapped out, something like AVGN or Ao Changzhang doing lighthearted snark. I had shots and camera angles in my head and everything. But then I thought about it and couldn’t decide whether to make my YouTube debut, so I shelved the video. Plus it’s a hassle. Typing is easier. The game I’m trashing today is called “Timepiece Ensemble.” And honestly, I didn’t play it because of Kiritani Hana, nor because I had a good impression of the studio Glace from before—I played it because of the artist, Sesenaau. Sesenaau is a female artist, and her characters always have this element of feminine “cuteness” that male artists just can’t capture. I’ve always thought that’s a big advantage of female artists: male artists can only draw girls that are super erotic, while female artists can draw cuteness on a spiritual level. It’s not that male artists can’t draw cute things—it’s just that it always feels fake, like it has no soul. So I saw this game called Timepiece Ensemble, and it was announced it’d be ported to PSV soon, so I skimmed the intro. It’s simple: the protagonist is preparing for the school culture festival and stumbles upon a mysterious shop. The shopkeeper says she can sell him “time”—the ability to rewind time. He doesn’t know what use that ability has, but that’s how the story begins.