I’m not an NTR fan and I honestly can’t wrap my head around how NTR fans think. Still, Japanese eroge are packed with NTR subject matter, for better or worse. NTR here doesn’t mean what grade-schoolers mean by “the girl you like doesn’t like you, she likes someone else.” It’s 寝取る — and the meaning is simple: your wife, your spouse, your lover, your girlfriend got slept with by someone else. Put plainly, you got cuckolded. Even if you’ve spent years lurking Reddit, ACFUN, the greening street, and the Thunder Bluff of 5ch, I’ve never once seen a guy discover he’s been cuckolded and feel happy about it. So yeah, the NTR fan mindset is hard to get. And yet NTR games keep coming out. Plenty of companies make them, some even set up a dedicated brand just for NTR titles to chase that specialist credibility. Like this one, Houkago ni Midareru Ane Kyoushi to Tonari no Heya de Aegu Imouto (放課後に乱れる姉教師と隣の部屋で喘ぐ妹 ～恋人になった女の子が、知り合いの嫌な男に寝取られる～), which bills itself as a standard NTR game.

Whirlpool — I used to have a pretty good impression of them. Stuff like the old whale-fucking, the robot-fucking, and the early dragon princess-fucking, etc. etc. Feels like Whirlpool just loves playing with human-beast… oh wait, I mean human and mixed-blood. Maybe that’s just their style. And so Whirlpool’s new game this year just popped out of nowhere, then out of nowhere it was out and on sale… I’d been thinking it wasn’t coming out until May… The new title is Nekonin Exheart (猫忍えくすはーと), and the premise is dead simple: two cat-eared ninjas show up at the protagonist’s ancestral home, claiming they’ve come to serve as his bodyguards and retainers. That’s the setup everything else hangs on. So I made a point of hammering these facts: the game itself only costs 2000 yen, and it’s only the first-press edition that comes with a hug pillow that runs 13000 yen. See? Remind you of anything? Sound like the XXX no Seiiki series? Yep — this game is basically following that series’ playbook. The appeal here is pretty clear-cut: short story, simple plot, good art.

Everyone knows I’m not a moe-otaku. Even so, I still look up to moe-otaku. Years ago — probably five or six by now — I was dead set on becoming one. Back then I was still watching anime, and when it comes to the stuff that was big around then, it’s gotta be K-On, right? At the time the Bilibili homepage was still wall-to-wall muscle bro memes, so if you wanted to watch shows you had to go to Acfun. But Acfun’s shitpost section was full of K-On MADs — the Cagayake!GIRLS MADs alone were everywhere, completely out of hand lol… I listened to it so much I could sing it. So sometimes when I saw that crowd spamming “My great Kon!” over the song, I couldn’t help feeling a little like I didn’t get it… There’s a reason I can’t wrap my head around it — I watched K-On! for real, seriously, but I just couldn’t keep going.

For something like visual novels, I’ve seen plenty of people claim they’re all about the story and don’t care about the art style. Yet 99% of the time, their avatars in ACG circles are still cute girls. This isn’t surprising, really — everyone appreciates a pretty face. And for something like visual novels, which in the mouths of Sendai aunties sits not far from Adult Video, judging by looks is about as normal as it gets. In other words, for a visual novel trying to boost sales and expand its reach, the first thing you need is good-looking characters. It’s rare to see a game with ugly-as-hell character art still sell like hotcakes — maybe Gakuen Handsome (学園ハンサム) counts as the exception? So if a game’s characters aren’t drawn well, you can basically declare it dead on arrival. Unless the character has some long history and a massive fanbase behind her—but even then, you’re only fooling the diehard fans, and only a fraction of them at that. You won’t reach the “silent majority” of users, and what good is that? Definitely not gonna work. So the first time I laid eyes on Kanojo to Ore no Renai Nichijou (彼女と俺の恋愛日常), I was dead sure this thing had to be trash.

Tsukikage no Simulacre was last year’s supposedly “free” “visual light novel”—and oddly enough, it’s rare for Japanese developers to label their own work that way. They usually just call it an eroge. And just like that “free” game said at the end, it only told an incomplete story. There were a ton of loose ends, and the devs themselves said the free version wasn’t the point—the real deal was the project coming after it. So what was that project? Well, look, the January eroge release schedule has a new entry called Tsukikage no Simulacre -Kaihou no Hane-, doesn’t it? Right—that free version was literally just a “trial edition.” A demo, basically. The final version is this game. Honestly, when you think about it, they just released a demo early, then put out the full game later. Dressing it up as “first we give you the free part, then the follow-up project” is the same old playbook.

I watched the Spring Festival Gala over Chinese New Year. Actually I’ve always watched it. I don’t know if it’s genuinely getting worse every year, but from where I’m sitting it’s definitely gotten less interesting — I can’t remember a damn thing from it anyway. A few days later I went back and watched a couple of the performances on YouTube, and they seemed… fine? At least there was something to them. And today I’ve already forgotten those too. Why? Setting aside the political bits and the self-congratulatory propaganda, some of the song-and-dance numbers, skits, and crosstalk are decent enough. While you’re watching you might catch a joke and think “oh, that’s clever,” or “that’s pretty funny.” Then it ends, and there’s nothing “gripping” about it, and you forget the whole thing. Basically: not terrible, not great, no real highlights, and not much heart in it either. You watch it, you laugh, you forget it. Some games are like that too. Like this one — Kimi no Hitomi ni Hit Me (キミの瞳にヒットミー).

Sometimes I think about this: so many scenario writers in Japan do original drafts for anime and games — are they just mass-producing the same thing over and over? …………I mean, whatever a given writer puts out, doesn’t it always follow one pattern no matter how you look at it? Code Geass, Guilty Crown, Valvrave, and the latest one — what was it called? Kabaneri? I’m not saying Ichiro Okouchi is bad; the man won a best screenplay award, didn’t he? I’m talking about visual novels — whether some writers end up reusing the same套路 across multiple games. I noticed this pretty early on. For example, the Shiiba route in Yuzusoft’s Sanoba Witch overlaps heavily with the Riru route in Kujira Kami no Tiastila, which came out not long after. I don’t know if that’s Tota’s doing or just coincidence. But a “competent scenario” shouldn’t have the problem of “can’t adapt, only ever writes one path” — otherwise you’re just showing how tapped out you are. But man… for Hoshi Koi * Twinkle… I don’t even know what to say anymore…

Someone once said that in a highly mature market, to raise production efficiency and lower costs, everything gets strictly standardized — even put on an assembly line. Which is why Japan, that special place where eroge still actually sells, is no exception for something like the visual novel. Before I started RSS-subscribing to various release sites, I wouldn’t have believed it — turns out there are a shitload of new eroge coming out in Japan every single week. The release lists alone are a sea of stars, like falling into an ocean of porn where one mouthful of semen-flavored seawater chokes you until you feel like you’re drowning in it. Lots of releases doesn’t mean high quality. Aside from the monthly big releases, most are small productions or just selling pure porn appeal, not much quality to speak of — the kind of thing you play for a bit and move on. It’s like liking horror novels: you can camp out at the bookstore for new releases, or you can wallow in 5ch horror threads chasing web serials. Different taste, different flavor. But once you’ve seen enough, you start noticing patterns — especially in a market as mature as Japan’s… Uh… I mean, even for eroge there’s a “basic formula” baked in. Most studios that want to play it safe follow that formula. Sales might not explode, but they sure won’t tank either… Games like that have passable art, passable voice acting, passable writing, a passable price tag, and end up being a passable eroge… Which brings us to Koi wa Yumemiru Mouretsu Girl! (恋は夢見る妄烈ガール!) — one of those “about right” eroge.

I’ve never had hemorrhoids, so I have no idea how much they hurt. And since I’ve never had them, I don’t really get how you’re supposed to treat them either. Someone told me it’s basically your asshole rotting, and only suppositories will do… okay, maybe that’s crude, but it’s the truth. Internal, external, mixed — I never bothered learning the difference, which is why I’m saying all this: I genuinely don’t know whether a person can shove a suppository up their own butt. And since I don’t know that, some game premises just leave me lost… like this one, Nukige Imouto ga Ji ni Natta node Zayaku o Irete Yatta Ken (妹が痔になったので座薬を入れてやった件).

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!