I’ve always thought of Lucle as something of an outlier among scenario writers in the visual novel market. While other works were still stuck on surface-level romance full of anime stereotypes, Lucle used theatrical prose and direction to deliver something genuinely different — a dimensional strike against a VN scene already frozen into “chuuni philosophy,” “dark and edgy,” and “cookie-cutter school confessions.” After Mahou Tsukai no Hako (紙の上の魔法使い), Suisou Ginka no Istoria (水葬銀貨のイストリア), Sora ni Kizanda Parallelogram (空に刻んだパラレログラム), and Meikai no Rupekaria (冥契のルペルカリア), Lucle went quiet for a long stretch with no new work. Some say he got lazy, but I doubt it. If you’ve followed his narratives, or really sat down and experienced them, it’s easy to spot Lucle’s three favorite tricks: a miserable fate built on contradictions, a weak-willed protagonist, and a villain who whispers demonic temptations at him for the long haul — plus a genius character whose presence he uses to show ordinary people their own inferiority. Meikai no Rupekaria was already the culmination, a distillation of everything Lucle could bring. You can see echoes of his earlier works all over it. Sometimes I think Lucle burned himself out finishing Meikai no Rupekaria. Or, to put it more bluntly: he ran out of material.

I first heard about Inverted Angel because I’m a fan of Nakamura Sanso—she sings the theme song (ED) for it. At first I figured it was just a simple little romance piece, or maybe one of those indie things with a bit of meta and philosophy tossed in, the usual slightly-deep-bait template. Then I actually played it, and I couldn’t help but say out loud: “What the hell is this?!”

The Playdate is a handheld made and sold by Panic, the studio behind the well-known game Firewatch — or rather, that game is exactly what gave the team the starting capital to build this thing. As a handheld, the Playdate has a grayscale reflective display that’s supposedly on par with e-ink (no backlight), a small enough size, a yellow shell, and a button layout reminiscent of retro handhelds. It looks very refined at first glance, but the real standout is the “crank” on the side that tucks in and pulls out. This kind of control device is probably the first I’ve seen in the “handheld” category.

I bought this game ages ago but never had time to actually play it. Finally got around to finishing it recently. Same familiar flavor as when I played Zanghua: Anhei Taohuayuan (葬花·暗黑桃花源), but improved in a lot of places. Overall it left me genuinely pleased, and even surprised me a few times. Let me state my stance up front: Efu: Mingmo Qianlixing (饿殍：明末千里行) is a very good game. Building on its predecessor Zanghua: Anhei Taohuayuan, it fixes a lot of the weak points, and honestly it’s the most “correct” game I’ve seen this year in terms of production choices. The studio has found the right approach, and sticking with it will definitely lead to bigger success.

Everyone goes through a chuuni phase. When I was young I loved collecting “really deep, philosophical” lines, treated them as gospel, and quoted them constantly to look like I had some kind of inner depth. Stuff like “humans are all selfish,” “humans are just animals driven by primal urges,” “society is dark,” “the world is one big conspiracy”… and so on. Guess everyone’s got their own personal Black Myth going on. Say that stuff now and it just feels embarrassing. It’s not that those lines are wrong—a lot of them are straight-up facts—but they’re all “correct nonsense.” “Humans are ugly, selfish, profit-driven…” (sounds even better in Japanese, some 人類とは…… type shit) Yeah, and? No shit. Does repeating it let you exploit these “human weaknesses” to make money? Or do you have some way to free humans from those “weaknesses”? If anything, the guy who keeps chanting about them is himself living inside them 24/7. Once you’re an adult and you’ve seen enough, most of this stops surprising you. What you care about is how to make yourself feel good, in a more practical sense. If something pisses you off, either change it, accept it, or put up with it. Anything else is just noise. That’s reality, sure, but in games and films this kind of material still sells. In reality we’re powerless, but in a virtual world we can fantasize about saving the world. So even in the visual novel space, the “become a creator god” premise is popular—parallel worlds popping up everywhere, giving you that high-tier-being experience of watching the seas turn to mulberry fields, a thousand years in a glance. Which brings us to Uzumaki-sha’s Hajimeru Sekai no Risouron (はじめるセカイの理想論).

I actually played this game a while ago — I even wrote a commercial piece on it — but I never got around to blogging about it, mostly because I forgot. I’ve forgotten almost the entire plot too. If I hadn’t been sorting through files today, I’d have pretty much erased the fact that I ever played it. So what kind of game is this? According to SMEE, it’s not just any game — it’s a commemorative game. Commemorating what, exactly? First, it’s SMEE’s 15th anniversary title. Second, it commemorates SMEE’s cumulative sales hitting 150,000 across all its games. The first time I saw those two “commemorations,” I nearly lost it. What kind of commemoration is this? Since when does 15 years even warrant one? And it’s not even a real “15th anniversary” — look closer and it turns out the project was conceived during the 15th anniversary… holy shit, that counts too. And this is the first time I’ve ever seen “cumulative sales” used as a reason to commemorate something. It reads like someone forcing out content when they’ve got nothing left.

I’ve been playing fewer galgames lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve left the scene — I’ve just played a bunch of stuff and haven’t felt like writing about any of it. And since that last post, I’ve upgraded my “gal machine” too: swapped it out for a GPD Win Mini, which I’ve been using ever since. This little thing is honestly better than I expected. As a “gal game player,” I can’t find anything more suitable right now. I’ve said before that if I ever bought another GPD product I’d eat shit, but this little guy has somehow become GPD’s best product to date, and the “gal machine” I’d recommend most. So, well — time to eat.

Years ago — don’t ask me where, probably the Google Play Store — I came across a game called Boku no Kanojo wa Ningyo Hime!? (My Girlfriend Is a Mermaid Princess!?). It was a mobile game, but it looked like a visual novel. I didn’t have time for it back then, so it went on the pile. Later I found out it had actually been ported to PC and put up on Steam, complete with a bunch of language options. So at some point it ended up in my Steam library… Well, I have to admit it: I’ve been “cleaning out” the visual novels in my Steam library lately, so this Mermaid Princess became the next target. I did finish it, and picked up all the achievements along the way. But when it comes to actually reviewing it, I find it hard to say anything.

Love Love School Days is a game I played a while back. Gotta say, this one’s got serious legs — and it’s perfect for streaming, absolutely packed with content. The map is randomized every run, so replayability is through the roof. No saves either, so you can’t just memorize the layout and save-scum your way through. It’s a “horror chase” type game, so the tension is high and it gets the streamer’s adrenaline pumping. There are plenty of “counterintuitive” tricks built in, which makes it even better on stream. So yeah, a game this good, and nobody in China seems to stream it. Probably because there’s no Chinese version. I’d originally 100%’d it, then a while back I noticed the game had gotten an update — and my full achievement set had vanished. My OCD forced me back in, and it turned out to be way more fun than before.

Around 2016, I think. Google+ was still alive back then, and I had this massive urge to express myself—I just really wanted to write something. I was super active in a Google+ community that had these “three-topic snacks” prompts, where they’d give you three related or unrelated words and you’d write a story around them. Eventually I got it into my head to write this insanely badass novel, serialized. I was still deep in my chuuni phase, and I’d played way too many visual novels, so the stories in my head naturally took on that shape. The idea was a story about an edgy male lead and a heroine at school. Students start dying mysteriously, but it turns out they all killed themselves, and the mastermind behind it is the cute, cheerful, harmless-looking heroine who has a hidden dark side. Using her secret identity, she lures students online, draws out their inner darkness, and talks them into suicide or into hurting each other—all for fun. She keeps her identity perfectly hidden, and since she never directly kills anyone, she can’t really be held responsible. The male lead keeps investigating because of a friend’s death, and the heroine hides who she is and investigates alongside him. The final boss is right next to you—that kind of feeling. Looking back now, that story is chuuni as hell, and a lot of it is immature and childish. But I still don’t think the subject matter is bad. If anything, it’s something you can always write, because I firmly believe that so-called “demonic whispering” really can drive a person to death. Everyone in modern society is under a ton of pressure, facing all kinds of pain, and it’s not uncommon to be unable to take it and momentarily lose hope. But what I want to talk about isn’t the story itself. Recently I realized that someone actually wrote the story I wanted to write back then, and turned it into a game… It’s this Steam hit, Seven Days Until the Protagonist Dies.