Some eroge studios, to make their games’ themes clear, put together projects tied to the seasons. But sometimes those projects get a little ambitious, and they do a “four seasons series”… meaning four games, each set in a different season, each telling a different story. Wake up. Put away that kitchen knife and those razor blades you were about to mail to Japan—they didn’t even make it through customs. I’m not talking about Shinji Nii, I’m not talking about Natsuyume Nagisa, and I’m not talking about Hatsuyuki Sakura. I’m talking about the “Season Kana ABB” series put together by Watanabe Ryoichi and Kio Nachi.

For a lot of people whose entire knowledge of Japan stops at the Second Sino-Japanese War and at the level of Aoi Sora and Matsushima Kaede, the impression they have of the country is basically this: “perverted,” “off-the-wall,” “all kinds of fetishes,” “twisted,” and so on and so forth. It’s not hard to see why. At least in mainland China, the Japanese social news you come across is nothing but some foot fetishist sipping a Coke while licking a stranger’s feet for 30 minutes, some ear-cleaning massage parlor, all sorts of weird services, those utterly pointless but deeply disgusting otaku fleshlight things, people who eat a girl’s shit, people who drink her holy water, and on and on… By any reasonable standard Japan should be a country with very strict moral restraints, but that’s exactly why people cut loose harder when they do… Then again, is anywhere else any less twisted? I flipped through mainland social news and there’s no shortage of twisted stories. I know a girl I went to middle school with — she posted on social media that she ran into a purebred “foot fetishist” on the streets of Zhengzhou, who politely asked to photograph her feet specifically… and to kiss them… and she said yes. Hard to say whether that’s real “twisted” or “perverted,” but my point is that these people who clash so hard with social norms exist everywhere in the world. Japan just likes to drag them out under the spotlight. “Otaku” and “ACG” culture have seemed stuck in the swamp of “pornography” from the very start. Most of the content is about sex, even though most of the people consuming it have never had any… so the impression they give others isn’t great either. Which is why when a classmate introduced me to someone, they’d add helpfully, “Don’t worry about him, he’s a 2D person, he’s not interested in you.” and I’d sit there dying inside. Thanks to the bigger imagination that ACG culture spawned, Japan has a fun hobby: “moe-fication” and “girl-ification.” Can’t find a girl? Just turn the stuff around you into girls. Trains become girls — when you ride the train, it’s like you’ve entered the girl’s body. Pens become girls — when you grip the pen, it’s like you’re stroking the girl’s slender fingers… Cola becomes a girl — when you squeeze the bottle, it’s like you’re caressing black tights. Pocari Sweat becomes a girl — when you… okay, never mind. So whether it’s Anime, Comic, or Game (though the term ACG probably wasn’t coined by the Japanese — they say マンガ, not Comic), there’s always a game where some object gets turned into a girl and becomes the protagonist. Especially in visual novels. I’ve seen an alpaca turned into a girl, a whale turned into a girl, a robot turned into a girl, a camcorder turned into a girl, a train turned into a girl, a cursed sword turned into a girl, not to mention all the non-human ghosts and gods… and animals and whatever else. So at this point, if you told me there’s a game where a girl is a smartphone turned human, I wouldn’t even be surprised. Honestly, it feels less like surprise and more like “well, obviously.” I stroke my phone for half an hour every day. Was I subconsciously treating it as a girl all along?

I was already suspicious of Hatsukoi Sankai-me from the moment I saw the promo material. The title literally means “third-time first love.” First love is supposed to emphasize the first, right? Once you’re past the first time, the second one can’t be called a first love anymore. So how the hell do you get three of them? I wasn’t interested in the game to begin with. The promo looked whatever, the lead heroine was voiced by Sendai-baasan, and I didn’t recognize anyone else in the cast. The only reason I wanted to play it was the little sister voiced by Uehara Aoi… And no, I’m not a siscon. I need to make that clear. What I didn’t expect was that after playing it, it actually exceeded my expectations. Hell, it might be the first game this year I’ve seen that “gets its story completely straightened out.” At the very least it’s at the level of a good title, right? The only real mystery for me was why the protagonist’s romance is called a “third first love.” Honestly, I went in expecting the game to give me a proper explanation.

A lot of things in life come out of nowhere. You can’t sort them out by sheer personal effort — mostly it comes down to the course of history. Plenty of things happen out of the blue. Say you’re a shut-in otaku, and suddenly someone tells you they’ve got a new match lined up for you.

There are all kinds of “what if I could go back to school again” hypotheticals online, and plenty of discussions built on top of them. Not that I haven’t had the same thought. I’ve talked about the possibility with friends too. In high school I was a waste of space. Every exam I barely scraped a pass, teetering on the edge of the bottom of the year, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. I just kept going out to find internet cafes, or hitting up relatives’ places, or classmates’ houses that had a PC, dicking around on forums to see what was playable. I think I even saved up and bought a Pocket PC, kept refreshing the same few forums, and ended up a moderator on one of them. Young me was pretty garbage at studying, honestly. Chinese I learned by reading newspapers; English I learned by playing games. Math wasn’t that I didn’t get it — the teacher just never taught you how to derive anything. He’d shove the process at you, tell you to memorize it, and next time you see this kind of problem, do it like this. Physics I thought I knew, but the problems always came out wrong somehow. Chemistry I had zero interest in. My biology teacher looked at me like I was brain-damaged. Sometimes at night, when I’m studying Japanese and all sorts of stuff, I sigh at how good the internet is now. Never mind whether you can use Google — even if you hit a problem, you can search Quora and find plenty of people explaining the principle in plain terms. Back in my high school days, even getting online was a pain in the ass. And even though I could use Google freely back then, I couldn’t search up anything, because Chinese resources were far too scarce and my English wasn’t good enough yet. So to me the internet now is more like a “library” — quickly look up whatever knowledge you need. You don’t even need a textbook’s explanation. With some judgment, you can learn basically anything through the internet. And now I’m always sighing that I don’t have enough time to study, work is full of bullshit, and when I try to read a book my attention gets shredded by the internet after a while. If I could be sent back to school to study, I’d definitely be way more goated than the waste of space I used to be. So this “what if” — I’ve argued it with people. “You know what, if you put me back in school now to study, I’d absolutely kill it.” Haozhi across from me drained his beer after hearing my bragging. “Bullshit!” He dropped those two words… And left me sitting there dumbfounded. ………………

Kinda embarrassing to admit, but for someone who thinks of himself as a tough guy, my first time on a roller coaster was only 4 years ago. My workplace organized a free trip to some place in Zhengzhou called “Fantawild,” so that’s where I rode a roller coaster for the first time in my life. The feeling… hard to describe. All I know is it made my prostate very uncomfortable.

I once saw some otaku girls who play otome games complaining: “In most galgames the heroine kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat, and in otome games the heroine also kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat. Man, male-oriented or female-oriented, the heroine always has it rough. You get used to it.” Thinking about it, that’s pretty much true. In a lot of stories women are painted as fragile things that need a man to protect them. Even the “senpai” type in galgames tends to get a later scene revealing she’s not actually that strong and is secretly fragile inside. It feels like something baked into the gender roles themselves. But every so often a game tries to change that. Sure, seeing the heroine carry the hero the whole way through in a male-oriented game is unrealistic. Everyone knows the protagonist is “the weakest” by default, and, well, by the end he’s always some broken-ass cheat character anyway. So all we can do is look at female-oriented games and see if any of them dare to make the heroine the strongest. So 断罪のマリア (Maria of Condemnation) might be one of those games. Not entirely, but it’s close — at the very least, the heroine’s combat power is the strongest in the game.

Your Diary is a game by CUBE, and about… two years ago, I played the Chinese-patched version… Holy shit, it’s already been two years!!! I swear it felt like no time at all!!! Of course the impression that game left on me was still pretty good. Whenever someone who’s just getting into Galgame asks me for recommendations, I recommend this one. Reason’s simple: good art, good music, the story is a bit clichéd but not toxic, and it’s still a very orthodox, wholesome story — isn’t that perfect to hand to a newbie trying to get into Galgame! Back then I didn’t really look at what Japanese players thought of the game. Later, while reading up on CUBE, I checked it out, and found Your Diary doesn’t rate that high in Japan. I originally thought a story like this should get an 80, but it barely held onto a 70. What’s funny is some Japanese players called the game “boring.” Boring… that’s a hard one to call. My thinking at the time was that Japanese otaku probably love those “wild twists” and see Your Diary’s story as all formula, so they’d find it boring. Of course, if you asked me to look back on Japanese opinions now, I’d say they actually have a point…

Honestly, at this point I’ve basically turned into a pure moe-otaku. What’s a moe-otaku? It means I no longer care about plot or story direction. As long as the girls are cute and the voices are nice, I’ll fucking say the game is good, and if someone says it’s not, I’ll fucking find excuses to say it is, and so on and so forth… But you can’t really blame me, right? This is a world that judges by looks.

For a long time, one of the big reasons galgames get doubted and looked down on by a bunch of hardcore princess-type players is this: the damn thing doesn’t count as a game. Honestly, I don’t think it counts as a game either. At best it’s an audiobook. I’ve said more than once that when Westerners talk about Japanese eroge, the word they use is always Visual Novels. When our local Japanophile shut-ins are solemnly announcing “I’m playing eroge again this month,” the Westerners are all saying What are you reading?. Of course, galgames themselves have increasingly become novelized, gradually turning into commercial products that sell purely on art, story, music, porn, or even just first-press bonuses. Development costs aren’t high either—plenty of small doujin circles start out as galgame companies, and it has that vaguely Chinese-youth-startup vibe. But this thing wasn’t like that in the past.