前一阵玩nukige太多了，然后nukige玩多了又玩了一票废萌キャラゲー，觉得自己还是应该回到“故事导向”的基本路线上来，搜了下看到了我个人非常喜欢的《紙の上の魔法使い》的脚本师的一个早期作品，叫做《運命予報をお知らせします》,简单看了下日本人在中二空间对它的评价，觉得应该没问题，也就开始玩了。 The game is supposed to be only a dozen hours or so, but it felt longer than I expected. I came away pleasantly surprised, maybe because it’d been a while since I’d played something with writing this good. It got to the point that after finishing it, I booted up the newly released Floral Flowlove (フローラル・フローラブ) and just couldn’t take the gap in prose quality between the two. The former reads like something a college student would write; next to it, the latter is straight-up middle-schooler level…… Anyway, probably because my Japanese has gotten better, I’ve started finding a lot of really dumb phrasing genuinely stupid — it’s not just about clawing my way to understanding the meaning anymore.

I got into HookSoft games pretty early — back when I was still a virgin. I remember the one I played was called HoneyComing. I actually found it on the school FTP out of boredom, and it was one of those green install versions with no translation. I couldn’t understand the text back then, but the game did have a manga scanlated by Sumisora! I flipped through it out of boredom. Fortunately the setup was simple enough that after reading the manga, I could roughly follow the dialogue from the tone, the character sprites, and the occasional kanji. Something about an idiot protagonist taking a class on how to pick up girls at school… all that nonsense. I do remember there was this one girl with a chopstick stuck in her hair who was pretty cute. I liked her. Can’t remember her name now — something-gaya, I think. Anyway, I thought the game was pretty good at first. Mostly because the art was nice and the girls were cute. I wasn’t watching much anime back then, but this game really sparked something in me — activated my inner moe pig genes, I guess. Kind of nostalgic to think about. Oh, and it was definitely the 18+ version. First time I saw a girl gobbling down mosaic censorship, it scared the shit out of me so hard my dick got hard. Took me a while to calm down. But time flies. Nearly ten years later, that virgin who first touched a Hook game has grown up into an old virgin. Really makes you sigh — Time flies, huh. Though I don’t know why my eyes are watering as I sigh…

“Why did it end up like this… A perfectly good moe nukige brand, just like that, dead…”

Alcot is supposedly on its deathbed. First the pillar of the studio, illustrator Yushi Ninomura, up and quit — went home to play gacha games. So this year Alcot put out nothing but a cash-grab FD for LoveREC with a handful of new CGs, plus an even more blatant cash-grab, Clover Days Plus, which is just the HCGs converted to Emote. The Chinese patch shipped same-day, if that tells you anything. But even if the main studio is finished, they’ve still got the sub-label Alcot Honey Comb, which tends to put out bolder stuff. I’ve played plenty of theirs — Shunkai Gentei, Mujikaku Mirai, that sort of thing — and this time we get something with a very different flavor: Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta. I say “different flavor” because most Alcot games give off a slice-of-life, comedy-heavy vibe. Genuinely sad ones are rare (not that they don’t exist — that Shinigami no Kiss thing at the start probably counts as sad too). So Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta shows up waving the banner of “a romance between predator and prey.” Everything up to here was made up. I can’t keep it going, so I’ll just be honest: the reason I’m playing a 2014 game is that I was bored listening to music on YouTube, heard the OP, thought it sounded interesting, and picked it up.

Around November last year, ensemble (Ongaku-ka) put out a game called Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata, and I thought it was pretty good at the time. The story is whatever, but there are so many characters that you’re bound to like at least one of them — picking a route and going through it isn’t a bad way to spend time. So as everyone knows, Japanese devs are great at squeezing out surplus value. The moment something gets a decent reception, they’ll immediately crank out a sequel or an FD to milk another round of cash. Galgame or Shirouto Zukan 7, doesn’t matter — if there’s confirmed demand, they’ll keep selling. On that front Japanese devs have even less shame than Baidu. So less than two months after release, ensemble announced an FD for Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata, and the FD’s name is appropriately FD-ish: Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata Kasaneta Omoi o Zutto. Forever overlapping feelings, or whatever… It finally came out last month. The game isn’t big, only about 2 GB. Honestly I went in expecting the usual FD stuff — prequels, sequels, maybe a new hook. That might be because the ones I’ve played are things like Wheel Country and the Grisaia series. But really, an FD is basically an After Story: a forced extension of life for a story that already ended. For a character-driven game like this, an FD can only ever be garnish for the sex scenes. I was fully prepared to just skim through it. Didn’t expect this FD to actually have a few things that exceeded my expectations.

One of the writers on Harumade, Kururu is a guy named Watanabe Ryoichi. His latest work is Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, but before that he and his buddy Kio Nachi worked on a bunch of eroge, including some with seriously weird premises. I looked into it way back, and eventually noticed these works tend to share one thing: They love a mindfuck twist. Right at the end they tell you the protagonists were living in a dream, or that the world wasn’t the real one. One of the better-known Watanabe Ryoichi and Kio Nachi collaborations is Sukima Sakura to Uso no Machi. No prizes for guessing, that game ends with exactly that kind of reveal. Though the two weren’t the planners on that one, so who knows if it’s their fault. Anyway, Harumade, Kururu is one of these two madmen’s joint projects. Why’d I play it? Because the OP hooked me again, obviously. Harumade, Kururu… the art’s got those twisted faces again, but it’s not the full NekoNeko Soft crew so it’s not a total disaster. According to the reviews on Chuuni Space, the game wins on story, and I’m a story guy, so I figured I’d give it a run. That run took half a year. More precisely, I did the pre-OP and a chunk of the post-OP stuff first, then only recently finished the rest. How do I put this… the story is genuinely insane, tons of imagination. But this game should not be… this long.

First off, my coworkers, friends, and classmates basically have no idea I spend my time like some kind of hopeless wreck bingeing Japanese porn games. If they have to understand it at all, they just figure I’m watching anime and playing Japanese RPGs. Honestly they know squat about Japanese adult games — to them it’s all at the level of things like Tail Strike and Artificial Girl. Of course, there was one adult game whose name they all learned recently… Purely x Cation. Thanks to Ali213, thanks to the diligent reposting by sites like Chunan Beta, the news that “a Japanese adult game maker will use industry-leading Denuvo DRM to fight piracy” became common knowledge. I know AKBsoft president Kei Misumi hates piracy, but this whole putting-the-cart-before-the-horse move is something I really can’t understand. Honestly, when Purely x Cation was first being promoted, I watched the Youtube intro and thought it looked pretty good — the E-mote effects especially were spot-on, way above some things like Maitetsu. But the president always rushes out to flex and beg to get slapped down. Last time that game The Office Worker’s Hookup… oh no, Romance Situation got cracked half a day after release and slapped him in the face, and I felt kind of bad for him, but this time he comes out provoking people again and I really don’t know what to say. Doesn’t he know the way to make real money is to keep your head down? Besides, I had actually considered buying the legit version of this game, because Denuvo isn’t that easy to crack — if it really came out and I couldn’t play it, that’d be a shame. But then I looked at the bonus items on the game’s official site and I was speechless. Apart from one illustration there was basically nothing. I don’t know if the president spent all the money on the DRM. Given the well-known fact that “buying the game = buying the bonuses,” the president is still this stingy — how could this game possibly sell? Even someone like me, dying to play it, lost most of the desire to buy… I figured if there’s no crack, then just leave it, deal with it later. But reality is dramatic: two days after release the game got dumped and cracked. The cracker was quite smug about it too, saying the game didn’t use Denuvo at all, and the crack just bypassed the so-called online authentication. After all, this is a nukige with one of those engines everyone’s seen to death… Anyway, the president got slapped again. I don’t know what the president is thinking now. I just hope it doesn’t affect future games — adding more bonuses is the real way to go. So back to Purely x Cation itself: how is it? I can say it does live up to the promotional expectations — a romance-raising game that lets you experience the beauty of first love.

I’m personally a huge fan of horror-mystery stuff. Honestly, it’s exactly this kind of work that got me into reading in the first place. Why? Because horror-mystery always dangles a hook in front of you, pulling you along, making you curious enough to keep going. Compared to other works where you have no idea where the plot or story is headed, this is way better — it completely saved middle-school me, who’d just read a few modern novels and gotten his face caved in by those fantasy-ass books with no discernible main storyline.

“The world is big, but everyone is equal. Picking up girls isn’t the exclusive right of rich, handsome guys. Even a total loser with nothing can have the right to pick up girls.” “There are two ways to pick up girls. One is to win her favor, fight for the position of boyfriend, and finally round the bases.” “The other… is to become a girl-hunting hunter. Or, to put it simply, a girl hunter.”

Honestly, I didn’t want to play this game at first. The trial version had been out for ages and I kept skipping it, and I had my reasons. First, the OP just doesn’t grab you. I’ve been burned by OPs before—more than once—so that’s probably a weak spot in how I pick games. Second, the premise is way too light-novel. A princess from the underworld comes to the surface to destroy the world or whatever—how many times have we seen that? A heroine drops out of another world and runs into the protagonist? A dime a dozen. Third, the art style. It’s just too… sultry. I really didn’t like the character designs. Every girl looks like a sexually frustrated female rapist. Maybe I’m better off as a simple moe pig—cute art appeals to me more. So for these pretty dumb reasons I kept ignoring the game. But the game kept making moves—announcing an anime, running ads, going on sale. I started to wonder what kind of backing this studio had. Eventually I couldn’t take the flood of Twitter bombardment anymore and thought, fine, I’ll check out the trial… And then I fell down the rabbit hole. How to put it—the game is way, way, way, way better than I expected. Honestly, it’s a solid gem.