Lately the stuff I’ve been playing has been a bit unusual — either hand-chopping, big meat grubs, or hookup — and after wandering the non-traditional aisle for so long, I couldn’t help but miss plain old moe. So when I was grabbing January releases, I figured I’d look for something light and fun. That’s how, among the January titles, while downloading Toukyou NECRO, I stumbled on this thing called Hanikami Clover. Compared to whatever Toukyou NECRO is doing, Hanikami Clover is obviously on the classic cute-girl-game track. So I got hyped, saw it was Ryokucha-soft, figured Ryokucha wouldn’t screw anything up — Minamijuujisei Renka (南十字星恋歌) got decent reviews, so this probably wouldn’t be a disaster either. Then I checked the official site for the cast: the first heroine is obviously Gotou Mai, and Hanikami Clover also has Akinohana, Sendai Eri, all solid voices. The most explosive part, though, was when I later watched the game’s OP. The dere-dere student council president, the sweet senpai, the lewd girlfriend, the little sister who’s a failure-of-a-brother manufacturing machine — all wrapped in a tempting, rhythm-heavy montage. The tagline was “a love story with a slightly H her.” Honestly, that OP makes it look like a moe-nukige, but hey, at least it beats hand-chopping big meat grubs and hookup games, am I right? Going by years of experience, this had to be a cheerful charmer of a moe game — and even if it’s a nukige, it’d be a comedy nukige, a light and fun one with no special effects. Playing it would definitely be a good time. My reaction at the time was:

LOVEREC. -Mini Theaters- is the fandisc for Loverec. Honestly, LoveRec is a pretty solid game. This fandisc, though? It’s… bone-dry. The whole thing is 1.95 GB. The story picks up right where the original ended—the protagonist is about to graduate, and the white-haired little sister plans to sell the film she shot at the next C90. Everyone’s trying to make it happen. Yeah… except that’s just the prologue. The actual filmmaking never comes up.

I’m pretty open-minded. If a game’s supposed to have an interesting story, I’ll give it a shot — moe, otome, BL, mystery, guro, whatever. Tokage no Shippo Kiri is a guro game. Actually, every game this developer puts out is guro, and there’s a funny pattern: most guro and hardcore titles get surprisingly high praise. They’re supposed to make you uncomfortable, yet tons of people sing their praises, and a lot of them say shit like “yeah it’s guro, but the story is so healing.” I genuinely don’t get that take. Guro is just a device; the actual story is what matters. A kid named Xiaoming helping an old lady cross the street, Xiaoming on crutches after a car crash still helping an old lady cross the street, and Xiaoming with a vibrator up his ass still helping an old lady cross the street — they all mean the same thing. Sometimes obsessing over those details really is pointless. It’s seasoning. The main dish is the same. So how does Tokage no Shippo Kiri fare? How’s the seasoning? How’s the main dish? Short answer: it’s pretty fucking bad.

Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o is PullTop’s release from the end of this year. Honestly I hadn’t really touched this company’s games before — well, that’s not quite right either. What I’d played were mostly works from its sub-brands, like Natsu Iro Recipe, like Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort… The company did have that one pretty impressive game, Kono Oozora ni, Tsubasa o Hirogete, but I never got around to playing it. The marketing angle from the start was “same staff as Kono Oozora ni, Tsubasa o Hirogete,” with the theme being staring up at the stars and astronomical observation. Unlike the earlier plane-building game, this one locks its season to winter, around Christmas, which fit nicely with a December release. Ah — actually I wrote a big long intro for this and then realized I’d accidentally turned it into smut again, so let me just get straight to impressions. Keep going like this and there’s no turning back from the road of filth. Put simply: as a visual novel, this game is very good. But as a game “about astronomical observation,” it falls a bit short.

As a proud LASS hater, I’ve played almost every game this company (aka “Rass” — short for “shit company”) has put out, except for the early Nanako series. I’m talking 3Days, 11eyes, Shoujo Shinki, Mayoeru Futari, plus their fandiscs and all the different versions and whatnot. Honestly, ever since Shoujo Shinki took a massive dump and turned a great setting into an utterly self-indulgent landmine, I’ve been thinking: when the hell is this shit company gonna go under? So I waited and waited, until Mayoeru Futari was announced, then delay after delay after delay. And what did I get? The game wasn’t the landmine I expected — just dumb and bland as tap water, with art that was straight-up weak. Every girl’s tits bigger than the last, each with a more seductive look in her eyes, moaning louder and louder during H scenes. I was overjoyed… practically trembling with glee, dripping wet with excitement. Not because big tits do it for me, but because I finally saw it: this shit company is done for.

Generally speaking, Japanese doujin games come in all shapes and sizes, but apart from the ones with no story that you just play, most of the story-driven ones are short, have mediocre artists, so-so music, and amateur voice acting. Story is usually the only thing they can win on, since it’s relatively easy to throw together. Good artists, good voice actors, and good composers don’t exactly grow on trees. Put simply, most doujin game circles don’t have much money, so they can only afford small-scale projects. If they actually had cash, they’d just set up a proper company and sell real games instead of operating as some awkward in-between doujin circle. But there are exceptions to everything. I’ve played some genuinely impressive doujin games, and even doujin galge can be surprisingly luxurious—like Unmanto’s Hakoniwa no Gakuen. First off, the character art for Hakoniwa no Gakuen is by Kuwabara Riko. That alone is enough to sell it, and on top of that there’s an absurdly stacked voice cast: Hidaka Rina, Tokui Sora, Kakihara Tetsuya, Numakura Manami… Everything’s in place—all it needs is a halfway decent script and this game could stand alongside proper company releases. But… reality is cruel, and the story ruins the whole thing.

During a matchmaking session with a music teacher, she asked me a question: “What was your youth like?” I have to say, there aren’t many questions in this world that can completely leave me speechless, but this one definitely counts.

Let’s talk about Lump of Sugar for a second. Back when I didn’t know any Japanese (still don’t, for the record), I figured this studio was hot shit. Mostly because the name sounded nice and because everyone and their dog kept holding forth about it. And whenever someone says “Lump of Sugar,” I picture an elegant girl sitting on a street corner in the afternoon, watching the crowd drift past under the awning, dropping a sugar cube into her coffee with pale fingers. Very atmospheric, very mood. But mood is mood, and in reality Lump of Sugar is just a company that makes porn games. Yeah — the kind that otaku love to gab about, big tits bracketed by mosaic, flesh-colored straws spraying white gunk. The feeling is like that elegant girl I just described taking a sip of her coffee, then suddenly shuddering, cheeks flushing, all because the black uncle running the shop next door has a remote-controlled vibrator stuffed inside her. The whole thing changes in an instant…

First off, let me confirm that Twinkle Crusaders (ティンクル☆くるせいだ) is indeed a galgame. (dead serious) Visual novels have always been treated as digital novels, and some studios have tried to do something with the systems to make us feel like it’s a game, but most of them failed… Twinkle Crusaders is the first game that changed my mind about that…

できない私が、くり返す。 left a decent impression on me, and not because of the art or anything like that — mostly it was a bunch of people saying it’s a “tearjerker” and “the best.” Generally a game that most people approve of can’t be that bad, so I played it during June when there was nothing else out. The title is weird. Going by my Japanese level of a one-year-old infant, I think it’s trying to say that no matter how many times I go back, I can’t change a damn thing. Early on, the protagonist gets a pocket watch from a big-sister type named Ren, who tells him it can travel through time and return to the past. “But there’s no point in going back, because the future can’t be changed.” A time leap that can’t change the future is basically useless, and Ren hammers it in every time she talks about the watch: 未来は変えられない So the story begins five years after big sis Ren dies, at the moment the watch-holding protagonist meets a girl named Shino.