God knows why I played this game. Curiosity, probably. Koumuin Yamete, Ana o Horu Koto ni Shimashita (公務員辞めて、穴を掘ることにしました) The title sounds like a joke, and that’s exactly what it is: a 4399-tier doujin minigame. I don’t know if the old “Chengguang” platform is even still alive, but this is the kind of thing that would only exist on a site like that. The game is short. Our thoroughly goofy-looking protagonist ditches his shut-in wife at home to dig a hole by the front door, and ends up in another world. There are multiple endings—one where you dig down, come back up, and find your wife has run off with someone else; one where you tunnel through time and space. But the whole thing is just snark and shitposting, so you’re not expecting anything actually interesting out of it. And the “jokes” in this game are genuinely hard for me to parse. Maybe it’s because I’m not a young Japanese person, but my face the entire time was the old-man-staring-at-his-phone meme: “What the fuck is this? What’s supposed to be funny here?”

Sure, Akane Ikegami-sensei once reported my Twitter account and got it suspended, claiming I “spoiled” things and “leaked the protagonist’s dick length.” But considering how utterly moronic the visual novel industry has been lately, with each new release dumber than the last, by that horizontal comparison, Ikegami-sensei’s game here is still worth a look. Ore no Koi Tenshi ga Ponkotsu Sugite Kowai (俺の恋天使がポンコツすぎてコワ～い。) The こわ〜い here only really works if you drag out the vowel. The title follows the same pattern as that “yabai” series from before, just swapped to “kowai” this time. The meaning is dead simple: My love angel Cupid is way too much of a klutz and it scares me. Honestly, I knew exactly how this game was going to play out just from the title, and the opening had me spitting out my drink: 男主在路边捡到了一个“Love Note”，并且认识了一个自称是“丘比特”的天使，天使说只要在“Love Note”上写下你喜欢的人的名字，很快你就会和这个人产生邂逅。 Ah, wonder if the protagonist still has to hold onto this “Love Note” and become the god of the new world.

I still have a lot of affection for Niijima Yuu, because the game he wrote, Hatsuyuki Sakura, was the first one that made me go “whoa, a visual novel can actually do this?” Up until then, every visual novel I’d played was the same old clichéd school romance: talk to a girl every day, confess when the time comes, then fuck and roll credits. The fact that Niijima Yuu went and pulled off something genuinely unusual left me with a really good impression of him. After that, Niijima Yuu put out a whole string of new works — Majo Renai Nikki (魔女恋爱日记) and whatever that Shinai Kanojo thing was. A lot of the reception has been pretty hostile toward him, but I still think the guy’s got real talent; the visual novel audience just doesn’t get him. Sometimes I think he should be writing novels instead of stooping to make visual novels. Then I heard Niijima Yuu went off to hang out with that hack Maeda Jun, and the two of them started jerking each other off in public, which somehow spat out Summer Pockets. After that, Niijima Yuu got tangled up with the Makura guys again, heading off to work on Sakura no Koro… Right when I was about to forget all about Niijima Yuu, I noticed this month’s releases include something called アインシュタインより愛を込めて APOLLOCRISIS…

I thought about opening with a look at how this new MELLOW studio connects to the old MME, but the more I turned it over the more pointless it seemed. MME is dead. Better to just talk about the game. The game comes from “Tareka,” the most shitpost-happy scenario writer MME ever had — the one who’d casually write orgies and compensated dating, though every now and then he’d turn out something decent. So even before release, this one reeked of “he’s doing a bit again.” アサガオは夜を識らない。 The title reads downright literary in Japanese. アサガオ is written 朝顔 in kanji and refers to a purple… trumpet-shaped flower. In English, a morning glory. Literally translated, the title is “The Morning Glory Doesn’t Know the Night.” But the game reads 夜 as あい — the character for love, 愛. Which turns the title into “The Morning Glory Doesn’t Know Love.” Conveniently, the heroine is also named Asagao, so the pun lands: on paper it’s “the morning glory doesn’t know the night,” in practice it’s “the heroine doesn’t know love.” From the very first promo, the game kept insisting: this is a true “pure love” story. Anyone with experience knows what it means when a writer keeps hammering on “pure love.” Didn’t Gen Urobuchi call himself the “warrior of love” while claiming he was writing pure love too? Looking at the key art — the heroine cradling a bleeding rabbit — I steeled myself, felt a flicker of anticipation, and opened the game. Which, as it turned out, was the start of my disappointment.

Making*Lovers is an older SMEE game, and it got a lot of praise. Lots of reasons, but mainly: Great music Funny skits Cute characters Sweet romance Don’t know about everyone else, but those four are why I loved it. Then SMEE went off and did some messy isekai stuff, finally realized they should get back to basics, and put out this new game. Probably on a tight budget, because it’s wearing the skin of the previous work — same title, Making*Lovers — but to me these two games are fundamentally different.

Back at the start of the year, someone told me Yuzusoft was putting out a new title this year. Sure enough, it dropped a while ago — except nobody saw it coming that it would be an all-ages release. Yuzusoft launched a sub-brand called Yuzusoft Sour, i.e. “Sour Yuzusoft.” Which is a bit of a redundant name, honestly — yuzu is already sour… And the important part: the game itself, Parquet. Most Yuzusoft fans instantly lost their minds when they saw the new title was “all-ages,” but I’m fine with it. Yuzusoft can tell a decent story — Senren Banka alone proves that much. If they drop the low-effort “horny” and “fanservice” angle and go story-driven, that’s not automatically a bad idea. If the writing and direction are strong, this could be a good moment to pivot… “If the writing and direction are strong,” though… So is this game actually any good?

There’s this stock setup you see all the time in Japanese anime and games: the protagonist has no known origin, gets treated like a freak and pushed around, and then it turns out he’s actually some kind of savior. Of course Japanese works rarely say “savior” — nine times out of ten they call him a kamisama. Honestly, back when I first started consuming this stuff, hearing “kamisama” still commanded some respect from me. A god, right? Omniscient, omnipotent. Obviously possessed of a towering intellect, ample charisma, and virtues we mere mortals could never hope to reach — the kind of being who can look down on us and address us as “mortals,” bellow Die Mortal! and take a deep, smoldering breath. But then I noticed how utterly saturated anime and games are with kamisama, and I finally wised up: the so-called “god” in Japan is about as valuable as a shared bike. Shrines dedicated to them are, by the Japanese’s own snark, as commonplace as public toilets (and in reality Japanese public toilets are not fucking commonplace at all — half the time I can only find one in a subway station). As for the “gods” set up in these stories, you don’t need to take them seriously at all. Most gods in anime and games are more useless than ordinary people. And so along comes yet another game waving the “god” banner, from everyone’s old acquaintance Lump of Sugar.

FAVORITE games generally give off a certain impression: artsy, fantastical, and long-winded. Especially that one they put out before, Sakura, Moyu. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “nothing but filler,” but saying it’s “long and stinky” seems fair enough. The prose itself isn’t really the problem — it’s that there’s way too much of that “Japanese-style” circular beating around the bush. Sometimes you’ll be seriously following a two-person conversation for half an hour with zero story progress, and sleepiness hits you fast. Older FAVORITE games had this trait too, but nowhere near this bad, which is exactly why I could get through the Irotoridori no Sekai and AstralAir no Shiroki Towa series but have never been able to finish Sakura, Moyu. And FAVORITE as a company gives off this really mysterious vibe — their release pace is absurdly slow. But later I figured it out: they’ve got a “sub-label” under them called ωstar. As for what “masterpieces” ωstar has put out, well, if you know, you know. Considering the popularity and sales of those “masterpieces,” FAVORITE’s revenue probably isn’t doing too badly — at the very least, they’re a long way from going under. But clearly FAVORITE wasn’t content to just sit back and live off past glories. They wanted to expand further. In 2021, they quietly ditched the old logo they’d used for years and swapped in a more direct new trademark, tacking an even more direct slogan underneath it: The Next Generation. At the same time, they announced a new title: ハッピーライヴ ショウアップ! This new game left a lot of traditional “F-company” fans confused. Tsukasa wasn’t the main artist anymore, and both the scenario and planning no longer had Yukito Ushihara involved. The setting and story synopsis also looked “pretty ordinary” no matter how you sliced it — just a bunch of girls wanting to put on a show on stage. A change like this is going to disappoint a lot of old fans, but it also makes plenty of people curious: will the new-generation-focused FAVORITE really go mid just like that?

Lately Key seems to have lost its mind, suddenly dropping a bunch of projects, mostly short and quick little pieces. And the weird thing is, Jun Maeda — Key’s star player — is nowhere to be seen. After his latest anime blew up in his face, maybe his ass really did split in half and he retired for good. Either way, this is a good thing for Key. I’ve been sick of Maeda for a while now. Every story he writes follows the exact same pattern: set up something super compelling, some really interesting premise, then once the premise is laid out he starts padding the daily-life scenes, and finally he realizes he’s running out of time and can’t hold it together, so he slams the accelerator on a roller-coaster super-twist, wraps it up in a hurry, and leaves the Key fans who watched it shit the bed screaming impotently into the void. Anyone who’s seen Angel Beats and Charlotte knows exactly what I’m talking about. Good news is, none of Key’s recent projects have that dumbass Maeda in them～ Fantastic. This month they even released the first one, and I was instantly hyped. It’s called Loopers, and the scenario is by Ryukishi07. I don’t particularly like Ryukishi either, but hey, better than that dumbass Maeda! Plus the artist for this game is seriously good, so I dove right in. And then… after playing it, I’ve got a bone stuck in my throat. I have to talk about this.

Seeing this title, let’s first define what counts as a “failure” according to the usual forum argument rules. Everyone knows a visual novel goes through a process from “planning” to “production.” You could say the “planning” is the game’s goal and determines its direction. Following that logic, if the game’s production completely runs counter to the “planning,” or if the game itself never even fulfills the planning’s original goal, then the game can be considered a “failure.” So today, let’s talk about one such “failed” game.