Visual novel blurbs have gotten seriously dishonest in recent years. Like, if a game claims it’s “pure love,” watch out. 90% chance it isn’t. If a game tells you it’s “a very quiet, uneventful story,” be suspicious. It won’t be uneventful. If a game tells you it’s yuri, there’s a good chance it’ll inform you the heroines are a bunch of guys’ cum dumpsters. If a game says “Now on sale to great reviews,” it already got shredded. Today I’m talking about a game that’s honest in every conceivable way. Seriously, in all my years of playing these things, I’ve never seen a game this honest. Umi to Yuki no Cyan Blue (海と雪のシアンブルー), from CUBE.

The Japanese love telling stories, and they especially love telling legends. Unlike Chinese legends, which mostly “stick to a certain framework,” a lot of Japanese legends go completely off the rails. This has to do with the Japanese idea of “eight million gods” — everything is a deity, so who isn’t a little kami? On top of that, many Japanese myths have a certain “Buddhist” flavor, mostly built on the idea of reincarnation. They love telling a legend about a god, and the legend also involves reincarnation — no matter how things develop, it always becomes a circle connected end to end, all to create some kind of thought-provoking effect. But play that trick too many times and it numbs you. At least it numbed me. I usually call this kind of plot “Japanese-style melodrama that refuses to speak like a human being.”

Everyone knows I like games that pull shitposts. Of course, “I” don’t represent the whole world, so from what I understand, most people who play games — especially visual novels — don’t really like shitpost-y works. You can see this in the little details. For example, I often see people on some forum, when a new release drops, asking: “Does this game have any landmines?” “Is this game pure love?” Both of these can basically be translated as: “Is this game just a plain romance routine?” What I genuinely can’t understand is the “plain romance routine” thing. Ever since the visual novel genre was born, it’s been fixed — at least 20 years now. Is it really necessary to repeat the same story over and over and over again for 20 years? Recently a game pulled a shitpost again, and a big one at that — so big that even the publisher distanced themselves, and players worldwide were cursing it out… That game is the Chinese-first, Steam-exclusive yuri work: Suteki na Kanojo no Tsukurikata (素敵な彼女の作り方)

I. A while back, my workplace went through a pretty brutal stretch of overtime. The work itself wasn’t much — just a system upgrade. Once the main system was upgraded, we had to debug the software and interfaces that talk to it. After that, we could go home. Sounds simple, right? The catch: the main system upgrade had to happen in the middle of the night and took several hours. The estimate was that the main system would finish upgrading around 2 a.m., and our auxiliary systems could only start testing after 2. By the time we wrapped up, it’d be 3–4 a.m. The original plan was to upgrade on Saturday, then use Sunday—when fewer people are on the system—to test and fix issues, so everything would be ready for Monday. That plan fell apart fast. Saturday’s upgrade went terribly.

That one Aonatsu Line everyone hyped to hell and back got a spiritual successor a little over a year later: Yukiiro Sign (ユキイロサイン). Why “spiritual successor”? Same writer, same artist, different company — some outfit called wonder fool. I’m all for them ditching the shitshow that is GIGA, but wonder fool isn’t exactly a saint either. Look at the garbage they’ve put out. Feels like they’re just publishing leftovers nobody else wanted. Anyway, I was still hyped, because Aonatsu Line was goated, so this had to be goated too. A bunch of otaku were dying to feel their youth again through this game (even though they never had one). Then it came out and I played it, and I have to say, unfortunately: this game does not deliver what most people wanted.

Rukuru’s first new game in two years, and honestly, from the moment 冥契のルペルカリア’s setting was announced, I felt very… uncomfortable. First off, the title alone looks like people are going to die. Then the character designs straight-up contain elements from 紙の上の魔法使い, which had me suspecting the game was trying to coast on past glories. That said, neither the synopsis nor anything else explicitly states what 冥契のルペルカリア has to do with 紙の上の魔法使い — just a bunch of plausible-sounding edge-balling. Even the CVs don’t line up; I remember the witch being voiced by 小倉結衣, not メイ大姐. I took a look at the plot summary and it turned out to be stage-play focused, which killed my interest even more. But the scenario writer’s skill is still there, and last year had basically nothing with a decent story, so I went ahead and played it on faith in Rukuru. The whole playthrough was a mess — at one point I lost my eroge machine, then it broke down again, and I finally stumbled my way to the end. Hmm… how should I put it. The quality was about what I expected, but there were some disappointing parts too. So let me just run through it briefly.

Kaiko no Okurimono (蚕の贈り物) is something I stumbled on by accident — a tiny indie game… The premise is dead simple: in a fairy forest there’s a moth youkai. It’s a moth, so its lifespan is short, and before it dies it wants to do something to prove it once lived… To stay faithful to the “moths don’t live long” thing, the game actually slaps a time limit on you. Of… one minute. Yep. The game is one minute long.

2020 was a rough year for everyone, eroge makers included, so there were way fewer games to play this year and way fewer that actually landed. And I played about as many as always… meaning not fewer. I went through 41 eroge in 2020, which somehow matches 2019 exactly. So I genuinely got worse this year. I’m supposed to be phasing this out gradually… That said, there seemed to be more games worth recommending this year. Though I clearly felt one thing — visual novel music just doesn’t hit anymore. Honestly, I tried to put together a list of “OPs and EDs that sounded good this year” and came up nearly empty. The lesbian game’s OP was decent, but frankly I didn’t even want to collect OSTs this year, so I’m skipping music entirely. Let’s just talk about the games. Here’s what “I personally” thought was good in 2020.

QUINCESOFT’s big 2021 opener, and it made me spit out my drink. Gohoushi Akuma to Oshioki Tenshi (ごほうしアクマとオシオキてんし), written as ご奉仕悪魔とお仕置き天使 — “the demon who does maid duty and the exiled angel.” This thing hit me hard enough that we should set the game aside for a moment and first go over how this label called QUINCESOFT even came to be.

The eroge market has been shrinking hard these past few years. Plenty of studios can’t be bothered making “story games” anymore and have all pivoted to short, punchy fanservice nukige, dressed up as “the pursuit of sweet romance.” In reality it’s just low-cost nukige to recoup money. Everyone knows these games have no substance — you’re here for the CGs — and the devs know it too, so they stuff more CGs in. And since a budget title needs more than one volume, they draw a bunch of heroines up front and sell them off in pieces. Small margin, high volume. Why not? Today’s subject is Itchokusen (Shojo→) Kanojo to Koi Shitai, from COSMOS, a small label under Windmill. If you ask me, the game has exactly two highlights. One is the artist Tsukimoto Jin — the art is genuinely good, and the heroine is genuinely beautiful. The other is the original concept by Houmori Kei. Because Houmori Kei may be an old pervert, but he’s decent at writing “sweet romance” stuff. His old light novel Ore mo Omae mo Choro Suginai ka was pretty good: the male lead desperately wants a girlfriend but is kind of flippant, confesses to anyone he sees, and then by some mix-up ends up confessing to our heroine, who — get this — earnestly and seriously accepts. And so the two begin a relationship where they put the cart before the horse…