There was a time when I was really into an artist named 白もち桜. Chinese fans render her name as “白餅桜” — I followed her Twitter account almost as soon as she opened it, and the funny thing is, she followed me back. That makes her the second artist to follow me, after 茉宮祈芹. I still think fondly of her characters. The one I liked most was probably ナツイロココロロッグ — the heroine genuinely moved me — and the character she handled in 魔女こいにっき felt like a step up in how the cast was written. Her characters are mostly faces paired with fangs and gorgeous outfits, and they really do feel girlish. The weakness is obvious too, though: same-face syndrome. Whatever she draws, it’s always the same face. She went on to work on some newer titles and drew plenty of illustrations, but honestly, I don’t see any real progress. Her characters always end up in the same handful of poses, always flashing their panties, always wearing that same smile… Gradually I stopped reacting to her characters. 茉宮祈芹, by comparison, spends most of her time drawing high-exposure lewds too, but she can still deliver genuinely appealing characters in actual games — TamaYura Mirai or whatever it was called. And more importantly, 白もち桜 hasn’t done original art for a galgame in ages. She even streamed once, playing Super Mario — and watching that was enough to spike my blood pressure. Then recently, out of nowhere, she came back. Partnered with Whirlpool, no less, on a little throwaway title whose name I literally cannot remember. It was something like… けもの道☆ガーリッシュスクエア

The game I’d been hyping up all last year, the one bro kept dumping on — Pieces / Wataridori no Somnium — got a sequel after a whole year… Sure, they call it a sequel, but it’s a fandisc any way you look at it — Pieces/揺り籠のカナリア, the canary in the cradle. Honestly, the fact that it got a fandisc surprised me. The original story was already over — if you’re making a fandisc, there’s basically no room for an after-story. Every protagonist wakes up from that “dream world,” and when the male lead and the heroine meet again, they’ve both lost their old memories. It’s just a fated reunion. What else is a fandisc supposed to say? Are they gonna have another go at it in the real world? Real life already has enough of that boring-as-hell “take a humblebrag, swallow it” type of douchebag like Chiku-niu. Not me, no thanks! Then the game got a demo, and I looked at it and immediately started roasting it.

Looking back on some of my old Gal impressions, I always want to laugh bitterly. The old me thought a game had to have a good story to be good. And what counts as a good story? It has to have a big twist, but not too absurd a twist — explode the plot while staying coherent, plant a pile of foreshadowing and pick every bit of it back up. Best if it also works in a little life wisdom and the truth of the world. That’s a good game. Now I see that what I was after was just the “good” games within the story-driven category. But like how a cinema shows more than Hollywood blockbusters, Galgames aren’t only the story-driven kind. I’ve also thought that if a game can make its characters cute enough, that’s fine too — I just always felt that kind of game was a tier below the story-driven ones. Because those are the big titles, and this is just selling moe character writing, tea-party-slice-of-life level. Like holding up Death Note against Yuru Yuri, or a AAA title against Minecraft — most people figure the two aren’t even on the same level.

Whirlpool — I used to have a pretty good impression of them. Stuff like the old whale-fucking, the robot-fucking, and the early dragon princess-fucking, etc. etc. Feels like Whirlpool just loves playing with human-beast… oh wait, I mean human and mixed-blood. Maybe that’s just their style. And so Whirlpool’s new game this year just popped out of nowhere, then out of nowhere it was out and on sale… I’d been thinking it wasn’t coming out until May… The new title is Nekonin Exheart (猫忍えくすはーと), and the premise is dead simple: two cat-eared ninjas show up at the protagonist’s ancestral home, claiming they’ve come to serve as his bodyguards and retainers. That’s the setup everything else hangs on. So I made a point of hammering these facts: the game itself only costs 2000 yen, and it’s only the first-press edition that comes with a hug pillow that runs 13000 yen. See? Remind you of anything? Sound like the XXX no Seiiki series? Yep — this game is basically following that series’ playbook. The appeal here is pretty clear-cut: short story, simple plot, good art.

I’d already made up my mind to play ワールド・エレクション (World Election) long before. It was the winter of 2015, as I recall — I was staring down a whole pile of landmine galge, and in game after game stuffed with Akino Hana, I couldn’t find a single CV worth a damn. For a seiyuu junkie like me that’s pure agony: like a plant deprived of sunlight, like an earthworm deprived of soil, like a shut-in deprived of instant ramen, like Four Leaf Clover deprived of TFboys. Then, out of nowhere, Whirlpool announced their new title, World Election. The main heroine, Kururu, was voiced by Sawasawa Sawa — a beacon in the pitch-black night, shining on this ugly bastard until I was so excited I couldn’t even find my bearings. No more “story is king,” no more “art style is king,” no more “the industry’s big releases are king.” As long as Kiritani Hana is in it, and she’s the main heroine, that’s the best. Period. But by the time this game actually came out, several months had passed. Honestly, I’d mostly lost interest by then. Just from the setup you can basically guess where it’s going: a destruction god drops out of nowhere, a fictional world where multiple races coexist, an election looming between those races, and of course our ugly-as-sin protagonist is definitely going to bang all the non-humans too, not to mention pinning the destruction god herself to the bed and teaching her some manners. Still, I remembered that this game had given me hope back last winter when I was desperate, finally letting me escape a world that was nothing but 秋野花, 秋野花 everywhere, and I’m a man of loyalty, you know. Considering that Whirlpool keeps putting out games with neat setups that then fumble the landing hard, I went into this one with the noble spirit of improving my Japanese reading comprehension.