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

My libido’s been through the roof lately, and on top of that it’s been ages since I played a game with a genuinely cute heroine. Everything on my plate lately has had art that doesn’t do it for me and plots that are aggressively stupid. Then a thought surfaced: I wanna play a moe nukige. Like, right now. So I dug through my abandoned-games folder and pulled out Panical Confusion (パニカル・コンフュージョン). I’d actually downloaded this one ages ago and never touched it, because Japanese otaku didn’t rate it well. Most of what they said boiled down to “the art’s the only good thing about it,” so I kept bumping it down the priority list. But I’m not the same person I was back then. What I need right now is exactly this kind of moe nukige where the heroine is cute and bonable and there’s nothing else going on — plus heroine #1 is drawn by 白もち桜, so, y’know. So I opened it.

I’ve played a fair number of visual novels, and there’s one thing I’ve never quite understood. Since most Galgames are eroge—18+ games whose selling point is the presence of sex scenes—they should by definition sit squarely in the adult game category. People who buy adult games are, for the most part, adults (at least on paper). So when it comes to how the content is presented, you’d think the “adult factor” would be played up even more. But here’s the ridiculous part: in the Galgame market, aside from the handful of developers who actually deliver on “adult game,” the majority of mainstream players have some really weird demands: The story can’t be cruel, or I’m sending you razor blades. The game can’t skip the sex, or I’m sending you razor blades. Logically, an “adult-rated” story worth its salt is bound to have cruel elements—the better it is, the more indispensable the cruelty. Yet the Galgame audience refuses to accept it. If you won’t accept a “cruel” story, then you must like pure love stories, right? But the sex is still mandatory—and not just any sex, you need all kinds of positions, all kinds of play to be satisfied… So what kind of twisted demographic are you people who play 18X galgames, anyway…