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)
A week ago, that well-known Linux kernel developer Mawei-kun gifted me this game.
Oshi no Love yori Koi no Love (推しのラブより恋のラブ).
Honestly I wanted Tryment, that reheated cash-grab, but Mawei-kun sent me this instead and hoped I’d walk through the gates of yuri.
The game isn’t long, and after finishing it I fell into deep thought.
Because this game made me think back on a lot of things…
A lot of memories I’d almost forgotten…
LAMUNATION! came out last year. I honestly didn’t know much about it — watched the OP, looked flashy, music was solid, skimmed the premise and it seemed to be some fictional world. But the setting never explains itself, there’s no visible main plot, so I just dropped it.
Plenty of people were actually optimistic about this one, aside from some guy called “Azirayt” — the other being Miss Wang. But Chinese people liking it doesn’t mean shit. The game’s reputation rides on what the Japanese think.
So how did the Japanese rate LAMUNATION!?
According to Chuuni Space’s scores… 45 points. Basically a landmine.
So I’d always assumed it was a landmine too. I’ve seen this type too many times — big budget, stacked staff, flashy OP, massive marketing, and then the scenario writer goes full late-stage psychosis and nobody can follow the story, so the game becomes a landmine. Examples everywhere.
But recently, for a certain reason, I got interested in LAMUNATION! again. I think it might not actually be a “landmine.” It’s just that people don’t understand it for a certain reason.
That’s a bit of a stretch. Normally, no matter how badly a game’s story is written, no matter how dogshit the author’s storytelling is, if you’re willing to meet the author halfway, you’ll usually find the story is “not bad.” But with LAMUNATION!’s writer, it might be a different situation.
Ah… how do I put this? Cultural incompatibility? Something like that.
Which means we have to go back to an earlier work by LAMUNATION!’s writer, Kepposhi…