Feeling empty, lonely, and a bit chilly lately, I decided I needed something “short and sweet,” “gets to the point fast,” “heroine’s got big tits,” “preferably that kind of plot” — in short, the “you know what I mean” kind of game. Which is how I ended up with QUALIA Yakusoku no Kiseki. The premise is about as obvious as it gets: the protagonist is a scientist, he builds a big-titted robot girl, and then there’s that soulful look in her eyes. Sure, this year is drowning in shitty “AI robot romance” galgames, but this one clearly isn’t like those dime-a-dozen ones. What kind of game this is — you get it, right? Let’s go! My guy!

More isn’t really a studio that specializes in galge, honestly. It looks more like… “A bunch of music people who make galge on the side so they have an excuse to put out albums.” The company name is MME — MORE MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. Which is my whole point: their center of gravity is clearly music. Making galge, a cheap kind of game dev, probably isn’t the day job for them. More like a hobby? Hobby or not, they’ve put out a decent number of games, and they don’t look like they’re doing a “one and done” bit. If anything they keep branching out, spawning more and more sub-brands… Sometimes I wonder if registering a new brand in Japan is just free. Why else does every eroge company change its skin every other year… This time the new More brand is called Niko, and their game is Golden Hour (ゴールデンアワー). I mean, More already had two brands running fine — More for pure-love stuff, Pure More for nukige — and now there’s a pile of sub-labels: Chelseasoft, which looks like it’s going for moege, DOLCE, which put out the little flower of Casablanca, and now Niko. God knows what style this one is supposed to be.

Someone once left a comment on one of my blog posts expressing contempt for PULLTOP. Honestly, my own feelings about PULLTOP are fine — they’ve put out some games I like, what with the plane-making one, the country romance, and the stargazing one. But PULLTOP has definitely also released some mediocre and even mind-numbingly sleep-inducing games. Most of those were the work of their sub-brand, though. PULLTOP LATTE was literally built as a nukige label, so if it’s boring, whatever — at least the main brand is fine, right? Like the guy in the comments said, he thinks PULLTOP itself is stupid, and sometimes I agree. Take the plane-making game — it was probably one of the first Japanese eroge to make the jump to STEAM. The publisher was a company called MoeNovel. I looked into MoeNovel, and the registered asset info lists it as a sub-brand of willplus. And willplus is the parent company of the PULLTOP brand. willplus is actually pretty big, with a bunch of labels under it — plenty of nukige, some normal stuff too. The old Propeller, PULLTOP, ensemble, all of them were willplus labels. I know guilty too — they do NTR. A company that big should be doing well, right? Yet I keep watching them make one dumb move after another. Some of their decisions are just braindead. How braindead, specifically? Back to the earlier topic. Since PULLTOP = MoeNovel, that means PULLTOP chose to publish its own games overseas itself — no licensing agent involved. Should be fine, right? The plane-making game had a great reputation, plenty of Western otaku wanted to play it, a fan translation was already finished, and lots of people said they’d buy it the moment it hit STEAM. Heaven and earth and man were all aligned. PULLTOP probably didn’t even need to translate anything — just grab the English translation license and lie back collecting STEAM money…

できない私が、くり返す。 left a decent impression on me, and not because of the art or anything like that — mostly it was a bunch of people saying it’s a “tearjerker” and “the best.” Generally a game that most people approve of can’t be that bad, so I played it during June when there was nothing else out. The title is weird. Going by my Japanese level of a one-year-old infant, I think it’s trying to say that no matter how many times I go back, I can’t change a damn thing. Early on, the protagonist gets a pocket watch from a big-sister type named Ren, who tells him it can travel through time and return to the past. “But there’s no point in going back, because the future can’t be changed.” A time leap that can’t change the future is basically useless, and Ren hammers it in every time she talks about the watch: 未来は変えられない So the story begins five years after big sis Ren dies, at the moment the watch-holding protagonist meets a girl named Shino.

11月のアルカディア was one of March’s new releases. I’d figured there was nothing worth playing that month, then I saw the OP — looked like a mystery/plot-driven thing — so I tried the demo. And surprise, the protagonist actually has a CV. No idea who it is, but he sounds a bit like Yuuichi Nakamura. Going on the principle that “if an eroge bothers to voice its male lead, the story probably isn’t a total trainwreck,” I dove in without hesitation. And sure enough, it didn’t let me down. This is the first thing since Paper no Ue no Mahoutsukai that I can praise without a single reservation.