Earlier this year I read a business plan from Visual Arts, Key’s parent company. The president, Baba Takahiro, turned out to have a surprisingly complete read on the industry—he knows how huge the overseas market is, especially the Chinese-speaking one, and he’s been actively registering local trademarks there, looking for local agents and partners. He also gets that the traditional “galgame” era is basically over, that selling on sex appeal alone can’t grow the market anymore, so the only way forward is all-ages. Raise the quality of the games themselves, and build IP across anime, manga, novels, and music. Rather than making games, make IP—that’s how you actually milk the 2D girls for money. At the end he said he’s extremely interested in the “metaverse,” and if they have the means, he’d like to explore whether the company can get in early on it. Reading this plan actually surprised me. My impression of Japanese companies, especially ones that got their start making Galgame, was that most of them are hopelessly stuck in their ways, utterly immune to reason, clinging to the same ancient engine until the day they die, at best peddling overpriced merch to scam people, and just shutting down outright when they can’t keep going. But Visual Arts is surprisingly clear-headed about the fact that the core of the “2D character” market is “IP” and “characters.” Be it story, music, games, or novels, every medium exists mainly to build the IP, and that IP then gets sold worldwide. That really is the kind of marketing strategy a cultural/creative company ought to have. Whether that roadmap is just bullshit or not, I honestly don’t know — but I did for sure notice this one thing: 『終のステラ』, the final chapter of the robot trilogy that began with 『planetarian』 and 『Harmonia』, written by Tanaka Romeo, scheduled for a spring 2022 release, aiming for a theatrical-film scale… And as you can all see, it’s already autumn and the game only just showed up. As for the “anime adaptation”—yeah, nobody brings that up anymore. Anyway, back to the game itself.