Today I’m going to talk about a game… First, the story takes place in Japan proper… Then, the protagonist is a black guy… Next, he’s also a samurai… And he’s an orphan, taken in by a leader and serving that leader… Yes, the game I’m talking about is… CRYSTALiA’s new cash-grab: Setsuna ni Kakeru Koi wa Hanabi!

When Red: Cherish was announced I wasn’t exactly hyped. My first reaction was “what the hell is this?” The legendary “cyberpunk” premise welded onto “running a restaurant day to day” — that reeks of a planning meeting where nobody had any ideas left and somebody just blurted out the first thing that came to mind. Still, I was glad the studio managed to put out something new at all. I’d been convinced they were going to milk the white-haired Tsubaki from the previous game until the lights went out, so credit where it’s due for stepping out of the comfort zone. I played the trial, and it was surprisingly good. Bought the full version too — and then the smile slowly slid off my face. How do I put this. It’s not that the game is bad. It’s that it’s way too different from what I expected.

《絆きらめく恋いろは》 is a game I found pretty creative and honestly pretty damn impressive — it’s got a ton going for it: Solid soundtrack Gripping combat A story that portrays the heroine’s growth in detail, easy to relate to Art that isn’t half bad And this game wasn’t just big in Japan — it blew up in China too. I saw “Tsubaki is my wife” everywhere, and the studio struck while the iron was hot and put out a Tsubaki-only fandisc. Kept the hype going and squeezed out another round of sales while they were at it. Before I knew it, it was late 2019, and word of a sequel started going around. The sequel was called Shiraha Kirameku Koi Shirabe (白刃きらめく恋しらべ). Honestly, I wasn’t worried about it at all — the writing style had already settled into a groove, and CRYSTALiA’s parent company AMUSE CRAFT didn’t exactly look strapped for cash, so there was no doubt they’d do the sequel right… But what confused me was that not long after this game came out, Tomochiyo Kurenai (智斗紅), the planner and producer of the original Kizuna Kirameku Koi Iroha (絆きらめく恋いろは), said some weird stuff on Twitter: He said he’d already left the company back in summer, and he’s barely retweeted anything about the new game — it’s all been stuff about older titles. He also said he was only nominally attached to the new game and didn’t actually do anything on it. What is this feeling? When does a game’s producer normally react like that? Only when the game itself turned out bad, when even they think it’s garbage, and they rush to shift the blame because they’re scared of getting flamed!

Tsuki Kiraboshi no Koi Iroha (絆きらめく恋いろは) looked like it had nothing going for it when it came out, but the sales ended up surprisingly good—and the reviews were really high too. The high praise isn’t because the game itself is all that good, or because the main heroine is written all that well, or because the main story is all that great either… It was because of the game’s second heroine — Tsubaki — who looked so cute and charming. So what is Tsubaki’s route actually about? She’s the one holding her family’s biggest prestige and resources, yet she gets dunked on by every self-made striver, and in the end she barely preserves her own dignity. So what’s there to praise about this plot? But the masses just think Tsubaki is moe, is cute, and completely ignore the psychological portrayal and the stuff about effort and striving—the only parts of that route I actually found decent…… トニカクカワイイ — in other words, as long as it’s cute, that’s all that matters. This is some absolute bullshit! Again! AGAIN! The story got beaten out by moege fluff! And this time, to throw a bone to the moe-blob crowd, the game got a fandisc — the protagonist isn’t the original one, the route isn’t the original route, it’s… Tsubaki. The game’s title even became Kizuna Kirameku Koi Iroha -Tsubaki Renka- (絆きらめく恋いろは －椿恋歌－).

AMUSE CRAFT seems like a pretty based company — at least they’ve got several pretty goated game brands under their belt, and a few pretty goated artists willing to work with them, plus they can pull in a lot of famous industry names, Shinjima Yū included. Oh right, this company also loves to open new brand aliases for no reason. Weren’t both of Shinjima Yū’s works released under new aliases that got thrown away after one use? So this time they’ve opened another new alias called CRYSTALiA, and very pretentiously announced that the codename for this new game is: Katana, which means “sword” in Japanese. So the full name of this game codenamed “Katana” is this painfully cringe “Kizuna Kirameku Koi Iroha.” I don’t even know how to translate it into Chinese properly — something like “shining bonds sprouting love,” I guess.