Haruoto Alice＊Gram, also known as My Daily Life With the Black-Tights, White-Tights, and Blonde Big-Tittied Girls in the Mental Hospital, comes from the Japanese eroge company Nanawind. It assembles star artists Nanao Naru and Takanae Kyourin giving it their all. A luxurious voice cast: the 36-year-old Sendai auntie who can’t find work and begs eroge companies on Twitter to no avail voices a heroine, the nearly-30-still-unmarried Ishihara Mai gets picked as a side heroine, and Ozaki Mami — the professional seiyuu who landed one lead in Girls und Panzer and then never got another anime gig — does a typecast brain-dead foreign ojou-sama performance. After several delays and repeated script polishing, it finally launched with much fanfare this month, with PlayDRM standing guard, leaving countless otaku sighing at the mysterious 300 and unable to play. Two weeks after release, it hit fifth place on ErogameScape’s most controversial games of the month, right behind that bug-ridden mess Tantei Seven.

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this more than once, but I’ve got a bad habit: I find games by listening to music. This time I stumbled onto the song Octave Rain, thought it was solid… looked it up, turns out it’s a game OP, so I went and grabbed the game… The game is called PARA-SOL. If your English isn’t terrible, you can tell that PARASOL means sunshade/parasol, so the title literally means “parasol.” When I downloaded it I wasn’t expecting it to be in Chinese. Fired it up and — holy shit, it’s translated. Didn’t see that coming… Before playing I checked what Japanese players thought. Most of them said the game “starts out insanely good and then goes insanely stupid later.” In the Chinese community the go-to explanation is more like “I literally have no idea what I just read!” Plenty of things I don’t understand. I’m the best at reading crazy-people works, so I opened the game without hesitation… A few days later I finished it… There’s only one route, and I had zero desire to touch a second one… The reason is simple: it’s way too insane!

I didn’t really want to play Koi × Shin’ai Kanojo (恋×シンアイ彼女) at first. Two reasons: Didn’t like the setup. That kind of school romance plot looks like a sleeping pill just from the description. I’m not a fan of Niijima Yuu, the writer everyone keeps hyping. Sure, I think Hatsuyuki Sakura (はつゆきさくら) is a decent game, but this guy’s scenario-writing ability really doesn’t deserve the praise. His work on Kisaragi Kinboshi pretty much confirmed my judgment.