I’ve played a fair number of visual novels, and there’s one thing I’ve never quite understood. Since most Galgames are eroge—18+ games whose selling point is the presence of sex scenes—they should by definition sit squarely in the adult game category. People who buy adult games are, for the most part, adults (at least on paper). So when it comes to how the content is presented, you’d think the “adult factor” would be played up even more. But here’s the ridiculous part: in the Galgame market, aside from the handful of developers who actually deliver on “adult game,” the majority of mainstream players have some really weird demands: The story can’t be cruel, or I’m sending you razor blades. The game can’t skip the sex, or I’m sending you razor blades. Logically, an “adult-rated” story worth its salt is bound to have cruel elements—the better it is, the more indispensable the cruelty. Yet the Galgame audience refuses to accept it. If you won’t accept a “cruel” story, then you must like pure love stories, right? But the sex is still mandatory—and not just any sex, you need all kinds of positions, all kinds of play to be satisfied… So what kind of twisted demographic are you people who play 18X galgames, anyway…

Everyone knows I’m not a moe-otaku. Even so, I still look up to moe-otaku. Years ago — probably five or six by now — I was dead set on becoming one. Back then I was still watching anime, and when it comes to the stuff that was big around then, it’s gotta be K-On, right? At the time the Bilibili homepage was still wall-to-wall muscle bro memes, so if you wanted to watch shows you had to go to Acfun. But Acfun’s shitpost section was full of K-On MADs — the Cagayake!GIRLS MADs alone were everywhere, completely out of hand lol… I listened to it so much I could sing it. So sometimes when I saw that crowd spamming “My great Kon!” over the song, I couldn’t help feeling a little like I didn’t get it… There’s a reason I can’t wrap my head around it — I watched K-On! for real, seriously, but I just couldn’t keep going.

Honestly, at this point I’ve basically turned into a pure moe-otaku. What’s a moe-otaku? It means I no longer care about plot or story direction. As long as the girls are cute and the voices are nice, I’ll fucking say the game is good, and if someone says it’s not, I’ll fucking find excuses to say it is, and so on and so forth… But you can’t really blame me, right? This is a world that judges by looks.

I’ve always figured I don’t really go for that whole “character design” thing. Which is to say, whether a character is cute doesn’t hinge solely on her looks, or on the artist—building the actual person still takes a CV and a story with some meat on it. So I’m generally not the type to see a girl in a picture and start shouting “I’d bang that” like some kind of animal. And I’ve never really gotten the “moe-otaku” crowd, for the reasons above—whether a girl in a game is cute isn’t just about appearance; it’s her experiences, her way of talking, all of it added up that makes her feel like a real flesh-and-blood girl. It’s a shallow world, but looks alone won’t cut it… That’s what I thought.

Every month there’s a visual novel that gets pushed hard. Neko-Nin exHeart (ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート) a while back, last month’s Wagamama High Spec—that whole “buy the sales numbers with money” school of release. Except Noratoto was actually good, and Wagamama rode a full-court marketing blitz to outsell ISLAND and Chaos;Child last month. So apparently in the visual novel market, if you’re willing to push, you can still move a respectable number of copies. This month’s most-promoted title is probably Seiken Tsukai no Meidai (聖鍵遣いの命題). I kept seeing news and updates about it in Dengeki Hime every time I turned around, but oddly enough, very few Japanese readers had anything nice to say after the demo dropped… I got curious and looked at the setting, and it’s kind of RPG-ish, but it doesn’t really reek of landmine either. The OP is genuinely great—there’s even proper animation—so clearly they spent real money on this thing. By all logic, a game made with real money shouldn’t get torn apart too badly unless the story pulls some spectacular self-destruct maneuver. So I decided to trust in the quality and went and played it.