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!

Honestly, I didn’t want to play this game at first. The trial version had been out for ages and I kept skipping it, and I had my reasons. First, the OP just doesn’t grab you. I’ve been burned by OPs before—more than once—so that’s probably a weak spot in how I pick games. Second, the premise is way too light-novel. A princess from the underworld comes to the surface to destroy the world or whatever—how many times have we seen that? A heroine drops out of another world and runs into the protagonist? A dime a dozen. Third, the art style. It’s just too… sultry. I really didn’t like the character designs. Every girl looks like a sexually frustrated female rapist. Maybe I’m better off as a simple moe pig—cute art appeals to me more. So for these pretty dumb reasons I kept ignoring the game. But the game kept making moves—announcing an anime, running ads, going on sale. I started to wonder what kind of backing this studio had. Eventually I couldn’t take the flood of Twitter bombardment anymore and thought, fine, I’ll check out the trial… And then I fell down the rabbit hole. How to put it—the game is way, way, way, way better than I expected. Honestly, it’s a solid gem.

Everyone loves to flex, but almost nobody enjoys watching someone else flex in their face. There’s a very telling phrase for this: “flexing with actual skill.” Sure, it’s mostly used as a joke, but it gets at something real—when it comes to flexing, if you’ve got enough genuine chops to back it up, there’s not much anyone can do about it. Speaking of “skill,” I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a friend about cooking. Back then I was being a total idiot, convinced that “a great chef has to make all these flashy, fancy dishes to be legit.” My friend just shook his head.

There’s a certain writing style I’ve always hated, but I’ve never been able to put my finger on what to call it. Put simply, it’s when someone can’t just say a thing directly — they have to wrap it up first, so you have to squint at it for a second. Like the cafeteria lady serving your rice: she doesn’t just scoop it onto your plate, she digs the ladle in, does a little fairy pose in front of you, and then flings it into your bowl. If the lady happens to look younger than you and is wearing a sexy black-stocking getup, or if the rice is free and comes with three big pork chops, fine. Otherwise you just think the lady in front of you is sick in the head, and after a while you start to find her downright disgusting… …even if she gives you five pork chops. So when a story dresses up its wording or its pacing, if the payoff turns out to be worth the dressing-up, whatever. But if it’s some trivial bullshit dressed up like the apocalypse and a blood feud… that just pisses me off.