I’ve made no secret of how much I love Hihou no Mahoutsukai (紙の上の魔法使い), or of how much I praise its writer, Rukuru. Same goes for Unmei Yohou wo Oshirase Shimasu, the game Rukuru put out before it. What makes this writer so strong is that he genuinely knows how to tell a story — the pacing, the dialogue, the word choice and the overall style all give off this elegant, gripping feel. Other visual novel writers, by comparison, read like high schoolers in the middle of a chuuni phase. That gap hits you hard: play a Rukuru game, then go pick up some mainstream VN, and the latter’s dialogue feels stupid and half-witted next to it, while the former actually reads like a story, one with images in it. I guess that’s what you’d call raw skill in a scenario writer. After Hihou no Mahoutsukai, the studio Ugui Sugura went quiet for way too long. A little over a year before, they tweeted that yes, they were properly working on a new game; then at the end of 2016 Suisou Ginkka no Istoria got announced, an early 2017 trial came out, and in March it launched with zero delays. Happiness arrived too fast, and I started playing the moment I got it. (I’d love to buy a legit copy, but I have no idea if standard forwarding will get me a friendly invitation from customs — any veterans with a reliable route, please enlighten me.)

前一阵玩nukige太多了，然后nukige玩多了又玩了一票废萌キャラゲー，觉得自己还是应该回到“故事导向”的基本路线上来，搜了下看到了我个人非常喜欢的《紙の上の魔法使い》的脚本师的一个早期作品，叫做《運命予報をお知らせします》,简单看了下日本人在中二空间对它的评价，觉得应该没问题，也就开始玩了。 The game is supposed to be only a dozen hours or so, but it felt longer than I expected. I came away pleasantly surprised, maybe because it’d been a while since I’d played something with writing this good. It got to the point that after finishing it, I booted up the newly released Floral Flowlove (フローラル・フローラブ) and just couldn’t take the gap in prose quality between the two. The former reads like something a college student would write; next to it, the latter is straight-up middle-schooler level…… Anyway, probably because my Japanese has gotten better, I’ve started finding a lot of really dumb phrasing genuinely stupid — it’s not just about clawing my way to understanding the meaning anymore.