In Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue, the character Misaki Tobisawa gets called “Best Girl” by a whole lot of Western players. Sure, everyone knows Best is a superlative, but Western otaku are all DDs — every girl they see is Best Girl. You can just read Best Girl as waifu. Put it this way: in the Western otaku aesthetic, they lean toward girls like Misaki Tobisawa — relatively real, emotionally driven, a little fragile, and if she’s got a bit of pride buried in there too, even better. Everyone knows Sprite, the developer of Aokana, has been dead for years. Back in the day they voluntarily walked away from the Galgame market, ditched the sequel they’d been planning, and citing “the shrinking industry market” went off to do mobile and browser games. Turns out mobile didn’t work either, so they slunk back to making Galgame… merch. Yeah, after Sprite came back from the dead they didn’t exactly rush to make games again — they started selling merch, just like they were doing right before they went under. Maybe merch really does pay, because Sprite was having a grand old time with it. Right when players couldn’t take it anymore, Sprite finally announced their new title… Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue Extra 2. So after all that buildup, they made a fandisc. Of course it came bundled with plenty of merch — this shitty company clearly has selling merch down to a routine. The game came out a while back, it’s not a short read, so let’s just talk about how it is.