A while back my main eroge machine, the Chuwi Minibook, broke — the power light wouldn’t come on anymore. Since the warranty on that thing was almost up, I contacted the support lady to see if I could get it repaired. But nobody bothered to answer me for about two months, right up until I’d given up. Then the email came! She said it could be repaired, and explained the part I’d been worried about. I’d heard Chuwi’s after-sales was garbage — basically they just reinstall the OS and ship it back — but it seems crowdfunded products aren’t treated that way. Of course, I also found out why there’d been no reply for two months: the lady who’d been answering had quit, and they hadn’t hired anyone in those two months… Fine. In the end the machine got sent off, and I had no Windows machine on hand. That’s when I spotted what looked like a Lenovo Windows tablet in my wife’s inventory. The model was Lenovo MIIX 2 10, and it even came with a keyboard. So I asked if I could borrow it. “Sure, whatever. That’s your mother-in-law’s computer, seems like it’s been abandoned for ages.” So I picked up this Lenovo MIIX 2 10 and kept playing Gal.

I’m not an NTR fan and I honestly can’t wrap my head around how NTR fans think. Still, Japanese eroge are packed with NTR subject matter, for better or worse. NTR here doesn’t mean what grade-schoolers mean by “the girl you like doesn’t like you, she likes someone else.” It’s 寝取る — and the meaning is simple: your wife, your spouse, your lover, your girlfriend got slept with by someone else. Put plainly, you got cuckolded. Even if you’ve spent years lurking Reddit, ACFUN, the greening street, and the Thunder Bluff of 5ch, I’ve never once seen a guy discover he’s been cuckolded and feel happy about it. So yeah, the NTR fan mindset is hard to get. And yet NTR games keep coming out. Plenty of companies make them, some even set up a dedicated brand just for NTR titles to chase that specialist credibility. Like this one, Houkago ni Midareru Ane Kyoushi to Tonari no Heya de Aegu Imouto (放課後に乱れる姉教師と隣の部屋で喘ぐ妹 ～恋人になった女の子が、知り合いの嫌な男に寝取られる～), which bills itself as a standard NTR game.

Corona Blossom Vol. 3 finally came out, which means the game that got unceremoniously chopped into three parts has, after Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, finally reached its ending. Looking back, the content distribution across the three volumes is actually pretty regular: Vol. 1 is Arne coming to Earth, Vol. 2 is the villain showing up, and the last volume is the final showdown (probably). Vol. 1 is the protagonist meeting a chunk of metal that falls from the sky. The metal is from outer space, turns into a little loli when it hits him, and he names her Arne (R-Ne). Then a bunch of self-proclaimed space pirates show up, saying Arne is their catch and demanding he hand her over. Vol. 2 is the protagonist befriending the space pirates and discovering they’re not actually that bad. The pirates gradually give up on Arne and become friends with him, and then at the very end the protagonist’s sister suddenly flips, announcing she’s a scientist and that this alien Arne would make great research material. The villain in Vol. 3 is that same sister, Kanade, who wants to ship the alien Arne off to the lab. She tells the protagonist that with Arne’s alien power, humanity could overcome all sorts of incurable diseases—sacrifice one alien loli and you save all of mankind—and asks him to join her. He refuses, and then it’s teaming up with the space pirates to hold off Kanade while building a rocket, choosing to send Arne back to her homeworld. The ending is Arne going home, and the protagonist getting married and having kids in that little town, occasionally recalling the summer he met Arne.

Kinda embarrassing to admit, but for someone who thinks of himself as a tough guy, my first time on a roller coaster was only 4 years ago. My workplace organized a free trip to some place in Zhengzhou called “Fantawild,” so that’s where I rode a roller coaster for the first time in my life. The feeling… hard to describe. All I know is it made my prostate very uncomfortable.

Not long after Corona Blossom wrapped up, Vol.2 got announced. Not really a surprise — the series was billed as three volumes from the start. The funny part is that Corona Blossom launched in Japan a month after Steam, meaning Steam got it first. Same for Vol.2: a galgame with a Japanese release slated for November, and it hits Steam ahead of schedule. Gotta hand it to them. Vol.1 didn’t score well on ErogameScape. Most of the complaints were that the story doesn’t go anywhere, the slice-of-life is boring, splitting it into volumes is shameless, etc. And honestly? Fair. These days if your eroge doesn’t have a shrine maiden with a deep grudge, or an idol restoring a fallen nation, or a cursed katana you can bang, or a train module you can bang, who the hell cares? Standard developments are played out. A lump of metal falls from the sky, goes duang, and turns into a cat-eared girl — light novels were doing that ten years ago. All tropes, bruh.

I once came up with a concept. It was about dreams, and there were people with a job kind of like “private detective” who specialized in entering people’s dreams. They’d go on adventures inside someone else’s dream, and ultimately change that person’s view of something. And of course, they get paid for it. Sounds a lot like Inception, I know. But I had a slightly different idea. I figured that since you’re entering “someone else’s dream” as a kind of “detective” or “hunter,” the setting and environment of the dream would all be tied to the dreamer. As the “intruder,” you’d need to adapt to the environment fast and exploit “the dreamer’s own internal logic” to get the advantages you need to finish the job. Say the dreamer is a hopeless MMO addict. You enter his dream and you’ll probably get dropped into some game-like world. You’d have to quickly adapt to the role the dreamer assigned you in that world, and also disguise yourself so you don’t stick out. That means you need to know the dreamer—their tastes, their personality, even their innermost thoughts. Walk blindly into someone else’s turf and you’ll definitely fail, maybe even lose your chance to ever wake up again… I thought this setup was cool as hell, and I even wrote a crappy short story based on it. If you’re willing to dig, you can find it on this blog. Though if I went back and read it now I’d spot a million problems—too embarrassing to even look at. Still, I’m thinking about dusting off that concept and rewriting it into a proper piece. Depends on whether I get the time and inspiration.

There was a weird new show in the April anime lineup called Wagamama High Spec. I forget how they translated the title into Chinese — something like “Selfish High-Spec.” Barely any content, insanely short episodes, and it made basically no sense at all. Turns out it’s an eroge adaptation, and the game hadn’t even shipped yet when the anime started airing, so the whole thing was just a promo ad for the game. Whether it’s a short or not doesn’t really matter. In the end, how good this thing is depends on the game. A while back I saw someone saying DOOM was going for a retro route, and I don’t buy it. DOOM just went back to what games fundamentally are; that’s not retro, that’s how games should be. Speaking of retro, I’d argue Wagamama High Spec is more of a retro thing — retro for eroge.

Yeah, it’s cliché, and I know I shouldn’t write it this way, but before I get into the game I need to talk about something from the past. You only really feel the game’s content deeply when you connect it to your own life, after all. Let’s start with a look. A gaze. The gaze of a certain girl from my elementary school days is one I’ve never been able to forget. Back then I was a top student. The especially top kind. Honestly, I don’t know why I was a top student. I just figured that the stuff they taught in class was something you were supposed to learn, that long-distance running in PE was something you were supposed to be fast at, that speaking and giving presentations was just something you did that way. I couldn’t understand — couldn’t even begin to grasp — how hard it was for everyone else to do the things that came so “naturally” to me. I never saw anyone as an enemy, but there are always people who want to see you as a challenge. After one final exam, a girl jumped out and said to me with a resolute look in her eyes: “Just you wait. Next exam, I’m taking first place. I’ll beat you.” And with that, she turned and ran off. Sure enough, at the next final exam, she took first place, and I took second because I got one math problem wrong. I didn’t really care, though, because soon after, I took first again, and that girl was still looking at me with that same resolute — almost resentful — gaze. “Why does she look at me like I’m her enemy?” I couldn’t understand it. By the time I did understand, years had passed, and that empathy has only grown deeper and more obvious with age…