Almost nothing worth playing came out in the second month of 2017 in the adult game space—except for one title called Ouka Saki (桜花裁き). Strictly speaking, Ouka Saki isn’t a pure “eroge.” It’s a “bugyō mystery” game. Plenty of games wave the mystery flag. The famous early one is Ace Attorney, and later there’s Danganronpa. Lump of Sugar also put out a mystery-ish game, though its story was more of a comedy. But come on—was Danganronpa’s story not a comedy either? Word is Danganronpa 3’s plot has gone so dumb it can’t even help itself, the final twist like tossing a grenade into a squat toilet and spraying shit everywhere, leaving players in a fury like burning-sea mad maggots. So I wisely didn’t play it. I couldn’t even be bothered to buy it. Even for Danganronpa 2, my verdict back then was: stop caring about that dumbass main plot and just enjoy the minigames. So for Ouka Saki, at first I figured it’d be some Danganronpa-imitating goofball game—claims to be mystery but is really just bullshitting, and in the end it’s a forced verdict. But after playing the trial version, it was actually surprisingly good. At least its case descriptions have something like a real mystery core. I can’t vouch for anything else, but compared to Danganronpa’s goofball motives, Ouka Saki is way better.

I’d originally planned to take my physics teacher out for Japanese food, but when I drove over the place was closed… I should’ve figured it out when nobody picked up the phone number listed on Meituan. Miscalculated. And somehow Meituan was still selling group-buy vouchers for the place — should I be snarking that everyone at Meituan is too busy lifting weights and riding bikes? So we decided on the hot pot place next door. Once we’d eaten most of the hot pot, my physics teacher started talking about her hobbies.

For a long time, one of the big reasons galgames get doubted and looked down on by a bunch of hardcore princess-type players is this: the damn thing doesn’t count as a game. Honestly, I don’t think it counts as a game either. At best it’s an audiobook. I’ve said more than once that when Westerners talk about Japanese eroge, the word they use is always Visual Novels. When our local Japanophile shut-ins are solemnly announcing “I’m playing eroge again this month,” the Westerners are all saying What are you reading?. Of course, galgames themselves have increasingly become novelized, gradually turning into commercial products that sell purely on art, story, music, porn, or even just first-press bonuses. Development costs aren’t high either—plenty of small doujin circles start out as galgame companies, and it has that vaguely Chinese-youth-startup vibe. But this thing wasn’t like that in the past.

Last year I played the fortissimo series, and my personal feelings about it were complicated. Content-wise, the fortissimo series has a super melodramatic plot. Basically the world gets destroyed, the guy destroying it might be your dad, your dad destroys the world because he’s despairing, so you as the protagonist go fuck up your dad, and after a bunch of cheat-code clashes you successfully fuck up dad and build a new world. No big twists—just cheat vs cheat, yelling matches, forced hot-bloodedness, justice always wins. And one big feature of this game is that fight mode and non-fight mode are two different worlds. In daily life a bunch of people joke around like a normal game, but once a fight starts it’s kill or be killed. Totally inconsistent… Still, as an experience, the fortissimo series is a blast, because there are tons of battle scenes, and the atmosphere during fights is genuinely great. Especially that feeling of “shouting each other’s names then activating cheats and unleashing a finisher”—it’s really hot-blooded, really hype, really satisfying. So for the previous fortissimo games, I think they’re ultimately not bad. I mean, after all… once you’re hyped, you don’t sweat the details.

So here’s how I found this game. I saw some foreigner streaming it on YouTube, in English of course. I didn’t even watch the game itself, just the part where the OP played. Honestly the OP is pretty good, pretty damn sick. And from the OP you can pretty much tell it’s a horror game. More importantly, the Japanese lyrics in the OP told me this was probably a Japanese Galgame that got an English localization. I got curious and looked around for info on it, but there’s basically nothing out there—just some stream videos and not much else. That got me hooked. I wanted to play it, searched everywhere and couldn’t find it, except on Steam. So I bought it on the game’s Steam page. It’s not big, a little over 700 MB, supports English and Japanese, just no voice acting. The surprise is it supports Windows / Linux / Mac, so after downloading, the journey began. I just want to say, this game’s journey really felt like a close call…