In the last month of 2020, on a weird date, a weird game showed up: Sakura-iro Dreamer. The developer is listed as “Cover,” with “Hololive” as its subsidiary — and everyone knows that’s a Vtuber agency. The heroine is one of their talents: Sakura Miko. The name is profoundly dumb, because translated it comes out as the painfully rustic “Sakura Shrine Maiden.” Sure, a Vtuber getting a game is a good thing that fits where the industry is headed. Vtubers are capital’s darling right now, the successful ones aren’t short on cash, and they’ve definitely got more money than the eroge crowd, so a game made with that backing should be solid, right? So I looked at this game, and it nearly killed me with anger before I even got started.

I’ve had this feeling for a while now: Alcot is done for. Looking back, Alcot’s peak was probably around the time of Clover Days. Their sub-label Alcot Honeycomb was doing well too, and Clover Days itself had the art advantage from the start. On top of that, other stuff like Spring Limited and the “ignore the future” sister-complex games carved out their own style. From any angle, it looked like they were about to take off. But that didn’t happen. I don’t know the exact reason — I just heard Clover Days sold poorly and counted as a loss. After that, Alcot honeycomb’s later titles seemed to lose their soul, at one point they even brought in a landmine specialist to write the story, and their main artist left too. They put out LoveRec — honestly I think it’s okay, but it still got middling reviews. And then it just kept getting worse. That mom-goddess whatever game Alcot put out last year — I couldn’t even be bothered to look at it. I couldn’t even find any reviews. It got completely treated like air… Alcot’s own Twitter account posts stuff every day, and it all gives off this “company is going bankrupt, everything must go” vibe — it’s all Clover Days merch and other ancient junk. That feeling, man, it keeps making me think they’re about to fold any minute. And so Alcot has a new title out this year, with the tagline “the proper sequel in the Alcot lineup.” I took one look and thought, yep, they’re really about to go under. Because the last company that pulled this “true sequel” move was Lass, and they ended up putting out a “long-delayed true sequel” too, and then they croaked. What actually bugs me more is — since when the hell does Alcot even have a “proper sequel” to anything? So your LoveRec was just a throwaway? Your Clover Days was fudged together too? Then I looked a bit closer and it clicked: they probably mean a proper sequel within that old “parody isekai half-sci-fi” series style of theirs. 《幼なじみは大統領》, Onigokko!, and 中の人などいない! are all roughly that style, and their later stuff seems to have drifted away from that direction. So this so-called “proper sequel” is basically just them going back to that original direction. And so we got the title of the new game: Shogun-sama wa Otoshigoro (将軍様はお年頃).

Alcot is supposedly on its deathbed. First the pillar of the studio, illustrator Yushi Ninomura, up and quit — went home to play gacha games. So this year Alcot put out nothing but a cash-grab FD for LoveREC with a handful of new CGs, plus an even more blatant cash-grab, Clover Days Plus, which is just the HCGs converted to Emote. The Chinese patch shipped same-day, if that tells you anything. But even if the main studio is finished, they’ve still got the sub-label Alcot Honey Comb, which tends to put out bolder stuff. I’ve played plenty of theirs — Shunkai Gentei, Mujikaku Mirai, that sort of thing — and this time we get something with a very different flavor: Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta. I say “different flavor” because most Alcot games give off a slice-of-life, comedy-heavy vibe. Genuinely sad ones are rare (not that they don’t exist — that Shinigami no Kiss thing at the start probably counts as sad too). So Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta shows up waving the banner of “a romance between predator and prey.” Everything up to here was made up. I can’t keep it going, so I’ll just be honest: the reason I’m playing a 2014 game is that I was bored listening to music on YouTube, heard the OP, thought it sounded interesting, and picked it up.

I was feeling down a while back, so I figured I’d play something to lift my mood. That’s when I came across the OP for “Haru Shiki Gentei Poco a Poco!” on YouTube — or more accurately, the OP sounded way too damn familiar, because it was on a music collection CD from some Angle Note thing I bought. I’d listened to it a ton of times without ever knowing it was this game’s OP. The OP is depressingly sad. You can tell the protagonist’s important person died and he can’t move past it. But then I looked up reviews and everyone was going on and on about what a fun, cheerful game it is. Whatever. I needed some comedy anyway, and once I saw the little sister’s CV, I was sold. So how was it… Is this game as sad as the OP, or as fun as the online reviews say? Turns out neither one’s wrong.

LOVEREC. -Mini Theaters- is the fandisc for Loverec. Honestly, LoveRec is a pretty solid game. This fandisc, though? It’s… bone-dry. The whole thing is 1.95 GB. The story picks up right where the original ended—the protagonist is about to graduate, and the white-haired little sister plans to sell the film she shot at the next C90. Everyone’s trying to make it happen. Yeah… except that’s just the prologue. The actual filmmaking never comes up.

I haven’t played many Alcot games, but most of them follow the same path: fairly lowbrow (no offense) snark and slice-of-life, cute moe character designs, and music that’s better than it has any right to be. I’d say it wasn’t like this back in Clover Heart, but by the time Clover Days rolled around it had quietly become this way, so my feelings about Clover Days carry over: no matter how you look at it, this stuff is “not especially clever,” but it’s also “not bad.” The plot beats are a bit clichéd, but it never force-feeds you shit. When LoveRec. was being promoted I took a look at the character designs… “Oh fuck, isn’t this just Anzu?” Yes, the heroine named Hitomi looks almost identical to Takakura Anzu from Clover Days, just with a different hair color and eye color. You could chalk it up to Jinmura Yuji’s art style, but the feeling that they “literally just took an old character, tweaked her, and put her on sale” is a weird one. Incidentally, the other two heroines weren’t drawn by Jinmura Yuji, but they’re also a bit off, and overall not as cute as Clover Days. Given Alcot’s usual style, I assumed this game was at most a moe showcase, and from the designs and the rough blurb that’s exactly what it looked like. But after finishing it, I came away feeling something different.

Clover Heart’s is an old 2003 game. As one of Alcot’s early works, it got a commemorative sequel ten years later in Clover Days. Looking at it now, Clover Heart’s has a surprising number of strong points for a 2003 visual novel — some of it even ahead of its time.