I have to admit it now: that August title I’d been dunking on for ages, Sen no Hatou, Tokihana Iro no Kouki (千の刃濤、桃花染の皇姫), is actually a really, really goated game. What makes it so good? The good part is that its setting is absurd on the surface, yet still rings true. Back then I was shitposting about it: “How can a world have a theocratic feudal monarchy on one side and a republic on the other, living side by side in peace, with the monarchy’s upper-class kids even going to school in the republic? That’s complete bullshit!” Obviously I don’t think that anymore. And I don’t think you do either. This kind of arrangement really does exist in the world.

Butterfly Seeker came out early this year, so naturally in the back half of the year they put out Butterfly Seeker: Chaos Nightmare, billed as its fan disc. Usually a game that sells well gets an FD, and sometimes a game that sells like shit gets one too — making a visual novel isn’t expensive, the worst that happens is the voice actors get tired, everything else is copy-paste. Why not squeeze some money out? Going by the other titles from this brand… (yes, I’m looking at you, Kage no Umi no Apeiria), the FD should just be a little slice-of-life sideshow with no real connection to the main plot, lower quality than the main story, maybe giving a route to a heroine who didn’t get one, maybe just shooting the shit. In short, a cash-grab riding on nostalgia. No reason to expect much. But Butterfly Seeker: Chaos Nightmare genuinely brings a lot of surprises.

I personally recommend Kage no Umi no Apeiria because it’s full of surprises and genuinely novel. Unfortunately, despite all my hype, it seems the game didn’t sell well last year — apparently it couldn’t even beat some other game’s FD. Still, Kage no Umi no Apeiria announced a sequel. Except it’s really just an FD, as you can tell from the title and cover art: Kage no Umi no Apeiria Casablanca no Kishi — the suffix is “Casablanca no Kishi” (The Knight of Casablanca). Normally, a fan disc gives you after-stories for the original cast plus new routes for characters who didn’t have one. That’s what I assumed Casablanca no Kishi would be, especially since the cover features those two side characters. Calling them side characters isn’t entirely fair — they did interact a lot with the protagonist in the main game, and one of them is the nurse connected to another main heroine, Mashiro. But in the virtual world, they’re two female knights. After playing it, though, I’d say this is less a fan disc and more an append disc.

I rate Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart very highly. Even the anime adaptation. I’ve never doubted scenario writer Hato’s sense of pacing, and I’ve always thought Hato was pretty smart—especially what they pulled off with the anime, getting maximum effect out of a minimal budget. So before long, Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart 2 arrived. Same team, same flavor, and by all appearances it could stand on the shoulders of the first game and recapture its glory. No need for any wild new developments—just replicate the formula of the first one and it should be a safe bet! But was it a safe bet? I don’t think so.

Wagamama High Spec (ワガママハイスペック) did pretty well for itself last year. It even got a short-form anime, and a way better one than that princess stray cat got — word is the latter ran out of money entirely. And when a game sells, a sequel is inevitable. So Madsoft sat on it for nearly a year and put out Wagamama High Spec OC. At first I assumed it was a sequel, and Madsoft’s own copy sort of implies that. In this “sequel,” the class rep who wasn’t a route before, April 1st Kanade, the protagonist’s editor-in-charge Takatsukasa Chitose, and his homeroom teacher Iwakuma Yukari all get promoted to heroines — while the original cast stays available too. No trial version. Straight to the full release. Which made me wonder — is this just a fandisk? Then I saw the price. Nearly 10,000 yen. You can’t be that brazen. Booted it up. Holy shit. It’s a fandisk.

Tayutama 2 -you’re the only one- (タユタマ2 -you’re the only one-) came out last year, and honestly I think it’s pretty good. Why? Because it’s not toxic. Yeah, the bar is low, but almost nobody clears it. Look around—not just games, even anime—barely anything out there doesn’t try to piss you off. Out of nowhere a love triangle to give you heartburn, or they’ll torture some poor girl to make you feel bad, or pull a time loop or isekai twist that makes you spit your drink. Compared to all that, Tayutama 2—a game so positive it’s practically a PSA about humans and Tayutai living in harmony—is a breath of fresh air. Sure, it didn’t sell great on Steam, and the price is a quarter of what you’d pay for 2B after the price hike. But that’s reality: bland positive content isn’t stimulating enough to attract the twisted otaku crowd. Only ass sells.

Waiting, waiting, and at last Spring Festival arrived — and with it, the long-awaited release of the Astraea no Shiroki Towa FD! Astraea no Shiroki Towa was probably one of the first untranslated games I ever played, and it left a hell of an impression on me. Three things stood out above all: The music! The effects! And Nitta Emi! Then Yoshizumi Hina retired, which left any follow-up to Astraea no Shiroki Towa stuck in limbo forever. But FAVORITE isn’t about to pass up a chance to milk a sequel, so pretty soon we got an FD for Astraea no Shiroki Towa with a recast VA — namely Astraea no Shiroki Towa Finale -Shiroki Hoshi no Yume-.

A while back I was reading some stories on a blog by a guy who claims to be an eroge-industry insider, and I came across this: つまりシナリオとは発売後に作品を支える要素であり、昔から初動の売り上げにおいてはイラストの方が重要であった。 (The initial sales of a game are mostly about the character designs and art style; the scenario is just one element that supports a game after release.) And then something even better: だから打ち合わせでは「キャラとイチャイチャしていれば話の中身なんてなくていい」と本当に言われるし、「○○先生に原画を担当してもらえる時点で売り上げは確保できているから、シナリオなんてクソにならない限りどうでもいい」とさえ言われてしまったりする。 (So at planning meetings people literally say things like “as long as the player can flirt with the characters, the story doesn’t need any substance,” and even “if Mr. XX is doing the original art, sales are guaranteed, so who cares about the scenario as long as it doesn’t turn to shit.”) Of course, none of that beats this: ゲームの傾向も変わってきていて、２００４年頃は「エロなんかいらねぇシナリオの質が重要」なんて一部で言われていたりもしたが、今企画会議でそんなことを言おうものなら袋叩きにされる。 理由は簡単で、シナリオを重視した作品よりもキャラクター性を重視した作品の方がグッズの売り上げがいいからである。 (The direction of games has changed too. Around 2004 some people were saying “who needs porn, what matters is scenario quality,” but if you said that in a planning meeting now you’d get beaten to a pulp. The reason is simple: character-driven works sell more merch than scenario-driven ones.) Well… what can you say? That’s reality, I guess?

11eyes: Resona Forma is the fan disc for 11eyes. I actually played it a long time ago, but only went through Kuraki Misuzu’s and Tachibana Kikuri’s routes — at the time the patch was incomplete and I couldn’t read Japanese, so the rest was a wash. Picked it back up recently and found that more of it has been translated, plus I’ve got enough Japanese reading ability now to sort of fumble my way through. So here we are. I’m genuinely attached to 11eyes. It was my first visual novel with gory blood-spraying and dimension-hopping magic battles — before that everything I played was pure romance, mostly straight-up moe stuff. And I really do think 11eyes has a lot of unique ideas in its setup and structure, the fight descriptions especially, the sheer variety of magic writing — sword styles, sorcery, the later scientific magic, hand-to-hand combat. It covers basically all of it and never really fumbles any of it. The most interesting thing to me now is the Void Boundary chapter bundled with the Xbox version and its take on modern magic: magic chant code stored on a server, magicians connecting via phone and remotely loading curses to cast, with magical duels including big-data attribute analysis and network-layer attack and counterattack. Even now I haven’t seen a battle written with that kind of idea again. “For friends and tomorrow” is 11eyes’ theme. For friends and tomorrow — maybe because 11eyes was popular enough that a fan disc was inevitable. The fan disc is called Resona Forma, which is Latin, or should be Resonating Form — you can read it as “resonant form” or “resonance mode,” hinting at the various resonances between the Eye of Aeon and its bearers, and also signaling that the game is an IF, Before, After structure presenting all sorts of possibilities.