Your Desperate Attempt to Be Praised Really Makes It Hard for Me to Praise You Years ago, when ANIPLEX.EXE entered the Galgame market as a Sony brand, a bunch of people were shouting “the big one is coming.” I sourly wrote a piece for Dimensional Fanaticism, roughly arguing that Sony was just dabbling and never had much expectation for this market anyway—that the day ANIPLEX.EXE stops putting out products purely through outsourced white-labeling and actually becomes a so-called “first-party developer” is when “the big one” truly arrives. And you’ve seen the results. “The big one” never came, and ANIPLEX.EXE went nearly two years in obscurity, until this year it started rolling out new titles again—still “outsourced” and “white-labeled,” except this time the label says “Looseboy.” The most famous title under ANIPLEX.EXE is of course ATRI (ATRI -My Dear Moments-). The game is a thoroughly formulaic Japanese sci-fi-future work—which doesn’t mean it’s bad. Clichéd stories can still land well, just like how we keep getting moved by formulaic hot-blooded action. Maybe to replicate ATRI’s success, the original team regrouped outside ANIPLEX.EXE and put out GINKA (GINKA). The art style, the scenario writer, the studio, even the title all scream “tribute to the predecessor.” So does GINKA deliver the same feeling as ATRI? Objectively speaking, yes—it even delivers far more content than ATRI. But is “more” good? That I’ve always doubted, and it’s exactly what I find most baffling and worth criticizing about this game.

A lot of fiction likes to play with the “end of the world” theme. I can’t really say why. Maybe it’s that “even after the world ends, I still love you” feeling that comes off as romantic? Or maybe everyone’s got a little bit of wasteland fever in them. An endless wilderness, nothing left but the male lead and the heroine, wandering the ruins looking for some reason for humanity to keep going. That does sound pretty coool. Use it too many times, though, and it stops being coool.

Someone once left a comment on one of my blog posts expressing contempt for PULLTOP. Honestly, my own feelings about PULLTOP are fine — they’ve put out some games I like, what with the plane-making one, the country romance, and the stargazing one. But PULLTOP has definitely also released some mediocre and even mind-numbingly sleep-inducing games. Most of those were the work of their sub-brand, though. PULLTOP LATTE was literally built as a nukige label, so if it’s boring, whatever — at least the main brand is fine, right? Like the guy in the comments said, he thinks PULLTOP itself is stupid, and sometimes I agree. Take the plane-making game — it was probably one of the first Japanese eroge to make the jump to STEAM. The publisher was a company called MoeNovel. I looked into MoeNovel, and the registered asset info lists it as a sub-brand of willplus. And willplus is the parent company of the PULLTOP brand. willplus is actually pretty big, with a bunch of labels under it — plenty of nukige, some normal stuff too. The old Propeller, PULLTOP, ensemble, all of them were willplus labels. I know guilty too — they do NTR. A company that big should be doing well, right? Yet I keep watching them make one dumb move after another. Some of their decisions are just braindead. How braindead, specifically? Back to the earlier topic. Since PULLTOP = MoeNovel, that means PULLTOP chose to publish its own games overseas itself — no licensing agent involved. Should be fine, right? The plane-making game had a great reputation, plenty of Western otaku wanted to play it, a fan translation was already finished, and lots of people said they’d buy it the moment it hit STEAM. Heaven and earth and man were all aligned. PULLTOP probably didn’t even need to translate anything — just grab the English translation license and lie back collecting STEAM money…

Years ago, The Fruit of Grisaia blew up as Frontwing’s anniversary title, and it’s not hard to see why. The game itself is rock solid, and it nails the mix of “daily-life comedy” and “plot-driven drama” — the 30-hour common route is all slice-of-life gags, while the other 30 hours of heroine routes lean hard into wild plot twists. A game that goes “grab both handles and grip them both tight” like that was never going to escape glowing reviews. The Fruit of Grisaia: possibly a masterpiece After that, Frontwing struck while the iron was hot and put out sequels in the series, including The Labyrinth of Grisaia and The Eden of Grisaia, plus several DLCs for the game. By the time the last DLC, The Melody of Grisaia, came out, the whole Grisaia series was complete, and the game series even got an anime adaptation. Looks like Frontwing put a period at the end of the Grisaia saga and moved on to making new anti-American propaganda spectacles…

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.

We’ve always said the Japanese have an island mentality. What does that actually mean? It has two senses. One is the textbook island mentality — a reluctance to take in culture from the outside world. The other is the one we toss around online when talking about Japan, which is sort of the opposite but comes from the same root: the feeling that you’re on a tiny patch of land with no resources and no long history, squeezed on one side by America and on the other by a rising China, with things not exactly peaceful at home either. So you’re always on alert, feeling like you’re at rock bottom in the dark, on the edge of being ruled by someone else, and you’d better be ready to suffer. Honestly that sense of crisis is correct. The old saying goes, “Born in adversity, die in comfort.” Which is why the Japanese work so hard — and at least on that count, I’d say it beats China’s habit of being woken up from its “celestial empire” daydreams by a slap across the face. But “island mentality” isn’t a nice word. It’s distorted, a little forced, and a little delusional, and it shows up in Japanese culture and all sorts of works. You’ve seen it in anime — Japan gets colonized, Japan needs a revolution, Japan gets surrounded like livestock, the world ends with Japan at the center. Etc. Etc. (I’m just talking off the top of my head. I didn’t name Guilty Crown, I didn’t name Code Geass, and I certainly didn’t mention Attack on Titan.) And by extension, of course there are visual novels that display the same mentality. Like the one I played this time… From the Future Undying.