Last year SMEE put out a game with a seriously baffling title. I mean the title itself is baffling. Hajilove -making*lovers- See, the actual title is Hajilove—first love—while the subtitle is borrowed from another well-known SMEE work, Making Lovers. Making lovers… as in making girlfriends, I guess. Why call it baffling? Because at a glance it looks like a Making Lovers sequel when it isn’t one at all. The reason for the naming is simple: riding the coattails. They want you to think this new title—which shares neither artist nor writer nor production team with Making Lovers—is the spiritual successor to the Making Lovers series. Buy it, and the sales go up. So why not just make an actual Making Lovers sequel? Here’s the kicker: Hajilove -makinglovers-* is really SMEE’s first attempt at the nukige space. SMEE has always stuck to a vaguely societal “pure love” lane, mostly matchmaking games, and nobody ever expected to fap to a SMEE title. So their “practicality” push this time is shy and embarrassed—still insisting over and over that it’s “pure love,” even after hiring several nukige artists… The reception to Hajilove turned out better than expected. A lot of old fans said they weren’t comfortable with the sudden nukige pivot, but the body doesn’t lie, and sales don’t either. With SMEE’s successful borrowing, its sister brand HOOK naturally had to take the same step, and so we got Secret Love (Kari).

The past few years have brought a wave of “retro.” People start missing the “old” stuff, and more and more content with a “retro” flavor gets dug out of the historical junk pile and put back into production. Keyboards with last-century styling, computers, handhelds, all sorts of odds and ends. FiiO recently put out a “cassette player,” not cheap, and chunky as hell. And yet people were falling over themselves to buy it. Even with the “retro” tax that steep, there’s still a market—at least enough of one to keep the manufacturers churning out reshelled products alive and well. Which gets me thinking about another industry soaked in the same “retro” smell: the beautiful-girl dating simulation game, commonly known as galgame. Anyone with a bit of history knows the earliest galgames weren’t like today’s mainstream products. The universally acknowledged granddaddy is the Tokimeki Memorial series—I remember it also being called Jun’ai Techou, though back in the day I kept reading the pirated disc as Jun’ai Techou… anyway, not important. What matters is that Tokimeki Memorial was a deadly serious game about “simulation,” “romance,” and “raising.”

Hooksoft’s earlier Houkago Cinderella (After School Cinderella) was a huge hit. I thought it was a decent game, but I never expected it to be popular enough to get an official sequel… so here’s Houkago Cinderella 2. The original was a pure school romance setup: the protagonist picks different after-school routes, runs into different heroines, and each one spins out into a different love story. The only real gameplay hook was the “fortune telling”: every day after school you can hit up two bros for a reading, they hint at where each heroine might show up, and you pick your route based on that to clear each girl’s route.

I first saw the key visual for SMEE’s new game at the end of last year, when someone sent it to me. My reaction was immediate: this has to be fake. The reason was simple: It looks like absolute shit! And what’s worse, this ugly-ass art was still done by the “same team” — no artist change, still the same “Taniyama-san.” There have long been rumors that this “Taniyama-san” isn’t one person but a team name. But come on, everyone knows the saying: water flows downhill, people strive upward. If drawing is your profession, you should only get better over time. How the hell do you get worse!!

So here’s the thing: I didn’t even want to play this game. I’ve given up on Hook. The way they develop their scenarios like some high-cohesion, low-coupling assembly line pisses me off just looking at it, and paired with that eternal 720p max resolution, my blood pressure went straight through the roof… But I heard there was a “landmine,” so I dove in. You know how it is. I really love playing “landmines.” No idea if that counts as a symptom of being a total M. And here’s the awkward part: I’d barely finished the game when I got a commission request. So yeah, I already busted my ass writing a not-exactly-short commercial piece on this game, and now being asked to talk about it again is exhausting. Plus there’s honestly not that much to discuss story-wise. If I had to say something, let’s talk about the game’s “concept” and where it crashes and burns.

I remember shelving an article called something like “The Otaku’s Love Manual.” I had the concept worked out and everything, but never got around to writing it, because it’s just too damn complicated. Real love isn’t like an eroge — you’re dealing with an actual person, not a two-dimensional character with preset parameters on the other side of a screen. Real people have all kinds of personalities and traits, which means the “girl” you’re up against in reality might be a fusion of several dozen different heroines from different eroge, and the “events” you run into out there might be spread across different routes belonging to different heroines. Maybe only by improvising and piecing it all together can you keep up. For most otaku, though, that’s not even the problem. The problem is their own emotional intelligence. I’ve met some “otaku” who constantly complain that they can’t find a partner, that girls won’t talk to them. But honestly… it’s not just girls — guys don’t want to talk to them either. The moment they open their mouths it’s all about their own little world, and they refuse to engage with anyone outside it. They lock themselves inside their own bodies and then complain that nobody understands their heart. Communication is a two-way street. If you won’t let anyone get to know you, but demand that they bare their souls for you to pick through — that kind of thing only happens in porn games for people with certain special interests. Of course, not all eroge are “fantasy works” like that. Some are pretty grounded in reality — HOOK and SMEE, for instance. There was a time when SMEE’s games were all about helping otaku leave the otaku life behind, while HOOKSOFT’s games were mostly traditional “school fantasy romance.” “Fantasy” because HOOK’s setups always had some wild idea — robots, virtual reality — and HOOK games always had an in-school chat system that live-roasted whatever the protagonists were doing. These days, all of that is gone. HOOK’s signature touches have pretty much vanished, to the point where their games are indistinguishable from SMEE’s. So HOOK’s latest release is a full-on SMEE-flavored game: Docchi no i ga Suki Desu ka? (Which “i” do you like?)

If you watch a lot of anime or play galge, you’re probably familiar with a certain setup. In Japanese otaku-oriented fiction, the most common one is the “harem.” This “harem” is a bit different from the Qing dynasty harem dramas we’re used to. Even if it’s somewhat similar to something like The Deer and the Cauldron, it’s still not quite the same. Japanese harems mostly consist of “the male lead maintaining ambiguous relationships with multiple women for a long time but never fucking confessing.” Because Japan is monogamous, you see—if you confess, that means the other women are done for, game over, loser dogs, and the harem loses its meaning. This “harem” thing thrives on that borderline-level ambiguity. You can be naked and hugging all sorts of girls, you can see their entire bodies, you can kiss, you can grab tits, you can even touch pussy, but as long as you don’t stick it in, you and she are just ambiguous, the other women still have a chance, and your harem can continue. So the actual fucking is generally the bottom line. Most harem works never cross that line—unless they’re heading for the ending. However, “harem” in the context of a galgame is a different picture entirely… Because galgames have no bottom line, harems split into “true harem” and “fake harem.” “True harem” is exactly what it sounds like—ハーレム—the male lead does 3P, 4P, 5678P… all sorts of indescribable things. “Fake harem” is still the manga/anime routine: all sorts of ambiguity, all the heroines like the protagonist, but since it’s a galgame you’ll definitely hit a home run and it won’t drag on without an ending like some dumbass manga or light novel. Most harem setups go like this: Ahuhu is an unbelievably ordinary high schooler. At home he has a sister who’s an unbelievably brocon and hates squid, next door lives a childhood friend named Xiaozhu who walks to school with him every day, the student council president at school is a sharp-tongued girl who deliberately picks fights with him every day, and meanwhile Ahuhu has a crush on some girl in the school library—a recent transfer student he ran into by chance on the train one time. Ahuhu keeps saying he has no luck with love, but the story ends with his sister wanting to marry him, Xiaozhu insisting she’s just a childhood friend while actually masturbating to him every day, the student council president being a tsundere who’s crazy about him and only picks fights to talk to him more, and the library girl actually liking him too but unable to say it no matter what, keeping it bottled up inside… So Ahuhu, while humbly calling himself a loser, simultaneously juggles all these beautiful girls like some romance-blind KY idiot, until some event triggers a choice and a confession… Familiar? Clichéd? I can’t say for manga and light novels, but at least most galgames follow a similar setup… Honestly, this setup has plenty of holes, especially the protagonist claiming he has zero luck with women: “You motherfucker Ahuhu, your luck with women is off the charts!” You get used to complaining about this stuff. Some games try to break out of the framework, but they always roll back in the end… After all, if you want to write multiple heroines, this is the only way… what else can you do… Yeah, what else can you do? Well, a company called Hook gave us a different answer, showing us what a harem looks like when it doesn’t follow the formula…

For a lot of people whose entire knowledge of Japan stops at the Second Sino-Japanese War and at the level of Aoi Sora and Matsushima Kaede, the impression they have of the country is basically this: “perverted,” “off-the-wall,” “all kinds of fetishes,” “twisted,” and so on and so forth. It’s not hard to see why. At least in mainland China, the Japanese social news you come across is nothing but some foot fetishist sipping a Coke while licking a stranger’s feet for 30 minutes, some ear-cleaning massage parlor, all sorts of weird services, those utterly pointless but deeply disgusting otaku fleshlight things, people who eat a girl’s shit, people who drink her holy water, and on and on… By any reasonable standard Japan should be a country with very strict moral restraints, but that’s exactly why people cut loose harder when they do… Then again, is anywhere else any less twisted? I flipped through mainland social news and there’s no shortage of twisted stories. I know a girl I went to middle school with — she posted on social media that she ran into a purebred “foot fetishist” on the streets of Zhengzhou, who politely asked to photograph her feet specifically… and to kiss them… and she said yes. Hard to say whether that’s real “twisted” or “perverted,” but my point is that these people who clash so hard with social norms exist everywhere in the world. Japan just likes to drag them out under the spotlight. “Otaku” and “ACG” culture have seemed stuck in the swamp of “pornography” from the very start. Most of the content is about sex, even though most of the people consuming it have never had any… so the impression they give others isn’t great either. Which is why when a classmate introduced me to someone, they’d add helpfully, “Don’t worry about him, he’s a 2D person, he’s not interested in you.” and I’d sit there dying inside. Thanks to the bigger imagination that ACG culture spawned, Japan has a fun hobby: “moe-fication” and “girl-ification.” Can’t find a girl? Just turn the stuff around you into girls. Trains become girls — when you ride the train, it’s like you’ve entered the girl’s body. Pens become girls — when you grip the pen, it’s like you’re stroking the girl’s slender fingers… Cola becomes a girl — when you squeeze the bottle, it’s like you’re caressing black tights. Pocari Sweat becomes a girl — when you… okay, never mind. So whether it’s Anime, Comic, or Game (though the term ACG probably wasn’t coined by the Japanese — they say マンガ, not Comic), there’s always a game where some object gets turned into a girl and becomes the protagonist. Especially in visual novels. I’ve seen an alpaca turned into a girl, a whale turned into a girl, a robot turned into a girl, a camcorder turned into a girl, a train turned into a girl, a cursed sword turned into a girl, not to mention all the non-human ghosts and gods… and animals and whatever else. So at this point, if you told me there’s a game where a girl is a smartphone turned human, I wouldn’t even be surprised. Honestly, it feels less like surprise and more like “well, obviously.” I stroke my phone for half an hour every day. Was I subconsciously treating it as a girl all along?

I got into HookSoft games pretty early — back when I was still a virgin. I remember the one I played was called HoneyComing. I actually found it on the school FTP out of boredom, and it was one of those green install versions with no translation. I couldn’t understand the text back then, but the game did have a manga scanlated by Sumisora! I flipped through it out of boredom. Fortunately the setup was simple enough that after reading the manga, I could roughly follow the dialogue from the tone, the character sprites, and the occasional kanji. Something about an idiot protagonist taking a class on how to pick up girls at school… all that nonsense. I do remember there was this one girl with a chopstick stuck in her hair who was pretty cute. I liked her. Can’t remember her name now — something-gaya, I think. Anyway, I thought the game was pretty good at first. Mostly because the art was nice and the girls were cute. I wasn’t watching much anime back then, but this game really sparked something in me — activated my inner moe pig genes, I guess. Kind of nostalgic to think about. Oh, and it was definitely the 18+ version. First time I saw a girl gobbling down mosaic censorship, it scared the shit out of me so hard my dick got hard. Took me a while to calm down. But time flies. Nearly ten years later, that virgin who first touched a Hook game has grown up into an old virgin. Really makes you sigh — Time flies, huh. Though I don’t know why my eyes are watering as I sigh…