I’ve had this nagging question for a while now: what exactly is up with this company called Azarashi Soft? They’re constantly doing collabs with different companies and teams, while their own games are all template-ridden “XX girlfriend” romance stuff. So I looked into the company’s background, and it turns out it’s no small deal. Skipping the long story, the parent company of “Azarashi Soft” was actually the precursor to Key, and they also made the fairly well-known game One. Maybe it’s because they’re a big enterprise, or maybe it’s nostalgia, but the company is still active in the visual novel industry, just now as “Azarashi Soft.” Recently they did another collab with a company that has history — Lump of Sugar, which always seems half-dead — and put out this new game, Kira☆Kano, that looks like it’s chasing the youth trend but actually ends up chasing nothing.

There’s a classic meme about Intel releasing the 11th-gen i7-11700K, which benchmarks showed was not only worse than cheaper competitors but even worse than the previous generation—a pure reverse toothpaste squeeze. Gamers Nexus famously called it a “waste of sand.” After playing Lump of Sugar’s so-called “new” 2023 release, I had a similar thought, and it led to the question in the title: If selling a CPU with reverse toothpaste squeeze is a waste of sand, what does developing a completely pointless galgame count as?

When I first saw the announcement for this new Lump of Sugar title, Arcana Alchemia (アルカナ・アルケミア), I genuinely couldn’t hold back a laugh. What year is it, and they’re still making traditional “alchemy” stories? The moment you say “alchemy” it’s always “human transmutation” this and that — at least bring up how alchemy was a precursor to modern medicine, philosophy, and chemistry, would you? Then I read the premise. Oh boy, of course it’s “transmuting a living beast-eared girl.” No idea if that was on purpose or an accident. When the game came out at the end of December, I couldn’t shake the association — seeing “shark” reminds me of that Osaka black-veil otaku, which then reminds me of jerking off, and that’s just uncomfortable. So I got around to this one first. And it turned out to be surprisingly decent. Honestly I’d even say Arcana Alchemia is the best thing Lump of Sugar has put out recently, good enough to squeeze into my year-end ranking.

There’s this stock setup you see all the time in Japanese anime and games: the protagonist has no known origin, gets treated like a freak and pushed around, and then it turns out he’s actually some kind of savior. Of course Japanese works rarely say “savior” — nine times out of ten they call him a kamisama. Honestly, back when I first started consuming this stuff, hearing “kamisama” still commanded some respect from me. A god, right? Omniscient, omnipotent. Obviously possessed of a towering intellect, ample charisma, and virtues we mere mortals could never hope to reach — the kind of being who can look down on us and address us as “mortals,” bellow Die Mortal! and take a deep, smoldering breath. But then I noticed how utterly saturated anime and games are with kamisama, and I finally wised up: the so-called “god” in Japan is about as valuable as a shared bike. Shrines dedicated to them are, by the Japanese’s own snark, as commonplace as public toilets (and in reality Japanese public toilets are not fucking commonplace at all — half the time I can only find one in a subway station). As for the “gods” set up in these stories, you don’t need to take them seriously at all. Most gods in anime and games are more useless than ordinary people. And so along comes yet another game waving the “god” banner, from everyone’s old acquaintance Lump of Sugar.

QUINCESOFT’s big 2021 opener, and it made me spit out my drink. Gohoushi Akuma to Oshioki Tenshi (ごほうしアクマとオシオキてんし), written as ご奉仕悪魔とお仕置き天使 — “the demon who does maid duty and the exiled angel.” This thing hit me hard enough that we should set the game aside for a moment and first go over how this label called QUINCESOFT even came to be.

I often regret some of my past articles. The main reason isn’t anything else—it’s that when I was younger I went on huge rants, trashing a lot of games I thought were terrible at the time. First and foremost among them: Lump of Sugar. I still remember that Unmei Senjou de Suika wo Kiru—I called its plot retarded. And Rensou Kankei—I said its system was dumb as shit. And yet, faced with Lump of Sugar’s new game Nekotsuku, Sakura. (ねこツク、さくら。)… I couldn’t help but shed tears. I deeply realized I was wrong.

Lump of Sugar. Yes, Lump of Sugar again — the sugar-cube studio. Its new game is here once more. 这次彻底踢掉了其他所有的傻逼画师，只留下了唯一能打的萌木原ふみたけ，而且萌木原作为唯一的画师还进化了画风，简单来说就是看起来更好看了。 I have to say, the game’s promotion came with some big surprises. Beyond what I mentioned earlier about the girls being drawn even better-looking, another surprise was the worldview setting and the game’s overall atmosphere. The game’s marketing leaned heavily on “Momiji,” and combined with the title itself, Enrite Kono Ha wa Kurenai ni, it finally managed to scrape together a bit of literary flair. It’s genuinely hard for an eroge to have a title with any literary flair. Everyone knows that these days, dumbass Japanese ACG titles have all turned into the structure of “kanji noun/adjective” + “katakana foreign-word fragment,” and it’s been going on for way too many years. Like “Hoshifuru Yoru no Farnese,” “Shojo Sprinkle,” “Apeiria of the Sea of Views,” “Haruoto Alice * Gram,” “Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue,” “Istoria of the Water-Burial Silver Coin,” “Simulacrum of the Moon Shadow"—and besides that kind, there are even more dumbass game titles written entirely in katakana or hiragana with no kanji at all, so many I don’t even know what to say. So I’m honestly puzzled: aren’t Japanese people always calling for their own native culture? You can’t pull that off if everything’s in katakana, right? Are you all going to write exclusively in katakana from now on? Even Mimorin tweeted that she was taking a walk, and she wrote ウォーキング instead of 散歩. I don’t know if Japanese people just find typing katakana more convenient than kanji, which is why they’re so hooked on it. All that said, I really like the title “縁りて此の葉は紅に”. I also really like the autumn-leaves mood and the setting. And you can roughly work out what the title means: because of a “connection / fate” premise, “the leaves here have begun to turn red.” Honestly, I thought January’s lineup was pretty mid all around, and this game ended up being my last hope. After playing it, I’d say it’s a decent step up — though there’s still room to grow.

Honestly? I’m a fan of Nanaroba Hana. Yeah, she’s got some black marks in her history, but I’m still a fan. I’ve always felt that when a female artist draws girls, there’s a kind of charm that male artists just can’t replicate—a sort of “cuteness” that only a girl can understand. So Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro. was naturally on my radar. It got delayed a bunch of times, a trial version came out, I played it, and I felt… weird about it. How should I put this—Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro. is put out by QUINCE SOFT, a subsidiary of Lump of Sugar. Quince is a fruit, a very peculiar one with a complicated “don’t just bite into it” nature. The reason the sub-brand is called QUINCE SOFT is probably that Lump of Sugar wanted to spin off that whole line of “somewhat playable, complex games” into its own label. What do I mean by “somewhat playable, complex games”? I mean stuff like Unmei Senjou no Phi, Magical Charming, Rensou Relation. Games that aren’t just simple branches but have a ton of complex choices. Honestly, I like these kinds of games. But for Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro., it’s a bit too complex.

Honestly, at this point I’ve basically turned into a pure moe-otaku. What’s a moe-otaku? It means I no longer care about plot or story direction. As long as the girls are cute and the voices are nice, I’ll fucking say the game is good, and if someone says it’s not, I’ll fucking find excuses to say it is, and so on and so forth… But you can’t really blame me, right? This is a world that judges by looks.

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.