Making*Lovers is an older SMEE game, and it got a lot of praise. Lots of reasons, but mainly: Great music Funny skits Cute characters Sweet romance Don’t know about everyone else, but those four are why I loved it. Then SMEE went off and did some messy isekai stuff, finally realized they should get back to basics, and put out this new game. Probably on a tight budget, because it’s wearing the skin of the previous work — same title, Making*Lovers — but to me these two games are fundamentally different.

I thought about writing some clever, unconventional intro, but then I figured nobody actually reads those closely anyway, so forget it. Let’s just talk about the game.

Everyone knows game companies these days basically have no shame… The most obvious sign of that shamelessness is they never “wait until the game is finished” before putting it on sale. They get it to roughly-done and immediately start selling. As for the rest—sell the base game first, deal with everything else later. When it’s done, they bolt it on and call it “Downloadable Content,” i.e. what we call DLC. Some of that DLC you have to pay extra for. So you pay for a half-finished game, then keep paying for the extra content bolted on afterward. Only after you’ve coughed up several times does the content count as fully there and the game count as complete… Think about it and that’s pretty fucked, isn’t it. Fortunately this dumbass habit is mostly a Western publisher thing; Japanese companies still have some shame… probably. Why “probably”? Because Japanese companies have learned bad habits too. Make half a game, then put out an expansion pack—it’s become the new normal. Once the engine and framework are in place, adding a few stages is just opening the map editor… And that goes double for visual novels, sitting at the very bottom of the game food chain, which don’t even need a map editor! SMEE, a sub-brand of the real estate company HOOKSOFT, is exactly this kind of shameless entity. They love putting out Minifandisks—the really short kind of fandisk, where the content length barely qualifies as DLC. Oh, and it’s not just SMEE being shameless. HOOKSOFT has no shame either; their games get Minifandisks too. If you want to say Asa Project, the other HOOKSOFT sub-brand, is relatively honorable and doesn’t do Minifandisks, you’d be dead wrong—they’ll add new characters and sell a PSV version, charge more, make more money… shame all over the floor. Is the Japanese real estate business just not turning a profit anymore? Is that why HOOKSOFT is shamelessly grifting every which way? Anyway, this time SMEE put out DLC for last year’s well-received Making＊Lovers—the so-called Mini Fandisk Volume 1. The full title: “Making＊Lovers Geki-Icha After Story Volume.01 Ako, Karen, Saki” Holy shit that name is dumb as hell. They’re one step away from tacking on a Deluxe Package Complete Edition suffix once all the volumes are out.