I’ve played a lot of games with interesting premises, and the one that left the biggest impression on me is definitely the one where a heroine turns into an alpaca. That game was actually pretty touching. The moe girl you love most turns into an alpaca—that’s the moment that tests whether your love is real. It’s worth recommending, too. Besides heroines transforming, there’s also the protagonist-transforms genre. The famous recent one is that game where the protagonist becomes a black cat. It even got an anime, so I won’t go on about it. This kind of game always produces a lot of comedy. It’s a comedy-grade absurd premise to begin with—the protagonist suddenly turns into another species, so of course there’ll be plenty of laughs. So this genre has a new member. More, the well-known rhythm game developer, has a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary whose brand got renamed—and that renamed brand, KATE, released its latest work: Koi wa Mofumofu! Love Me Teddy (恋はもふもふ!ラブ・ミー・テディ). Literally, “Love is Fluffy, Love Me Teddy!” Don’t bitch about why it isn’t “Love my teddy” yet—I looked it up, and “love me teddy” seems to be a reference to something. The premise is easy enough to explain: the protagonist turns into a teddy bear, gets taken home by several girls, and gets rubbed all over.

Growing up, every one of us ends up watching some… physiological, health-oriented, body-art, stimulating, videotapes. And among those… physiological, health-oriented, body-art, stimulating, videotapes, the most famous ones besides the female teacher, the flight attendant, and the OL are probably the prosecutor series. Most prosecutor-series films are about a female cop who, to fight the evil forces of darkness, infiltrates the enemy’s ranks, gets caught, gets tortured and humiliated… oh, sorry, disgraced, and then our unyielding heroine defeats the evil forces and completes her mission or whatever… Of course, this kind of educational plot isn’t only something you can see performed by Matsushita Saeko on videotape. We’ve also got the so-called “2D version” in the visual novel sphere.

Japanese works love to bring up “four-leaf clovers” all the time. Most of the time it’s the hero and heroine finding one in the grass—the kind that supposedly symbolizes “luck.” One use of that trope would’ve been plenty, but unfortunately it’s everywhere now, played out to death. It goes back to games like Clover Hearts in 2003, and from then until now the four-leaf clover legend just keeps multiplying. Sometimes I honestly wonder if Japan is covered in the damn things. Four-leaf clovers are supposed to mean luck because they’re rare, so why can the protagonist and heroine always, without fail, stumble onto one? I wrote a post complaining about this a long time ago too: if four-leaf clovers stand for luck, then what does the ordinary three-leaf clover stand for? Does that mean three-leaf clovers are unlucky compared to four-leaf ones? Of course, a three-leaf clover isn’t unlucky. But if you actually use three-leaf and four-leaf clovers as a metaphor for people, the happiness a four-leaf clover gets really isn’t something everyone has. For me, I read it as “the three-leaf clover stands for the ordinary and the mediocre.” Last year More launched a sub-brand, DOLCE, and put out its first game, “カサブランカの蕾” — that is, “The Buds of Casablanca.” I rated that one pretty highly, because it gave me a lot to chew on: its take on desire and true love is “realist,” and the ending, paired with an old song redone as something new, really shines. DOLCE put out a new one again this year. Given how More has a habit of spinning up brands for no real reason, this label’s whole deal seems to be cranking out the same type of game over and over. The new one’s called Shamrock no Hanakotoba — “the language of flowers, shamrock edition,” basically. My guess is it follows the same route as Casablanca no Tsubomi before it: grounded, leaning dark. At least that’s what I figured when I stumbled onto one of the promo CGs — a big ol’ 3P shot staring me in the face… Before I got into this game, I didn’t even know there was a word “Shamrock” that specifically means “clover” — I’d always thought it was just Clover. Naturally I also looked up the language of flowers for clover, and after reading up on it, I get why everyone says the four-leaf one stands for luck. The language of the shamrock: one leaf stands for prayer, one leaf stands for hope, one leaf stands for love, and the last leaf stands for happiness. If you can find a four-leaf clover, you will find happiness. And of course, if you didn’t find that fourth leaf… you have everything, except happiness. Yes, this game is the story of four girls who had everything except happiness.

More isn’t really a studio that specializes in galge, honestly. It looks more like… “A bunch of music people who make galge on the side so they have an excuse to put out albums.” The company name is MME — MORE MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. Which is my whole point: their center of gravity is clearly music. Making galge, a cheap kind of game dev, probably isn’t the day job for them. More like a hobby? Hobby or not, they’ve put out a decent number of games, and they don’t look like they’re doing a “one and done” bit. If anything they keep branching out, spawning more and more sub-brands… Sometimes I wonder if registering a new brand in Japan is just free. Why else does every eroge company change its skin every other year… This time the new More brand is called Niko, and their game is Golden Hour (ゴールデンアワー). I mean, More already had two brands running fine — More for pure-love stuff, Pure More for nukige — and now there’s a pile of sub-labels: Chelseasoft, which looks like it’s going for moege, DOLCE, which put out the little flower of Casablanca, and now Niko. God knows what style this one is supposed to be.