Pulltop probably got paid off by some local government somewhere, because they’ve started pumping out a whole series of “tourism promo” games. The story is light, sweet, and most importantly, all-ages… Last year they had Sora to Umi ga, Fureau Kanata, and this year they went and made a sequel called Ano Hi no Tabibito, Fureau Mirai. As expected, it shares the same world, the same staff, and even the same characters. Before release, this game had zero presence. I just remember Pulltop putting out a statement one day saying something like “Due to the pandemic, Ano Hi no Tabibito, Fureau Mirai has been delayed.” Everyone was dumbfounded when they saw that. Not because of the delay itself, but because of something else: Since when was Pulltop releasing this game? We didn’t even know it existed! And when they announced the delay, the game didn’t even have a proper website yet. Later on, the scenario writer plugged it while doing promo for ATRI, otherwise literally nobody would’ve cared. Anyway, the game did come out. The previous title’s “Ogasawara Islands diving” story was actually pretty good, so how does this new one hold up?

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.

I’d nearly forgotten that I used to run around in the student council back in college. My whole student council stint was so boring I barely remember it. The org I joined was called the “Office.” I had no idea what it did then, and looking back it was probably something like a school office or faculty office — handling paperwork, doing publicity and the like. So it turns out I was already being forced to write stuff back then. A long, proud tradition. I don’t think I did much in the “Office,” either — just pulled together some notices and announcements, wrote some notices and announcements. Most of the time I hid in the student council room playing games, messing with my phone, messing with a computer. Actually I only got into the student council because the president picked me. The president was a girl, reasonably good-looking, friendly. I have no idea why she picked me or what I was supposed to do once I was in, and frankly I never saw what anyone else in the council did, either. In my head the “student council” was a purely nominal body with zero real power, no funding, and nothing to show for itself besides printing the occasional poster. Oh, right — the student council did organize an evening party once. I remember the president telling me she wanted to put on an evening party with real feeling. She was really into folk and rock. I think the two are kind of worlds apart, but my impression of her was always that she was that artsy type of girl. She also said that instead of a conventional evening party, a bonfire gathering would be better — more down-to-earth, more popular with the students. Naturally all her ideas got shot down in the end. The school took the whole thing over and turned it into exactly the kind of party she hated. You could read the displeasure all over her face. The so-called “student-council-organized evening party” still had the student council’s name on it, but it had nothing to do with us anymore. “Nothing to be done. Sometimes that’s just how things are.”

When I first watched Your Name., I saw the heroine frustrated with her mountain village, wanting to go to the big city, wanting to explore a new world. Honestly this kind of thing isn’t exactly fresh for us. We always see it in Japanese film and TV: the protagonist stuck in the countryside, sighing about how they hate this town, hate the sticks, want to go to Tokyo, want the big city. But I figure a lot of people might not get that feeling: “The countryside’s great, what’s so good about the big city? The countryside’s way more free.” Well, you don’t know what you’re missing till you’ve tasted it. Maybe people who grew up in big cities can’t understand the longing for excitement that exists in small towns. Most of the people talking about going back to the countryside are just sick of the noise of the city. And a lot of them have no idea what the countryside is actually like. Drop them out there, let them walk into town and fail to find a single Heytea, and no amount of bike-riding with their ass chafing will fill that void inside. I remember going to the countryside once when I was little. My family’s from a poor county in Kaifeng, Henan — well, not exactly my hometown, my grandma’s side. How poor was it? I remember when we got there, the relatives served us their best meal: a pot of mian gedda soup with a few beaten eggs in it. That was the top standard. And those eggs only existed because the old hen had graciously laid them that day — otherwise there wouldn’t even be eggs. The villagers there didn’t even have coops. Just a laying nest. At night the roosters and hens would fly up into the trees to sleep. Yeah, I only realized chickens were birds too after I personally watched a big rooster fly up to the treetops. They’ve got wings. It’s just that city thinking makes us forget. As novel as the countryside was, I got bored of it fast. Even with flying chickens, it was just too dull. Too monotonous — not just the food, but the people, the things to do, the scenery. Lots of people say the mountain valley views are so beautiful. But watch them every day and you’d get sick of them too. Tell someone they have to look at that for the rest of their life and never go back to the city, and they’d probably break. So maybe now you can understand the mindset of people in the countryside who want to go to the big city. Even with internet and delivery out there now, the exciting world is still better. And what if that “countryside” is on an island?

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…