I can’t remember who Parasol’s parent company is, I just always got the feeling they’re half-dead. By “half-dead” I mean they keep making games that feel out of step with the times, the kind you look at and think “no way this sells,” and the wildest part is they make them and still don’t go under. Still, every now and then Parasol puts out something normal—though those games always make me suspect the writer’s brain is wired wrong. Take their most famous one, Haru na Hana. But I do think Parasol genuinely wants to make good games, and Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou from two years back was actually pretty solid. It even introduced this surprisingly ahead-of-its-time concept, basically an “internet addiction boot camp” school. Shame is, a lot of Japanese players didn’t get it—they kept saying “no way a school like that exists, where they lock kids up and force total obedience to the principal, that’s so fake.” Apparently the game got an official Simplified Chinese release, so maybe Chinese players would understand it better. Not that I’ve looked into how they actually felt about it. If they can make something like Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou, that proves Parasol’s got some skill. So naturally, strike while the iron’s hot—make something even better, reinvent yourself, achieve self-actualization, all that. So I waited, and in 2019 Parasol dropped a game called Koarashi Spiritchu. At first glance it looked pretty hype. Then I saw the premise and immediately spat out my drink.

Parasol has put out another new game. Honestly I don’t expect much from Parasol anymore — their games have lost any real identity or selling point. The last one with actual buzz was Hare nochi Kitto Nanohana Biyori, a.k.a. “Haru na Hana.” That game had serious problems with its narrative logic; calling it a landmine isn’t unfair. After that Parasol felt like it never recovered. Everything since has been a minor throwaway title, made half-heartedly, with painfully generic premises and nothing that stands out. Take last time’s “swimming club” thing, or that one from the start of the year, “My Everyday Romance With My Girlfriend” or whatever — they just slap together a school setting, add a harem with every girl type imaginable, you pick whoever you want, fuck her once, and it’s over. How do I put this… it doesn’t feel like romance. It feels like hiring a prostitute. So this time Parasol is back with Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou (桜ひとひら恋もよう). No idea how to translate the title well. A single cherry petal has the shape of love? Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou? Whatever, you get the idea. But the premise of this new one didn’t interest me at first glance either… except I noticed there’s a nine-year-old loli elementary schooler in the game, and you can’t even get on her route. The setup is that the protagonist is going to school as usual when suddenly the school is going to be merged into another one, due to enrollment rates or bad management or whatever. He refuses to accept it and leads a bunch of classmates in protest. That’s the story. Japan’s declining birthrate is getting worse, so school mergers are a dime a dozen. This premise is just taking the old “a girls’ school gets merged in” setup and flipping it to “we refuse the merger, and it’s not a girls’ school.” What’s the difference? Same soup, different bowl… That’s what I thought at first. Then I found out the game has a lot more going on inside.

For something like Galgame, I’ve seen plenty of people claim they’re all about the story and don’t care about the art style. Yet 99% of the time, their avatars in ACG circles are still cute girls. This isn’t surprising, really — everyone appreciates a pretty face. And for something like Galgame, which in the mouths of Sendai aunties sits not far from Adult Video, judging by looks is about as normal as it gets. In other words, for a Galgame trying to boost sales and expand its reach, the first thing you need is good-looking characters. It’s rare to see a game with ugly-as-hell character art still sell like hotcakes — maybe Gakuen Handsome (学園ハンサム) counts as the exception? So if a game’s characters aren’t drawn well, you can basically declare it dead on arrival. Unless the character has some long history and a massive fanbase behind her—but even then, you’re only fooling the diehard fans, and only a fraction of them at that. You won’t reach the “silent majority” of users, and what good is that? Definitely not gonna work. So the first time I laid eyes on Kanojo to Ore no Renai Nichijou (彼女と俺の恋愛日常), I was dead sure this thing had to be trash.

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this more than once, but I’ve got a bad habit: I find games by listening to music. This time I stumbled onto the song Octave Rain, thought it was solid… looked it up, turns out it’s a game OP, so I went and grabbed the game… The game is called PARA-SOL. If your English isn’t terrible, you can tell that PARASOL means sunshade/parasol, so the title literally means “parasol.” When I downloaded it I wasn’t expecting it to be in Chinese. Fired it up and — holy shit, it’s translated. Didn’t see that coming… Before playing I checked what Japanese players thought. Most of them said the game “starts out insanely good and then goes insanely stupid later.” In the Chinese community the go-to explanation is more like “I literally have no idea what I just read!” Plenty of things I don’t understand. I’m the best at reading crazy-people works, so I opened the game without hesitation… A few days later I finished it… There’s only one route, and I had zero desire to touch a second one… The reason is simple: it’s way too insane!

Having played a fair number of visual novels, I end up talking about plot, and when it comes to scenario structure there are basically two directions. One is the suspenseful gamble-and-court-death kind, where you manufacture some huge news, some big twist, build up a ridiculously hype mystery at the start, then line up some hype developments and one hell of a reveal at the end. The other is the utterly ordinary school romance slice-of-life, maybe with a little friction over life, studies, and club activities, which gets resolved on the way to the ending. Personally I like the first one, but not everyone can pull off big news, and running faster than everyone else won’t get it done either. Suspense and crazy twists demand a seriously strong scenario writer to handle—pacing, laying the mystery, arranging the different routes, all of it is interconnected, and one wrong step leads to every step being wrong. Plenty of people crash on the first type, drawing a tiger and ending up with a dog, or the story is passable but the writing can’t carry it, so the mystery lands with no impact, or is outright incomprehensible, and a good premise and story go to waste. The second type is way simpler—at least you won’t cause a disaster just by writing it casually. It can produce great stories too, provided you’re a gag writer good at digging up the fun in everyday life; Yukikoi Melt and The Shepherd of the Great Library are pretty solid examples of the latter. Still, it’s actually hard to completely botch the second type. Compared to walking the tightrope of suspense, everyday content is safer. Or rather, slice-of-life games don’t ask much of the plot anymore—a lot of people are probably more into the character designs and the CV performances. It’s not just games; anime mostly runs on the same rhythm. Some live on plot, some live on slice-of-life, and you can see how hard it is to nail the former. Kantai Collection went for a crazy twist and got called “shit-feeding,” while Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka? does daily moe and gets called “healing”—the difference in their setups isn’t even that big, they just chose different scenario routes. Of course, for some studios, botching a twist-heavy scenario naturally makes them think, once bitten twice shy, might as well fall back on slice-of-life for safety. Like Parasol’s QUINTUPLE☆SPLASH!.