If you’ve seen what games I play, you’ve probably noticed I’m into “swords and sorcery,” and not so much “mecha and high tech.” So Baldr Heart, along with its earlier predecessors, never really interested me. But there’s this pervert who’s about to end up in a police cell who constantly hypes the game up, tongue hanging out, pushing it on everyone he meets. And he’s screwed me over twice before, so I had no intention of taking his recommendation. Except I’ve got a big mouth, and I said, “If Baldr Heart ever gets fan-translated by Moxing, I’ll play it.” And so, as they say, if you don’t do stupid things you won’t die. I soon saw this… and it was shoved right in my face. You all know I’m a man of my word, so I had no choice but to play it.

I’m not really a fan of “guns, cars, and balls” games—I find they get old fast. After all, run-and-gun always boils down to the same few formulas, so even during the years when CS was huge, I didn’t play it for long. If I had to name what I genuinely enjoyed playing the most, it’d be Chinese RPGs. Like everyone else, my first was the Xianjian series. Before RPGs I never read the story — the run-and-gun stuff wasn’t translated back then anyway, but it had GPS-style navigation: open the map, follow the route, kill whoever you run into. RPGs don’t let you skip the story, though. It’s a narrative, and no walkthrough is gonna sit there and recap the plot of every game you’ve played the way I stupidly do. So starting with the “Xianjian” series, at first I was mashing Enter to skip every conversation with anyone in Yuhang County, until I got to Suzhou City, where I started actually reading the story properly. Bit by bit I settled into it, and felt the pull of “game plot” for the first time. Of course you can’t say the “guns, cars, balls” games of that era had no plot — it’s just that games back then didn’t say much about their plots. How was I supposed to know that Delta Force 3 Land Warrior had a cute little sister character named Mako who nearly got killed off… the game didn’t mention a damn thing about it. What I’m actually getting at is this: riding that wave of Chinese RPGs, I started playing games “as stories to read,” and somewhere along the way RPGs drifted apart from the whole “guns, cars, and balls” crowd. The latter chases a “rush”; the former chases a “read.” Chinese RPGs had a golden age once. Plenty of them, even now, could wipe the floor with a lot of Japanese visual novels — China’s history is longer than Japan’s, after all, and there’s a lot more material worth showing off. Even if the cultural climate on the mainland keeps getting worse, at least the Chinese-speaking world still has Taiwan. The Xuanyuan Sword (轩辕剑) series counts as a pretty unique presence in Chinese-language RPGs: it was the first to fuse “history” with “mythology,” and the side stories in particular weave “emotion” into the mix.

Every month there’s a visual novel that gets pushed hard. Neko-Nin exHeart (ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート) a while back, last month’s Wagamama High Spec—that whole “buy the sales numbers with money” school of release. Except Noratoto was actually good, and Wagamama rode a full-court marketing blitz to outsell ISLAND and Chaos;Child last month. So apparently in the visual novel market, if you’re willing to push, you can still move a respectable number of copies. This month’s most-promoted title is probably Seiken Tsukai no Meidai (聖鍵遣いの命題). I kept seeing news and updates about it in Dengeki Hime every time I turned around, but oddly enough, very few Japanese readers had anything nice to say after the demo dropped… I got curious and looked at the setting, and it’s kind of RPG-ish, but it doesn’t really reek of landmine either. The OP is genuinely great—there’s even proper animation—so clearly they spent real money on this thing. By all logic, a game made with real money shouldn’t get torn apart too badly unless the story pulls some spectacular self-destruct maneuver. So I decided to trust in the quality and went and played it.