I actually played this game a while ago — I even wrote a commercial piece on it — but I never got around to blogging about it, mostly because I forgot. I’ve forgotten almost the entire plot too. If I hadn’t been sorting through files today, I’d have pretty much erased the fact that I ever played it. So what kind of game is this? According to SMEE, it’s not just any game — it’s a commemorative game. Commemorating what, exactly? First, it’s SMEE’s 15th anniversary title. Second, it commemorates SMEE’s cumulative sales hitting 150,000 across all its games. The first time I saw those two “commemorations,” I nearly lost it. What kind of commemoration is this? Since when does 15 years even warrant one? And it’s not even a real “15th anniversary” — look closer and it turns out the project was conceived during the 15th anniversary… holy shit, that counts too. And this is the first time I’ve ever seen “cumulative sales” used as a reason to commemorate something. It reads like someone forcing out content when they’ve got nothing left.

For years now, SMEE’s main scenario writer Yu Hayase has been getting cozy with Azarashi Soft. After a few “collab mini-games,” they’ve stopped pretending and just merged, with Hayase even spearheading Azarashi’s new title Amanatsu. The game looks weird no matter how you slice it. The title and art style are pure Azarashi, but the side characters and dialogue style scream SMEE. Probably to boost sales, they brought in a bunch of VAs old players know by heart. And goddammit, they dragged out my most hated one, Yukary Aoyama, to voice the main heroine. Every role she’s done except Kazuki Kazami gives me PTSD. The second heroine is Akinohana, who’s currently on permanent vacation, and the third is Mai Gotou. That’s a stacked cast spanning three generations of eroge VAs. If this game had a press conference, the fat otaku in the audience would’ve been screaming. I was actually hyped for this one, but less than five minutes in, I felt this weird sense of disappointment.

I first saw the key visual for SMEE’s new game at the end of last year, when someone sent it to me. My reaction was immediate: this has to be fake. The reason was simple: It looks like absolute shit! And what’s worse, this ugly-ass art was still done by the “same team” — no artist change, still the same “Taniyama-san.” There have long been rumors that this “Taniyama-san” isn’t one person but a team name. But come on, everyone knows the saying: water flows downhill, people strive upward. If drawing is your profession, you should only get better over time. How the hell do you get worse!!

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.

Not sure if it’s the pandemic or what, but the number of visual novel releases has dropped off a cliff this year, and a lot of veteran studios seem to have slowly lost their original passion for the craft. Take HOOKSOFT for example—they and SMEE have planned a pile of new titles this year, but… those titles are hard to describe in polite company. For instance, Hook’s “Yubisaki” is basically an SMEE game, and SMEE’s new title feels more like a Moonstone Cherry game. But both of those games (including the Hook one that isn’t out yet) have nearly identical promotional styles, down to the website intros. Put it bluntly: these three games are “obviously off the same assembly line.” I’ve been shitting on assembly-line products ever since I first trashed Yuzusoft’s stuff years ago. Sure, an assembly line boosts efficiency, cuts costs, speeds up production, and raises profits. But games aren’t cold commodity goods—they’re vessels for narrative and, to some extent, culture. Churning that kind of thing out on a production line lowers costs, speeds things up, and maybe increases revenue, but the games themselves naturally become boring as hell.

Seeing this title, let’s first define what counts as a “failure” according to the usual forum argument rules. Everyone knows a visual novel goes through a process from “planning” to “production.” You could say the “planning” is the game’s goal and determines its direction. Following that logic, if the game’s production completely runs counter to the “planning,” or if the game itself never even fulfills the planning’s original goal, then the game can be considered a “failure.” So today, let’s talk about one such “failed” game.

A female teacher I know once said something: “In a romance it looks like the man is chasing the woman, but the initiative is always on the woman’s side. All she has to do is pick from a menu of things the man does.” I think her version is incomplete, though. There’s a precondition: the woman has to be good-looking. If you look like Shonan’s walking dick, no man is coming over to hand you a menu. You can also read that line the other way. In a normal man-chases-woman romance, it looks like the guy grinds it out with persistence and wins his goddess, but really the woman was just giving him chances, one after another. Think about it. If she genuinely has zero interest in you, she won’t give you a single chance to make contact, and she won’t listen to a word you say. You think you’re conquering her. Really you’re just being allowed to conquer her.

The first time I heard that SMEE — the “matchmaking game maker” — was doing a harem game, I was shocked. SMEE has always emphasized “pure love,” and not just that, but a kind of “realistic romance.” I’ve praised them for doing that well more than once. And then, before they’d even done it well a few times, they got cocky. What’s weirder is that they basically swapped identities with their parent company HOOKSOFT. In other words, HOOKSOFT, which usually pulls settings out of its ass, started doing pure love. And SMEE, which usually does pure love, started doing settings. Sure, both SMEE and HOOKSOFT have done settings plenty of times, with all sorts of gimmicky elements — “gradual conquest,” “a friend of a friend,” “corporate drone matchmaking,” “conquering and being conquered” — but none of that shit ever mattered. What sticks with you is always the bickering between the protagonist and the heroines. So I think the core competitive strength of SMEE, and of the now-SMEE-fied HOOKSOFT, has become “couple bickering skits.” Nobody cares what story you’re telling, nobody expects any wild developments, nobody even thinks you’ll throw in a “memory flashback.” The core is always that “lovers’ quarrel,” and that’s exactly what everyone wants to see. Actually, don’t underestimate “lovers’ quarrels” — not many people can do them well, which is one of the reasons I keep praising SMEE. If I were the president of SMEE, I’d lock in the protagonist and heroine names. Copy-pasting the same template of “unpopular protagonist suddenly hits his popular phase” every time is exhausting. Just use one name, like Wu Laoji or whatever, and put the protagonist’s name in every game title: Wu Laoji’s Country Adventure, Wu Laoji’s Matchmaking Odyssey, Wu Laoji and Miss Wang’s Space Adventure, Wu Laoji and the King of Another World… Keep that up and forget sales — SMEE could become famous overnight, get a theatrical film, and build a national IP. But that pattern feels familiar… Oh right, speaking of “another world,” this time SMEE actually did go with an “isekai” setting. The title is pretty blunt too: Harem Kingdom. The protagonist suddenly gets transported to another world, becomes its king, and gets a harem. To this day I still want to complain that this setting is just so not-SMEE!

I remember shelving an article called something like “The Otaku’s Love Manual.” I had the concept worked out and everything, but never got around to writing it, because it’s just too damn complicated. Real love isn’t like an eroge — you’re dealing with an actual person, not a two-dimensional character with preset parameters on the other side of a screen. Real people have all kinds of personalities and traits, which means the “girl” you’re up against in reality might be a fusion of several dozen different heroines from different eroge, and the “events” you run into out there might be spread across different routes belonging to different heroines. Maybe only by improvising and piecing it all together can you keep up. For most otaku, though, that’s not even the problem. The problem is their own emotional intelligence. I’ve met some “otaku” who constantly complain that they can’t find a partner, that girls won’t talk to them. But honestly… it’s not just girls — guys don’t want to talk to them either. The moment they open their mouths it’s all about their own little world, and they refuse to engage with anyone outside it. They lock themselves inside their own bodies and then complain that nobody understands their heart. Communication is a two-way street. If you won’t let anyone get to know you, but demand that they bare their souls for you to pick through — that kind of thing only happens in porn games for people with certain special interests. Of course, not all eroge are “fantasy works” like that. Some are pretty grounded in reality — HOOK and SMEE, for instance. There was a time when SMEE’s games were all about helping otaku leave the otaku life behind, while HOOKSOFT’s games were mostly traditional “school fantasy romance.” “Fantasy” because HOOK’s setups always had some wild idea — robots, virtual reality — and HOOK games always had an in-school chat system that live-roasted whatever the protagonists were doing. These days, all of that is gone. HOOK’s signature touches have pretty much vanished, to the point where their games are indistinguishable from SMEE’s. So HOOK’s latest release is a full-on SMEE-flavored game: Docchi no i ga Suki Desu ka? (Which “i” do you like?)

“Tomodachi ijou, koibito miman” — more than friends, less than lovers — is a pretty common phrase in Japanese, and a handy way of describing a vague sort of romantic relationship. Most people know what it means: the two of you are past being friends but haven’t quite reached lovers yet. And of course, once you do reach “lovers,” there’s the same kind of transitional gap before you become an actual married couple, so you’d figure “more than lovers, less than married” ought to exist too. Which is why SMEE went and used that exact name for their recent fandisc: “Sugar*Style: Koibito Ijou, Fuufu Miman.” It fits what the fandisc actually is, honestly — most of it is afterstory, so naturally it’s all stuff that happens after they’ve become a couple.