I remember a few years back, before Google+ shut down, some helpful guy online told me the thing he hated most was when a character in certain anime/game works says one specific line — the moment that line comes out, he instinctively writes the whole thing off as garbage. “Humans, huh~ they’re just that kind of creature” 其实一开始我不能理解这种想法，直到我后来玩的 Galgame 越来越多，接触的所谓“神作”越来越多，我也就开始越来越明白，这样开口闭口都是“人間とは……”的角色…… I fucking hate this! What I hate isn’t the line this character says, it’s the tone he says it in—all high and mighty, like he’s above it all. He’s still a “human” himself, yet he’s always judging humans from God’s-eye view. You could call it self-mockery, but that air of superiority doesn’t look like it. What annoys me even more is that everything he does fits the mold of the “complainer who never offers a solution” type. For example, this kind of character always rants like a lunatic about how ugly humans are, how selfish humans are, how goddamn stupid humans are—and then goes right on doing ugly, selfish, goddamn stupid things himself, while never once advocating truth, goodness, or beauty. It looks more like he’s making excuses for his own stupid behavior than actually criticizing anything.

There was a time when I was really into an artist named 白もち桜. Chinese fans render her name as “白餅桜” — I followed her Twitter account almost as soon as she opened it, and the funny thing is, she followed me back. That makes her the second artist to follow me, after 茉宮祈芹. I still think fondly of her characters. The one I liked most was probably ナツイロココロロッグ — the heroine genuinely moved me — and the character she handled in 魔女こいにっき felt like a step up in how the cast was written. Her characters are mostly faces paired with fangs and gorgeous outfits, and they really do feel girlish. The weakness is obvious too, though: same-face syndrome. Whatever she draws, it’s always the same face. She went on to work on some newer titles and drew plenty of illustrations, but honestly, I don’t see any real progress. Her characters always end up in the same handful of poses, always flashing their panties, always wearing that same smile… Gradually I stopped reacting to her characters. 茉宮祈芹, by comparison, spends most of her time drawing high-exposure lewds too, but she can still deliver genuinely appealing characters in actual games — TamaYura Mirai or whatever it was called. And more importantly, 白もち桜 hasn’t done original art for a galgame in ages. She even streamed once, playing Super Mario — and watching that was enough to spike my blood pressure. Then recently, out of nowhere, she came back. Partnered with Whirlpool, no less, on a little throwaway title whose name I literally cannot remember. It was something like… けもの道☆ガーリッシュスクエア

The game I’d been hyping up all last year, the one bro kept dumping on — Pieces / Wataridori no Somnium — got a sequel after a whole year… Sure, they call it a sequel, but it’s a fandisc any way you look at it — Pieces/揺り籠のカナリア, the canary in the cradle. Honestly, the fact that it got a fandisc surprised me. The original story was already over — if you’re making a fandisc, there’s basically no room for an after-story. Every protagonist wakes up from that “dream world,” and when the male lead and the heroine meet again, they’ve both lost their old memories. It’s just a fated reunion. What else is a fandisc supposed to say? Are they gonna have another go at it in the real world? Real life already has enough of that boring-as-hell “take a humblebrag, swallow it” type of douchebag like Chiku-niu. Not me, no thanks! Then the game got a demo, and I looked at it and immediately started roasting it.

Maybe everyone gets this illusion — that when you meet someone, or hit some particular moment, your brain flashes “wait, have I seen this scene／this person in a dream before?” Plenty of people have researched and argued this phenomenon, and most land on a few possibilities: memory misplacement, an illusion of similarity between scenes, or some blurry subconscious memory of a scene. One of the Steins;Gate games even explains it as “déjà vu across worldlines.” And then there’s the one factor that’s never certain but can’t be ruled out: dreams. Which is to say, it’s entirely possible that the familiar thing you just ran into really was something you saw in a dream. Dreams are funny like that. Humans can never control their dreams, yet the dream is something the person themselves created. So when we go adventuring in a dream, the dream is something we wrote ourselves. There’s a bit of “playing with yourself” to it. Some say a normal person creates one to three dreams every night, and over the course of growing up, all those assorted dreams pile up to a terrifying number. Among them, one or two scenes are bound to resemble something you run into in reality, and that produces the so-called “déjà vu.” This is probably the most reliable explanation for the “I keep seeing it in dreams” feeling — but compared to that cold reality, we’d rather accept the romantic explanation: “You and I are connected by something heaven ordained, so we met in a dream long ago, and that dream scene guided us to meet in reality…” Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? uh?

Looking back on some of my old Gal impressions, I always want to laugh bitterly. The old me thought a game had to have a good story to be good. And what counts as a good story? It has to have a big twist, but not too absurd a twist — explode the plot while staying coherent, plant a pile of foreshadowing and pick every bit of it back up. Best if it also works in a little life wisdom and the truth of the world. That’s a good game. Now I see that what I was after was just the “good” games within the story-driven category. But like how a cinema shows more than Hollywood blockbusters, Galgames aren’t only the story-driven kind. I’ve also thought that if a game can make its characters cute enough, that’s fine too — I just always felt that kind of game was a tier below the story-driven ones. Because those are the big titles, and this is just selling moe character writing, tea-party-slice-of-life level. Like holding up Death Note against Yuru Yuri, or a AAA title against Minecraft — most people figure the two aren’t even on the same level.

Whirlpool — I used to have a pretty good impression of them. Stuff like the old whale-fucking, the robot-fucking, and the early dragon princess-fucking, etc. etc. Feels like Whirlpool just loves playing with human-beast… oh wait, I mean human and mixed-blood. Maybe that’s just their style. And so Whirlpool’s new game this year just popped out of nowhere, then out of nowhere it was out and on sale… I’d been thinking it wasn’t coming out until May… The new title is Nekonin Exheart (猫忍えくすはーと), and the premise is dead simple: two cat-eared ninjas show up at the protagonist’s ancestral home, claiming they’ve come to serve as his bodyguards and retainers. That’s the setup everything else hangs on. So I made a point of hammering these facts: the game itself only costs 2000 yen, and it’s only the first-press edition that comes with a hug pillow that runs 13000 yen. See? Remind you of anything? Sound like the XXX no Seiiki series? Yep — this game is basically following that series’ playbook. The appeal here is pretty clear-cut: short story, simple plot, good art.