Honestly, at first I figured HARUKAZE was dead as a studio, that they’d gone full-time into all-ages TokyoToon stuff. Didn’t expect them to come back from the dead with a brand-new title. The game’s called “Monkeys!¡,” and that double inverted exclamation mark at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Combined with the premise, it gave me the feeling they were about to do a crossdressing bit. I haven’t touched many crossdressing VNs. Most of them follow the same playbook, and the ones that actually do something interesting with it are rare. The one that stuck with me was Maria†Holic from back in the day, and even that didn’t have much to do with crossdressing, really. I’ve always appreciated HARUKAZE’s talent for shitposting, so I was looking forward to this one bringing something new. After playing it, though, all I can say is this game brought plenty of “surprises”—and even more disappointment.

God knows why I played this game. Curiosity, probably. Koumuin Yamete, Ana o Horu Koto ni Shimashita (公務員辞めて、穴を掘ることにしました) The title sounds like a joke, and that’s exactly what it is: a 4399-tier doujin minigame. I don’t know if the old “Chengguang” platform is even still alive, but this is the kind of thing that would only exist on a site like that. The game is short. Our thoroughly goofy-looking protagonist ditches his shut-in wife at home to dig a hole by the front door, and ends up in another world. There are multiple endings—one where you dig down, come back up, and find your wife has run off with someone else; one where you tunnel through time and space. But the whole thing is just snark and shitposting, so you’re not expecting anything actually interesting out of it. And the “jokes” in this game are genuinely hard for me to parse. Maybe it’s because I’m not a young Japanese person, but my face the entire time was the old-man-staring-at-his-phone meme: “What the fuck is this? What’s supposed to be funny here?”

Sure, Akane Ikegami-sensei once reported my Twitter account and got it suspended, claiming I “spoiled” things and “leaked the protagonist’s dick length.” But considering how utterly moronic the visual novel industry has been lately, with each new release dumber than the last, by that horizontal comparison, Ikegami-sensei’s game here is still worth a look. Ore no Koi Tenshi ga Ponkotsu Sugite Kowai (俺の恋天使がポンコツすぎてコワ～い。) The こわ〜い here only really works if you drag out the vowel. The title follows the same pattern as that “yabai” series from before, just swapped to “kowai” this time. The meaning is dead simple: My love angel Cupid is way too much of a klutz and it scares me. Honestly, I knew exactly how this game was going to play out just from the title, and the opening had me spitting out my drink: 男主在路边捡到了一个“Love Note”，并且认识了一个自称是“丘比特”的天使，天使说只要在“Love Note”上写下你喜欢的人的名字，很快你就会和这个人产生邂逅。 Ah, wonder if the protagonist still has to hold onto this “Love Note” and become the god of the new world.

I still have a lot of affection for Niijima Yuu, because the game he wrote, Hatsuyuki Sakura, was the first one that made me go “whoa, a visual novel can actually do this?” Up until then, every visual novel I’d played was the same old clichéd school romance: talk to a girl every day, confess when the time comes, then fuck and roll credits. The fact that Niijima Yuu went and pulled off something genuinely unusual left me with a really good impression of him. After that, Niijima Yuu put out a whole string of new works — Majo Renai Nikki (魔女恋爱日记) and whatever that Shinai Kanojo thing was. A lot of the reception has been pretty hostile toward him, but I still think the guy’s got real talent; the visual novel audience just doesn’t get him. Sometimes I think he should be writing novels instead of stooping to make visual novels. Then I heard Niijima Yuu went off to hang out with that hack Maeda Jun, and the two of them started jerking each other off in public, which somehow spat out Summer Pockets. After that, Niijima Yuu got tangled up with the Makura guys again, heading off to work on Sakura no Koro… Right when I was about to forget all about Niijima Yuu, I noticed this month’s releases include something called アインシュタインより愛を込めて APOLLOCRISIS…

As everyone knows, the Japanese visual novel industry is on its deathbed lately — August didn’t even have a single big release worth playing — so out of boredom I had to go find something else to play. That’s when I happened to see someone on a blog hyping up a visual novel called Hallucination (幻觉). The funny part: the studio behind it, Ash Heaven (灰烬天国), had a previous game called Old Watch (旧手表) that was pulling in a lot of positive reviews on Steam. Most Chinese-made visual novels on Steam have high ratings anyway, except the ones that shitpost themselves to death. Considering Old Watch was especially praised for its story, and considering I literally had nothing better to do, I bought the Old Watch + Hallucination bundle and started playing. Old Watch first, naturally. The playthrough wasn’t especially long, wasn’t especially short. Honestly, Old Watch far exceeded my expectations. Compared to the games I ran into years ago where the “anime-nerd concentration was high enough to make me vomit,” Old Watch actually has a shadow of what a real “Chinese-made visual novel” could be, and its strengths and weaknesses are both very obvious. So I figured I’d write something about this game and its sequel, plus my own views on the endless stream of “Chinese-made visual novels” coming out these days. No plot summary this time, and no savage roasting either (I heard bashing Chinese visual novels gets you flamed?). Just an essay, writing wherever my thoughts go.

I thought about opening with a look at how this new MELLOW studio connects to the old MME, but the more I turned it over the more pointless it seemed. MME is dead. Better to just talk about the game. The game comes from “Tareka,” the most shitpost-happy scenario writer MME ever had — the one who’d casually write orgies and compensated dating, though every now and then he’d turn out something decent. So even before release, this one reeked of “he’s doing a bit again.” アサガオは夜を識らない。 The title reads downright literary in Japanese. アサガオ is written 朝顔 in kanji and refers to a purple… trumpet-shaped flower. In English, a morning glory. Literally translated, the title is “The Morning Glory Doesn’t Know the Night.” But the game reads 夜 as あい — the character for love, 愛. Which turns the title into “The Morning Glory Doesn’t Know Love.” Conveniently, the heroine is also named Asagao, so the pun lands: on paper it’s “the morning glory doesn’t know the night,” in practice it’s “the heroine doesn’t know love.” From the very first promo, the game kept insisting: this is a true “pure love” story. Anyone with experience knows what it means when a writer keeps hammering on “pure love.” Didn’t Gen Urobuchi call himself the “warrior of love” while claiming he was writing pure love too? Looking at the key art — the heroine cradling a bleeding rabbit — I steeled myself, felt a flicker of anticipation, and opened the game. Which, as it turned out, was the start of my disappointment.

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.

Back at the start of the year, someone told me Yuzusoft was putting out a new title this year. Sure enough, it dropped a while ago — except nobody saw it coming that it would be an all-ages release. Yuzusoft launched a sub-brand called Yuzusoft Sour, i.e. “Sour Yuzusoft.” Which is a bit of a redundant name, honestly — yuzu is already sour… And the important part: the game itself, Parquet. Most Yuzusoft fans instantly lost their minds when they saw the new title was “all-ages,” but I’m fine with it. Yuzusoft can tell a decent story — Senren Banka alone proves that much. If they drop the low-effort “horny” and “fanservice” angle and go story-driven, that’s not automatically a bad idea. If the writing and direction are strong, this could be a good moment to pivot… “If the writing and direction are strong,” though… So is this game actually any good?

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.

There’s this stock setup you see all the time in Japanese anime and games: the protagonist has no known origin, gets treated like a freak and pushed around, and then it turns out he’s actually some kind of savior. Of course Japanese works rarely say “savior” — nine times out of ten they call him a kamisama. Honestly, back when I first started consuming this stuff, hearing “kamisama” still commanded some respect from me. A god, right? Omniscient, omnipotent. Obviously possessed of a towering intellect, ample charisma, and virtues we mere mortals could never hope to reach — the kind of being who can look down on us and address us as “mortals,” bellow Die Mortal! and take a deep, smoldering breath. But then I noticed how utterly saturated anime and games are with kamisama, and I finally wised up: the so-called “god” in Japan is about as valuable as a shared bike. Shrines dedicated to them are, by the Japanese’s own snark, as commonplace as public toilets (and in reality Japanese public toilets are not fucking commonplace at all — half the time I can only find one in a subway station). As for the “gods” set up in these stories, you don’t need to take them seriously at all. Most gods in anime and games are more useless than ordinary people. And so along comes yet another game waving the “god” banner, from everyone’s old acquaintance Lump of Sugar.