Kaiko no Okurimono (蚕の贈り物) is something I stumbled on by accident — a tiny indie game… The premise is dead simple: in a fairy forest there’s a moth youkai. It’s a moth, so its lifespan is short, and before it dies it wants to do something to prove it once lived… To stay faithful to the “moths don’t live long” thing, the game actually slaps a time limit on you. Of… one minute. Yep. The game is one minute long.

2020 was a rough year for everyone, eroge makers included, so there were way fewer games to play this year and way fewer that actually landed. And I played about as many as always… meaning not fewer. I went through 41 eroge in 2020, which somehow matches 2019 exactly. So I genuinely got worse this year. I’m supposed to be phasing this out gradually… That said, there seemed to be more games worth recommending this year. Though I clearly felt one thing — visual novel music just doesn’t hit anymore. Honestly, I tried to put together a list of “OPs and EDs that sounded good this year” and came up nearly empty. The lesbian game’s OP was decent, but frankly I didn’t even want to collect OSTs this year, so I’m skipping music entirely. Let’s just talk about the games. Here’s what “I personally” thought was good in 2020.

Last year, when I was writing “My Favorite Eroge of 2019”, I gave the number one spot to a work by Tōta-sensei. I think Tōta-sensei sometimes writes preachy plots, and he has this weird obsession with random trivia that makes reading painful, but his storytelling is structurally sound, and most importantly, he always delivers something memorable. Whether it’s the moral encouragement in Floral Flowlove (フローラル・フローラブ), or the exploration of Japanese folklore, the hiyoku bird, and immortality in Tamayura Mirai (タマユラミライ), both are thought-provoking. To borrow the words of that Osaka Black Shark normie who’s always got a JK under his arm: “He can tell a good big-picture story.” But soon enough, Tōta slapped me in the face. That’s what today’s topic is about: Garasu Hime to Kagami no Juusha — Glass Princess and the Mirror Servant.

QUINCESOFT’s big 2021 opener, and it made me spit out my drink. Gohoushi Akuma to Oshioki Tenshi (ごほうしアクマとオシオキてんし), written as ご奉仕悪魔とお仕置き天使 — “the demon who does maid duty and the exiled angel.” This thing hit me hard enough that we should set the game aside for a moment and first go over how this label called QUINCESOFT even came to be.

The eroge market has been shrinking hard these past few years. Plenty of studios can’t be bothered making “story games” anymore and have all pivoted to short, punchy fanservice nukige, dressed up as “the pursuit of sweet romance.” In reality it’s just low-cost nukige to recoup money. Everyone knows these games have no substance — you’re here for the CGs — and the devs know it too, so they stuff more CGs in. And since a budget title needs more than one volume, they draw a bunch of heroines up front and sell them off in pieces. Small margin, high volume. Why not? Today’s subject is Itchokusen (Shojo→) Kanojo to Koi Shitai, from COSMOS, a small label under Windmill. If you ask me, the game has exactly two highlights. One is the artist Tsukimoto Jin — the art is genuinely good, and the heroine is genuinely beautiful. The other is the original concept by Houmori Kei. Because Houmori Kei may be an old pervert, but he’s decent at writing “sweet romance” stuff. His old light novel Ore mo Omae mo Choro Suginai ka was pretty good: the male lead desperately wants a girlfriend but is kind of flippant, confesses to anyone he sees, and then by some mix-up ends up confessing to our heroine, who — get this — earnestly and seriously accepts. And so the two begin a relationship where they put the cart before the horse…

In the eroge circles everyone knows, there’s a legend going around: they say Subarashiki Hibi is a masterpiece. And when you ask what exactly makes Subarashiki Hibi so amazing, the answers you get are a little off-topic. “There’s tons of hardcore CG in Subarashiki Hibi!” “There’s even gender-bent futanari HCG in it!” “All kinds of violence and sexual elements!” Hearing all that, it’s easy to assume the “masterpiece” label here is just because of “overly hardcore porn.” But that doesn’t really seem to be the case for Subarashiki Hibi either. Search online for impressions of the game and you’ll always find all sorts of write-ups that are “very philosophical, but completely incomprehensible.” Why “very philosophical”? Because a lot of people leave huge walls of text after playing Subarashiki Hibi, discussing everything under the sun—from ancient Cthulhu Mythos to every parallel-space theory after it, quoting sources left and right, citing classics, as if the game’s depth were on par with some massive philosophical tome. The “incomprehensible” part is that after reading all that text, I still couldn’t figure out what kind of story the game tells. But it did make me remember the scenario writer: SCA-Di. Later, out of curiosity, I tried Subarashiki Hibi. Since I couldn’t read Japanese at the time (still can’t), I played the translated version. About two hours in, I closed the game. The reason was simple: boring as hell. A lot of the dialogue in this game is just “mindless insertion of forced philosophical arguments.” The two characters are really just chatting, but it’s padded with tons of so-called “philosophical content.” The main axis of the game is just the protagonist wandering around and talking. That’s it. Back then, what I wanted was “crazy twists” and “world-saving-level battles.” Subarashiki Hibi clearly wasn’t my thing. Later I had the chance to play Sakura no Uta, which shares the same writer as Subarashiki Hibi. Maybe by then I’d gotten tired of stupid chuuni edge-fest games, because I rated Sakura no Uta pretty highly. As a story, Sakura no Uta left a deep impression on me—the dialogues between geniuses, the “Shang Zhongyong”-style development, and that slightly melancholy ending. Some of the philosophical discussions in the game also stuck with me, especially the relationship between “art” and “mathematics,” which let me successfully flex in front of my female teacher. Despite my good impression of Sakura no Uta and the decent rating I gave it, when I saw what people online were saying about it, I was dumbfounded, because a familiar scene played out before me again: Online praise for Sakura no Uta was still a mountain of philosophical text, including the game’s slightly chuuni dialogue, the Japanese literary excerpts it quotes, and all that fantastical self-indulgent emotion. Of course, there still wasn’t much introduction to the plot. Some didn’t even have plot. Don’t ask—the answer is “avoid spoilers.” But even avoiding spoilers, you can still say what kind of story the game tells, right? Otherwise I’m just watching you gush about how great the game is without even knowing what it’s about—how am I supposed to know if it suits me? This reminded me of Subarashiki Hibi back then, the same feeling. And I instantly understood: looking at Sakura no Uta, I should be able to understand what kind of game Subarashiki Hibi is too, right? Of course, to this day, I still haven’t played Subarashiki Hibi again.

In the last month of 2020, on a weird date, a weird game showed up: Sakura-iro Dreamer. The developer is listed as “Cover,” with “Hololive” as its subsidiary — and everyone knows that’s a Vtuber agency. The heroine is one of their talents: Sakura Miko. The name is profoundly dumb, because translated it comes out as the painfully rustic “Sakura Shrine Maiden.” Sure, a Vtuber getting a game is a good thing that fits where the industry is headed. Vtubers are capital’s darling right now, the successful ones aren’t short on cash, and they’ve definitely got more money than the eroge crowd, so a game made with that backing should be solid, right? So I looked at this game, and it nearly killed me with anger before I even got started.

After the follow-up that seriously underwhelmed me, Shiraha Kirameku Koi Shirabe, CRYSTALiA came out with another entry in the series, Kurenai Tsuki Yureru Koi Akari. Honestly, looking at the production team, this one feels more “serious” — at least more serious than the last cash grab. They brought back the original scenario writer and the art quality got a big upgrade. The original planning team, of course, is never coming back. The setup is more of a “prequel”: the seniors from the various families come to this school to train in martial arts. The protagonist’s role changed too — he’s now a discharged instructor taking over a class full of “problem children.”

CUFFS’s HOLOTTE brand spawned a sub-label called HOLOTTE ROI, and they put out a new game titled Kokoro no Katachi to Iro to Oto. The name is pretty generic—it literally means “The Shape of the Heart, Its Colors and Sounds.” The story follows our protagonist, who was born with a superpower: he can hear the “voice of the heart” and sense the “colors of the heart.” Anger is red, happiness is yellow, irritation is purple, that sort of thing. Sounds cool, right? It’s not. Your head gets loud as hell because you can hear what everyone around you is thinking, and it’s annoying as fuck. Our hero is sick of it, so eventually he develops the skill of “automatically blocking out surrounding noise.” This stupid skill is actually necessary, because the game stops bothering to show his power in any complex way. Occasionally the screen flashes a color to indicate he heard something, but otherwise the player pretty much forgets he has this dumb superpower at all. Then the game gets to the point. Two girls show up: a pink-haired one and a blonde one. The protagonist discovers his power doesn’t work on the pink-haired girl—he can’t hear her inner voice, but he can hear the blonde’s. Sound familiar? So even though he constantly hears the blonde’s inner voice screaming that she’s crazy about him while she acts tsundere and tells him to go for the pink-haired girl, he ignores the miserable blonde and keeps heating things up with the pink one.

The protagonist is your average corporate drone slash illustrator. By pure chance he boards a steam train at night and sets off on a journey with no known destination. He’s not alone on the train. There’s a foreigner from Sweden, a squinty-eyed guy, a pretty older sister type, a black cat loli, and of course a conductor who knows absolutely nothing about anything. The trip passes through a lot of places. The dark forests of Northern Europe, an island in southern Japan, the Hakodate planetarium in Hokkaido, and the place where the protagonist used to live. Yeah, you can guess where this is going. The train exists across time and space, and it carries its passengers to the place they once yearned for most. For the foreigner that’s the dark forests back home, for squinty-eyes it’s the island, for the pretty sister it’s Hokkaido, and for the protagonist it’s naturally his own place.