Originally I wanted to write something poking fun at the straight-guy Twitter guy, Awen, but then I figured he’s already pitiful enough and I shouldn’t pile on, so I deleted that and went back to the original format. That said, this game is incredibly practical. I don’t mean that kind of practical. I mean the “teaches you how to fall in love” kind. HOOKSOFT and SMEE have always been solid at this, but unfortunately most otaku just use their games as joke-dispensers for rom-com sketches. Genuinely a shame. In recent years HOOKSOFT and SMEE seem to have pulled off a weird identity swap: the former started doing SMEE’s “love simulation” thing, while the latter leaned into fantasy settings. Most people don’t care, since both brands come from the same daddy and their art styles are converging at a frankly alarming rate anyway. Nobody cares about brand purity — honestly they could merge into one label someday. This time HOOKSOFT’s offering is Houkago Cinderella (放課後シンデレラ) — literally “After School Cinderella” — built on the premise of “romance through chance encounters depending on which route you pick on the way home after school.”

Years ago, back when I was still hanging around online, I met this so-called “big shot” who completely overturned a lot of my views on the world. It was the first time I’d ever met someone that impressive on the internet. At least, he claimed he was impressive. The “big shot” said he was living in Canada, young and successful, just taking classes now and then, occasionally doing some work for Microsoft, with access to the latest Windows Vista beta builds. He also had the money to mess around with all kinds of new “UMPCs.” At the time I thought this guy was absolutely amazing—being in the same group chat as him felt like a real honor. But then I started to find it a bit odd. If he was really such a “big name,” why did his Discord name still have all that “Martian language” and scene-kid vocabulary? And if he was such a huge deal, why was he online basically 24/7? So one night, while we were private messaging, the “big shot” said he wanted to show me something “nice.” He sent a video. I clicked on it and saw a huge white guy violating two very small people. Looking closer, those “small people” seemed to be kids—a little girl and a little boy. That video made me extremely uncomfortable, but the “big shot” was still asking me if I “Want Some More.”

Girls Book Maker announced a series of cash-grab DLCs half a year after the base game shipped. Cash-grab, sure, but honestly this is standard practice by now. We’ve seen too much of this over the years. This DLC is called ガールズ・ブック・メイカー ～グリムと三人のお姫さま～, which translates to Girls Book Maker: Grimm and the Three Princesses, so naturally it’s about the world-famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Since Grimm’s Fairy Tales is itself an anthology, you can’t really sum it up with one character, so they just carved out the princesses and split them into three volumes sold separately. Sound familiar? Yeah, classic milking scheme. The three princesses are Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

The game this time is called God Sisters.

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.

So here’s the thing — playing this game was a complete mistake. I don’t even know when I downloaded it. I didn’t know what the premise was, who voiced the heroine, basically nothing about it. I just found it sitting on my hard drive while I was cleaning things up. My guess is the developer name, Prekano, threw me off, since there’s a million games out there called “XX Kano” these days. But through sheer coincidence, I ended up playing it anyway.

A long, long time ago, a game caught my eye: Suite Life, put out by MME before they went under. My English is trash. Back in high school I used to pronounce “Suite” as “Suit,” and it took me forever to realize I’d been saying it wrong the whole time. That’s part of why the title stuck with me. Suite Life, literally “packaged life.” There’s an American TV show with the same name, but this game seems to have nothing to do with it. Honestly, I played Suite Life not long after it came out, and then… I dropped it. Dropping it wasn’t my intention, I was genuinely interested. The main reason was that the game was just too boring. And years later I went back and finished it. The main reason was pretty much the same as why I dropped it: I was too bored.

Feeling empty, lonely, and a bit chilly lately, I decided I needed something “short and sweet,” “gets to the point fast,” “heroine’s got big tits,” “preferably that kind of plot” — in short, the “you know what I mean” kind of game. Which is how I ended up with QUALIA Yakusoku no Kiseki. The premise is about as obvious as it gets: the protagonist is a scientist, he builds a big-titted robot girl, and then there’s that soulful look in her eyes. Sure, this year is drowning in shitty “AI robot romance” visual novels, but this one clearly isn’t like those dime-a-dozen ones. What kind of game this is — you get it, right? Let’s go! My guy!

When ANIPLEX.exe was throwing money at visual novels, aside from ATRI -My Dear Moments-, they also put out Utsuro no Utage (徒花異譚), which has a seriously weird art style. It was made in collaboration with Liar-Soft, which immediately told everyone these people know what they’re doing, and plenty of eroge fans went “based.” Also, you can pretty much guess that ANIPLEX.exe’s two releases were aimed at different audiences. ATRI -My Dear Moments- was clearly for the “casual moe-blob otaku,” while Utsuro no Utage comes off as a bit more hardcore. Of course, that “hardcore” label is just my own wishful thinking. After finishing this fairly short game, all I can say is that Utsuro no Utage isn’t really a game so much as a genuine “short fantasy novel.” This “novel” won’t lecture you about life’s great truths; what it gives you is more of an emotional jolt. I’m not going to go into detail about what Utsuro no Utage is actually about. Getting hold of the game isn’t that hard for most people, and although the scenario was written by Nozomu Kaihara, who previously wrote Uso kara Hajimaru Koi no Natsu (尋蝶者), once it steps outside the “romance game” frame, the story feels all the more comfortable in its own skin.

A lot of fiction likes to play with the “end of the world” theme. I can’t really say why. Maybe it’s that “even after the world ends, I still love you” feeling that comes off as romantic? Or maybe everyone’s got a little bit of wasteland fever in them. An endless wilderness, nothing left but the male lead and the heroine, wandering the ruins looking for some reason for humanity to keep going. That does sound pretty coool. Use it too many times, though, and it stops being coool.