I often regret some of my past articles. The main reason isn’t anything else—it’s that when I was younger I went on huge rants, trashing a lot of games I thought were terrible at the time. First and foremost among them: Lump of Sugar. I still remember that Unmei Senjou de Suika wo Kiru—I called its plot retarded. And Rensou Kankei—I said its system was dumb as shit. And yet, faced with Lump of Sugar’s new game Nekotsuku, Sakura. (ねこツク、さくら。)… I couldn’t help but shed tears. I deeply realized I was wrong.

Girls Book Maker (ガールズ・ブック・メイカー) is an eroge developed by Yumemiru, a new label from some big Japanese company. But compared to your average eroge, this one’s pretty unusual—it’s got a bizarre “setting” and “worldview,” with a dash of “cultural depth” thrown in. The plot: the protagonist is a bookworm who gets summoned by chance to a “library in another world,” where he works as the librarian and helps the head librarian exterminate the “bookworms” hiding inside books. Thanks to this setup, our hero can easily hop between “stories” with different worldviews, interact with “the heroines within those stories,” and go on all sorts of wild adventures. The books referenced are almost all classics: The Little Match Girl, Alice in the Mental Hospital, The Sino-Japanese Co-Production Journey to the West, The Phantom Thief Weak-Ass Gentleman Lupin, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter Goes to the Moon, Gay Faust, and so on. These stories are not only familiar but should be no strangers to most eroge players—Alice, Kaguya-hime, Faust, Lupin have all been done to death in Japanese ACG works.

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.

Anyone who knows a thing or two about Japanese people knows they get “particular” when telling a story. That particularity is baked in — the kind of small-mindedness that lacks any grand scale, constantly getting weepy over the most trivial shit. There’s actually a word for this in Japanese: mono no aware, which Chinese renders as 物哀. Basically, you see anything at all and get inexplicably sad. For pretentious artsy kids that’s maybe OK, but if it’s the only register you ever play, you’ve run out of tricks. Mono no aware isn’t just in the usual stories — it’s more in how Japanese people tell stories. Endlessly wistful and mournful, a hundred twists and turns, and after a hundred laps around the track you still haven’t gotten back to the starting point. The reader gets anxious, and all that circling still lands you on some utterly unremarkable ending, which easily leaves you feeling embarrassed and angry. Yes, I’m embarrassed and angry again. Miss Wang, bring me my Italian cannon, I’m opening fire.

So here’s the thing—this game has been sitting in my hard drive gathering dust for ages. I’ve always had mixed feelings about it. I want to play this game because its premise and art style are actually pretty good I don’t want to play this game because I already know how it plays out without even having played it This game comes from Campus, a label that got shut down and sold off. Campus was actually a sub-brand of Light, set up specifically to crank out quick cash-grab mini-games. The formula was basically: find a decent artist, push out a single-route or two-route short game, keep the budget low, sell it cheap, and hope it pumps some blood back into the parent company Light. Honestly, Campus’s intent to recoup some cash by selling these games is way too obvious. Just look—every single one of them is a “multi-platform release,” with iOS and Android versions and everything else they can slap it on, not a single one left out. There are also free non-18+ versions, and only the 18+ content costs money. It’s basically a “we’re not making games to make money, we’re just here to make friends” stance, as if they think their game quality is so solid that surely some player—or some otaku who wants to see the lewd art—will shell out for the physical edition, and then they can pull a reverse play and rake it in, revive the company, and return to the old capital… Except that didn’t happen. Light still died, and Campus got sold off too.

Long, long ago, seven people committed a grave sin and were struck by divine punishment. They came to a small island said to be a place where one could speak with the gods, and there they prayed devoutly to the heavens, begging for forgiveness, begging for their own salvation. Because their hearts were so devout, the gods above were moved by them, and using their divine power they pardoned the sins of these seven, erasing the crimes they had committed, and the people who had died because of them came back to life. And because the history of their past crimes had been altered, the seven forgot that they had ever begged the heavens for anything, and went on living happily. But someone nearby had been watching what these seven did, and that peeping observer wrote down the ritual by which the seven had pleaded with the gods. This ritual later came to be called “Toki no Shirabe.” Gather seven people, and the ritual could be performed—and you would receive the grace of the gods above, have any wish you desired granted, even change history itself. In time the ritual was abused by wicked people, causing consequences beyond repair and giving rise to tragedy. To keep such tragedy from ever happening again, the shrine maidens of the island’s shrine hid away the items needed to perform the ritual, and did everything they could to let the “legend of the seven” fade, wanting this so-called ritual to vanish from the world. Many years later, people carrying “seven sins” of their own came to this place. By sheer chance, they were asked to activate a mysterious ritual called “Karumaruka.” Word had it that performing this ritual would erase one’s own sins. But at the moment the ritual began, they did not choose to erase their sins for their own sake, or even to change history—they chose to stop the ritual forever, and that wish too was accepted by the gods. For they had realized that no matter the past or the future, blindly using the power of the gods to change things was wrong, and that what matters should be held in your own hands. After that, there was no more “Karumaruka,” and no more “Toki no Shirabe.” The island closest to the gods returned to its quiet. And so the story of Karumaruka * Circle came to an end.

The 9-nine- series, delayed for God knows how long, has finally reached its fourth volume, bringing us the last routeable heroine, Yuuki Noa, and finally prying open the various secrets buried in the game’s setting. The title is Yukiiro Yukihana Yukinoato.

I vaguely recall that the last time I played a game with Kantoku art was years ago, and I ragged on it pretty hard. Honestly, looking back now… Still deserves a good ragging. Why? Because Kantoku always works with CUBE, and the heroines in CUBE games inexplicably turn into Easy Girls—like, they confess to the protagonist and before you know it they’re spreading their legs. Yeah yeah, I know it’s an eroge, but even for an eroge you can’t keep doing it so bluntly. Nobody watches porn for the plot anymore? Well, a little story goes a long way—it makes it tastier. So after all these years, a new game with Kantoku art drops, and the title alone is high-tier: Kamisama no You na Kimi e I honestly don’t know how to translate it. I feel like in Japanese this kind of sentence could mean “to you, who is like a god,” but a direct translation would be “to you like a god.” The English subtitle is To you like goddess, so I guess it’s the first meaning. But none of that matters. What matters is the scenario lineup—they brought in three guys who specialize in writing toilet paper… oh wait, I mean light novels. Looks like they decided to go all-in on the story. But how did it actually turn out?

Hato, the writer who got famous off the Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart series, went quiet for a while and then came back — this time on Steam. A game called Marco & the Galaxy Dragon (マルコと銀河竜) showed up, and it had that “we’re not hurting for cash” look about it, plus the standard day-one Simplified Chinese, so it read like a cash grab from every angle. By that point my opinion of Hato had already soured pretty badly, because with Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart 2 he’d started going way too sappy and way too self-indulgent. You couldn’t even tell what the main plot was about anymore, and the jokes were getting harder and harder to follow. My personal take is that he’d gone full “mentally ill genius” like certain other famous scenario writers — call it “too artsy to understand” if you’re being polite, “can’t write a straight sentence” if you’re not. I still wasn’t happy with the game, but Mayuge flat-out refused to gift it to me, so I had to go get it and play it myself. Pretty simple reason: “How am I supposed to dunk on it if I don’t play it?” Anyway, after playing this “scam game,” I feel like I underestimated Hato. Sure, I think he’s a bit unhinged now, but I forgot that he’s got a real gift for doing big things on a shoestring — something he’d already made obvious with the ultra-low-budget galge-to-anime adaptation he spearheaded. Put simply, Marco & the Galaxy Dragon is exactly that kind of “big things on a shoestring” game.

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!