It’s the year 2050. Plague, war, resources running dry, and a whole lot of infighting have humanity staring down extinction. To head off the tragedy, humanity picks three representatives, forms the “Three Sages,” and hand-selects over a thousand genetically superior people to build a giant biological computer. Led by the Three Sages, the human gene modification project begins. Oh, right — it’s called the “Three Sages” and yes, there really are three people, but that’s just the name of the organization. The modified “new humans” are immune to a ton of viruses and bacteria, their constitutions are way stronger, and there are some “side effects”… a good number of them end up with “superpowers.” The Three Sages who improved the new humans also rewrote their own genes, gaining ageless, deathless lives along with monstrous physical ability and strength. But they chose to go into hiding, holed up in a secret underground base, quietly watching the new humans live. And so the world goes on for nearly 70 years.

I’d nearly forgotten that I used to run around in the student council back in college. My whole student council stint was so boring I barely remember it. The org I joined was called the “Office.” I had no idea what it did then, and looking back it was probably something like a school office or faculty office — handling paperwork, doing publicity and the like. So it turns out I was already being forced to write stuff back then. A long, proud tradition. I don’t think I did much in the “Office,” either — just pulled together some notices and announcements, wrote some notices and announcements. Most of the time I hid in the student council room playing games, messing with my phone, messing with a computer. Actually I only got into the student council because the president picked me. The president was a girl, reasonably good-looking, friendly. I have no idea why she picked me or what I was supposed to do once I was in, and frankly I never saw what anyone else in the council did, either. In my head the “student council” was a purely nominal body with zero real power, no funding, and nothing to show for itself besides printing the occasional poster. Oh, right — the student council did organize an evening party once. I remember the president telling me she wanted to put on an evening party with real feeling. She was really into folk and rock. I think the two are kind of worlds apart, but my impression of her was always that she was that artsy type of girl. She also said that instead of a conventional evening party, a bonfire gathering would be better — more down-to-earth, more popular with the students. Naturally all her ideas got shot down in the end. The school took the whole thing over and turned it into exactly the kind of party she hated. You could read the displeasure all over her face. The so-called “student-council-organized evening party” still had the student council’s name on it, but it had nothing to do with us anymore. “Nothing to be done. Sometimes that’s just how things are.”

I can’t remember who Parasol’s parent company is, I just always got the feeling they’re half-dead. By “half-dead” I mean they keep making games that feel out of step with the times, the kind you look at and think “no way this sells,” and the wildest part is they make them and still don’t go under. Still, every now and then Parasol puts out something normal—though those games always make me suspect the writer’s brain is wired wrong. Take their most famous one, Haru na Hana. But I do think Parasol genuinely wants to make good games, and Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou from two years back was actually pretty solid. It even introduced this surprisingly ahead-of-its-time concept, basically an “internet addiction boot camp” school. Shame is, a lot of Japanese players didn’t get it—they kept saying “no way a school like that exists, where they lock kids up and force total obedience to the principal, that’s so fake.” Apparently the game got an official Simplified Chinese release, so maybe Chinese players would understand it better. Not that I’ve looked into how they actually felt about it. If they can make something like Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou, that proves Parasol’s got some skill. So naturally, strike while the iron’s hot—make something even better, reinvent yourself, achieve self-actualization, all that. So I waited, and in 2019 Parasol dropped a game called Koarashi Spiritchu. At first glance it looked pretty hype. Then I saw the premise and immediately spat out my drink.

Animal Panic (あにまる☆ぱにっく) is a weird game… First off, the premise is weird. It comes from QUINCE SOFT, a Lump of Sugar sub-brand I’d just been praising for Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro.. I figured it was Lump of Sugar’s experimental plot, a place for oddball new games with strange setups. A year and change later, I got slapped in the face. Animal Panic looks like the most generic moege imaginable, and the staff list gives zero reason to expect surprises. Then, even weirder: I actually played the damn thing for some reason, and found it contains stuff way stranger than I expected.

I’ve always been waiting for Yuzusoft to crash, but unfortunately their games have always been stable—it’s hard for them to crash because their production process is practically an assembly line. Pick a theme/setting for the game Design characters based on the theme Then get scenario writers to split the story, write each part, and stitch it together Start the hype campaign, release countdown animations every day Release character songs, keep building hype Remix the character song tracks and use them as the game’s OST Game ships Also, Yuzusoft’s artists are almost always the same, so the art style is guaranteed, and the voice actors they hire are all competent. After playing, you basically never feel like it’s a “landmine”—at worst you think “the story is just okay,” “too formulaic,” “the setting is a bit childish”—not outstanding, but definitely not bad. This level of quality has also bred a lot of “irrationally devoted Yuzu fans.” I vaguely remember saying on social media that Riddle Joker had a dumb story, and someone tracked me down on Telegram to rant at me, practically saying “I’m so mad I’m so mad I’m so mad.” That shows how powerful Yuzusoft’s magic is. But precisely because of the nature of their games, most Yuzu fans are quite young, many still minors. I remember seeing a post on Twitter about a minor who broke down after being rejected from a Yuzu live event. So I have mixed feelings about Yuzusoft: I love them because they’re genuinely one of the benchmarks of the visual novel genre, and they always manage to cast voice actors I like, I hate them because they’ve always been an assembly line producing moe-feed with zero innovation. The impact of Yuzusoft’s lack of innovation isn’t just on themselves. As a cult company where “every new release tops the annual sales chart,” if they can keep making easy money off the assembly line, other companies will inevitably copy them. I really don’t want every visual novel company to become like Yuzusoft—if that happens, the industry is truly doomed. But this year’s Yuzusoft seems to have actually tried something different… And they crashed…

I remember shelving an article called something like “The Otaku’s Love Manual.” I had the concept worked out and everything, but never got around to writing it, because it’s just too damn complicated. Real love isn’t like an eroge — you’re dealing with an actual person, not a two-dimensional character with preset parameters on the other side of a screen. Real people have all kinds of personalities and traits, which means the “girl” you’re up against in reality might be a fusion of several dozen different heroines from different eroge, and the “events” you run into out there might be spread across different routes belonging to different heroines. Maybe only by improvising and piecing it all together can you keep up. For most otaku, though, that’s not even the problem. The problem is their own emotional intelligence. I’ve met some “otaku” who constantly complain that they can’t find a partner, that girls won’t talk to them. But honestly… it’s not just girls — guys don’t want to talk to them either. The moment they open their mouths it’s all about their own little world, and they refuse to engage with anyone outside it. They lock themselves inside their own bodies and then complain that nobody understands their heart. Communication is a two-way street. If you won’t let anyone get to know you, but demand that they bare their souls for you to pick through — that kind of thing only happens in porn games for people with certain special interests. Of course, not all eroge are “fantasy works” like that. Some are pretty grounded in reality — HOOK and SMEE, for instance. There was a time when SMEE’s games were all about helping otaku leave the otaku life behind, while HOOKSOFT’s games were mostly traditional “school fantasy romance.” “Fantasy” because HOOK’s setups always had some wild idea — robots, virtual reality — and HOOK games always had an in-school chat system that live-roasted whatever the protagonists were doing. These days, all of that is gone. HOOK’s signature touches have pretty much vanished, to the point where their games are indistinguishable from SMEE’s. So HOOK’s latest release is a full-on SMEE-flavored game: Docchi no i ga Suki Desu ka? (Which “i” do you like?)

《絆きらめく恋いろは》 is a game I found pretty creative and honestly pretty damn impressive — it’s got a ton going for it: Solid soundtrack Gripping combat A story that portrays the heroine’s growth in detail, easy to relate to Art that isn’t half bad And this game wasn’t just big in Japan — it blew up in China too. I saw “Tsubaki is my wife” everywhere, and the studio struck while the iron was hot and put out a Tsubaki-only fandisc. Kept the hype going and squeezed out another round of sales while they were at it. Before I knew it, it was late 2019, and word of a sequel started going around. The sequel was called Shiraha Kirameku Koi Shirabe (白刃きらめく恋しらべ). Honestly, I wasn’t worried about it at all — the writing style had already settled into a groove, and CRYSTALiA’s parent company AMUSE CRAFT didn’t exactly look strapped for cash, so there was no doubt they’d do the sequel right… But what confused me was that not long after this game came out, Tomochiyo Kurenai (智斗紅), the planner and producer of the original Kizuna Kirameku Koi Iroha (絆きらめく恋いろは), said some weird stuff on Twitter: He said he’d already left the company back in summer, and he’s barely retweeted anything about the new game — it’s all been stuff about older titles. He also said he was only nominally attached to the new game and didn’t actually do anything on it. What is this feeling? When does a game’s producer normally react like that? Only when the game itself turned out bad, when even they think it’s garbage, and they rush to shift the blame because they’re scared of getting flamed!

Kimagure Temptation (きまぐれテンプテーション) is the new release from Silkyplus Wasabi, a Japanese studio known for horror-leaning games. Most of their past output has been dark, gory, and supernatural, but this one unexpectedly looks like a moe nukige—probably because they switched their main artist to Kimishima Ao. Also, the price is absurdly low for an eroge. After playing it, a lot of moe fans loudly declared it a landmine. Which brings me back to something I’ve said before: “A game that moe fans call a landmine is guaranteed to be interesting.” So I decided to take a look. Having played it, I’m conflicted—not because it’s “especially brilliant,” but because it mostly left me feeling baffled. So here’s my breakdown and my take.

The Japanese eroge maker CUFFS has a whole pile of sub-brands — Sphere, CUBE, miniCUBE, SONORA, and HULOTTE, which looks unrelated but apparently isn’t. I hadn’t touched a CUFFS game in ages. CUFFS games are all basically the same: same engine, same font, same choice-navigation UI, same Duca songs covering everything, same marketing playbook, same coloring style, and… the only thing that really differs is the artist. So CUFFS games get old fast, because there’s just too much that’s identical. Sure, sometimes they roll out a “story premise” that looks decent, but the actual execution always disappoints. Well, not disappoint exactly — it’s more that there’s just nothing interesting there. CUFFS announces a new title, you look at the character setup and you can already guess how the plot will unfold. Beat the game and sure enough, it played out exactly as you expected. No surprises. If anything it’s less exciting than what you imagined… Which leaves you with disappointment… emptiness… and self-loathing for wasting your time on this game.

I. I’m a 20-year-old virgin. The no-sex kind. A friend invited me to a Christmas party and, beating his chest to pieces, swore he’d introduce me to all sorts of cute girls there. But as a great virgin, how could I possibly hold court at such an event? So I made a decisive choice! I chickened out… again.