Two years on, after a run of teasers early in the year, Japan’s galgame powerhouse Yuzusoft has finally put out its full-price R18 proper new release for the year: LimeLight Lemonade Jam (the Chinese title roughly reads as “Spotlight and Lemonade Performance,” since “Jam” can mean fruit jam or a band’s set). And to everyone’s mild surprise, it’s a girl-band story. From announcement to launch the whole thing ran like classic Yuzusoft: no long gap in between, and they put out a free online demo download well ahead of time — the kind most of today’s so-called “super blockbusters” won’t bother with. Credit where it’s due: no offline demo event, no flying out KOLs on the company dime to say nice things in advance. Just traditional marketing, step by step, and the release didn’t slip. You can smell the mature project management.

Straight to the point: me buying this game, and even playing it, has honestly not that much to do with the game itself. First off, I played the previous entries. To be blunt, only the first one, Memories That Don’t Exist (不存在的夏天), is something I actually understood. The storytelling is weird as hell, full of deliberately contrived “trick narration” and prose soaked in anime-isms — enough that even a veteran otaku like me has to go “damn, the flavor is strong.” But the game also, unusually, has a genuinely beautiful passage in the back half that I still remember to this day, so I walked away thinking it was pretty good. Then the second game came along and the story started getting strange. Probably because the first one got so much praise, the writer got a bit full of himself and decided the “dregs” from part one were actually correct, so he doubled down. The result is something that looks deeply odd to me: the core is packed with Chinese elements, but the prose isn’t written the way Chinese people actually write, so reading it feels off — like a West Coast gangsta rap track performed entirely on traditional Chinese instruments, with heroes pulling pistols out of their crotches to ganggang each other while dealing mystery pharmaceuticals on the side.

A lot of young kids who’ve just gotten into Japanese otaku culture tend to pick up some misconceptions, putting on a filter of assumed truth: that Japanese people are earnest, professional, reliable, down-to-earth. Most of that comes from Japan’s rigid personality, the various reigning “masters” (sennin) of every craft, and the healthy growth of niche hobby groups everywhere. Sure, plenty of retro subcultures can find their fanbase in Japan, along with the meticulously researched material those groups put out… But there are two sides to everything. Japanese people are also utterly shameless about grabbing your money. Amusecraft has a pile of labels under it, most of them used once and tossed like toilet paper. One of them, CRYSTALiA, was created from the start to launch a new KATANA project — the theme being a futuristic world telling the story of “blades” and “samurai.” To hammer home the tech angle, they set the katana up as something like a smartphone: a high-tech device with its own OS that you can even hack into. The game even added a route for the blonde girl specifically to flesh out this setting. That route has no “samurai” or “duels” — it’s all about developing and controlling this high-tech katana with its built-in chip called “Orikami.”

The protagonist, Ogata Iori, is a nothing-special, invisible high schooler living that boring, loser-ish high school life. One morning on his way to school he kicks a wild drunk woman lying by the roadside — weird outfit, wings on her back, a halo on her head (LED-powered). Because he’s an inexperienced Xiao Chun’an type with no street smarts, he blurts out the first thing that comes to mind: “Whoa, are you an angel?” So this LED-wearing shady woman freezes for a second, then admits it. She’s an angel, sent down here to save him. What does he wish for? His repressed true nature spills out: he wants the angel to make him happy. The angel freezes — is this a proposition? He corrects himself: he wants a girlfriend, wants to become a normie. The angel figures that’s a piece of cake and agrees. And so the contract is made. The angel moves into his house and starts living shamelessly off his food and rent.

Haven’t written a blog in a while, mostly because I had no motivation and writing felt like a pure waste of time. Also, once you get into that “not writing often” state, inertia kicks in—the less you write, the less you want to write, and you just keep being a lazy dog. Just after finishing a commercial piece, I thought I’d start writing something again. While organizing screenshots, I realized I still had a Galgame I’d played but hadn’t written impressions for. Then something magical happened: I could barely remember playing this game at all. I couldn’t even recall what the story was about—just like the protagonist in that short time-travel piece from Purple Software last month, who completely forgets what happened in the past… The game is Jewelry Knights Arcadia -The ends of the world-, the sequel to Jewelry Hearts Academia, which I thought was a pretty good big title…? It was only thanks to chat logs with the editor I’d commissioned and various screenshots that I gradually recalled what this game was actually about. And once I remembered, I couldn’t help but cringe.

Misuzu, a Japanese middle schooler who lost her mother at six, is about to turn sixteen. On the night of her birthday, a girl about her own age taps on her window. She says her name is “Yoko”—Misuzu’s mother, come through time from when she was sixteen. Misuzu wants nothing more than to see her mother again, but it’s hard to square this sixteen-year-old girl with the word “mother.” After a nostalgic tour of the house with this “mother,” Yoko makes an offer: come with her on an adventure. Misuzu doesn’t know why, but she feels like she’s supposed to go, so she half-stumbles out the door after Yoko. The two pass through a long cave and somehow cross through time again, arriving more than ten years in the future. Yoko makes a phone call, and as if it were all arranged, a married couple appears with a girl of about the same age. The girl is called Tsumugi—and this Tsumugi is the daughter Misuzu will have in the future. So the one bringing Tsumugi to meet Misuzu… is the grown-up, married Misuzu herself.

I once had an idea I thought was the shit: a visual novel with one of those fiery “feminist warrior” types as the heroine. Talk about a gimmick, and the conflict writes itself. I’m not against women’s equality. But feminism and what gets called “femcunt-ism” are not the same thing. The former is a demand for equal rights; the latter is extremists wrecking it for everyone. And in an internet that gets more torn apart by the day, the latter’s rise and volume have long since overtaken the former. Put plainly, the former are normal people and the latter are morons. Putting a moron in a visual novel—ideally a nukige—and giving her a good hard fucking isn’t an unreasonable thought, is it? Anyway, last year that wish got granted. A game called Otome Sekai no Arukikata (オトメ世界の歩き方) sold itself on exactly that premise. The setting: the future, where women have taken total power and passed a special “Gender Segregation Act.” Women are top-tier humans, men are beasts of burden, and the two sexes are physically separated. So the “New Tokyo City” that symbolizes high society is almost entirely women, while the men are out on the frontier as soldiers and disposable material, fighting off an invading hostile power.

The story opens with the protagonist as a corporate drone, ground down every day by life and his boss, starting to think about ending it all. At the subway station entrance — the Japanese favorite for this sort of thing — he stares at an oncoming train and considers jumping. One little hop and it’s all over. Of course, he doesn’t have the guts, so he keeps scraping by. Right when he’s at his lowest, he meets a girl who asks him to help her get into a mixed-bath bathhouse. Her reason is simple: she’s never been in one and wants to see what it’s like. The girl calls herself Nagisa. She seems cheerful enough, and not only does she drag him into a mixed bath, she hauls him all over the place — eating good food, trying new things, sightseeing by the sea, vacationing on a little island. Maybe it’s some kind of magic spell, but he just lets her pull him along. Total strangers, yet the two of them do couple-ish things together like a string of dates, and eventually they do the thing couples do, too. Then, right after they’ve finished and he drifts off, he wakes to find she’s quietly gotten up and walked out onto the balcony. She thanks him, says she’s an unforgivable murderer, and that her last wish has been fulfilled. Then she jumps. She hits the ground hard and lies there in a pool of blood.

When this game was first announced I was hyped as hell. Madsoft at the helm, so you know the production values are solid. Yuzuna on art, easy on the eyes. And the premise—a “comeback story”—was exactly my shit. The writer had previously done all sorts of training-and-humiliation eroge, which made it even more promising. Pair that with the absolutely fire OP from the initial promo, and my expectations were through the roof. Then the game dropped. I dove in full of hope, and pretty quickly something started feeling off. The “play dumb, crush the elite” / “poor dude climbs to the top” power fantasy I was promised? Nowhere to be found. Instead the whole game turned into the usual Otome-soft style routine—the protagonist becomes the school’s incubus, every woman goes crazy for him, and he even gets a direct invite to join the student council. The story then headed in the direction I was most familiar with but had zero desire for. The protagonist says he wants to climb the ladder, but his method for crossing class lines is to bang some upper-class young lady—works out great whether you’re talking bloodline or marrying in. He even starts fantasizing—oh, he’s fantasizing again—about becoming the school’s stud horse, every woman becoming his wife, and he’s already picked out how many kids they’re gonna have… What kind of Shandong peasant logic is this…

The story starts with our protagonist, Kakehashi Yashiro (宵宮梯子), a truant who’s already stopped going to school. On the road after running away from home, he wanders into an abandoned ruin somewhere in the city and meets an angel with only one wing. The angel grants him a mysterious power through her feathers and asks for his help recovering them, handing him a feather that bestows a special ability. The price: once the feathers are returned, he’ll forget everything.