A long time ago there was this game that blew up because the title was so ridiculous: Onii-chan, You Are Forbidden from Using Your Right Hand (お兄ちゃん 右手の使用を禁止します) It’s a pure siscon game. The protagonist has a name, but his presence is pathetically low. Several sisters orbit around him, and the OP is an absolute earworm. The game sold because it had a gimmick. That’s it.

《Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o (見上げてごらん、夜空の星を)》— I’ve already forgotten what year it originally came out. Still, that game left a pretty strong impression on me. I remember it was winter, deep winter, around December. I was curled up under the covers and blasted through the game from the prologue to the OP in one sitting. Watching the protagonist finish building the telescope and do that first stargazing session together, with that hype OP playing — man, it hit me. The thing I remember most is the soundtrack and the staging. Most scenes are at night, mostly quiet music, all kinds of shot compositions arranged like a film. The main story is excellent too — it’s nominally about “astronomical observation,” but what it actually is is a love triangle, and the real heroine is Amanokawa Saya with her heterochromia. The game intercuts memories and the present, and lays it all out on a detailed timeline. You can tell they cared. But… when the main game of 《Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o》 was selling well, they put out a fandisc, and that one felt like it was missing something. First the timeline was gone. Then the cinematic music and staging were gone… and finally the stargazing was pretty much gone too. They call it a fandisc, but none of the strengths of the main game made it over. It’s just an ordinary vehicle for HCGs. Depressing. Fine, whatever, it’s an FD, you can’t ask for too much. But I never expected… that after all this time, 《Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o》 would get another FD. The full title is 《Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o Interstellar Focus》. The “Interstellar Focus” part sounds like it means “starlight focus,” but with a hint from Bob I finally saw it — the words are just there to spell out “IF.” IF meaning this game depicts “another story, what if.” And what’s the “if”… When faced with the love triangle between Hikari and Saya, the protagonist says…

Everyone knows game companies these days basically have no shame… The most obvious sign of that shamelessness is they never “wait until the game is finished” before putting it on sale. They get it to roughly-done and immediately start selling. As for the rest—sell the base game first, deal with everything else later. When it’s done, they bolt it on and call it “Downloadable Content,” i.e. what we call DLC. Some of that DLC you have to pay extra for. So you pay for a half-finished game, then keep paying for the extra content bolted on afterward. Only after you’ve coughed up several times does the content count as fully there and the game count as complete… Think about it and that’s pretty fucked, isn’t it. Fortunately this dumbass habit is mostly a Western publisher thing; Japanese companies still have some shame… probably. Why “probably”? Because Japanese companies have learned bad habits too. Make half a game, then put out an expansion pack—it’s become the new normal. Once the engine and framework are in place, adding a few stages is just opening the map editor… And that goes double for visual novels, sitting at the very bottom of the game food chain, which don’t even need a map editor! SMEE, a sub-brand of the real estate company HOOKSOFT, is exactly this kind of shameless entity. They love putting out Minifandisks—the really short kind of fandisk, where the content length barely qualifies as DLC. Oh, and it’s not just SMEE being shameless. HOOKSOFT has no shame either; their games get Minifandisks too. If you want to say Asa Project, the other HOOKSOFT sub-brand, is relatively honorable and doesn’t do Minifandisks, you’d be dead wrong—they’ll add new characters and sell a PSV version, charge more, make more money… shame all over the floor. Is the Japanese real estate business just not turning a profit anymore? Is that why HOOKSOFT is shamelessly grifting every which way? Anyway, this time SMEE put out DLC for last year’s well-received Making＊Lovers—the so-called Mini Fandisk Volume 1. The full title: “Making＊Lovers Geki-Icha After Story Volume.01 Ako, Karen, Saki” Holy shit that name is dumb as hell. They’re one step away from tacking on a Deluxe Package Complete Edition suffix once all the volumes are out.

Asa Project. Once my favorite brand. I used to think Asa Project was the Wong Jing and Stephen Chow of the visual novel world, especially after my first encounter with their games. For a while it seemed like they’d found their lane: exaggerated faces plus comedy. They put out some decent stuff, and by the time Kara Kurashi Renai… no, by the time Hitotsu Tobashi Renai (ひとつ飛ばし恋愛) came around, the meme game and the parody had hit its absolute peak. First time I played it, it honestly kind of “scared me” — felt like they were trying way too hard. Years later, going back to it, I realized that was Asa Project’s actual peak. And when you say peak, you’re also saying everything after it is downhill… Pura Main Wars (プラマイウォーズ) just barely held the rhythm together. Then came that baffling Suki to Suki to de Sankaku Renai (スキとスキとでサンカク恋愛), and I felt it deep: Asa Project had lost the plot. They seemed to be dropping the parody angle and pivoting to pure romance, leaning harder into making the girls bashful and cute — without fully giving up the old “parody skit” stuff. The result is a mess. If you want pure romance, commit to it. Stop having the girls spew dirty jokes every other line. If you want parody, then set up a proper straight man and funny man, let the characters actually play off each other. Sadly, Asa Project trimmed the game’s “plot engine” down to one character — or half of one — and slowly pushed her to the margins, turning her into a mascot whose only job is reminding the player “this is an Asa Project game.” Nothing else. The games started cramming in more and more tsundere bashful cuties, and, well, you know how it is — Asa Project’s artists are what they are. Not exactly boner-inducing. So the games got weirder and more boring: no comedy, no romance either. Funny thing is, under the same HOOKSOFT umbrella, Asa Project is getting outclassed by smee. smee’s skits keep getting sharper, the atmosphere keeps getting cozier, and the romance is still there. Asa Project, meanwhile, became a neither-here-nor-there mess. Painfully awkward. So with that awkward feeling, we arrive at Asa Project’s new release: Karigurashi Renai.

Must’ve been almost two years ago now — there was this game called Hatsukoi Sankai Me. It had that annoying Sendai auntie in it, but the story was actually pretty interesting. And when it came out the marketing was basically nonexistent, yet the quality was already above par for a 2018 visual novel. This is why we keep saying the industry is doomed: everything coming out this year is just too dumb. So the studio behind Hatsukoi Sankai Me, Windmill — colloquially “Fuusha-sha” — grandly announced a new title this year with a name that sounds like they were happy to burn money on it: Yakusoku no Natsu, Mahoroba no Yume. Literally that’s “Summer of Promise, Dream of Illusion.” Though mahoroba isn’t quite just “illusion” — it leans more toward “utopia” or “paradise.” The game wasn’t even out and Windmill started promoting it, at least half a year of preheating. Then I saw how they were promoting it and I fucking spat out my drink. They chose to promote this game by releasing the scenario text first! Look, as an eroge company, wouldn’t you want your marketing to push sales as hard as possible? Who buys eroge the most? Isn’t it the “hardcore wealthy otaku” who scream “my wife” at everything on the internet, retweet every lewd image, and shout “I want to draw bishoujo” in their spare time? The irony is that the people who nitpick the scenario every day (like me) often aren’t the ones willing to drop money on tokuten, and sometimes they even turn into 割り厨. In short: the people who actually buy a lot of eroge don’t care about story at all. As long as the girls look good and the plot doesn’t have them gang-raped into meat toilets, sales won’t be low. What good is a good story? It doesn’t sell. Look at Sakura no Uta — praised to the heavens, and it still didn’t top the sales charts that year. Who was number one? Yuzusoft (lol). So if I were Windmill, for this new title I’d just keep dropping CG after CG, mostly lewd ones, the lewder the better. That’s how you build attention and sales, dammit. Of course, this seems to be the mainstream way to promote a visual novel these days. The industry really hasn’t changed one bit.

神待ち 読み方：かみまち 「救いの手を差し伸べてくれる人を待つ」といった意味であるが、特に、家出した女性が自分を泊めてくれる男性を電子掲示板などで探すことを意味する表現。 Read as: kamimachi Literally “waiting for someone to reach out and save you,” but these days it usually means a runaway girl hunting the internet for some guy who’ll put her up for the night.

I’ve played a fair number of visual novels, and there’s one thing I’ve never quite understood. Since most visual novels are eroge—18+ games whose selling point is the presence of sex scenes—they should by definition sit squarely in the adult game category. People who buy adult games are, for the most part, adults (at least on paper). So when it comes to how the content is presented, you’d think the “adult factor” would be played up even more. But here’s the ridiculous part: in the visual novel market, aside from the handful of developers who actually deliver on “adult game,” the majority of mainstream players have some really weird demands: The story can’t be cruel, or I’m sending you razor blades. The game can’t skip the sex, or I’m sending you razor blades. Logically, an “adult-rated” story worth its salt is bound to have cruel elements—the better it is, the more indispensable the cruelty. Yet the visual novel audience refuses to accept it. If you won’t accept a “cruel” story, then you must like pure love stories, right? But the sex is still mandatory—and not just any sex, you need all kinds of positions, all kinds of play to be satisfied… So what kind of twisted demographic are you people who play 18X visual novels, anyway…

Sometimes I stop and wonder how long it’s been since I last played a landmine game. Maybe I’ve just gotten more sensitive lately. One look at a game’s setup and I can tell if it’s shit, so I haven’t stepped on one since the second half of last year… But there’s one thing I can’t resist: the art style. If the art hits my tastes just right, I’ll overlook the landmine parts and be willing to forgive a whole lot more. And it’s not just me. According to a poll I ran on some dumbass social media site, over half the people said “a work with good-looking characters but a boring story” beats “a work with a great story but characters you can’t stand to look at.” It’s a shallow world, I guess. And I love Sesena Yau’s art that much. Even though one of her previous games was mind-numbingly dull, this time I fired up her new one without hesitation—even though I vaguely remembered seeing someone on Weibo tear it apart with a long screenshot post calling it garbage. The game is Natsuiro Ramune. And just like I said at the start, it’s a landmine. Sesena Yau drew another landmine.

When I first watched Your Name., I saw the heroine frustrated with her mountain village, wanting to go to the big city, wanting to explore a new world. Honestly this kind of thing isn’t exactly fresh for us. We always see it in Japanese film and TV: the protagonist stuck in the countryside, sighing about how they hate this town, hate the sticks, want to go to Tokyo, want the big city. But I figure a lot of people might not get that feeling: “The countryside’s great, what’s so good about the big city? The countryside’s way more free.” Well, you don’t know what you’re missing till you’ve tasted it. Maybe people who grew up in big cities can’t understand the longing for excitement that exists in small towns. Most of the people talking about going back to the countryside are just sick of the noise of the city. And a lot of them have no idea what the countryside is actually like. Drop them out there, let them walk into town and fail to find a single Heytea, and no amount of bike-riding with their ass chafing will fill that void inside. I remember going to the countryside once when I was little. My family’s from a poor county in Kaifeng, Henan — well, not exactly my hometown, my grandma’s side. How poor was it? I remember when we got there, the relatives served us their best meal: a pot of mian gedda soup with a few beaten eggs in it. That was the top standard. And those eggs only existed because the old hen had graciously laid them that day — otherwise there wouldn’t even be eggs. The villagers there didn’t even have coops. Just a laying nest. At night the roosters and hens would fly up into the trees to sleep. Yeah, I only realized chickens were birds too after I personally watched a big rooster fly up to the treetops. They’ve got wings. It’s just that city thinking makes us forget. As novel as the countryside was, I got bored of it fast. Even with flying chickens, it was just too dull. Too monotonous — not just the food, but the people, the things to do, the scenery. Lots of people say the mountain valley views are so beautiful. But watch them every day and you’d get sick of them too. Tell someone they have to look at that for the rest of their life and never go back to the city, and they’d probably break. So maybe now you can understand the mindset of people in the countryside who want to go to the big city. Even with internet and delivery out there now, the exciting world is still better. And what if that “countryside” is on an island?

When I get nostalgic, elementary school inevitably comes to mind. Because back then I felt like an ACG protagonist. People like to reminisce about when they were hot shit, not when they were a dumbass—totally understandable. But my so-called “protagonist” days weren’t about going to Beijing for some “X-Fusion” to brag about “this is so fucking insane,” or riding a bike to get Heytea and chafing my ass, or constantly tearing down laptops and fiddling with Raspberry Pi while saying “how how how amazing I am” in a Shonan accent, or juggling a female teacher, a pigeon girl, and a student I met in Japanese class. It was just that in elementary school my grades were okay, my looks were okay, my conversation was okay—enough that some girls would voluntarily get close to me. But what does an elementary school “protagonist” actually get? You don’t know shit in elementary school, and I didn’t either.