Wagamama High Spec (ワガママハイスペック) did pretty well for itself last year. It even got a short-form anime, and a way better one than that princess stray cat got — word is the latter ran out of money entirely. And when a game sells, a sequel is inevitable. So Madsoft sat on it for nearly a year and put out Wagamama High Spec OC. At first I assumed it was a sequel, and Madsoft’s own copy sort of implies that. In this “sequel,” the class rep who wasn’t a route before, April 1st Kanade, the protagonist’s editor-in-charge Takatsukasa Chitose, and his homeroom teacher Iwakuma Yukari all get promoted to heroines — while the original cast stays available too. No trial version. Straight to the full release. Which made me wonder — is this just a fandisk? Then I saw the price. Nearly 10,000 yen. You can’t be that brazen. Booted it up. Holy shit. It’s a fandisk.

Looking back on some of my old Gal impressions, I always want to laugh bitterly. The old me thought a game had to have a good story to be good. And what counts as a good story? It has to have a big twist, but not too absurd a twist — explode the plot while staying coherent, plant a pile of foreshadowing and pick every bit of it back up. Best if it also works in a little life wisdom and the truth of the world. That’s a good game. Now I see that what I was after was just the “good” games within the story-driven category. But like how a cinema shows more than Hollywood blockbusters, visual novels aren’t only the story-driven kind. I’ve also thought that if a game can make its characters cute enough, that’s fine too — I just always felt that kind of game was a tier below the story-driven ones. Because those are the big titles, and this is just selling moe character writing, tea-party-slice-of-life level. Like holding up Death Note against Yuru Yuri, or a AAA title against Minecraft — most people figure the two aren’t even on the same level.

I played サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ last year, and my takeaway at the time was: strong opening, decent premise, peaks early and then nosedives, rushed ending. I remember the promo OP being absolutely insane. The buildup before the OP hits is done perfectly—basically the protagonist falls in love for the first time, confesses to the girl he likes, Madoka, and then the very next moment, because he wasn’t paying attention, she gets killed by a serial killer. His rage, despair, regret—all of it explodes the moment that blazing OP kicks in. Hell of an opening. I won’t get into the rest of the game. It’s a textbook high-open-low-walk. The protagonist starts randomly chasing the killer who murdered his girlfriend, randomly joins a few organizations, solves a few random haunted-house incidents around town, and the plot gets more and more psychedelic. The killer turns out to be a psycho, also bisexual, then the killer himself starts randomly getting superpowers, and the protagonist gets a parasite… This kind of escalation reminds me of a ghost story I read in high school. The mystery setup was solid, then suddenly the protagonist gains Taoist powers and starts having superpowered xianxia battles with all sorts of ghosts. I literally spat out my drink. It went from mystery to melodramatic wuxia, massive disappointment. Same with サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ. Massive disappointment. Great start, then it turned into a mess. After that, the scenario writer for サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ, Go Nii… oh wait, Mr. Go, went off to write other games. Still heavy horror stuff, but no longer the “dream diving” of the original サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ. The game called 仄暗き時の果てより tells a story of aliens and Cthulhu-style time travel. It was actually okay, but I was starting to feel fatigue with Mr. Go’s approach of “not enough plot? add ketchup.” Then サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ 2 was announced as a sequel. At first I was curious what kind of story サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ 2 could possibly tell, since the first game basically wrapped everything up. The protagonist’s girlfriend died, killed by a bisexual psycho. By the end, Madoka had ascended to heaven and the protagonist couldn’t even see her ghost anymore. The mastermind, that bisexual psycho, had been taken out by the protagonist. The story had a relatively complete ending. All that was left were some loose threads with the side heroines. I could understand an FD, but a “2”? Are we just calling FDs “2” now? Then the game came out. After playing through it in bits and pieces over two weeks, I’d say as a “2” it holds up.

Since I started playing eroge I’ve eaten a fair amount of shit, and my standards have kept dropping. At this point I figure a game just has to tell one story without being brain-dead, draw the characters decently, and not have some Sendai oba-san for a voice actress — that’s a good game. Fine, a “not-bad game.” Japanese people like to call an unexpectedly garbage game a “landmine.” You go in hyped, the drop is enormous, it doesn’t just fail to meet expectations, it’s a turd — like stepping on dog shit, like hitting a landmine, you just explode. Pretty apt, honestly. I haven’t played many landmines, to be fair. Maybe I just don’t want much, so I don’t expect much, and I’m easy to please. No matter how ridiculous a game gets, I figure it’s at least dumb in an amusing way, at least it’s got something. Whether a game is dumb or garbage mostly depends on the dev team. Some games, I think the devs could’ve just played them once themselves and known what level they were at — no need to let the players judge, judging it themselves would’ve been enough. One thing puzzles me though: some eroge are clearly made with zero care in every department. The dev team has to know it’s a slapdash rush job. And they still ship it and sell it. In other words: you know it’s a turd, you put it on sale anyway, you won’t make money, you’ll only make enemies. Why insist on releasing it? Today’s subject is a game called Aoiro Note.

Back when I played World of Warcraft, I’d always run into these “casual guilds.” They didn’t have any strict raid schedule. Anyone could join, and the guild leader would help out the newbies a bit, and the atmosphere was relaxed. Every now and then they’d run a raid, but most of the time there were no rules at all — just people screwing around. A lot of the hardcore players wanted the kind of guild with a rigid hierarchy and harsh rules that could push into better raids for better gear. They had nothing but contempt for the “casual guild” type. Most of them couldn’t wrap their heads around what the point of such a lazy, ambitionless guild even was. But the members of those casual guilds didn’t care. They just quietly lived their lives. I’ve had my own hardcore phase too. I used to not get casual guilds either — until I got old, until I no longer had the time to dump into a game as a hardcore gamer, and I joined a casual guild, because no other guild would take me. Once I was in, I understood. The guild looked like it was just “a tag for people who don’t have a guild,” but it wasn’t that simple. The core of a guild like that is almost always the leader. The leader is very likely a middle-aged guy — good-tempered, easygoing, doesn’t get angry. Because the guild takes all comers, the leader is constantly playing peacemaker. Members might rub each other the wrong way, but most of them have no complaints about the leader. Plenty of members leave when they find a new guild, and the leader wishes them well. Some people complain that the guild has no events, can’t down bosses, can’t get gear, and all the leader can do is apologize and say he’s useless. For a casual guild like this, lose the leader and it’s done for in a heartbeat. But these leaders have a hell of a lot of willpower, and they always manage to keep the guild alive. Once I was chatting with a guild leader and asked him out of curiosity: “Why do you pour so much energy into keeping a guild like this running?” “A game is like society,” he answered. “There are always people out there who don’t belong anywhere, who have no home. They need something like a family to take them in, to give them a harbor that feels like home.” I still think about that line a lot. It makes a lot of sense. Whether our parents are around or not, we always feel lonely — that loneliness of “nobody is here with me” — so we need something like a “family” to let us escape and rest for a while, a harbor for the heart. That’s why you see people trying to do this in real life too — adopting orphans and whatnot. In fiction there are even more of these characters: the ones who take in lost children, the “hopeless good guy” setup, that’s everywhere. Like this game, Ouchi ni Kaeru made ga Mashimaro desu (お家に帰るまでがましまろです).

Kage no Umi no Apeiria (景の海のアペイリア)… This is a game built on deception.

These days most galge are locked into a mold — standard school romance, over-the-top bloodbath, or the “playable” kind. “Playable” means the game has some actual game to it, unlike a traditional visual novel. Maybe lots of choices, maybe combat, maybe investigation. Right, investigation. The easiest thing to bolt onto an AVG is an investigation and deduction system. Throw together a Danganronpa-style investigation screen, then pile up a bunch of choices during the deduction phase — points for right answers, deductions for wrong ones. Compared to building an RPG with combat, this is as simple as it gets, and it’s the go-to for any studio trying to inject “gameplay” into an AVG. So this month we got a game called Tantei Seven (タンテイセブン), which is just “Detective Seven” (I’ll call it Detective Seven from here on). The marketing pushed the “mystery detective” angle hard, and the promo art was so over-the-top cool that it instantly reminded us of a certain game called Persona 5. The OP is genuinely hype too — gives off a “there’s something big here” vibe. I happen to like this kind of setup, so I gave it a spin this month. And after playing it, I was fully satisfied… (on multiple levels)

Haruoto Alice＊Gram, also known as My Daily Life With the Black-Tights, White-Tights, and Blonde Big-Tittied Girls in the Mental Hospital, comes from the Japanese eroge company Nanawind. It assembles star artists Nanao Naru and Takanae Kyourin giving it their all. A luxurious voice cast: the 36-year-old Sendai auntie who can’t find work and begs eroge companies on Twitter to no avail voices a heroine, the nearly-30-still-unmarried Ishihara Mai gets picked as a side heroine, and Ozaki Mami — the professional seiyuu who landed one lead in Girls und Panzer and then never got another anime gig — does a typecast brain-dead foreign ojou-sama performance. After several delays and repeated script polishing, it finally launched with much fanfare this month, with PlayDRM standing guard, leaving countless otaku sighing at the mysterious 300 and unable to play. Two weeks after release, it hit fifth place on ErogameScape’s most controversial games of the month, right behind that bug-ridden mess Tantei Seven.

Someone once left a comment on one of my blog posts expressing contempt for PULLTOP. Honestly, my own feelings about PULLTOP are fine — they’ve put out some games I like, what with the plane-making one, the country romance, and the stargazing one. But PULLTOP has definitely also released some mediocre and even mind-numbingly sleep-inducing games. Most of those were the work of their sub-brand, though. PULLTOP LATTE was literally built as a nukige label, so if it’s boring, whatever — at least the main brand is fine, right? Like the guy in the comments said, he thinks PULLTOP itself is stupid, and sometimes I agree. Take the plane-making game — it was probably one of the first Japanese eroge to make the jump to STEAM. The publisher was a company called MoeNovel. I looked into MoeNovel, and the registered asset info lists it as a sub-brand of willplus. And willplus is the parent company of the PULLTOP brand. willplus is actually pretty big, with a bunch of labels under it — plenty of nukige, some normal stuff too. The old Propeller, PULLTOP, ensemble, all of them were willplus labels. I know guilty too — they do NTR. A company that big should be doing well, right? Yet I keep watching them make one dumb move after another. Some of their decisions are just braindead. How braindead, specifically? Back to the earlier topic. Since PULLTOP = MoeNovel, that means PULLTOP chose to publish its own games overseas itself — no licensing agent involved. Should be fine, right? The plane-making game had a great reputation, plenty of Western otaku wanted to play it, a fan translation was already finished, and lots of people said they’d buy it the moment it hit STEAM. Heaven and earth and man were all aligned. PULLTOP probably didn’t even need to translate anything — just grab the English translation license and lie back collecting STEAM money…

Marriage is happening later and later in Japan, and more and more people can’t find a partner at all. So the country keeps cranking out “get married already” content — dramas, music, anime, manga… games — all trying to sell you on the romance-and-matrimony package and get you dreaming about wedded bliss. Kekkon Shugi Kokka (結婚主義国家) is one of those games. Originally it looks like it was a small doujin title; by the time I played it, it had been polished up and turned into… a mobile game. It’s also been split into several volumes. Volumes one and two are free, the rest cost money — about 250 yen a pop. I only tracked it down out of curiosity, and I couldn’t even finish volume one. Once I heard the later volumes are just parallel-world stories, I shelved it. So this is a view through a keyhole — volume one only.