Tayutama 2 -you’re the only one- (タユタマ2 -you’re the only one-) came out last year, and honestly I think it’s pretty good. Why? Because it’s not toxic. Yeah, the bar is low, but almost nobody clears it. Look around—not just games, even anime—barely anything out there doesn’t try to piss you off. Out of nowhere a love triangle to give you heartburn, or they’ll torture some poor girl to make you feel bad, or pull a time loop or isekai twist that makes you spit your drink. Compared to all that, Tayutama 2—a game so positive it’s practically a PSA about humans and Tayutai living in harmony—is a breath of fresh air. Sure, it didn’t sell great on Steam, and the price is a quarter of what you’d pay for 2B after the price hike. But that’s reality: bland positive content isn’t stimulating enough to attract the twisted otaku crowd. Only ass sells.

Let’s play a guessing game first… The protagonist is an ordinary, unremarkable high schooler. One day strange phenomena start popping up around his town. Eventually he runs into a girl and discovers she has superpowers — and she’s fighting for something too. At the same time he meets a mysterious talking creature. The creature tells him he has immense potential and power, but for the life of it can’t figure out what his ability actually is. Led along by this creature, the protagonist teams up with the superpowered girl to investigate the weirdness in town, and soon discovers plenty of his classmates are hidden espers too… and he clashes with them. As the investigation goes deeper, more and more of the shadowy conspiracy comes to light… Figured out what it is yet? Oh, or rather… Have you figured out which works I’m talking about?

Back in middle school I read all kinds of web novels, so naturally I ran into power fantasy and harem stuff. Power fantasy needs no explanation—the protagonist shows up, is insanely OP, plays the pig to eat the tiger, and sometimes doesn’t even bother playing the pig and just instakills heaven, earth, and the entire world. As for harem novels, I stumbled on those later; I’ve always thought Chinese web novel romance is pretty terrible, but the “harem” tag in Chinese web fiction really does mean a true harem. The protagonist has several girls around him, and every single one of them is totally fine with him having other women, and they all coexist harmoniously… That’s not weird at all, though—you’ve read The Deer and the Cauldron, right… After that I got into the Japanese “light novel” thing. Japanese light novels also have power fantasy and harem stuff… it just feels completely different from the Chinese version.

When I was a kid, my father would rigorously review my homework—essays above all. By “review” I mean I had to show him my essays first, he’d give suggestions for revision, and only once he was satisfied and I’d done enough editing could I hand it in. Pretty unreasonable, right? A very paternalistic approach, right? But every coin has two sides—luckily my father happened to be a decent writer himself, so a lot of his feedback was actually useful. The thing I remember most is what he said about narrative essays. Sometimes he’d flat-out call my writing “boring”—meaning it gave you no desire to keep reading. “You should give your story ups and downs, maybe even suspense, so people will want to keep going.” “But the thing I’m writing about was just boring.” I think it was about giving up my seat to an old lady—“A Meaningful Event.” “You can arrange the story a bit—like, you give up your seat but she flat-out refuses to sit at first, and only later explains she thinks she’s not that old yet, or something…” “But that’s just making stuff up…” “And giving up your seat isn’t making stuff up? Have you ever actually given up your seat?” “…………”

Voice actress Matsunaga Rika (Yomogi Kasumi) must be thanking her lucky stars she got cast in Natsuiro Kokoro Log. Why? Because on her Twitter page, the only character she can actually show off is the main heroine from this game. Every other role she’s done is either some jobber or a boss — and if it’s a lead, it’s guaranteed to be the busty heroine of some nukige getting violated, the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to use as an avatar. Actually, the heroine of Natsuiro Kokoro Log, Tokiwa Kuon, is genuinely adorable. Thanks to artist Shirakawa Mochizuki’s moe one-hit-kill, this game is a breath of fresh air among “moe-nukige” titles. Story? Music? Voice acting? None of it matters here — as long as it clears the bar, the art style alone is enough to make moe pigs cry out banzai. But as you all know, I’m not some moe-obsessed fanboy, and I’m not a little-sister complex guy either, so while playing Natsuiro Kokoro Log (ナツイロココロログ), all I really felt was that this game’s protagonist is a total fucking idiot. I said it in a previous post too: this guy is wishy-washy, has zero opinions of his own, and the moment things look bad he immediately tucks tail and runs. When the girl wants nothing from him and all she needs is for him to nod, he instead turns around and goes home. In real life, that’s the kind of scumbag who has a great time banging a girl, then vanishes the second she’s pregnant. And somehow that scumbag is the protagonist of a harem-flavored moe game. I can’t accept it.

Last week in Zhengzhou I met up with a friend from Beijing who works at a well-known internet company with business all over the country. He’s fairly famous on G+ as a road-bike inner-thigh chafing specialist and senior programmer critic, “Neo Slixurd.” Since his name is Neo and he’s gay, I usually call him “Genio,” or just “Genniao” for short. Chatting with Genniao is always a good time. We started by discussing whether “Princess Xiaozhu is actually an idiot,” and quickly reached a consensus. The conversation later drifted to the fact that I play visual novels. What Genniao was most curious about was how I learned Japanese so fast. It wasn’t fast at all, honestly — play porn games every day and you’ll learn fast too. My experience with that is documented here. His second question was how many games I actually play. By my own count, I got through about 80 last year. That number isn’t exactly accurate, since I personally treat visual novels as novels — meaning I only read “the main ending the game anoints as canon.” Every other ending is just a “possibility” to me. If you’re in love with a heroine you can fantasize about it, but it’s not the real story. So for most games, unless it’s something like Hatsuyuki Sakura that splits the whole story apart, I just take the main route and skim the rest. A single game isn’t that long either — if you clear every route, according to ErogameScape most Japanese players need about 19 hours. That’s not so bad, but who plays this stuff every single day? Finally we got onto where visual novel stories are headed. Genniao said the games he’s played are all older ones or the more famous ones, and he has no idea what the newest stuff is like. I explained that most of the newest games are still clichéd as hell — a notch above the current mainstream seasonal anime in overall quality, sure, but that’s just a product of the audience. ErogameScape stats show most eroge players are in the 25–30 age bracket, not the under-20 elementary-schooler tier you get watching anime on Bilibili in this country. “Honestly most eroge plots are pretty stupid. Like the one I’ve been playing recently.” And that’s how I brought up Hataraku Otaku no Renai Jijou.

I’ve made no secret of how much I love Hihou no Mahoutsukai (紙の上の魔法使い), or of how much I praise its writer, Rukuru. Same goes for Unmei Yohou wo Oshirase Shimasu, the game Rukuru put out before it. What makes this writer so strong is that he genuinely knows how to tell a story — the pacing, the dialogue, the word choice and the overall style all give off this elegant, gripping feel. Other visual novel writers, by comparison, read like high schoolers in the middle of a chuuni phase. That gap hits you hard: play a Rukuru game, then go pick up some mainstream VN, and the latter’s dialogue feels stupid and half-witted next to it, while the former actually reads like a story, one with images in it. I guess that’s what you’d call raw skill in a scenario writer. After Hihou no Mahoutsukai, the studio Ugui Sugura went quiet for way too long. A little over a year before, they tweeted that yes, they were properly working on a new game; then at the end of 2016 Suisou Ginkka no Istoria got announced, an early 2017 trial came out, and in March it launched with zero delays. Happiness arrived too fast, and I started playing the moment I got it. (I’d love to buy a legit copy, but I have no idea if standard forwarding will get me a friendly invitation from customs — any veterans with a reliable route, please enlighten me.)

This post shouldn’t exist. I originally wanted to make a video to trash this game—I even had the style mapped out, something like AVGN or Ao Changzhang doing lighthearted snark. I had shots and camera angles in my head and everything. But then I thought about it and couldn’t decide whether to make my YouTube debut, so I shelved the video. Plus it’s a hassle. Typing is easier. The game I’m trashing today is called “Timepiece Ensemble.” And honestly, I didn’t play it because of Kiritani Hana, nor because I had a good impression of the studio Glace from before—I played it because of the artist, Sesenaau. Sesenaau is a female artist, and her characters always have this element of feminine “cuteness” that male artists just can’t capture. I’ve always thought that’s a big advantage of female artists: male artists can only draw girls that are super erotic, while female artists can draw cuteness on a spiritual level. It’s not that male artists can’t draw cute things—it’s just that it always feels fake, like it has no soul. So I saw this game called Timepiece Ensemble, and it was announced it’d be ported to PSV soon, so I skimmed the intro. It’s simple: the protagonist is preparing for the school culture festival and stumbles upon a mysterious shop. The shopkeeper says she can sell him “time”—the ability to rewind time. He doesn’t know what use that ability has, but that’s how the story begins.

I’m not an NTR fan and I honestly can’t wrap my head around how NTR fans think. Still, Japanese eroge are packed with NTR subject matter, for better or worse. NTR here doesn’t mean what grade-schoolers mean by “the girl you like doesn’t like you, she likes someone else.” It’s 寝取る — and the meaning is simple: your wife, your spouse, your lover, your girlfriend got slept with by someone else. Put plainly, you got cuckolded. Even if you’ve spent years lurking Reddit, ACFUN, the greening street, and the Thunder Bluff of 5ch, I’ve never once seen a guy discover he’s been cuckolded and feel happy about it. So yeah, the NTR fan mindset is hard to get. And yet NTR games keep coming out. Plenty of companies make them, some even set up a dedicated brand just for NTR titles to chase that specialist credibility. Like this one, Houkago ni Midareru Ane Kyoushi to Tonari no Heya de Aegu Imouto (放課後に乱れる姉教師と隣の部屋で喘ぐ妹 ～恋人になった女の子が、知り合いの嫌な男に寝取られる～), which bills itself as a standard NTR game.

Almost nothing worth playing came out in the second month of 2017 in the adult game space—except for one title called Ouka Saki (桜花裁き). Strictly speaking, Ouka Saki isn’t a pure “eroge.” It’s a “bugyō mystery” game. Plenty of games wave the mystery flag. The famous early one is Ace Attorney, and later there’s Danganronpa. Lump of Sugar also put out a mystery-ish game, though its story was more of a comedy. But come on—was Danganronpa’s story not a comedy either? Word is Danganronpa 3’s plot has gone so dumb it can’t even help itself, the final twist like tossing a grenade into a squat toilet and spraying shit everywhere, leaving players in a fury like burning-sea mad maggots. So I wisely didn’t play it. I couldn’t even be bothered to buy it. Even for Danganronpa 2, my verdict back then was: stop caring about that dumbass main plot and just enjoy the minigames. So for Ouka Saki, at first I figured it’d be some Danganronpa-imitating goofball game—claims to be mystery but is really just bullshitting, and in the end it’s a forced verdict. But after playing the trial version, it was actually surprisingly good. At least its case descriptions have something like a real mystery core. I can’t vouch for anything else, but compared to Danganronpa’s goofball motives, Ouka Saki is way better.