One of the writers on Harumade, Kururu is a guy named Watanabe Ryoichi. His latest work is Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, but before that he and his buddy Kio Nachi worked on a bunch of eroge, including some with seriously weird premises. I looked into it way back, and eventually noticed these works tend to share one thing: They love a mindfuck twist. Right at the end they tell you the protagonists were living in a dream, or that the world wasn’t the real one. One of the better-known Watanabe Ryoichi and Kio Nachi collaborations is Sukima Sakura to Uso no Machi. No prizes for guessing, that game ends with exactly that kind of reveal. Though the two weren’t the planners on that one, so who knows if it’s their fault. Anyway, Harumade, Kururu is one of these two madmen’s joint projects. Why’d I play it? Because the OP hooked me again, obviously. Harumade, Kururu… the art’s got those twisted faces again, but it’s not the full NekoNeko Soft crew so it’s not a total disaster. According to the reviews on Chuuni Space, the game wins on story, and I’m a story guy, so I figured I’d give it a run. That run took half a year. More precisely, I did the pre-OP and a chunk of the post-OP stuff first, then only recently finished the rest. How do I put this… the story is genuinely insane, tons of imagination. But this game should not be… this long.

Goddammit, ever since I started playing eroge I’ve learned a bunch of words that never showed up in any textbook. Stuff like yarichin, yariman, and then a while back I ran into yarisā. I’m sitting there wondering what the hell a yarisā even is, and of course I had to look it up, and of course that cost me an entire night of my youth. Everyone knows (don’t even say you don’t, I won’t believe you) that yariman is the word for a slut, and yarichin is the male version (hell, I don’t know what the good Chinese equivalent is, you can’t exactly call it “black foreskin”), so by analogy, yarisā is a sā of dare demo yareru, where sā is, of course, sākuru—circle in English—which in Japanese katakana means a “club” or “circle.” So put it together and a yarisā is a circle where anyone can get laid, or to spell it out plainly, a “hookup orgy club.” And while I was looking up yarisā, I found a couple of explanatory posts on Quora. That’s when I learned this word has way more going on under the hood than I thought. Quora: Some scandals involving Japanese university students Quora: Why do Japanese tennis clubs have such a bad reputation?

I’d had my eye on Sakuranomori†Dreamers (サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ) ever since before its release — the premise was dark as hell, the OP absolutely slapped, and going by the description it looked like it was going the horror route. Unfortunately the release got delayed, so I had to push it back on the list. I can’t say playing it felt bad, but it definitely wasn’t pleasant either — though half of that “not pleasant” is in the good direction. If I could get enjoyment out of a horror game, I’d probably be one step away from a jail cell… This game’s hard to rate. I lean positive, but I honestly can’t point to anything that absolutely backs that up. Maybe it’s just that I personally like this style of game, and it falls “just a hair short” in every direction…

I’ve always figured I don’t really go for that whole “character design” thing. Which is to say, whether a character is cute doesn’t hinge solely on her looks, or on the artist—building the actual person still takes a CV and a story with some meat on it. So I’m generally not the type to see a girl in a picture and start shouting “I’d bang that” like some kind of animal. And I’ve never really gotten the “moe-otaku” crowd, for the reasons above—whether a girl in a game is cute isn’t just about appearance; it’s her experiences, her way of talking, all of it added up that makes her feel like a real flesh-and-blood girl. It’s a shallow world, but looks alone won’t cut it… That’s what I thought.

Every month there’s a visual novel that gets pushed hard. Neko-Nin exHeart (ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート) a while back, last month’s Wagamama High Spec—that whole “buy the sales numbers with money” school of release. Except Noratoto was actually good, and Wagamama rode a full-court marketing blitz to outsell ISLAND and Chaos;Child last month. So apparently in the visual novel market, if you’re willing to push, you can still move a respectable number of copies. This month’s most-promoted title is probably Seiken Tsukai no Meidai (聖鍵遣いの命題). I kept seeing news and updates about it in Dengeki Hime every time I turned around, but oddly enough, very few Japanese readers had anything nice to say after the demo dropped… I got curious and looked at the setting, and it’s kind of RPG-ish, but it doesn’t really reek of landmine either. The OP is genuinely great—there’s even proper animation—so clearly they spent real money on this thing. By all logic, a game made with real money shouldn’t get torn apart too badly unless the story pulls some spectacular self-destruct maneuver. So I decided to trust in the quality and went and played it.

A while back I was reading some anecdotes on a blog by someone claiming to be an eroge industry insider, and I came across this line: つまりシナリオとは発売後に作品を支える要素であり、昔から初動の売り上げにおいてはイラストの方が重要であった。 (A game’s opening sales mostly come down to the character designs and art style; the scenario is just one element that keeps a game going after release.) And then an even better one: だから打ち合わせでは「キャラとイチャイチャしていれば話の中身なんてなくていい」と本当に言われるし、「○○先生に原画を担当してもらえる時点で売り上げは確保できているから、シナリオなんてクソにならない限りどうでもいい」とさえ言われてしまったりする。 (So at planning meetings people really do say things like “as long as the characters are flirting with each other, it doesn’t matter if the story has any substance,” and even “the moment you’ve got Sensei XX doing the original art, sales are guaranteed, so the scenario can be whatever as long as it doesn’t turn to shit.”) Of course, none of that beats this one: ゲームの傾向も変わってきていて、２００４年頃は「エロなんかいらねぇシナリオの質が重要」なんて一部で言われていたりもしたが、今企画会議でそんなことを言おうものなら袋叩きにされる。 理由は簡単で、シナリオを重視した作品よりもキャラクター性を重視した作品の方がグッズの売り上げがいいからである。 (The direction of games has shifted too. Around 2004 some people were saying “who needs the ero, what matters is the quality of the scenario,” but if you said that in a planning meeting today you’d get the shit beaten out of you. The reason is simple: character-driven works sell more merch than scenario-driven ones.) Man… what can you say? That’s just how it is, I guess?

I keep asking myself one question: when is Lashi-sha gonna croak. Then last time they shoved out some half-assed cobbled-together nukige, and instead of dying they went and opened a new label. Lass Pixy, dedicated to putting out Lashi-sha’s pure-love stuff. Like this new one, Pure Marriage Akai Ito Monogatari, all about pure love and brides. Completely different from that ninja training thing they did before. Then I looked closer. The game has three heroines, and the first release is titled “Pure Marriage ~Akai Ito Monogatari Madoka-hen.” They’re selling it split by heroine? Price is cheap at least, a bit over 1,400 yen. Cheaper than some singles. What does that remind me of? Isn’t there some X no Seiiki? Probably eroge just don’t sell anymore, and eroge companies are having a rough time of it, so everyone’s trying the low-budget, sell-in-pieces approach. Not just Feng—Frontwing is doing the Neko-para thing on Steam, and there’s light’s Four Seasons lie series. But do the math on Lashi-sha’s plan: three heroines, and the whole game still ends up cheaper than the usual 9,000 yen for an eroge. I know Lashi-sha is dying and flailing. At that price, can you even break even? Make any money? So out of curiosity I played it. And after playing it, I understood. I can tell you responsibly: this piece of crap from Lashi-sha really would recoup its costs with more sales. It’s cheap as hell to make.

There was this weird new show in the April anime lineup called Wagamama High Spec. The Chinese title got rendered as something like “Wagamama High-Spec” — the thing has almost no content, runs incredibly short, and makes absolutely no sense to watch. Turns out it’s an eroge adaptation, and the game hadn’t even come out yet when the anime started airing, so it’s basically a promo ad for the game. Whether it’s a short-form anime or not doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, what this thing is worth comes down to the game. A while back I saw someone saying DOOM was going for a retro route. I don’t buy that. DOOM just went back to the essence of games — that’s not retro, that’s what games should be in the first place. Speaking of retro, I’d say Wagamama High Spec is closer to a kind of retro — a retro of eroge.

When Onii-chan, Kiss no Junbi wa Mada Desu ka came out, I looked at it and thought, holy shit, this looks familiar. First off, the title. It’s the exact same sentence pattern as Onii-chan, Migite no Shiyou o Kinshi Shimasu. I looked it up — same planner, one of the same artists, and a good chunk of the same voice cast. Only the company is different. I remembered Galette’s siscon series… no, wait, its family series. The next entry was supposed to be Onii-chan Teacher, and this Onii-chan, Kiss no Junbi wa Mada Desu ka thing is by Tinkle Position. Yeah, that company name, read out in katakana, is uncomfortably close to “chinbo.” Their mascot is literally a yellow dick with a smiley face. The promo and the premise gave me wall-to-wall déjà vu, and the gimmick is basically the same head-pat setup from Onii-chan Teacher, except now it’s kissing. So I played it out of curiosity. Not because of the premise or the content. Trust me. So how is it? All I can say is this game made me start reflecting on my life.

The reason ISLAND caught my attention is that everything else releasing around the same time was way too easy to read. I was going to say those other games were “boring,” but Wagamama wasn’t really that boring—it’s more that most titles, just from their intro blurbs, obviously aren’t going to pull anything unexpected. So ISLAND came charging out with tags like “all ages,” “story-driven,” “high-end foreshadowing payoff,” and announced an anime adaptation not long after reveal. For someone who loves plot developments, that should be unmissable. But after a long and frankly painful playthrough, I realized it wasn’t the kind of game I imagined at all. Not that it’s bad—if anything, the rigor of its plot is taken to some kind of extreme. It’s just not for me. Maybe the EVER17 / Steins;Gate time-loop crowd will eat this up. In other words, there aren’t many game types I hate, but one of them is exactly the kind of development ISLAND pulls. So no, this game didn’t give me even a little joy. Only pain.