Dear readers, good afternoon, good morning, good evening — somehow it’s already April and I still haven’t posted my 2023 Galgame wrap-up. I originally wanted to finish writing up last year’s backlog of impressions before posting, but looking at my pace, I probably won’t finish. Whatever — the games I didn’t write about aren’t worth recommending anyway, so I’ll just post the annual summary. For the ones I played but didn’t write about, I’ll leave links here to hold the spot and update them slowly in the future. I went through last year’s screenshots and found that in 2023 I played, all told, only 19 games related to “dating simulation.” I even fully cleared a 2024 game and wrote a commercial article for it, and I still couldn’t be bothered to write a blog post…… You can find the list of commercial articles here. There are many reasons for this. On one hand, I’m busy with life and need to take care of kids, so I have less time; on the other hand, in 2023 I’d basically switched over to playing all kinds of console games, and my Steam playtime has been rising day by day. These increasingly dumb Galgames I look down on more and more, and I can’t bring myself to play them anymore; and another reason is that the Galgame market in 2023 was just this sluggish. In some months mid-year, you couldn’t even find a so-called “proper release” released that month — nukige and nothing but nukige. Even the “proper releases” were half re-releases, half garbage…… So this isn’t my fault. The responsibility lies entirely with Japan. The games are made so assembly-line and so abstract — how the hell am I supposed to keep playing? So let’s just get to the games I recommend this year. I’ll probably struggle to even scrape together 10……

Your Desperate Attempt to Be Praised Really Makes It Hard for Me to Praise You Years ago, when ANIPLEX.EXE entered the Galgame market as a Sony brand, a bunch of people were shouting “the big one is coming.” I sourly wrote a piece for Dimensional Fanaticism, roughly arguing that Sony was just dabbling and never had much expectation for this market anyway—that the day ANIPLEX.EXE stops putting out products purely through outsourced white-labeling and actually becomes a so-called “first-party developer” is when “the big one” truly arrives. And you’ve seen the results. “The big one” never came, and ANIPLEX.EXE went nearly two years in obscurity, until this year it started rolling out new titles again—still “outsourced” and “white-labeled,” except this time the label says “Looseboy.” The most famous title under ANIPLEX.EXE is of course ATRI (ATRI -My Dear Moments-). The game is a thoroughly formulaic Japanese sci-fi-future work—which doesn’t mean it’s bad. Clichéd stories can still land well, just like how we keep getting moved by formulaic hot-blooded action. Maybe to replicate ATRI’s success, the original team regrouped outside ANIPLEX.EXE and put out GINKA (GINKA). The art style, the scenario writer, the studio, even the title all scream “tribute to the predecessor.” So does GINKA deliver the same feeling as ATRI? Objectively speaking, yes—it even delivers far more content than ATRI. But is “more” good? That I’ve always doubted, and it’s exactly what I find most baffling and worth criticizing about this game.

When I heard Asa Project’s new game Koibana Renai (コイバナ恋愛) had been slapped with the “landmine” label, I was genuinely shocked. Sure, I think their games have been on a downward slope compared to those old meme-face classics, but there’s no way it deserves “landmine” status. Asa Project has always made these “politically incorrect” games where the whole point is unhinged nonsense. You can force a guy into a girl’s body, you can stumble into BL endings without trying. Their audience is mostly shitposters who know exactly what to expect and have the mental fortitude for it. No way they’d get got by Asa Project’s antics and slap a “landmine” label on it. Besides, from what I remember, their 2023 release Koibana Renai was billed more as a “youth ensemble drama” — basically boys and girls bumping into each other, and the title spells it out. コイバナ means “love talk,” so Koibana Renai feels like a big pile of lovesick brains. Tell me how that premise could possibly be a landmine. Unless the protagonist joins a youth-themed swinger club or something. So out of curiosity I checked the game out. My first impression: yeah, it’s not good. I also get why people call it a landmine. But the reason it’s bad isn’t the landmine — it’s something else entirely.

The past few years have brought a wave of “retro.” People start missing the “old” stuff, and more and more content with a “retro” flavor gets dug out of the historical junk pile and put back into production. Keyboards with last-century styling, computers, handhelds, all sorts of odds and ends. FiiO recently put out a “cassette player,” not cheap, and chunky as hell. And yet people were falling over themselves to buy it. Even with the “retro” tax that steep, there’s still a market—at least enough of one to keep the manufacturers churning out reshelled products alive and well. Which gets me thinking about another industry soaked in the same “retro” smell: the beautiful-girl dating simulation game, commonly known as galgame. Anyone with a bit of history knows the earliest galgames weren’t like today’s mainstream products. The universally acknowledged granddaddy is the Tokimeki Memorial series—I remember it also being called Jun’ai Techou, though back in the day I kept reading the pirated disc as Jun’ai Techou… anyway, not important. What matters is that Tokimeki Memorial was a deadly serious game about “simulation,” “romance,” and “raising.”

There’s a classic meme about Intel releasing the 11th-gen i7-11700K, which benchmarks showed was not only worse than cheaper competitors but even worse than the previous generation—a pure reverse toothpaste squeeze. Gamers Nexus famously called it a “waste of sand.” After playing Lump of Sugar’s so-called “new” 2023 release, I had a similar thought, and it led to the question in the title: If selling a CPU with reverse toothpaste squeeze is a waste of sand, what does developing a completely pointless galgame count as?

I vaguely remember it — a night about eleven years ago, back when I was still a pure, innocent little 2D virgin. I’d followed the Mashiroiro Symphony anime all the way to the end, and like most of the fat otaku who watched it back then, the redhead’s crying at the end was where it all began. And at the end of the anime, they told you a PSP version with an added route for the redhead was coming out. I had a PSP at the time, but my Japanese wasn’t good enough, so I did what everyone else does — waited for a fan translation. That wait turned into two years.

Thinking back, Sakura no Uta (サクラノ詩) was eight years ago now. I rated it pretty highly at the time, and it resonated with me on a personal level given some of my own experiences. It genuinely taught me a lot too, especially about the relationship between “mathematics” and “art” — the correspondence between the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence had me half-convinced that a “Creator” and “God” might actually exist, and made me instantly understand why so many scientists end up turning to mysticism. Because there’s just too much in this world that’s strange, mysterious, and completely unexplained. All that to say, I got a lot out of Sakura no Uta, and even purely as narrative it’s plenty gripping — honestly it’s that gripping story that kept me reading, and along the way I picked up all sorts of interesting trivia. I figured the story was over, since the ending really didn’t leave any obvious room for a sequel. Then I heard about Sakura no Toki (サクラノ刻). There’s a sequel? What would it even be about? I genuinely had no idea. The female students who barely registered in the original main plot? Or forcing a route onto Ms. Ai, who was already perfectly complete as she was? The protagonist’s relationship with her was lovely precisely because it wasn’t family but might as well have been — were they really going to shoehorn a romance in just so she’d be “routeable”? No way, right? There’s no need to be that tacky… doing that would drag down the whole game’s prestige and even wreck the protagonist’s character. I already thought him getting with Misono Rin was a stretch — that was already a concession to “R18 game sales” — no need to go that far, surely? And then with the release of Totono no Sora Remake (终の空 Remake), I became even more confident about Sakura no Toki. I figured it absolutely wouldn’t be some unnecessary sequel milking the name, nor a rushed product made just to pander to players by forcing a route onto some character. Well, Sakura no Toki came out anyway, and you can probably guess the rest. I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.

I keep seeing posts like this online: “Looking for a device to play Gal.” “Which tablet is good for eroge?” “This handheld is great, a perfect eroge-dedicated machine.” … Sometimes I’m confused too. The “Galgame” category has been a dying industry for ages, so why does it look like there are still so many fans online, willing to spend real money on a pricey dedicated device just for it? Actually, long-time readers of my blog probably know that about 10+ years ago I wrote a similar article. I briefly laid out some of my own views back then; some hold up now, some were incomplete. After all these years I’ve built up a fair amount of galgame experience and cycled through a lot of devices for playing them. Maybe we should sit down and talk about this again, and share some of my experience.

Honestly, when I heard ハッピーライヴショウアップ！ was getting a sequel, I was both surprised and not surprised at all. Surprised because the original story was already complete enough that there was basically no room for a sequel. The protagonist marries Sofia and they even have a kid. What’s left to say? Were they going to have him go back to school as a teacher, hang around a bunch of female students, and fall in love with the daughter of one of the previous heroines? That’s a nasty setup. And the not-surprised part is obvious: Miyabi, who had a decent amount of screen time in the original, was never a romanceable heroine. Her presence was too captivating, her charm impossible to resist — half the time she was stealing the show. I’m a diehard Natsuwa Komachi fan, but I think she already had enough screen time in this game. There was absolutely no need to force a “romanceable route” just to satisfy some straight-guy OCD, especially when it makes the whole story feel inconsistent. But it’s not my call. F-chan needs to make money, so ハッピーライヴ ショウアップ アンコール！！, a new release with a brand-new Miyabi-exclusive route, hit the shelves anyway.

Anyone familiar with my past blog posts knows I’m not exactly a Yuzusoft hater, but I’m definitely not a fanboy either. I’ve always kept a measuredly critical stance toward Yuzusoft’s (ゆずソフト) past works. With Sora-iro I called them moege; with Witch I said they needed to get serious; with Senren * Banka I said they were too formulaic; by Riddle Joker and that all-ages title whose name I can’t even remember I was already mocking them as washed up; and by Shinigami no Butterfly I was flat-out saying they’d crashed and burned. So yeah, my feelings on Yuzusoft are pretty negative across the board. Even if deep down I think they’re already better than their peers, they never quite hit that point I’m looking for, never triggered any real desire in me to praise them. Fast forward to 2023: Yuzusoft is still alive, still putting out a new game every 1–2 years. This one’s called Tenshi Souzou (天使騒々). Honestly, the name is terrible, gives off major Tenshi Ranman vibes. And after reading the game’s synopsis, I pretty much assumed this was Yuzusoft returning to their roots — by lying flat on their face.