A while back I was bored out of my mind, so on a whim I decided to play a roleplay game with ChatGPT. The kind where I have it play, you know… a little-sister type who keeps calling me “onii-chan,” hopelessly in love with me on the inside but acting all cold on the surface — a veteran tsundere, that push-and-pull, playing-hard-to-get kind of conversation. People online have already said you can chat about all sorts of lewd stuff with ChatGPT, as long as you feed it enough preconditions and declarations first. That’s obviously no obstacle for me, so I charged right in. Getting ChatGPT to accept the identity I gave it wasn’t hard, and soon we were deep in conversation. It’s just that the conversation felt… really weird.

I’m not from the Northeast, but I know plenty of Northeasterners. Back when World of Warcraft was huge, Zones 2 and 6 were the China Unicom servers, and they were basically northerners’ territory. And among northerners, Northeasterners made up a wildly high proportion of the player base. It was pretty much: join any random raid, hop on voice chat, and there’s a good chance the raid leader is speaking with a Northeastern accent. Combined with the old sitcom Northeast Family (东北一家人) being a hit, I’ve picked up the dialect by osmosis. The Northeastern dialect is a branch of Northern Mandarin, with a lot of Beijing influence in the pronunciation. Anyone who understands Standard Mandarin can follow it without much trouble, and it carries this weird mix of “comic” and “gangster” energy. A lot of people assume Northeastern guys are all hard cases, but honestly the Northeastern girls are worse. Fun fact: the only domestic violence shelter in all of China that protects men is in Shenyang, Northeast China. Meaning out there, the girls will chase the big Northeastern lads around and beat the crap out of them.

I started building websites back in middle school. I remember it clearly — the summer of eighth grade. I applied for a free forum and domain and threw together an extremely crude “class website.” I figured it was just for fun, but it somehow took off across the whole class, then the whole grade. It wasn’t just my own class. Kids from the neighboring classes signed up and started posting too, and all kinds of conversations got going. That chatter later moved to the school’s official forum, and after that to the class Discord group. I think I was the one who created and ran that Discord group, for the simple reason that I was one of the few users who had permission to create Discord groups at the time. So I made the group for the class, and I’m still listed as admin to this day, even though nobody’s said a word in it for years. Later I went to college and started making all kinds of websites and forums again, but honestly nothing ever took off the way it did, and I could never recapture that middle-school glory. In one of the forums I’d rebuilt God knows how many times, I once wrote this line: “Some dreams you only dream at eighteen, and some dreams you only understand once you’ve grown up…” There were a few more lines after that, I don’t remember them now — something with that whole “forcing yourself to feel sad for the sake of a poem” vibe. I didn’t really know what I was trying to say. I just thought it sounded cool, so I went with it. Sure enough, a classmate came along and criticized it right away, saying I’d taken the wrong medicine and that it was so pretentious it gave him goosebumps. I thought he had a point, so I made that line my Discord signature so he’d have to see it every day. Years later I thought of that line again, and I have to say, I now think it actually makes sense. Because there really are things you only do when you’re young, and dreams you only understand when you’re young at heart.

Finally got around to writing up everything I played last year. Turns out I went through 31 games, same as 2021. That said, I can already feel 2023’s number dropping off a cliff — not because I don’t have time, but because the industry is just cooked. Look at May: barely a handful of titles worth mentioning. By year’s end I’ll be lucky to count ten on my fingers. Looks like my dream of “watching the galgame sunset industry finally die” is about to come true. Last year’s quality was honestly nothing to write home about. If you asked me to list my “personal best,” I doubt I could even fill ten slots. So let’s do it differently this year — alongside the usual recommendations, I’ll throw in some roast-flavored awards. “Worst,” “dumbest,” that sort of thing… just for fun. Helps people dodge landmines.

Taiwanese rapper MC HOTDOG shows up in a lot of movies too, but he’s a bit different — he only does “low-budget,” “rough around the edges,” the kind of thing you look at and think, yeah, this is gonna be a mess. He’s worked with the likes of Xiao Shenyang, Da Peng, Yue Yunpeng. Sometimes he even pops up in Taiwanese horror films by directors nobody’s heard of. The results are about what you’d expect: most of these movies got panned. Basically everything he’s been in is a stinker. A lot of people, me included, were puzzled. The guy is arguably the face of Chinese-language rap. Eminem made 8 Mile. Hotdog should at least have the ability and the resources to make something decent — even a vanity project shouldn’t turn out to be a “bad movie.” But in a later interview he brought this up himself, and his answer stuck with me. Hotdog explained that he doesn’t like so-called “big productions.” He prefers that “cheap” B-movie feel. And he laid out all the upsides of B-movies: because they’re niche, the subject matter can be sloppy but also way more unhinged; because they’re niche, the content can be bolder, more willing to shitpost, even touching sensitive territory that “big” films won’t go near; because they’re niche, the style gets more exaggerated — horror gets scarier, gore gets bloodier, comedy gets to cut loose. And because it’s a B-movie, niche audience, niche marketing, nobody’s really watching, so it’s just more free. There’s a decent-sized crowd of B-movie lovers out there going nuts over films that “don’t belong in polite society.” That idea hit me, and it reminded me of when I first got into visual novels. For a market that’s been called a sunset industry for years, the B-movie approach works just as well — in both subject matter and plot development, visual novels are freer, and a lot of the “masterpieces” were born inside that freedom. No wonder so many people find “healing” in themes of darkness, death, torture, even training. So finally some developer remembered the common ground between visual novels and B-movies. Like CUBE’s Same to Ikiru Nanokakan (サメと生きる七日間), “Seven Days Living with Sharks.”

When I first saw the announcement for this new Lump of Sugar title, Arcana Alchemia (アルカナ・アルケミア), I genuinely couldn’t hold back a laugh. What year is it, and they’re still making traditional “alchemy” stories? The moment you say “alchemy” it’s always “human transmutation” this and that — at least bring up how alchemy was a precursor to modern medicine, philosophy, and chemistry, would you? Then I read the premise. Oh boy, of course it’s “transmuting a living beast-eared girl.” No idea if that was on purpose or an accident. When the game came out at the end of December, I couldn’t shake the association — seeing “shark” reminds me of that Osaka black-veil otaku, which then reminds me of jerking off, and that’s just uncomfortable. So I got around to this one first. And it turned out to be surprisingly decent. Honestly I’d even say Arcana Alchemia is the best thing Lump of Sugar has put out recently, good enough to squeeze into my year-end ranking.

Honestly, when I first played Hamedashi Creative, I was completely baffled. First off, the story made no sense. The game is packed with “instantly fake” elements: a little sister who’s deep into 2D culture, a brocon, and loaded enough to support her worthless older brother; a 2D artist who loves drawing lewd art, enjoys hanging out with fat otaku without being gross like them, and is willing to date one; a cold, sharp-tongued, self-absorbed black-haired beauty who flip-flops between tsundere and queen just to throw herself at a fat otaku; and a Vtuber who looks totally ordinary—the kind who’d graduate in a month in the V-tuber world—yet somehow becomes a top earner without relying on insults or dirty jokes, and still falls for the otaku… In this game’s world, it’s as if every woman sees the protagonist and wants to sleep with him. Their insults are just tsundere, their rejections are just playing hard to get, their “NO” actually means “YES,” they say one thing but mean another, and deep down they’re always craving to be conquered by him… Unless you tell me the setting is that only one man is left in the world and women can only survive by mating, I still can’t buy into this story.

One of the hottest topics lately is AI. ChatGPT blowing up again at the start of this year left the masses stunned—“it’s already this powerful?"—and also a little scared. “If computers keep getting this strong, it’s only a matter of time before they replace us, right?” Along with that fear comes every sci-fi plot about machines ruling humanity, as if in a few years we’ll all be jacking cables into the backs of our heads and entering a metaverse called the matrix, while our bodies form a resistance underground against the mighty robots. The crisis always arrives fast and sudden. But is that really how it goes?

I actually finished Jewelry Hearts Academia a while ago and just couldn’t be bothered to write about it. Main reason: I’d already done the commercial piece, where I dissected the plot front to back, went through the details, and gave the damn thing a thorough evaluation from every angle. It wore me out. The thought of writing a second version for the blog made me want to throw up, so it just sat there. Still, for the year-end roundup and review, I have to write about it eventually. No escape. I really can’t be bothered to lay out the plot. It’s too fucking long and too fucking complicated. Let’s keep it brief, just a summary, and skip the details.

More and more Japanese studios have figured out just how much money the overseas otaku crowd is sitting on, so we keep seeing visual novels pop up on Steam—including a whole crop of “Steam exclusives” planned specifically for the overseas market, with the domestic audience written off entirely, all in the name of moving units and making a buck. Most of these games sell like crap. Maybe it’s that Japanese “don’t cause trouble for others” instinct, but they always try to read overseas players’ minds using their own assumptions. They figure anything “too Japanese” or “too hardcore” won’t land with foreigners, and they unilaterally decide that what overseas weebs want out of Japan is ninjas, cherry blossoms, JK, school festivals, and so on. This kind of presumptuous pandering reliably produces results that are deeply, painfully cringe. If you need a reference point, look at how Japan “localizes” for overseas markets: they assume Chinese users want to hear Japanese anime girls speak Chinese, so they record exclusive Chinese theme songs, and some games even rewrite the scenario for overseas players. Nobody buys any of it. Back then the Japanese side genuinely couldn’t understand why so many Chinese users who don’t speak a word of Japanese insist on the Japanese voice track—like, does not understanding it not bother you?