Earlier this year I read a business plan from Visual Arts, Key’s parent company. The president, Baba Takahiro, turned out to have a surprisingly complete read on the industry—he knows how huge the overseas market is, especially the Chinese-speaking one, and he’s been actively registering local trademarks there, looking for local agents and partners. He also gets that the traditional “galgame” era is basically over, that selling on sex appeal alone can’t grow the market anymore, so the only way forward is all-ages. Raise the quality of the games themselves, and build IP across anime, manga, novels, and music. Rather than making games, make IP—that’s how you actually milk the 2D girls for money. At the end he said he’s extremely interested in the “metaverse,” and if they have the means, he’d like to explore whether the company can get in early on it. Reading this plan actually surprised me. My impression of Japanese companies, especially ones that got their start making Galgame, was that most of them are hopelessly stuck in their ways, utterly immune to reason, clinging to the same ancient engine until the day they die, at best peddling overpriced merch to scam people, and just shutting down outright when they can’t keep going. But Visual Arts is surprisingly clear-headed about the fact that the core of the “2D character” market is “IP” and “characters.” Be it story, music, games, or novels, every medium exists mainly to build the IP, and that IP then gets sold worldwide. That really is the kind of marketing strategy a cultural/creative company ought to have. Whether that roadmap is just bullshit or not, I honestly don’t know — but I did for sure notice this one thing: 『終のステラ』, the final chapter of the robot trilogy that began with 『planetarian』 and 『Harmonia』, written by Tanaka Romeo, scheduled for a spring 2022 release, aiming for a theatrical-film scale… And as you can all see, it’s already autumn and the game only just showed up. As for the “anime adaptation”—yeah, nobody brings that up anymore. Anyway, back to the game itself.

Hooksoft’s earlier Houkago Cinderella (After School Cinderella) was a huge hit. I thought it was a decent game, but I never expected it to be popular enough to get an official sequel… so here’s Houkago Cinderella 2. The original was a pure school romance setup: the protagonist picks different after-school routes, runs into different heroines, and each one spins out into a different love story. The only real gameplay hook was the “fortune telling”: every day after school you can hit up two bros for a reading, they hint at where each heroine might show up, and you pick your route based on that to clear each girl’s route.

There’s a weird phenomenon in the visual novel scene: a lot of works that advertise themselves as “telling a story” keep getting more and more horny and “practical,” while plenty of titles that come right out the gate branding themselves as “hardcore” suddenly start telling stories for no apparent reason. This isn’t unique to visual novels, either—Japan’s adult film industry is the same. That’s exactly why I love watching stuff directed by “Maeda the Literary Giant.” You get the visceral impact of flesh, sure, but also plenty of food for thought. It’s like how we judge people. We always slap the label of good guy or bad guy on them based on some kind of “contrast.” A guy who does ten thousand good deeds becomes a bad person after one bad one, while a total scumbag becomes the representative of conscience because he did one good thing. So some game producers deliberately go down this route, trying to cram something more humanistic into a nukige that’s supposed to be pure fap material. It’s one of the easiest ways to birth a so-called “masterpiece.” Of course, it doesn’t always work.

Years back there was a game called Study § Steady (a.k.a. “Study and Steady”), from a company called Marmalade (“Orange Marmalade”). I’ve always had a soft spot for this studio’s stuff — the early “Primal” series, and later Marshmallow. The vibe they give off is “solid”: no shitposting in the plot, just ordinary school romances with a little heartstring-tugging. Straight-up orthodox work. But for some reason, with the previous Study § Steady they lost their damn minds and changed the whole production style, pivoting hard into engine R&D. They poured what looks to me like a shitload of effort into a not-particularly-novel Emotion tech, and sacrificed most of the game’s content for it. So Study § Steady ended up feeling weird as hell. The story was dead simple, the pacing was a bore, and the only bright spot was the “animated heroine sprite” wobbling around like a balloon. But the tech wasn’t mature, so not only did the sprite look stiff and yank you out of the story, the game’s specs were absurdly high — no top-tier PC and you couldn’t hold a stable 30fps. Sure, plenty of people were praising the heroine’s black-tights CGs, and the game had a ton of HCGs, but those HCGs weren’t “animated” at all, which made them a total snooze… In my book, Study § Steady is a complete failure. The weird part is it still got Fandiscs, and the even more baffling part is it got a sequel… Study § Steady 2!

Not gonna lie, my X account and 茉宮祈芹 mutually follow each other. I think I followed her back when she wasn’t that well known, sent her a greeting message, and got a reply. Occasionally she’ll like some lewd art I retweet, and I’ve written a paid piece hyping her up too. I used to think the stuff she draws was too explicit, but then I figured, as a freelance illustrator, drawing it a bit more H for sales is pretty understandable. When I reviewed Ninja Girl and the Mysterious Army of Urban Legend Monsters! Hunt of the Headless Horseman, I said that 茉宮祈芹 is an illustrator who can raise the quality of an entire visual novel single-handedly. One reason is that her drawing and coloring style leans toward flat, digital-game visuals, which means the character art in any visual novel she works on stays consistent — no awkward art shift from a different colorist stepping in. No matter which other artists she’s paired with, her characters always stand out. And even when she isn’t drawing characters with heavy exposure, she still nails the heroine’s cuteness. So here’s a new game: FLIP＊FLOP 〜INNOCENCE OVERCLOCK〜, put out by a DMM Game shadow brand, with 茉宮祈芹 on art, Houmori Kei on planning and scenario, and Kitakoji Yuki voicing the lead heroine. With a lineup like that, there’s no reason not to give it a shot.

Lu Xun once said: Moonstone Cherry is a good company. They put out a famous series called 妹ぱらだいす!, and that series is the reason this blog ever got any traffic at all — go look at “most popular on the site” in the sidebar, the title’s sitting right there in plain sight. Course, Manbara Paradise isn’t loved just because it’s a sister-type nukige. It’s the “usability” upgrade. The character designs had nothing going on, but the HCGs went hard. They were already using Emotion ten years ago, plus a “countdown to launch” feature, so you and the heroine can reach each other across the screen in mutual fashion. I’ll say it: that game wore me out back in 2011. The sequels went two more rounds. Not as striking as the first, but they swapped in the best voice actresses available at the time and kept the old usability tradition. The third one even upped the music quality. Classic, re-pressed. But apparently Moonstone Cherry figured hanging from one tree wasn’t great, so they stopped making 妹ぱらだいす! and started pushing out games under planner “Wu Lao’er” that look weirder the longer you stare at them… “Welcome to the sex open world,” “welcome to the sex underworld” — what the hell is any of that. And now we get Yūnagisō no S-Kyū no Kanojo-tachi (夕凪荘のＳ級の彼女たち).

Generally speaking, the “cross-dressing” games enesemble puts out have painfully contrived premises. Most of them go like this: the male lead has some unavoidable reason to dress as a girl and transfer into a girls’ school, where he proceeds to whip it out and go on a rampage. Even though the protagonist is nominally a cross-dresser, the HCG in these games is genuinely lewd, and he’s the lewdest one of all despite being a guy. And the lewdest guy still fights at full power in the HCG, as if following the principle of “treat every shot like it’s your last, and don’t be afraid of going impotent” — which bumps up the usability a lot. For a while I just mentally filed these games under the nukige subcategory. But enesemble clearly shifted direction after last year’s cross-dressing title. It started caring about plot coherence, even going for crazy twists. Last year’s game felt like a Frankenstein’s monster of ideas, but willingness to change is always good. So this year enesemble brings us a new cross-dressing game: Hana wa Mijikashi, Odore yo Otome (華は短し、踊れよ乙女).

For years now, SMEE’s main scenario writer Yu Hayase has been getting cozy with Azarashi Soft. After a few “collab mini-games,” they’ve stopped pretending and just merged, with Hayase even spearheading Azarashi’s new title Amanatsu. The game looks weird no matter how you slice it. The title and art style are pure Azarashi, but the side characters and dialogue style scream SMEE. Probably to boost sales, they brought in a bunch of VAs old players know by heart. And goddammit, they dragged out my most hated one, Yukary Aoyama, to voice the main heroine. Every role she’s done except Kazuki Kazami gives me PTSD. The second heroine is Akinohana, who’s currently on permanent vacation, and the third is Mai Gotou. That’s a stacked cast spanning three generations of eroge VAs. If this game had a press conference, the fat otaku in the audience would’ve been screaming. I was actually hyped for this one, but less than five minutes in, I felt this weird sense of disappointment.

Hey! Friend, have you had COVID? Are you worried about long COVID? Are you scared of getting quarantined? By now it’s been confirmed over and over that COVID is a “self-limiting disease” — which basically means there’s no silver bullet against the virus, and all you can do is boost your immune system and tough it out. But nobody ever tells you how to boost your immune system, or what counts as a way to significantly boost it. But one eroge recently gave a clear answer.

Years ago, when I first started playing eroge, I had plenty of reasons for it. I was sick of light novels, anime, and manga dragging their “serials” on for years without end, and sick of their bloated, convoluted stories. So I went with galge. One of the reasons that satisfied me most back then was this: “Visual novels are different from other ACG works — in a single game, you always get to see the story’s ending.” But times change, and that line has drifted further and further from reality. My view of visual novels has swung to the opposite end too — from weariness to outright hatred. Never mind that visual novels have all learned the light-novel “split-volume” sales model. What wears on me most is the “advance or regress” market development of the genre over the years. Visual novel players always call themselves “subculture enthusiasts” and take pride in their supposedly niche hobby. They’re always finding ways to recommend visual novels to others, or personally jumping into making them, or introducing their favorites in ACG discussion forums. Most of these so-called “enthusiasts” will admit it’s a niche market, in a gray zone, not something you can show in broad daylight — but they keep praying that one day the market will evolve and become accepted by more people. And as a niche game category, visual novels have far too many flaws that most people clearly reject, yet the so-called enthusiasts ignore and tolerate them, year after year for over a decade. That’s what I never expected.