Not sure if it’s the pandemic or what, but the number of visual novel releases has dropped off a cliff this year, and a lot of veteran studios seem to have slowly lost their original passion for the craft. Take HOOKSOFT for example—they and SMEE have planned a pile of new titles this year, but… those titles are hard to describe in polite company. For instance, Hook’s “Yubisaki” is basically an SMEE game, and SMEE’s new title feels more like a Moonstone Cherry game. But both of those games (including the Hook one that isn’t out yet) have nearly identical promotional styles, down to the website intros. Put it bluntly: these three games are “obviously off the same assembly line.” I’ve been shitting on assembly-line products ever since I first trashed Yuzusoft’s stuff years ago. Sure, an assembly line boosts efficiency, cuts costs, speeds up production, and raises profits. But games aren’t cold commodity goods—they’re vessels for narrative and, to some extent, culture. Churning that kind of thing out on a production line lowers costs, speeds things up, and maybe increases revenue, but the games themselves naturally become boring as hell.

Seeing this title, let’s first define what counts as a “failure” according to the usual forum argument rules. Everyone knows a visual novel goes through a process from “planning” to “production.” You could say the “planning” is the game’s goal and determines its direction. Following that logic, if the game’s production completely runs counter to the “planning,” or if the game itself never even fulfills the planning’s original goal, then the game can be considered a “failure.” So today, let’s talk about one such “failed” game.

Everyone knows game companies these days basically have no shame… The most obvious sign of that shamelessness is they never “wait until the game is finished” before putting it on sale. They get it to roughly-done and immediately start selling. As for the rest—sell the base game first, deal with everything else later. When it’s done, they bolt it on and call it “Downloadable Content,” i.e. what we call DLC. Some of that DLC you have to pay extra for. So you pay for a half-finished game, then keep paying for the extra content bolted on afterward. Only after you’ve coughed up several times does the content count as fully there and the game count as complete… Think about it and that’s pretty fucked, isn’t it. Fortunately this dumbass habit is mostly a Western publisher thing; Japanese companies still have some shame… probably. Why “probably”? Because Japanese companies have learned bad habits too. Make half a game, then put out an expansion pack—it’s become the new normal. Once the engine and framework are in place, adding a few stages is just opening the map editor… And that goes double for visual novels, sitting at the very bottom of the game food chain, which don’t even need a map editor! SMEE, a sub-brand of the real estate company HOOKSOFT, is exactly this kind of shameless entity. They love putting out Minifandisks—the really short kind of fandisk, where the content length barely qualifies as DLC. Oh, and it’s not just SMEE being shameless. HOOKSOFT has no shame either; their games get Minifandisks too. If you want to say Asa Project, the other HOOKSOFT sub-brand, is relatively honorable and doesn’t do Minifandisks, you’d be dead wrong—they’ll add new characters and sell a PSV version, charge more, make more money… shame all over the floor. Is the Japanese real estate business just not turning a profit anymore? Is that why HOOKSOFT is shamelessly grifting every which way? Anyway, this time SMEE put out DLC for last year’s well-received Making＊Lovers—the so-called Mini Fandisk Volume 1. The full title: “Making＊Lovers Geki-Icha After Story Volume.01 Ako, Karen, Saki” Holy shit that name is dumb as hell. They’re one step away from tacking on a Deluxe Package Complete Edition suffix once all the volumes are out.

If you watch a lot of anime or play galge, you’re probably familiar with a certain setup. In Japanese otaku-oriented fiction, the most common one is the “harem.” This “harem” is a bit different from the Qing dynasty harem dramas we’re used to. Even if it’s somewhat similar to something like The Deer and the Cauldron, it’s still not quite the same. Japanese harems mostly consist of “the male lead maintaining ambiguous relationships with multiple women for a long time but never fucking confessing.” Because Japan is monogamous, you see—if you confess, that means the other women are done for, game over, loser dogs, and the harem loses its meaning. This “harem” thing thrives on that borderline-level ambiguity. You can be naked and hugging all sorts of girls, you can see their entire bodies, you can kiss, you can grab tits, you can even touch pussy, but as long as you don’t stick it in, you and she are just ambiguous, the other women still have a chance, and your harem can continue. So the actual fucking is generally the bottom line. Most harem works never cross that line—unless they’re heading for the ending. However, “harem” in the context of a galgame is a different picture entirely… Because galgames have no bottom line, harems split into “true harem” and “fake harem.” “True harem” is exactly what it sounds like—ハーレム—the male lead does 3P, 4P, 5678P… all sorts of indescribable things. “Fake harem” is still the manga/anime routine: all sorts of ambiguity, all the heroines like the protagonist, but since it’s a galgame you’ll definitely hit a home run and it won’t drag on without an ending like some dumbass manga or light novel. Most harem setups go like this: Ahuhu is an unbelievably ordinary high schooler. At home he has a sister who’s an unbelievably brocon and hates squid, next door lives a childhood friend named Xiaozhu who walks to school with him every day, the student council president at school is a sharp-tongued girl who deliberately picks fights with him every day, and meanwhile Ahuhu has a crush on some girl in the school library—a recent transfer student he ran into by chance on the train one time. Ahuhu keeps saying he has no luck with love, but the story ends with his sister wanting to marry him, Xiaozhu insisting she’s just a childhood friend while actually masturbating to him every day, the student council president being a tsundere who’s crazy about him and only picks fights to talk to him more, and the library girl actually liking him too but unable to say it no matter what, keeping it bottled up inside… So Ahuhu, while humbly calling himself a loser, simultaneously juggles all these beautiful girls like some romance-blind KY idiot, until some event triggers a choice and a confession… Familiar? Clichéd? I can’t say for manga and light novels, but at least most galgames follow a similar setup… Honestly, this setup has plenty of holes, especially the protagonist claiming he has zero luck with women: “You motherfucker Ahuhu, your luck with women is off the charts!” You get used to complaining about this stuff. Some games try to break out of the framework, but they always roll back in the end… After all, if you want to write multiple heroines, this is the only way… what else can you do… Yeah, what else can you do? Well, a company called Hook gave us a different answer, showing us what a harem looks like when it doesn’t follow the formula…