After the middling reception to last year’s title, Saga Planets once again tapped Sakaki Kasa (さかき傘) to write the main scenario, hoping he could rescue the new game’s reputation. The game is called Ambitious Mission (アンビシャスミッション), and it’s set in Sapporo, Hokkaido (though the game deliberately renames the place). The protagonist grew up in an orphanage, and one day he stumbles onto the fact that the school’s untouchable beauty, Arise Kaguya, is secretly moonlighting as a righteous phantom thief. With her identity blown, Arise Kaguya also notices the protagonist is no slouch himself—fast runner, high jumper—so she strong-arms and sweet-talks him into joining her crew, training him up as a fellow thief to lighten her own workload. Meanwhile, one of Sapporo’s oldest families, the Ishikawa, have also caught wind of the phantom thief running around pulling jobs across the city. The Ishikawa family tradition is to protect the city’s safety in a manner not unlike the ninja, so they send out the family’s sixteenth-generation successor, Ishikawa Yae, to apprehend the thief. In the end the protagonist still gets caught during one of his operations, nabbed by Ishikawa Yae—but she’s shocked to find that the so-called phantom thief is actually the guy living next door to her. Then comes another round of the carrot-and-stick routine, and Ishikawa Yae gets pulled into the phantom thief crew too. There’s also a gyaru makeup artist on the team, Hongou Nijimu, plus some servants from the Arise Kaguya household, and together they make up the crew. Once the “phantom thief crew” is complete, the game starts explaining why the team was formed in the first place. Turns out there’s a legend passed down in Sapporo about something the Ainu left behind: an Ainu dial called “Ambitious” that archaeologists dug up, with 12 slots on it. Collect the matching 12 gemstones and set them in, and you can summon the legendary “god of medicine” — a cure for any illness. Aruse Kaguya’s older sister, Athena, was originally supposed to be the family heir, but a car accident when she was little left her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, so Kaguya ended up next in line as the family’s successor — though she’s been carrying the guilt ever since. Back then, there was a phantom thief in Sapporo called Fantom who pulled off exactly that kind of heist — and vanished after the job was done. So Arise Kaguya decided to follow in Fantom’s footsteps: steal the gems, and cure her sister’s illness.

2020 was a rough year for the whole world. COVID hit a lot of industries hard, and that includes the Japanese visual novel business. I say “even” because visual novels theoretically shouldn’t be affected by the pandemic. Selling software, collaborating online, selling through online stores, and the customer base is all otaku who can’t be bothered to go outside—by all rights, the industry should’ve been totally fine. Unfortunately, the actual visual novel market doesn’t work that way. Because visual novels live and die by first-week sales, and first-week sales don’t depend on game quality at all—they depend entirely on the bonus merch driving purchases. And bonuses are tied to specific retail stores, which means, surprise, you’re back to physical storefronts. It’s 2020 and software sales still rely on brick-and-mortar. Only in Japan, I swear. Saga Planets, though, doesn’t seem worried about money. Their previous title Kinkoi was a huge success and clearly raked in a mountain of cash. Rumor has it Saga Planets split from Visual Arts (Key’s parent company) and went independent. They’re really flying high now. My guess is they’ve gone back to the “money is no object” phase. Remember what happened last time Saga Planets had money to burn? Yeah, you know where this is going. Last time it was Karumaruka. This time, probably because Kinkoi did so well, they made Kakenuke★Seishun Sparking!

Long, long ago, seven people committed a grave sin and were struck by divine punishment. They came to a small island said to be a place where one could speak with the gods, and there they prayed devoutly to the heavens, begging for forgiveness, begging for their own salvation. Because their hearts were so devout, the gods above were moved by them, and using their divine power they pardoned the sins of these seven, erasing the crimes they had committed, and the people who had died because of them came back to life. And because the history of their past crimes had been altered, the seven forgot that they had ever begged the heavens for anything, and went on living happily. But someone nearby had been watching what these seven did, and that peeping observer wrote down the ritual by which the seven had pleaded with the gods. This ritual later came to be called “Toki no Shirabe.” Gather seven people, and the ritual could be performed—and you would receive the grace of the gods above, have any wish you desired granted, even change history itself. In time the ritual was abused by wicked people, causing consequences beyond repair and giving rise to tragedy. To keep such tragedy from ever happening again, the shrine maidens of the island’s shrine hid away the items needed to perform the ritual, and did everything they could to let the “legend of the seven” fade, wanting this so-called ritual to vanish from the world. Many years later, people carrying “seven sins” of their own came to this place. By sheer chance, they were asked to activate a mysterious ritual called “Karumaruka.” Word had it that performing this ritual would erase one’s own sins. But at the moment the ritual began, they did not choose to erase their sins for their own sake, or even to change history—they chose to stop the ritual forever, and that wish too was accepted by the gods. For they had realized that no matter the past or the future, blindly using the power of the gods to change things was wrong, and that what matters should be held in your own hands. After that, there was no more “Karumaruka,” and no more “Toki no Shirabe.” The island closest to the gods returned to its quiet. And so the story of Karumaruka * Circle came to an end.

Heard the industry’s own tumor, minori, is finally closing up shop and quitting games. I was so happy I didn’t write a damn thing all day. Plenty of people think minori made “masterpieces” like Ef and Eden, that it was a big-name studio worth mentioning, and that its sudden “collapse” (just quitting games, mind you) is somehow sad. But I still say the reason the Galgame industry is in this mess has a lot to do with these so-called “old studios, old stubborn farts” who refuse to die. Go back to the ancient days, before the concept of Galgame even existed — there was only what they called エロゲーム, porn games, literally. Everything in them existed to deliver porn. Later, as some older studios joined in, the porn ratio in these porn games kept shrinking and the “story” kept growing. As the industry developed, “30% story, 70% porn” gradually turned into “70% story, 30% porn,” and some games even went “100% story, no porn,” becoming true visual novels. The hordes of otaku who’d been secretly playing porn games could finally straighten their backs and announce they weren’t in it for the dirty pictures, purely for the story — and some elite specimens among them even elevated “playing porn games” into an “artistic pursuit.” So we see a lot of companies wanting to put out all-ages games, to finally operate in the clean light of day, goods out, people in, no longer forced to spend every day side by side with AV, becoming real game development companies. Sounds like the birth and sprouting of some new art form… except Galgame’s audience was never the general public. It’s otaku who want to see tits and pussy. Which is why KID, who went all-ages, died. 5pb., who inherited the mantle and wanted to go all-ages, is still desperately clinging to the accidentally successful Steins;Gate. Key puts out all-ages games too, but its output feels like it’s stopped running entirely. minori tried all-ages as well, took a massive loss, and afterward started frantically selling tits and ass to survive. People always criticize otaku as disgusting — on one hand elevating themselves by saying they play for the story, on the other saying they won’t buy a game without 18+ content. In the end they just want to see dirty pictures. I thought that way years ago too, but now I’ve got a new take:

Although I enjoyed Saga Planets’ game from last year, HanaSaki Work Spring! (man, the katakana part of that title is a pain to remember), and considered it a well-rounded game with “no real flaws in the story,” “very entertaining daily conversations,” “cute heroines,” “some standout music,” and “art definitely worth checking out,” I had a bad feeling about the company’s new release this year, Floral Flowlove, from the very start. So, at first it was described as a “ojou-sama-related” game, which already sounded boring to me. After all, when you hear “ojou-sama,” you think of the kind of thing from Note company—gorgeous style, cultured ladies, and the protagonist either infiltrates or lives a luxurious high-society life as a young master. I had no interest in that kind of setup. Then the full title, character designs, and setting were revealed, and I was completely let down… “あの日、俺は天使を見た” “That day… I saw an angel.” And then the story was the usual cliché setup: the protagonist at an elite school surrounded by all kinds of ojou-samas, especially the main heroine who reeked of desperate affection. I saw the scenario was by Tōta, a regular for Yuzusoft, and I even thought about ignoring this game entirely… Later the OP movie was released. Honestly, it was several orders of magnitude worse than HanaSaki Work Spring!’s. Many of the girls didn’t do anything for me; it was pure moege vibes, the simplest and most粗暴 kind of moege. But then I thought, I didn’t want to give up on Saga Planets just yet, so I tried the trial version. It turned out there was some substance there, including quite a bit of religious content. And I suddenly realized that the one who shone in the trial wasn’t the heroine who looked laughably desperate, but the foreign princess, Aa-chan. As for the other characters, they seemed just as dumb as expected. “If the full game digs into this religion and princess theme, maybe it’ll be salvageable.” With that thought, I played the full version, intending to “just do the princess route and stop.” I had zero interest in the other characters, and they didn’t seem to have much screen time anyway. But man, once I started, I couldn’t stop. I did the princess route, then went through all the other routes, and finally stayed up all night to finish the True End. And my opinion of the game during that playthrough was like a roller coaster—low to high, high to low, then low to high again… This is the first game that gave me such a wild ride and made me slap my own face repeatedly. ISLAND was similar, but that was the writer deliberately showing off, so it’s a different type.