My working days are full of stress, and those are almost all my days. So what to do? I’ve come to appreciate a certain kind of game — I’m not sure if it falls into a single genre, but it’s the kind that I can play and just relax to. Often they don’t even gave a story to follow, but if they do, it’s a light one. The island exploration game A Short Hike falls into this category, and so does the landscape creation puzzle game Dorfromantik. And though this may be surprising, so does SimTower, the original building construction and management simulator.
I wrote a retrospective review of this entry in the Sim series way back in 2014, not long after I started this site. Back then, I was also under a lot of stress as a student. It was a different kind of stress than I have now, but playing SimTower helped me relieve a little of it. And while part of its appeal to my adult self may have been the nostalgia it inspired in me — I first played SimTower soon after its release in 1994 as a kid on the one family computer — it wouldn’t hold up at all if nostalgia was all it had going for it. So after nine years away, I decided to return to my old Windows 95 virtual machine and my tower construction duties to see just how well this game would stand the test of time.
The humble beginning of my new grand tower, just a dumpy building in a dying office park off the highway. Since we can’t afford another elevator car just yet, my tenants’ employees will have to stand in line since they’re too god damn lazy to use the stairs. This will become a theme.
I went over the basics of the game in my old post, but to recap, SimTower was created by Japanese game developer Yoot Saito and his team. According to an interview I read in the “official guide” to the game (and actually a very good one) Yoot got the initial idea for the game while waiting for an elevator in an office building and wondering why he had to wait for the furthest elevator from him to stop at his floor, a story which if you’ve played SimTower for even ten minutes you can immediately believe. Yoot expanded this elevator-based concept into a building simulator, as far as I know the first of its kind, and at some point he met Maxis head Will Wright and sold him on the idea as a natural addition to his SimCity line. Therefore, while it was released as simply The Tower in Japan, Yoot’s game got the Sim branding in North America.
I felt I got more out of this third playthrough of SimTower, or if not more, then something different than before. In the foreword to the same guide I looked through, Yoot himself says that in SimTower he wanted to create a hakoniwa, or a kind of miniature garden. I don’t know much about the concept, but I think I basically understand what he was going for, and if my idea is right, I think he succeeded. Though there’s a ton of complexity in certain aspects of the game — the traffic flows most of all — the greatest appeal to me of SimTower now is being able to just let time run and watch the residents of and visitors to my tower live their lives, doing my best to accommodate their needs and wants but otherwise letting it flow.
Here’s a typical day in your mid-sized tower: office workers show up every workday morning, take the elevators to their offices, and work through the day with a break for lunch in one of the building’s fast food places. Most offices close at five, with some working longer hours (more realistically in my experience) starting the rush home, the white-collar workers passing the arriving hotel guests on the elevators, which are always too slow and backed up. The hotel guests will go straight to their rooms and stay up for a while doing whatever they’re doing (no overly personal details shown, but maybe implied) before sleeping, unless you’ve provided proper restaurants for them to have dinner at in which case they’ll give you even more business. And repeat the next day, excepting weekends when the offices are closed but your commercial spaces see more business from outside to compensate.
The tower grows, slowly becoming worthy of its name. It’s especially important to plan ahead in your elevator placement, which I didn’t do here — I ended up deleting the shaft on the left and building a new one on the far left to make room for needed improvements.
All this is very satisfying to watch run when it’s going well, meaning your elevator placement isn’t fucked and your zoning is reasonably sensible. You have relative freedom over the placement of your units, the greatest restriction being that you can’t place certain units like hotel rooms and offices underground. So while you can put a fast food place next to an office, the office drones won’t be very happy about the noise and the smell of frying oil next door unless you lower their rent. Not that the hired help would probably care much about the office’s overhead, but maybe the offices’ evaluation bars only care about the owners’ and operators’ opinions. Temps and grunts like me can fuck off as usual.
Not that that’s a point against this game. It’s probably obvious at this point, but there’s a lot of abstraction to SimTower. Most of it necessary — imagine having to balance elevator and stair traffic concerns in a 60-story mixed-use tower with the details of electricity and cable hookups, maintenance, and waste disposal. Even the calendar is extremely simplified, with a game year broken into four quarters, each quarter consisting of just one week of three days each, two working days and one weekend day for a 12-day year. Admittedly a strange calendar, but you’ll be grateful for it considering that your office tenants pay their rent on a quarterly basis.
And don’t worry about attracting tenants or guests to give you money: SimTower takes place in a city with seemingly unlimited demand for office space and hotel rooms, as they’re all rented out on the very same day you build them with a few special exceptions. There’s even a condo option available, though it’s a shitty one that I never take seeing as how condo owners are assholes who only pay you once and then spend the rest of their residence in your tower complaining about noise and traffic. Fuck condos: don’t build them.
So none of that’s very complicated. No, the most complex aspect of SimTower by far is traffic management, and the greatest focus otherwise is simply on building. That relative simplicity works for me — it would probably be impossible to get that miniature garden sort of feel Yoot wrote about if the player were having to stress more than necessary.
I especially get this feel where the commercial, office, and hotel sections meet. Express elevators are a godsend at this point, allowing hotel guests and theater patrons to bypass all that shitty standard elevator traffic and go straight to my deluxe sky mall without any unnecessary stops.
But then again, there’s one form of abstraction to SimTower that some people may find especially strange. It’s perhaps the most obvious one, and one shared by the sequel Yoot Tower: the total lack of a third dimension. Your SimTower is entirely 2D, with just one view available of the front of the building. Or maybe the side, since the lobby entrances are on either side, presumably opening to the streets than you can’t see. It doesn’t matter, though, since you can only place units on a flat plane in this view. I guess the depth is implied, but it does still strike me as weird being stuck in this 2D cross-section view when I think too much about it.
There were obvious technical limitations on SimTower, released nearly 30 years ago now, that would have made it difficult if not impossible to expand into a third dimension. Back when I first wrote about it, the only such games I knew of aside from SimTower was its 1998 sequel, which faced similar limitations and had a similar fully 2D style. But now, looking back, I think there was more to this decision than just technical considerations. Expanding a hypothetical new SimTower-style game into three dimensions, with individual units and rooms, might be so incredibly complex as to be fundamentally unplayable by a single person. At that point you’re basically just building an actual building, which takes massive crews of engineers, planners, and other specialists. Naturally none of it would be real, but even so, combining that complexity with the kind of management you’d expect from a SimTower sequel anyway might be too much for anyone possibly aside from hardcore Victoria series players.
And even if that were feasible, I think you’d end up losing a lot of that hakoniwa feel Yoot wrote about and that’s such a part of the appeal of these games for me. Back when I wrote about SimTower, I speculated about another sequel to this series, which we’d get two years later with Project Highrise, and though I haven’t played it myself, it looks from the gameplay footage I’ve watched that it also uses a 2D cross-section format. Maybe there’s a good reason for that.
There’s something peaceful about a scene like this one, your hotel guests headed to their rooms. If I were one of them, I’d take the elevator up to floor 16 and get a coffee before the café closes.
Given how good this game was and how relatively well it must have done, considering that it’s one of the better-remembered old Sim games, it’s a little surprising that we went through an 18-year gap between Yoot Tower and Project Highrise for proper building simulators. My best guess is that the scope of the building simulator has something to do with that. The Sim series has thoroughly covered life on a large city-wide scale with SimCity (though with the failure of the last entry in that series, the city-building torch has completely passed to Paradox and their Cities: Skylines series) and even far more thoroughly on a small scale with the wildly popular TheSims. SimTower and Yoot Tower are somewhere in between those two, and maybe they’re a little mundane for that reason. SimCity features natural disasters and even alien attacks; The Sims features extreme interpersonal drama. The only disasters in SimTower are the occasional fire and terrorist bomb threat. Which are admittedly pretty dramatic, but even those can be dealt with through money if you have enough and don’t trust your security team enough to leave it to them.
But I don’t mind if SimTower is a little more mundane than its city simulator counterparts. Again, I think that contributes to its appeal.
Maybe what SimTower truly needs is a series where you fall into the Backrooms but it’s all the building’s parking lot that warps into endless creepy empty hotel corridors at night. That kind of dumb bullshit spinoff might get the kids interested in this old rusty game. (Though I do like Kane Pixels’ video series, obligatory mention there. Check it out; it’s good.)
As for BIGPPTWR, as it’s officially known because of the eight-character name limit, it currently stands at 37 floors, topped by a row of fancy hotel suites that nobody has yet stayed in. I’m not sure whether I’ll bother building any higher than that — if I really cared about reaching four stars, which requires a population of 5,000, I’d build wider than I am, but I decided to restrict myself to nine office lengths for aesthetic reasons. If you want to play properly (as far as there even is a way to play a Sim game properly, which I guess there isn’t) you can really just fill the entire screen with building, including the underground section as long as you remember to leave the bottom three levels for that metro station.
For my part, I’m just happy to let my modest tower run. Maybe 37 floors is tall enough. Or maybe I’ll get the urge to keep obsessively building higher. Either way, I’m happy to say that SimTower does hold up. If you want to try it for yourself, I’d encourage you to download a copy of the game’s iso image from the archive.org library: since SimTower seems not to be sold anywhere at all, not even on GOG, this seems like a reasonable option. And in case you’re wondering, I wanted to check out Yoot Tower again and tried to do so, but I couldn’t get the damn thing to work on my virtual machine, even though it’s supposed to run on Windows 95, and I don’t have a copy of Windows 98 to try it out on. Despite my issues with 95, though, it’s still far more user-friendly than this Windows 10 shitpile.
It’s been a while since I wrote about any games here, but I haven’t been idle on that front. There’s one game I’m nearly done with and will be writing about in a full review at some point this month — I don’t want to be too ambitious with my schedule considering how much work I’m taking on this month, but that much seems feasible. However, I’ve also been playing a new game and returning to some I’ve had on Steam for years (and maybe itch.io too?) Blowing the dust off of those, just because they’re there, and I don’t feel like spending any more money since I wake up in a cold sweat sometimes thinking about my debt. But then that’s a lot of us, sadly. It’s the reason I have the job I have to begin with. I sure as hell don’t do it for fun.
So let’s talk about something actually fun. Neon White was released in June last year on PC and Switch, but since my PC is garbage, I had to wait until the PS4 release in December to play it. I’m not much for action games as you’ll see if you look through the Games index page on this site, but there are two reasons I picked up this one, starting with the recommendation of fellow blogger Frostilyte. Our tastes in games don’t totally overlap, but his analysis is always a great time to read, and his looks at Neon White got me interested in checking it out for myself. And secondly — I won’t even make a show of downplaying this because I’ve already written about VTubers a few times on the site, but there’s a certain laughing dragon girl who played through the game, and her streams are always entertaining, but before watching any of it I don’t want to spoil anything for myself, least of all the solutions to the stages. That’s as good a reason as any, isn’t it?
Speaking of, Neon White isn’t a standard FPS as the guns might suggest. While there is plenty of shooting in the game, it’s far better described as an action platformer with puzzle elements. Each stage in the game up to the point I’ve played takes place in Heaven, where the characters including the protagonist codenamed Neon White have to clear out a demon invasion. The game’s primary mechanic is a card system: each card represents a gun (a pistol, rifle, shotgun, etc.) with a set amount of ammunition, but the card can also be used up and discarded to perform an extra function like a double-jump or a boost.
I’ll get into the system in greater depth when I’m done with the game, but it’s surprisingly intuitive and easy to get hooked on. There’s a strong speedrunning aspect to Neon White, but you don’t have to be a Hardcore Gamer™ to get into it. I’m certainly not. Another nice aspect of this game is that it’s pretty forgiving about jumps, allowing you to do demon-slaying parkour without worrying about pixel-perfect landings. However, the challenge is still there, especially for those who want to earn the top “ace” medal times in each stage for bragging rights (or the really extreme red medal times, of which I’ve only gotten two. Good thing these really are meant just for bragging rights.)
As for the story and the characters, you may have heard from Frostilyte or elsewhere that they are over-the-top ridiculous, and that’s totally true. Neon White does have a plot, but it feels like something a 13 year-old boy might write with plenty of edge and hot girls with guns etc. etc. The protagonist even has amnesia. What more can you ask for? It’s pretty much a bad anime plot. I’m not sure just how self-aware the developers were, but it feels like they just decided to go all out here, which I respect: commit totally to the over-the-top feel or don’t bother at all.
There’s not much more I can say so far — this isn’t a review since I haven’t finished the game, but I will be taking Neon White on in full at some point. Very fun so far, though.
And then there’s my backlog of old games. I have no hope of clearing this out, not unless I find a rich patron to fund me quitting my job and locking myself in my living space and living off of deliveries which I’d love to do if I could. But I can make a dent in the backlog, at least. Looking through my list of games on Steam, I have several visual novels, a few action platformers, and an assortment of stuff that I can’t easily categorize. I remember HuniePop 2 irritating me for some reason, but it is in there and I do want to return to it — it’s been long enough that I don’t remember what it was that annoyed me about that one. Maybe I was just in a lousy mood at the time. I also have Momodora III and IV, which I’ve meant to play forever now.
Momodora III by indie developer rdein, which I played ten minutes of before getting thoroughly beaten by the first boss. Those demons just won’t let up. But I will be back — the challenge to games like this is in getting the patterns down.
I’d like to get through a few of these sometime soon, but the VNs might take precedence. Not sure how I’ll approach my backlog, but I will at least put a few chips in it, if not even a dent. And HoloCure is coming out with an update this or next week, so I’ll be wasting at least a few hours there when that happens.
I hope the brief update was interesting, anyway. This week is going to be hell for me, so I don’t expect to be able to post anything else until this coming weekend. Hope you all have a better week than I do!
When you hear that a game has crafting in it, what do you immediately think of? Perhaps some thrown-together tacked-on gameplay mechanic like “put this piece of wood and this piece of metal together to make an axe” or “make this weed you found on the side of the road into a potion.” Crafting has a bit of a bad reputation as a gimmicky and unnecessary mechanic among gamers, at least here in the US — to the point that when I’ve tried to sell a few friends on the game series that’s the subject of this post, I’ve had to assure them that even though it’s full of crafting, it actually implements it really well. I swear. Just hear me out, please!
And yes: I’m talking about the Atelier series. Considering how many Atelier titles I reviewed last year — between those and the Blue Reflection games, officially noted as the “Year of Gust” on the site — this new deep reads post might not be such a surprise, even if I did keep you all waiting for a long time on it.
At first, I was planning to put this post off until I finished the Mysterious sub-series, since I’m almost halfway through that now-tetralogy at this point. But I felt like writing it now for various reasons, some of which have to do with opinions I’ve read about the Atelier series that I very much disagree with and that I’d like to offer counters to. Also, I think after having played almost eight Atelier games, I have a pretty good feel for what the series is about. Gust keeps releasing the damn things, too, at least once a year, so I don’t think I’ll ever truly be “caught up” anyway.
Another important note before I start: this post is not going to take on the entire series from start to finish. As with my Megami Tensei deep reads post series, I’m admitting upfront that I haven’t played most of its many titles. However, I have played a lot of the Atelier games since the major series overhaul that started with Atelier Rorona at the start of the series’ PS3 era. The series as a whole stretches all the way back to the 90s, starting on the PS1 with Atelier Marie: The Alchemist of Salburg in 1997. However, my understanding is that Rorona wasn’t quite a total change to the series but more of a return to the old alchemy-heavy style of the first games, a shift back away from the more standard JRPG gameplay of the PS2 Atelier Iris trilogy.1 So maybe a lot of what I write about these later games will apply at least generally to the earliest ones. I also have the excuse that a lot of those very oldest Atelier titles (Marie through Viorate I think, 1 through 5) were never localized, at least to my knowledge.
Anyway, enough with the apologies and explanations and on to something hopefully more interesting. First, a few questions that some new players might be asking themselves:
What’s all this about alchemy?
The typical Atelier game centers around usually one and occasionally two alchemists. Said alchemist protagonist(s) almost always happen to be girls (the one exception I’ve played being Logy from Escha & Logy — he’s one of the very few exceptions to that rule.) Though they come from different circumstances and sometimes even from entirely different worlds, these girls always have bright futures ahead of them, though that’s sometimes not apparent at the outset. However, all their various quests, goals, and ambitions can be achieved with the help of their families and friends and most uniquely with the help of alchemy, the practice of gathering and mixing all sorts of ingredients — plants, liquids, metals, minerals, and so on — to create the widest range of goods imaginable, from poisons to medicines, from explosives to apple pies.
The first time I ran into this alchemy concept as a game mechanic was in the also Gust-produced Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia. While the Ar tonelico games aren’t part of the Atelier series (though they arguably do have links to at least a few of the games) and are very different in both storytelling style and gameplay, they have item-crafting functionality in common with Atelier. The crafting system in Ar tonelico is called synthesis, and while it’s pretty simple and not at all essential to get down to actually beat the games, it does add some nice flavor, especially with the inclusion of sometimes strange and silly recipe notes from the characters making the items. Not quite simply “add wood to metal to make metal beating stick”, then, even if it isn’t all that complicated mechanically speaking.
Okay, I don’t have a screenshot of Ar tonelico synthesis, so instead here’s a conversation from Ar tonelico II. I think I have a thing for certain haughty girls who are really sweet on the inside, but that might be a subject for another post.
Alchemy in Atelier is a different matter. Starting with Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland in 2009, the series again placed a serious emphasis on item-crafting not simply as a helpful tool but as a necessary mechanic that’s also central to the plot. There’s no “fuck this crafting nonsense, let me go fight a dragon boss” option in these games for two major reasons: 1) your power in battle is directly tied to what sort of equipment and attack/defense items you’re using, almost all of which you’ll have to craft to get better than a garbage setup, and 2) the game, depending on which game you’re playing, won’t allow you to progress and might even give you a game over if you’re not keeping up with your alchemist duties and balancing those with your more typically JRPG-style map exploration, enemy-killing, and loot-finding ones.
The choice of the term alchemy for this system of crafting is interesting in itself. Before I’d even heard of the Atelier games, I knew alchemy as most of us do: that old scientifically dubious practice of turning base metals into gold. Historically, alchemy was more than just “turn this lump of iron into gold so I can get rich”, but that was naturally a lot of its appeal. Never mind that if any of these guys had ever found that secret iron/lead/whatever-to-gold recipe, the vast increase in the gold supply would have destroyed its value — they weren’t taking economics classes back in the 1300s. It’s certainly possible to turn one element into another by splitting atoms through nuclear fission and fusing atoms to create heavier elements through the far more energy-intensive nuclear fusion (also the process the Sun uses to convert hydrogen to helium.) But naturally, old-fashioned alchemists didn’t have such technology. They were making potions and probably dumping rat’s tails into them or some nonsense.
That was alchemy in our world: a bullshit science in the vein of astrology, or at least until physicists started shooting atoms at each other in the early 20th century. However, the line between alchemy on one hand and actual chemistry and medicine on the other was often blurred — alchemists could also act as legitimate medicine-makers considering their knowledge of plants with real healing properties and the like.
And there’s the possible connection to alchemy in the world of Atelier. Medicine is always one of the very first items you’re tasked with making, and it’s naturally in high demand and extremely useful in combat. The difference in Atelier is that even aside from the realistic medical benefits of herbs and so on, alchemy as a whole is entirely real and can be done with nothing more than a big pot and a stirring stick — as long as you have the learning and skill to master the recipes.
Speaking of recipes, in Atelier, baking is also an essential and extremely important aspect of the art of alchemy. I don’t think any “real” alchemists ever tried turning lead into a Mont Blanc. (Atelier Meruru DX)
No small feat in itself. Alchemists in Atelier are valued for their knowledge and skill (if not always for their wisdom — that one depends on the alchemist.) Training is intensive, and the few people with the aptitude for it spend lifetimes honing their crafts. While the techniques used in alchemy differ a little between each sub-series within the wider series, it seems to be the case that some kind of inherent skill is required before someone can even hope to start training. What that inherent quality is I can’t say, since the games I’ve played don’t really say themselves, but that’s not important: all you have to know is that your protagonist(s) have that skill along with the necessary motivation to practice and learn.
Another common thread that links all these games together is the player’s workshop, or atelier. These terms are pretty interchangeable, and though I haven’t seen it used, laboratory would also fit well. I’m not sure why the creators of the series landed on the term “atelier” specifically, but I like it — it adds to that old European feel a lot of the series has, with its Renaissance/early modern European-looking cities and towns and its characters with largely French and German-sounding family names.
Atelier is a French-to-English loanword, and here a French-to-Japanese one. In its original and English definitions, an atelier is specifically an artist’s workshop, referring to both the fine arts and more practical crafts like dress-making and architecture, something more like a studio than a lab. A search for “atelier” on Google, aside from references to the game series, brings up both art and fashion-related spots around my city. So unless アトリエ/atorie has a different meaning in Japanese, the use of “atelier” as an alchemy workshop is a little unusual here.
Then again, maybe it isn’t. Alchemy in the Atelier series seems to be just as much an art as a science, with alchemists adding their own personal touches to their work. And since you can craft armor, pendants and other jewelry with defensive attributes, and even dresses that fall into the armor category, I guess “atelier” really does fit. (Just don’t ask how such things are produced by mixing a boiling solution in a cauldron: that question was never meant to be answered.)
As for the proper pronunciation of Atelier: excuse me for being all proper, but it should be pronounced in English in the French way in my opinion. I’m not British, but I’m going with Cambridge in this case, and the other authorities agree. The Japanese title atorie might also be a clue — while Japanese can’t quite get the l sound down with the syllable リ (somewhere between li and ri) that エ at the end points to the original French pronunciation. But for fuck’s sake — even if you’re going to pronounce that r at the end out of habit or because saying a French word feels too fancypants for you, at least don’t call it an atleer.2
Your atelier can take various forms: most often it’s a dedicated workshop, but your alchemist girl might resort to dragging a cauldron into a corner of her family’s house or her room if she doesn’t have that option. You might even be doing alchemy out on the road in a makeshift tent workshop. But no matter what form it takes, when you’re in that atelier, you’ll have access to all the resources you’ve collected and been given in order to brew new potions and craft new items and armor.
The atelier isn’t just a workshop, however. Most of the Atelier games I’ve played turn the your workshop into a meeting place and sometimes a regular hangout spot depending on where it is. And in the cases they don’t, the practical effect is the same, because the alchemists always become pillars of their respective communities if they aren’t already. The powers of alchemy can be used for good or evil — you can synthesize some massively destructive items in your atelier, after all. But while disreputable alchemists aren’t entirely unheard of in the series, your protagonists are always the good sort. They differ in personality, sometimes wildly, but they all have a strong desire to help their friends and to be a positive force in the world as a whole.
Which brings me to the final question I’d like to address, and in an extremely long-winded way:
What’s the appeal?
I’ve gone on a lot about ateliers and alchemy and how to pronounce French loanwords, but here’s the key question. What’s the point of all this item synthesis and why should I care? And why are most of these alchemists wearing such frilly fucking dresses? Don’t those ribbons get in the way of the cauldron-stirring?
I can’t address the practicality of those frills and ribbons, but I can describe what I find to be the appeal of Atelier. I can only speak for myself, though I expect a lot of other fans will agree on these strengths of the series.
1) The art and aesthetic
Getting all fancy with “aesthetic” here, but there’s a good reason for it. Gust games are generally known for their excellent art design: between the Atelier, Blue Reflection, and EXA_PICO series, I doubt there’s a single title that doesn’t have at least pretty impressive art.
Atelier in particular stands out for its art and character designs, and all the more so because of the several artists who have worked on the series, bringing their own unique visions to it. In my Atelier reviews, I’ve noted the breakdown of the wider series into subseries, often into trilogies (that may later expand into tetralogies or more: see Atelier Lulua and Atelier Sophie 2) and each of these subseries to date has featured a different art director. Playing these games in roughly sort of chronological order as I’ve been from Rorona on, I’ve prepared to be at least a little let down by the new artistic direction in the following subseries, but that hasn’t happened yet with the very partial exception of the AtelierRyza series as far as I’ve played it. At worst, the art and general style might just not appeal to me quite as much, but I still end up pretty much liking it and feeling the new style suits the new general direction of the game.
Toridamono’s work is my least favorite out of the four Atelier subseries I’ve played, and he’s still a damn good artist whose work I like a lot, which should speak well for the rest of the series’ art. (Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout)
Among the three other art directors of the series I’ve played — Mel Kishida in the Arland series, and also responsible for the art of the Blue Reflection games, Hidari in the Dusk series, and Yuugen and Noco in the Mysterious series — I can’t even rank them against each other. If Toridamono’s just a notch below them according to my own tastes, the rest are on the same extremely high rung. If you’re imagining one of those tier rankings that have become so popular among streamers and VTubers these days, based on its art alone, Ryza is in the A rank and the rest are up in S.
But what is it about the art in these games that I find so striking? Part of it might be that old European feel most of the games have. Dusk is a little lighter on that feel, though there are still hints of it in especially in Atelier Ayesha, but generally the makers really seem to love the look of those 16th/17th century west European cities and towns. I might be completely off here, but as an American, I think we tend to have a love for that look too, maybe because it feels a bit exotic and also because we don’t have anything similar in our own country aside from the architecture that’s designed specifically to mimic those styles.
I believe this is part of the cover of the original Atelier Rorona for the PS3, the one you absolutely shouldn’t play because the Vita and DX PS4 remasters/remakes look far better. But damn if Mel Kishida’s art isn’t amazing anyway.
More important are the character designs, which are usually memorable and excellent. I’m no visual artist and I’ve never created a character design because I can’t draw worth a shit, but I know what I think is memorable and looks good and what doesn’t, and I haven’t played an Atelier game yet that failed to impress in that way. I’ll just say I own that Artworks of Arland artbook for a reason. I’d own artbooks of Hidari and Yuugen/Noco’s work too, but those don’t seem to exist or else I haven’t found them. I’ve posted examples of their work throughout, especially of Hidari’s, so here’s another CG I love from the Mysterious series:
Just ignore Sophie’s weird gold beret outfit. That one’s not her fault, anyway; it was a gift from another character with some pretty damn dubious tastes. But note the bottle hanging at her side — a nice touch that many of the alchemists’ outfits include considering how often they have to gather materials and work out in the field. (Atelier Sophie DX)
I haven’t seen another game series with such a strong emphasis on costume design, either. It’s most obvious in Atelier Sophie, which contains an entire side plot about Sophie wearing her grandmother’s old alchemist outfit from way back when she was out in the field to gain her courage or something (not the one above; it looks a lot better in my opinion) but this focus runs throughout the series. Of course, unusual costumes in JRPGs are naturally nothing new (see Final Fantasy) but that aspect of Atelier is also notable. Whether it’s a positive is up to you — I feel Ryza drops it a bit in favor of a somewhat more practical-looking “adventurer” look if that’s more to your taste — but I find it adds some great spice to the series.3
If only to see our characters running around in the field and into battle in this getup. Not exactly made for combat, though at least the knight in the front line is dressed for the occasion. (Atelier Sophie DX)
2) The slice-of-life relaxation
Plenty of JRPGs provide breaks to their players in the form of easygoing character interaction, but again, no series I’ve found places such an emphasis on that as Atelier. While you’ll certainly face plenty of challenges in the series, up to and including difficult bosses to fight and the occasional world-ending crisis, most of my experience with Atelier has been pretty relaxed. There are certain story beats I’d grown up to expect after playing other JRPG series as a kid: someone in your party will betray you at a key moment, your home base or town that seems safe will get attacked at some point and you’ll have to flee, your protagonist will probably end up romantically tied to another character, most likely the female lead. And of course, some godlike entity is almost certainly controlling the supposed ultimate bad guy from behind the scenes and you’ll have to beat it up to prevent all life from being destroyed. Some series put their own unique spins on these JRPG tropes (Megami Tensei for example), but they’re tropes for a reason.
You’ll barely find any of the above in Atelier. Hardly any betrayal, much less of the dramatic “top 10 anime betrayal” kind complete with the speech trying to justify the traitor’s backstabbing. Very little romance, outside of some yuri-flavored teasing that never ends up going anywhere (by far most common in the Arland subseries) and an option to get Escha and Logy into an implied romantic relationship in their game that’s otherwise not at all central to the story.
I don’t blame Logy for dating his coworker, hard to resist a girl who can put away cake like this. And yes, Escha is as she looks: another cute cinnamon roll-esque character. I think I have a thing for them too as long as they’re not overdone. (Atelier Escha & Logy DX)
And while Atelier does feature crises, these aren’t always the world-ending kind. The crisis in question is usually a lot more personal than you’d expect: for a few examples, the protagonist trying to track down her missing adventurer mother (Atelier Totori), working to convince her father to let her become an alchemist (Atelier Meruru), or making a trek across the world to sit for an alchemist certification exam (Atelier Firis). A couple of other games do feature potentially world-ending threats, most especially the Dusk subseries (Ayesha, Escha & Logy, and Shallie), which centers around an ongoing catastrophic environmental decay (what an idea — I just can’t imagine that happening in real life, can you?)
But even the Dusk trilogy contains plenty of relaxation and slice-of-life messing around. This is such a staple of Atelier that it would be impossible to imagine the series without it. While exploration and combat are certainly important elements to every Atelier game I’ve played so far, they aren’t the central elements — they take place alongside a lot of necessary work in the atelier.
The combat is fine if you’re all right with turn-based systems, and it does feature some big changes from game to game, most notably in the Ryza series that shifts to a more action-based battle mechanic. I just don’t find the combat a particular strength of Atelier, though a few games do interesting things with it. (Atelier Ayesha DX, with admittedly one of the less interesting battle systems.)
And while your alchemist protagonist is brewing her potions and baking her pies in that cauldron, she’ll receive visits from friends and the few townspeople who are important enough side characters to get character portraits. Building relationships with your party members is a must, but even the shopkeepers in most Atelier titles have roles to play beyond the typical “Hi ___, look at the new wares I have for sale” fare — they’re very often interesting characters in their own rights, and some of them might even join your party.
That’s no mistake: typically the protagonist herself is a shopkeeper, at least of a sort. As the local alchemist, and sometimes the only one in town, part of your task as the player is to fulfill the requests of customers, some of whom are shopkeepers themselves who might go on to sell your wares at a higher price. Everyone benefits from the arrangement: you gather the materials and either sell them or more often use them to synthesize a product that only you can create, and the shopkeeper provides a wider market for the salve, cake, dress, or whatever else it is you’ve made. It’s a small-scale economy at work — not a very complicated one, but then it doesn’t need to be. There’s plenty of complication for you to deal with elsewhere, as we’ll soon see.
Pamela’s shop is the most popular among the town’s men — they all hang out there so much that their wives start complaining about it. Maybe you can see why? That’s right: it’s all the amazing perfume she sells that Rorona synthesized for her. (Atelier Rorona Plus)
All these relationships your protagonist(s) build with their families, friends, and townspeople — even with the odd ghost they might meet during their explorations — these all contribute to the generally relaxed feel of the series as a whole. Because of my near-oppressive work schedule (though a typical one for my profession, sadly) I’ve had to drop every other JRPG for the foreseeable future. Even my beloved Megami Tensei has fallen by the wayside. But Atelier is somehow still keeping me in its grip, and I think its strong relaxed slice-of-life aspect is part of the reason why it’s managed to draw me back in.
3) The alchemy
Alchemy. (Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream)
There’s a good reason I decided to make this edition of my deep reads a series instead of a single post: this fucking alchemy system deserves its own post. Let me correct that: systems, because there’s well more than one. The fact that I’ve spent so many hours crafting items in Atelier where I’ve groaned at two minutes of crafting a sword in some other game and asked why I had to bother — that still escapes me, but I’d like to figure out just why the hell that’s the case, and I’d like to get to it in the next post in this set.
I’m prepared to be totally wrong about at least half of what I end up writing about alchemy in these games, because there are actual experts out there and I’m not one of them. But I’ve gotten used to being wrong about things, so it’s no problem for me. Until next time!
1I really don’t know how I missed out on Atelier Iris back in the day considering I was pretty big into JRPGs at the time. Their exclusion from this post series feels like a serious gap, but it’s not one I can do anything about. The same goes for the Mana Khemia games, which despite their titles are canonically part of the Atelier series.
2And here’s part of why I think barely any fans lament the loss of the English dubs for these games following Atelier Firis. Though the fact that most of us are probably weebs who default to the Japanese voiceovers also has something to do with it. And no, I don’t blame the VAs at all: I blame the localizers who should have been in charge of giving them proper direction, or maybe Gust if they didn’t allocate a sufficient localization budget to bother with that. I hope those VAs are finding plenty of work elsewhere, anyway. I think Crunchyroll is dubbing a lot of anime these days.
3This raises an interesting question about the target audience for such games. There are male characters in the Atelier games too — lean pretty boys, muscular tough guys, and a few in between or miscellaneous types, and often with their own interesting designs. But the focus seems to be far more on the ladies, and combined with the very flowery aesthetic I wonder if Atelier has a larger female player base than other RPG series might.
Then again, there’s such a strong emphasis on the ladies that I also suspect the series might be aimed specifically at guys. As I noted at the start of my Disgaea deep reads series way back, Marl Kingdom seems to have had a similar issue with being considering “for girls” when it was localized, possibly with an eye to capture more of a female player base. But I also think the market has changed a lot since then. Then again, I’m no marketing expert or video game historian, so I’ll leave those questions to them.
Last post I wrote about my probably unhealthy coffee-drinking habits, so I may as well have a look at a game all about coffee, coffee-adjacent drinks, and the people they bring together in a small independent coffee shop in alternate fantasy universe Seattle. Coffee Talk, released on Steam in 2020, is a visual novel with a drink-mixing minigame attached in which you play a barista and coffee shop owner, serving a diverse mix of the city’s residents — humans, elves, succubi, fairies, werewolves and so on.
Latte art? I’m a coffee guy, not a damn artist. But maybe all baristas are expected to also be artists in Seattle? I’ve never been there.
As the sort-of blank slate player character, your job is to talk to patrons, both regulars and newcomers, and fill their drink orders. You’ll have an increasing stock of ingredients to choose from as the game continues, allowing you to mix dozens of different drinks for your customers.
Pictured: constant regular patron Freya, a woman after my own heart — not a long-lived heart with all the triple espressos I drink though.
Drink-making is an important part of Coffee Talk and provides the only traditional “game” element with a little extra challenge — while some of the orders your patrons make will be straightforward, others will make vague orders or just ask for whatever. You’re free to serve whatever drink you think best, but the drinks you serve at certain points will affect the course of the story. To add to the challenge, you’ll start with a blank drink reference list that fills out as you make each drink, meaning you can’t easily refer to it for clues if you haven’t made a particular order yet (or just look it up online, of course.)
Don’t give this guy milk unless you just want to be a jerk
The visual novel part of Coffee Talk is its central element, however — you’ll be spending almost all your time in this game making and listening to conversation over coffee (and tea, hot chocolate, etc.) Coffee Talk features a cast of about ten or a dozen recurring patrons, each with their own stories and challenges that they might bring up while sitting at your counter. While it might seem like a linear story at first, this game does have different endings to achieve, based not on dialogue options (the traditional branching-path VN style) but on whether you serve the right drinks to your customers and friends at the critical moments. It should be pretty obvious when these moments arise, even if the drink you have to serve at that time isn’t.
Things get heavy on occasion. I wonder how often real-life baristas see such scenes. I’ve never worked behind a counter myself, though I did unfortunately suffer through a “scene” at a sort of small bar/restaurant once that was considerably worse than this one.
Anyone who’s read this site for very long might know one of my favorite indie games is VA-11 Hall-A. If you’ve played VA-11 Hall-A yourself or have seen a playthrough of it, all of the above should sound very familiar to you, because Coffee Talk clearly took serious influence from that game — the drink-mixing, the strong social/visual novel elements, and the way the drinks you serve at certain points affects the story. One of the main reasons I picked up Coffee Talk, in fact, was because it reminded me so much of that old favorite. Also because I was getting tired of the endless “where the fuck is it” Atlus-style wait for the long-announced sequel N1RV Ann-A (still “coming soon”, haaah.)
However, it would be a mistake to think of Coffee Talk as simply a copy of VA-11 Hall-A. It’s similar in its structure and mechanics, but it has a different flavor and stands well on its own. The most obvious difference is the setting: where VA-11 Hall-A was set in a dive bar built mostly to serve alcohol, in Coffee Talk you’re running a coffee shop. That’s not a small difference, either, since for better or worse you can’t get anyone drunk and running their mouths in this game like you can in VA-11 Hall-A. That doesn’t mean your drinks don’t have significant effects on your patrons, both energizing and calming — they just won’t be getting boozed up.
Somehow alcohol was not involved with creating this situation
The broader settings of the games are also very different, with Coffee Talk set in a real-world American city known for being a unique sort of place (in a similar way to Portland and Austin, so maybe not actually “unique” but you get the idea — it’s an artsy city.) Both games deal with some pretty serious social issues through their conversations, though again somewhat different ones — you can really tell the fictional Glitch City of VA-11 Hall-A has the sorts of issues thought up more by guys from a place like Venezuela as its developers were, with the talk of government corruption and currency hyperinflation.
I can relate more personally to the complaints about insane drug prices and instability of freelancer life in Coffee Talk, though having lived in an “open corruption/government actually giving no fucks” sort of country before I understand those complaints as well, even if I’ve always had the extreme and undeserved luxury of an American passport.
Either way, I won’t accuse anyone of complaining about “first world problems” if their issues are serious and not just “I got the wrong drink order” or something that inconsequential. I always thought that criticism was bullshit when used as a blanket statement. Family problems, for example, exist everywhere — you can’t get away from them.
Both games took on their more serious subjects without coming off as preachy to me or laying it on too thick as well, which I always appreciate. I don’t like having my nice relaxing coffee or booze game interrupted by a sermon or a TED Talk jammed in out of nowhere, but when the points are made naturally in the course of an interesting story I’m all for it. That’s proper storytelling. Even if you can probably guess the politics of the people who made Coffee Talk (but then it may also help that I’m on board with them myself — and even then most of the serious talk here is more about personal/social matters than really political ones.)
A vampire has a serious conversation with a succubus about relationships while a fairy does her best to sit between them and not feel awkward, life in 2020 if COVID hadn’t happened. It’s important to note that Coffee Talk was released in January of 2020. Maybe the sequel can be set entirely on Teams or Discord; imagine how fucking miserable that would be.
That said, I ended up connecting with VA-11 Hall-A a little more than with Coffee Talk. Both are skillfully and thoughtfully put together, with some interesting characters and side stories, and I’d recommend either one almost completely, only with the exception that VA-11 Hall-A does get a lot more graphically into sex talk for those who aren’t as comfortable with such subjects or just don’t want to get into them in a “comfy game” like this one. There’s no Dorothy here to spice things up in that direction.
I didn’t mind that talk, however. I also preferred the setting and general feel of VA-11 Hall-A to Coffee Talk, though that’s a totally subjective matter. If I had the choice myself, I’d go to the cyberpunk dive bar tended by an embittered lady like Jill than this nighttime-only coffee shop in Seattle, though I’d be happy with either. I feel the same about the soundtrack — the music in Coffee Talk can be flipped through and played like in VA-11 Hall-A, and this soundtrack perfectly fits the setting: lo-fi beats to caffeinate to, with a lot of electric piano, always a plus for me. Again, I just slightly prefer the soundtrack to VA-11 Hall-A, but switch the soundtracks and each would totally clash with the other game’s atmosphere.
I’ve never had coffee with a churro in it, but I have to try a Spanish Sahara now. Coffee Talk introduced me to a lot of new coffee and tea drinks I’d like to try out when I get the time and freedom to do that.
Finally, I preferred Jill as the player character and protagonist of VA-11 Hall-A over the blank slate (though not silent) protagonist of Coffee Talk. This is still another totally subjective preference, since I can’t say one is better than the other or would be more effective for this sort of game. If I couldn’t have related so much to Jill’s troubles, I probably wouldn’t even be saying this, and I honestly wish I couldn’t relate to her on that level. There is more to the player character of Coffee Talk than “our friendly barista” however, which is what I thought I was for a while — I won’t spoil anything more here, though.
That’s another hint that you should check out Coffee Talk for yourself. I found it very relaxing, a nice break from my usual bullshit schedule. One playthrough only takes a few hours, so it’s not a massive time investment either like some VNs can be, though if you want to get multiple endings you’ll have to play through a few more times and make those very particular drinks at the right times to change the course of the plot.
It’s a good thing the quality of your latte art has no effect on the story. No amount of moe moe kyun can fix this.
Finally, if you do decide to go for CoffeeTalk, which again I do recommend, I also recommend you check it out on itch.io instead of Steam, because fuck Valve for their still extremely inconsistent (and if you really want to be uncharitable to them, and I don’t feel like being charitable, potentially xenophobic) attitude towards Japanese VNs. Though I still have a massive backlog of games on the platform to get through if I ever can, so I can’t say I’ll be “boycotting” them or anything. I’ve bought most of my VNs there, in fact — I’ll just be doing my best to untangle myself from Steam from now on, at least until there are serious changes at Valve.
Well here’s a nice surprise from itch.io, though not a surprise that I’m covering it. HoloCure is a Hololive fan game, what else, about a set of VTubers affiliated with the agency.
These multi-talented girls are usually only tasked with entertaining their fans on stream by playing games or singing or whatever, but one day a mysterious evil force makes said fans into drooling zombies who love their favorite VTubers blindly and go mad (is this some subtle commentary?) forming mobs that their favorites have to subdue. It’s a story worthy of the Beatles back when they made movies like A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, or maybe the Spice Girls’ Spice World. When was the last time you thought of that movie, if you’re even old enough to have been alive when it came out?
Which Spice Girl would Gura be, tell me in the comments after you smash like and subscribe and ring that bell
HoloCure is a takeoff of Vampire Survivors from what I hear. I haven’t played that one, so I don’t know how this game stacks up to it, but even if you’re new to this sort of game like I was, the mechanics are simple: just aim your automatic attacks at the enemies running towards you, collect the powerups and other drops they leave, and use them to upgrade existing skills and learn new ones.
Ina is somewhere in this mess. The tentacle is her main method of attack, which can be powered up as you defeat enemies/subdue fans. See also the huge miniboss at the bottom right — these guys will show up in fixed intervals to challenge you.
The current version of HoloCure has four sets of characters to play with, coming out to 20: all 11 ladies in the English-language branch (not counting the recently recruited guys in Tempus) and 9 in the Japanese branch — nowhere close to the total, so if like me you were hoping to play as Pekora, you’ll have to wait for a future potential update. But even so, there’s nice variety in the available characters’ styles, with some being slow and tanky and others being quick and agile, and still others I have no idea how to use because I’m terrible at them since their attacks require precision to pull off well.
Like Okayu, who chooses to throw rice balls at enemies that annoyingly arc in the air. The onigiri won’t help her against these shield walls of Mori fans.
I hadn’t played this game before the update just yesterday, but from the several hours I’ve played of it now (yes, this is what I’ve been doing since stopping work on Friday evening, no grass-touching for me) I could already tell a couple of things about independent developer Kay Yu, the first being that they’re clearly huge fans of Hololive and its streamers/characters/personalities, with a ton of references in the powerups and descriptions especially that all check out.
Like Plug Type Asacoco, which is exactly what it looks like. It’s not just the game being crass, this is a “real” product from a parody morning show created a year or two ago; here it’s just another weapon.
The second is that these creators care about making a quality game. The gameplay is smooth and the sprites look great (both VTuber and fan, and there are many fan/enemy types that correspond with the “fan names” and art depicting them. The music is catchy, and I’m pretty sure the few tracks in the game are based on a few of the girls’ original songs, though I couldn’t tell you which they were. (The opening/menu theme sounds a little like “Hare Hare Yukai” from Haruhi Suzumiya — hopefully a better fan can help me out here.)
All that leads me to a different question — can you enjoy HoloCure if you’re not a fan and know nothing about any of this Hololive or even VTuber bullshit? Obviously, you won’t get as much out of the game if you don’t pick up on or care about the references, and you certainly won’t get the inside jokes that come from well-known stream incidents like the Plug Type Asacoco above or Miko’s Elite Lava Bucket. HoloCure was made by fans, for fans, and also for the VTubers themselves, who have naturally been playing this on stream as well.
Kiara in the newly added Hololive HQ/office setting. This one feels a lot more challenging than the first stage’s open field since you can easily become trapped by enemies in here if you’re not careful.
Even so, I think a non-fan can still enjoy this game. It’s not just running around and killing/dodging enemies; there is a little skill involved at least mixed in with the RNG element of whether you’ll get good weapon and skill upgrades as you level up. I didn’t think I’d have that much fun with the game for its gameplay, but I have, and all the better that you can actually upgrade the characters as you progress by collecting coins and rolling to unlock new characters. In fact, the gacha element might make the game a little easier for non-fans, since they won’t be obsessively rolling to unlock best fox/cat friend Fubuki (who I still don’t have… damn. Soon, though.)
Pleading with the talent director A-chan won’t help. She won’t even look up from her screen; she’s just here to work.
So I’d say even if you know don’t or care a damn for Hololive or anything like it, you still might want to check this game out. It’s a free fan work and extremely high quality for that. And hell — I love itch.io, and I think indie gaming is the true future of the medium, but the fact is itch.io is filled with no/low-effort tossed-off crap that you have to dig through before finding the worthwhile games. The gems are there, but they can be hard to dig up, so any time I have one I’m likely to highlight it here.
And I barely even watch Hololive anymore, honestly. I am still waiting for an update that includes Pekora, but even more than that, I’d love to see a NijiCure. Maybe that’s just a dream. I certainly don’t have any of the skills necessary to putting a game like this together, but that’s a benefit to being the biggest: you generally get the most and best fan works (see also Touhou.) Though Nijisanji is huge in Japan too, and they’re catching up here as well, so maybe it’s just a matter of time.
Look out YAGOO, Anycolor is coming for Cover! Maybe this is why we keep getting denied that Pomu/Kiara collab, anyway — is HoloEN management afraid of attracting attention to the competition? The nice thing about smaller agencies is that they don’t seem to have such hangups with each other assuming that’s what’s going on here. (Edit 10/22/22: It happened! The barrier’s been broken. Took them long enough.)
A lot of the above is probably gibberish to anyone who’s not deep in the rabbithole like me, so I’ll shut up right now and just say that I had a good time with HoloCure and that you might too, even if you’re not in that hole. Just try not to get dragged into it yourself.
Yeah, finally. After years of looking at this game every so often on Steam and thinking “well, maybe” the whole series went on sale this summer and I finally went for it. For the few who haven’t heard of it, HuniePop is a dating- and boning-themed puzzle game. Released in 2015, it made the rounds online and especially in let’s plays on YouTube (remember when they were called that? I do, and yeah I’m old.) I guess this popularity was partly because of how straightforward the game was in its intentions, no beating around the bush. So to speak.
But there are games that inspire plenty of memeing but aren’t actually any fun to experience, sometimes not even in that so bad it’s good way. Where does HuniePop fall, and was it worth the two dollars I paid for it on sale? I’ll keep the suspense up for once and not give that away, but maybe you already know the answer.
Are these good lines at the bar, what do you think
HuniePop opens with the player character drinking at the local bar when you’re approached by a mysterious lady in a red dress who seems to be gauging your ability to hit on women. When you prove to be a tongue-tied weirdo, this lady, Kyu, tells you you’re a perfect subject for her efforts. The next scene takes place the following morning at your apartment, where Kyu shows up again and reveals her true form as a pink-haired love fairy whose job it is to help poor guys and ladies like you (you can be either by the way — see the settings) improve their dating/seduction skills.
Even though it’s Monday morning and you’d normally have to get to work or attend school or something, in this world you’re apparently not hurting for money at all and don’t have anything else to do all day but try to pick up girls. Kyu knows this and demands that you start working all day every day on your skills, taking you on a sort of practice date that evening at a nice outdoor lounge to show you how it’s done.
How it’s done
Here you’re introduced to one of the two main game modes. Dating in HuniePop involves solving a match-three puzzle grid. Your moves aren’t timed, but your number of moves is limited, and you can only move one token at a time and only in a straight line horizontally or vertically. Matching up hearts, bells, and teardrops gives you various benefits like extra turns and point multipliers, and matching broken hearts knocks your score down dramatically and so should be avoided as much as possible. A successful date requires you to reach the point threshold within the move limit.
Once you pass the impossible-to-fail tutorial date, Kyu tells you to get out there and start finding girls, giving you a nudge by taking you to the local university campus where you run into the student Tiffany and her professor Aiko.
Who both have very interesting outfits. Attendance at some of my freshman lectures would have been higher than 20% of the class if the professor had looked like Aiko and worn short shorts every day, though I guess the guys wouldn’t have been paying much attention to the lecture itself.
Professor Hotpants leaves and you strike up a conversation with Tiffany after getting some advice from your love fairy tutor, who’s helpfully using magic to make herself invisible to everyone but you so Tiffany doesn’t think you’re hanging out with your cosplayer girlfriend. At this point we get into the other game mode in HuniePop, the conversation. When you meet a new lady, you can talk with her to earn “Hunie” (counted in the pink in the upper right of the screen) with far more earned if you give her answers she likes based on her personality. She won’t feel like talking if she’s hungry, but you can buy her something to eat or drink from the shop to prolong your conversation together with other gifts that can increase the Hunie you gain from talking to her.
During your conversation, you’ll gather information about each woman that you can put in your HunieBee computer or app or whatever it’s supposed to be. And once you’re ready, you can ask her out on a date and shift over to the match-three puzzle mode to hopefully push your relationship to the next level. No need to settle down with one girl either, because each girl you meet leads you to a new dating prospect (see your “Girl Finder” in the menu to find those girls around town.)
Talking to Aiko after meeting Tiffany. She’s talking about eating an orange I just bought her, don’t worry. Though talking about biting in any other context would just be scary now that I think about it.
That’s how HuniePop rolls along until nearly the very end: go out and meet new ladies with a variety of personalities, likes, and dislikes, get to know them through conversation, give them gifts and receive gifts in return, and take them out for dates, then jump over to the puzzle mode and earn “Munie” that you can use to spend on gifts and food to encourage more conversation and relationship-building. The gift-giving factors into the game’s puzzle mode: gifts can be equipped and used to gain effects as long as you match enough Sentiment points represented by the teardrop-shaped tokens on the board. The point requirement for passing a date rises after every successful date you pull off, but you can also spend your Hunie to increase the amount of affection you generate through matches, so it all evens out.
See, it’s easy. Just like real dating!
And in real dating you don’t even get a heart meter to tell you how close you are to getting intimate, I mean what the hell is that
These ladies are also in the habit of answering your questions about them and then quizzing you on those answers, so be sure to either have a good memory or have the HuniePop wiki open while playing so you can get more Hunie. Though there’s also no real penalty for missing answers or for losing at the match-three date puzzles for that matter — all a miss means is that you’ll have to take another shot later on. The true penalty is having to run through a bunch of the same conversations again, really, and especially when some of the questions are “how much do I weigh” and “how big my titties are” since you’re a fucking weirdo who asks those questions but somehow doesn’t get slapped for it. Maybe that’s a sign of just how secretly charismatic the player character is.
But then it’s immediately obvious that HuniePop is fucking ridiculous, and also that it knows that and doesn’t take itself seriously in the slightest. The player character is an initially no-charisma dingus to the extent that Kyu takes you on as a special challenge, and by the end you’re a god of both romance and sex, able to successfully juggle nearly a dozen girlfriends. Reality is out the window in this game. But at least Kyu acknowledges some of that with her limited fourth-wall-breaking powers.
And yeah, you do get to date Kyu too, because this isn’t the kind of game that gives you a sex fairy character and then doesn’t let you also bone her. HuniePop knows what its players are looking for.
And for once it’s a game review on the short side, because I don’t have much more to say about HuniePop. The puzzles are a good time and managed to get me hooked enough to play through the entire game, the voice acting is nice, and the portraits and CGs of the girls you get throughout are also nice (though it should be said nothing in the game is extra-explicit — there’s nudity but the sex is implied by still another match-three puzzle, though a far easier kind than normal.) All that said, it’s important to note what HuniePop isn’t, and what it’s not really trying to be: an actual dating sim. There’s not all that much depth to the characters in this game and none at all to the story, if this even qualifies as a story.
Then again, the game doesn’t care about any of that and doesn’t try to be more than it is. And as for a recommendation — this feels very much one of those “you already know whether you’ll like it” cases. I basically liked it, though I also did feel like a pretty major piece of shit for going out with each one of these women and telling them completely different things about myself, my likes and dislikes and personal history, to get them each to like me, then literally fucking around behind all their backs. This isn’t what people generally mean by “playing the field.” Especially not when you end up with a Jessie and Tiffany situation. You’ll see if you play it.
Yeah, you don’t have continue, I know what you mean by “actress.”
So while it didn’t change my life or anything so dramatic, I was happy to finally get to play HuniePop considering how much it made the rounds several years ago. And hey, it was pretty fun while I had it going, and at least fun enough for me to want to play its sequel, which I also own now, so possibly look forward to that review at some point.
Next time I’ll return with still more anime, though. Until then — don’t be a two-timer, and especially not a nine- or ten-timer. Leave that behavior for the sexy puzzle games.
No, it’s still not the end-of-month post, but that’s still on the way. By contrast — this post probably should have been written years ago, and here it is now. Talk about a post with niche appeal, anyway; a lot of readers might not know what the fuck I’m even talking about this time without some background. So let me briefly introduce you to Touhou (which I’ve done before on the site once or twice, but once more won’t hurt.)
Touhou Project is a bullet hell/danmaku shmup series created by Japanese indie game designer/music composer/beer enthusiast ZUN. Touhou is primarily about shrine maiden Reimu Hakurei and mischievous witch Marisa Kirisame along with a few other recurring main characters fighting a bunch of youkai who are also all cute girls who fire lasers and make puns at each other. This all takes place in Gensokyo, a part of rural Japan that was cut off from the rest of the world with a magical barrier in the 1880s, the result being that it now exists in its own dimension.
Touhou has been going strong for nearly three decades now, getting its start on the PC-98 in the 90s when ZUN was still a designer working at Taito. However, his work apparently didn’t get much notice until the release of Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, which came out for the PC in 2002. With EoSD and its followups Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night, Touhou exploded in popularity on the indie scene in Japan and among the Western niche weeb weirdo circles that I moved in back in the mid-2000s (and that I still do today, of course.)
If you’ve played or seen gameplay of an original Touhou game, a few aspects of it probably jumped out at you, like the intricate, colorful, and often extremely difficult to dodge bullet patterns or ZUN’s famously not-so-great character portraits (which have been long beloved in the community anyway, a lot like Ryukishi07’s slightly scuffed character art in the Higurashi and Umineko VNs.)
But to me and many other past and current fans, the most standout aspect of Touhou is its music. Each of ZUN’s games come with an excellent soundtrack, with pieces generally sorted into one stage and boss theme each over six stages, along with a few extra boss themes and a main theme. As it plays in sync with all that colorful bullet hell going on, the music adds to the effect, and it’s no exaggeration at all to say the games wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable to play muted.
That said, here are seventeen themes from Touhou 6 through 8 and 10 that I rank as my favorites. Yeah, seventeen, that’s right. I couldn’t possibly have reduced this list any more than I have. In fact, I still feel bad about leaving a ton of excellent themes out of it; that seventeen could just as easily have been seventy. The only reason I’m even limiting the selection to four out of the now 20+ original ZUN-made Touhou games is that these are the ones I played when I was really into the series way back before I kind of fell out of it for a while. So if you’re wondering where your favorite DDC or LoLK track is, I’m not putting those down at all — it’s just that I’m not as familiar with those soundtracks and games in general. I’ll also be listing these by order of play if you were playing through the series chronologically, since I can’t bring myself to rank them in quality either. But that also means you get to see some of the evolution in ZUN’s sound, which is pretty interesting in itself.
Starting with one of the first hard hitters in the PC-era series. I’m not sure who “Shanghai Alice” is, aside from being the name of ZUN’s doujin circle — there’s an Alice who shows up not here but in Touhou 5 and again in 7 and ends up sticking as a major character in the series — but Hong Meiling is Chinese as the “Shanghai” suggests. But then the song sounds not Chinese but western. According to ZUN, he was thinking more about the 19th century Shanghai French concession, which would explain the western sound and the “Meiji 17” in the title, i.e. 1884.
More importantly, this theme fits Meiling’s character — she’s usually considered comic relief as early stage bosses sometimes are, but she’s no joke in combat, and the fast pace of “Shanghai Alice” reflects that.
“Locked Girl” takes a much more somber tone than the last boss theme, again fitting for its character. I admit Patchouli is my favorite Touhou character — she’s a shut-in who lives in a library reading all day and never even bothers to change out of her nightgown, what’s not to like about that? Very relatable; I’d do that too if I could get away with it. But it’s not just favoritism working here, because Patchouli’s theme is excellent too, and a nice showcase of ZUN’s skills at different sounds and styles.
And it turns out the big bad boss of Touhou 6 is a small vampire girl. Remilia might not look intimidating at first, but like a lot of the other girls in Touhou she has serious magical ability and can fuck you up with it. Remilia also claims to be the daughter of Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes, aka Dracula, the 15th century ruler of Wallachia in modern-day Romania. She’s confirmed to be over 500 years old, but her claim of descent from Dracula is a lie according to the Touhou wiki.
Even so, she’s powerful, and her stately theme fits her character perfectly. “Septette” is famously based on the third movement of Beethoven’s “Pathetique” sonata. They diverge pretty quickly, but the beginning of “Septette” is very similar, showing some of ZUN’s western classical influence.
4) U.N. Owen was her? — Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil — Flandre Scarlet’s theme
Of course I couldn’t leave out this iconic piece. “U.N. Owen” is the theme of Flandre, Remilia’s younger sister they keep locked in her room because anyone having contact with her other than Remilia and a select few others ends extremely badly, usually as a splatter of blood and guts on her wall. Flandre’s theme is appropriately chaotic compared to her sister’s, and her fight is hard as hell. Even getting there requires you to beat the game at least on normal mode to unlock the extra stage, which is no small feat itself. I do like how Flandre’s theme is a little playful as well, though — she really just wants someone to play deadly danmaku laser games with and doesn’t seem to fully appreciate her own power.
The “U.N. Owen” in the song’s title is also a reference to an Agatha Christie novel, though I still don’t get the connection there. Maybe it’s all just meant to fit the generally western theme of the game.
Continuing the more western, European sound with “Doll Maker of Bucuresti”, my first pick from Touhou 7. The stage themes in these games are often considered character themes by the fans, even if they technically aren’t meant to be, and when the stage is dominated by one enemy character she ends up with two of them in a game (and sometimes more if she comes back to fight later on.) “Doll Maker” perfectly fits Alice Margatroid, pictured above, a returning character from the PC-98 era who ended up becoming one of the most prominent usually non-player characters in the series (maybe thanks in part to a remix of the next song on the list by IOSYS that got insanely popular in the mid-2000s.)
And here’s Alice’s other PCB theme, the proper boss battle one this time, and it also fits with her character very well. Alice is one of my favorite characters in the series, usually depicted as somewhat of a loner who lives in a house in the woods with all the autonomous dolls she makes for a living. Despite the ominous sound to her PCB themes, Alice after this game is usually a friend to the protagonists, especially Marisa (though that relationship is sometimes depicted as more than just friendly, and sometimes extremely complicated. It’s been long accepted that the fandom makes up most Touhou lore.)
7) Border of Life — Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom — Yuyuko Saigyouji’s theme
One of my favorite final boss themes from Touhou, Yuyuko’s theme is a great mix of beauty and power that the series is known for. It fits especially well considering Yuyuko has an extra-tragic story, even if the fandom has made her into a bit of a joke character thanks to some of her lines during her appearance as a player character in Touhou 8. Well, that’s on ZUN, isn’t it? But this is still one of my favorite themes of his.
Sometimes early stage themes aren’t quite as impressive as the mid- and late-stage ones, even according to ZUN himself, who writes notes for each of his songs he puts out with the games. But “Night Bird” stands up very well to a lot of the other pieces in Touhou 8, with plenty of tension building the player up to what’s coming next. And it’s no good scoffing at early stage bosses anyway — Mystia Lorelei, the stage boss and night sparrow of the title, doesn’t put up much of a fight on the Touhou scale, but she does have an interesting gimmick that can really annoy you your first play through. My favorite section starts at 1:27, which is perfectly synced up to Mystia’s appearance (where she starts shooting at you before her fight proper even begins — pretty common in Touhou games to have bosses drop in on you during the stage itself.)
9) Plain Asia — Touhou 8: Imperishable Night — Keine Kamishirasawa’s theme
Keine has one of the more interesting jobs in the Touhou series, even if she doesn’t show up so much these days — she protects the human village of Gensokyo from youkai threats through her power of hiding/erasing history so they can’t find it. Or eating history, which she can do in her animalistic form that she turns into during a full moon, which just happens to occur during Imperishable Night, so you’ll be seeing her again later on. I’m still not sure exactly what “eating history” involves, but there are a lot of weird concepts in the Touhou universe that you just have to accept.
No matter what pair of characters you’re playing as (these team-ups being another unique aspect of 8, at least at the time) Keine presents a fair challenge. But trying to play “Plain Asia” is way more of a challenge. ZUN really went nuts on the piano for Touhou 8; might be part of why it features probably my favorite Touhou soundtrack.
In Touhou, sometimes you have to fight your friends, and so it is in stage 4 of Imperishable Night. If you’re playing as Marisa and Alice, you have to fight Reimu, and if you’re playing as Reimu and Yukari, you have to fight Marisa (and you still have to fight one of them if you’re playing as Sakuya/Remilia or Youmu/Yuyuko, but I forget how that breaks down.) I think Marisa might have had a few different themes throughout the series, but “Love-colored Master Spark” seems to be the most associated with her, and I can hear why. It has more of a rock sound, maybe thanks to the electric guitar-sounding synth in there, and fitting with Marisa’s somewhat wild and carefree attitude.
Now that I think about it, Marisa is sort of the Sonic the Hedgehog of Touhou in that sense, making the rock-sounding theme even more appropriate. I don’t know if anyone else has made that comparison, but it feels right to me. Does that make Reimu a non-oblivious version of Knuckles, then? I’m not sure. Maybe this character match-up doesn’t actually work so well.
“Kagome-Kagome” is another great stage theme that builds up the excitement as you approach the final parts of the game and hope to any and all gods or spirits or whatever else you like that you don’t run into a stray bullet or get boxed in by a pattern without a bomb to clear the screen. The title might be familiar — the main melody is based on a song that accompanies an old Japanese children’s game of the same name.
No idea what that has to do with moon rabbits or Princess Kaguya or anything else that Imperishable Night is about, but the piece works really well here anyway. “Kagome-Kagome” is also the closest thing stage mid-boss Tewi Inaba has to a theme as far as I know unless she received one later on. Usually these mid-boss-only characters don’t get much popularity, but Tewi is a pretty big deal in Touhou, even being featured on the Wikipedia page for the obsolete kana ゐ that’s part of her name. Do you have the distinction of being featured on the Wikipedia page for a dead letter? I certainly don’t, but if I had the chance I’d want to get on the page for ȝ.
Apologies to true final boss Kaguya for not including her theme Flight of the Bamboo Cutter ~ Lunatic Princess in this list (there’s her honorable mention anyway) but I like this extra boss theme more. Mokou is hell to fight, and her theme reflects that. If I ever got to be a boss in a game, I’d also want a theme with as cool a name as “Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke.” This one is the badass sort of piece that brings out the edgy 13 year-old in me, though I’m pretty sure that’s not what ZUN was going for.
Another excellent stage 2 theme with great build-up. The Mountain of Faith soundtrack feels like it has a lot more organ in it, which I like. Not much else to say about this one except I still don’t get the deal with Hina and why she’s constantly spinning.
Now here’s a fucking song. “The Gensokyo the Gods Loved” is so iconic in the series that a lot of fans refer to it as the Gensokyo national anthem. A lot of them also say it has a nostalgic feel, which I agree with. Maybe it’s partly the fact that I’d gotten used to those synth trumpets ZUN loves so much (aka the ZUNpets, if you’ve heard that term — that’s what those refer to.)
I partly love this theme as well because of its contrast with the stage boss theme:
Again, what a piece. More organ, with a slightly rock sound this time. I’m a big fan of Nitori as well, a kappa engineer who invents all sorts of strange machines some of which show up in later non-mainline games like Touhou Luna Nights (which I own, but I’m way too horrible at — I need to try it again.)
If I don’t have as much to say about the Mountain of Faith pieces, it’s not because I like them less — I just wasn’t quite as hooked on Touhou by the time 10 came out and didn’t engage with it in quite the same way. I never stopped listening to the music, though. Sanae is another interesting character, a natural rival to Reimu as a fellow shrine maiden, though they eventually end up pretty cordial with each other. However, Sanae’s theme is appropriately fierce in Touhou 10, reflecting the fact that she doesn’t let up in combat either.
Of course. How could I not end this list with “Native Faith”? It’s another piece I don’t have a lot else to say about except how good it is. All of Mountain of Faith feels like it has an earthy feel to it, the music included, sort of like how Imperishable Night has a spacy one. Frog goddess Suwako’s theme caps that off nicely, though once again, as an extra stage boss she takes some effort to reach.
And that’s my list of favorite Touhou themes, again, with a lot of excellent music necessarily left out, otherwise this post would be even longer than 3,000 words, which is probably already too long. If you’ve made it this far, I hope I’ve been able to show just how special the music in this series is. Touhou is well worth picking up and trying out, though unfortunately most of the games on this list aren’t available to play legally very easily. I’m pretty sure the games from Mountain of Faith on are all on Steam now, but for practical purposes 6 through 9 are only playable as downloads unless you can track down physical copies. The PC-98 games take more work to play, since they require an emulator to run, but they’re available out there as well if you don’t have qualms about less than legal methods (and I was going to link to the fansite Moriya Shrine here and say ZUN apparently doesn’t have an issue with piracy of practically unavailable games, but maybe he does, since just last month it seems to have been hit with DMCA notices, so never mind? I own copies of EoSD, PCB, and IN but I got them at anime cons back when Touhou had more of a presence in those circles than it does now. Maybe go check the subreddit instead.)
Whatever path you choose, whether you’re already a fan or you decide to check the series out or leave it, I hope you at least enjoyed the music. If you did, there’s an unimaginably massive amount of fan-created Touhou albums out there in every style for you to explore, a few of which I’ve looked at here on the site, specifically the jazz stuff by Tokyo Active NEETs and DDBY, so be sure to check on those as well. Next post, I really will be getting to the featured articles from March and a couple of album reviews, so until then.
It’s been a few years since I wrote once of these short free game review posts after digging around on itch.io, but it’s never too late to dig an old concept up again, and there are always broke people around looking for games to play (assuming they don’t want to turn pirate.)
I’ve also been watching some videos on YouTube in the “analog horror” category. This is a fairly new genre that from what I can tell is based on taking early 90s aesthetics and putting them into a psychological horror context. Kind of like a creepy version of vaporwave, I guess. It’s a strange concept, but some of it works pretty well. I’ve already talked up the series Gemini Home Entertainment, which I thought made great use of the old home video format to put together an interesting horror story. On the other hand, I also watched the wildly popular analog horror series Mandela Catalogue and wasn’t impressed with it, despite how much it’s talked up online — it even got a few eye rolls out of me, which is death when it comes to horror unless you’re going for a comedic effect, and it definitely wasn’t.
So maybe this is just a hit-and-miss genre for me. Or maybe I just need to play some games in the same genre instead? So I picked one free analog horror game, and then another game on itch.io after searching for “analog” when I couldn’t find any other analog horror stuff that didn’t look like a takeoff of Gemini or Mandela or Local 58. I also searched for “analogue” to include the non-American works as well, since the rest of the world thinks we spell that word incorrectly. But that didn’t yield anything too interesting aside from a free pdf tribute to Laika, the dog who died after being launched into space on Sputnik 2. I thought I was fucking depressed, but some of these people on itch.io, man.
Finally, just to get a third game in, I typed “aaa”, hit enter, and played the first game that didn’t look like complete tossed-off garbage from the thumbnail and description. Maybe there was a reason I retired this post format.
Starting with one that apparently just about every big horror jumpscare spooky game let’s player YouTuber already covered two years ago, the ones who used to dramatically scream at every shadow they saw until people finally got tired of that irritating shit.
No Players Online simulates an early 90s-looking capture the flag FPS, a beta multiplayer game with up to 16 players able to join each server, presumably in teams of up to 8 each. However, checking the server list reveals a column of 0/16s. Mysteriously, some of these servers are still online. Joining one of these drops you into an empty FPS map, a brutalist-style concrete structure with a couple of courtyards and trees and a central chasm that I tried to jump into but couldn’t.
I always wondered what other possible function the weird structures in these old FPSes could serve aside from being deathmatch arenas.
You have a gun that shoots a random number of bullets before you have to reload, but that’s not a problem since you’re the only player in the game. What follows is the easiest capture the flag game in history — at least until the creepy stuff starts happening, which doesn’t take long. No Players Online doesn’t let on about how you’re supposed to deal with said creepy stuff, but getting close to your goal of getting 3 out of 3 points does reveal a bit of what’s going on, and you’ll have a choice at that point between completing and not completing your mission. If you choose not to complete it, you can always quit and try another server.
There doesn’t seem to be much of an ending to the game at first, but after a little digging, I found that there is some kind of ARG thing going on with it featuring encoded messages and clues outside the game, and naturally people have already used those to solve its mysteries. Apparently it can’t be fully solved independently any longer, but that’s just how it is with these kinds of projects that rely on other media — sometimes you end up hitting a wall with a broken link or a disconnected phone number.
There’s a good chance this guy is a fan of the Caretaker too
I found the empty server pretty creepy, at least the first time I played through a “match” in it, so good on the developer for getting that atmosphere down. However, it also leans a little too much on the kind of “spooky distorted face man oh no” bullshit that made me dislike Mandela. There’s also just not that much game in this game, at least in the traditional sense. No Players Online is not exactly what I was looking for, but at least it’s an original concept, and there is more here than it might seem like at first glance, so it might still be worth a look for players who are into such projects.
One of the nice things about hunting for games on itch.io is that some of them are playable on your browser, no messing around with installation. These tend to be smaller/shorter games of course, but it’s possible to have fun with even a five minute-long game, so why discriminate in that sense?
While searching for “analog”, I found TASCAR, one of these browser games that promises a top-quality racing experience in the form of a text adventure. It’s not a horror game, though — at least not in the traditional sense.
Yeah, it’s one of these.
I believe TASCAR was created by someone who hates both stock car racing and text adventures, because this game seems to be purposely nearly unplayable. I was curious about how the hell someone managed to depict a car race in text form, but the point of it rather seems to be purely to piss the player off.
Oh yeah, you might be saying “hey, there’s a help option, try that out!” So I started a new game and decided to ask for directions for once.
thanks asshole
Eventually I managed to enter the fucking race and drive after the game refused to understand the commands drive, proceed, and step on the gas pedal, but this was the ultimate result:
what fun
I was wondering how aggressively hateful towards its players a game would have to be for me to still dump on it even when it’s free, and I think I’ve found a good example in TASCAR. I guess it’s just meant as a joke, but if so, it’s the Takeshi’s Challenge kind of joke where you basically end up kicked in the balls if you bother with it. If you’re a real masochist, then, you might enjoy this more than I did.
There’s a title that accurately describes how I felt after playing the above game. Despite its strange name, aaaaAAAAA is actually playable. It’s also frustrating and obtuse, though this time I can blame myself in part for just not being very good at such games.
aaaaAAAAA is a platformer that requires the player to jump on falling blocks to get as high up as possible. There are two gimmicks to it that complicate matters: the controls change every minute, and the player has to constantly hold down the a key at the same time to replenish their HP.
This is what the kids call “a mood” I guess
I’m not the most coordinated person on the planet. There’s a reason I mostly play JRPGs and avoid a lot of action games and platformers that require extreme timing and precision. That said, aaaaAAAAA seems like a nice free game to check out if you like to challenge yourself.
The spiked bricks falling on your character’s head and the constant screaming also make this game feel a lot like living life, which if that was the point was very well executed in my opinion! Congratulations to the developer Mewore for really getting that feeling down well if that was their intention. And even if it wasn’t, I still can’t help but think of the game as a metaphor for life. The fact that I suck at it makes that metaphor all the more accurate.
On that sunny note, as usual, that’s it for this round of free itch.io games. Next time I try out this feature, I’ll probably drop the themed aspect of it, because it clearly isn’t working out for me anymore.
Not the game I’d planned to review next, or even the post I’d planned to write next, but life has a way of fucking up your plans, doesn’t it? And that’s a lesson that’s very relevant to the game I’m reviewing today.
Despite its sugary sweet look, this one deals with adult subjects like sex and drug use and heavy, serious subjects mostly related to mental health and various kinds of psychological and physical self-harm up to and including suicide, so the usual warning here for kids and those who prefer not to touch such games. The game has its own covering our ass “this is all fiction and please don’t do any of this” message every time you start it up, and the message is warranted.
Needy Streamer Overload, put out by Japanese developer Why so serious, Inc. (with the original title Needy Girl Overdose, changed apparently when it was put up on Steam, though both titles fit it pretty well) is an ADV game depicting a month in the life of Ame, a girl who’s into some of the usual hobbies like gaming, watching anime, and cosplay. At the start of the game, Ame’s decided that she’s going to take advantage of her cuteness and on-screen charisma to become a streamer on MeTube (of course) and to rake in love, attention, and superchat money from shut-ins and nerds across Japan.
And you the player are her boyfriend (edit: or girlfriend if you prefer; as commenter phoenix below pointed out to me there’s no explicit reference to the player character’s gender, so keep this in mind going forward since I’m not taking the minimal effort to edit therest of this post. But thanks for the catch!) known only as “P-chan”, as she claims above because you’re perfect for her, but also because you’re basically her producer. As Ame promises on day 1, she’s placing her life in your hands: she’ll do whatever you ask of her, and her only demand is that you drive her channel to a million subs in a month. Sounds difficult, but not impossible, because when she’s on camera Ame uses makeup, a wig, and a flashy costume to transform from her dour regular self into the peppy OMGkawaiiAngel-chan or KAngel for short.
The contrast between her persona and her real self is most obvious through the tweets Ame makes on the in-game Twitter equivalent through her public KAngel account and the private one only you can read.
Each day is divided into three time periods called day, dusk, and night, and as Ame’s live-in boyfriend/producer your responsibility is to direct her entire life. Throughout the day, Ame has various activities she can take part in, including using the internet/social media to get new ideas and pump up her subscriber/viewer counts, going out to neighborhoods around Tokyo with P-chan to take in the sights, and staying inside to play a game or spend some one-on-one time with P-chan (including an option labeled *** with a bed icon — I wonder what that could be? Well, the game doesn’t actually try to hide it.)
Daytime, with the available options on the left side and the text screen on the right. An exclamation point on an activity option means Ame will get an idea for a new stream if you choose it for her. Also man what the hell, don’t say that.
While the first two parts of the day are dedicated to letting Ame get new ideas, shill her own channel online, or rest, the night is for streaming. It is possible and sometimes advisable to skip a day and put the stream off to the next evening, but night is the only time Ame will stream since it’s peak viewing hours. After picking one of several available stream idea options for her, your job is to watch Ame’s stream and monitor chat for shitty comments to delete (not necessary, but deleting the right ones will reduce her stress slightly) and colored superchat comments with donations attached for Ame to read at the end of the stream (though only two of them, because KAngel doesn’t give her love out to her adoring fans that freely, and this also isn’t strictly necessary.)
Most comments are nice and positive, but you always have a few assholes in chat. Sometimes they’ll even pay money to try to get Ame to read their asshole comments. What a use of money that is.
Finally, note the Task Manager at the top right of the screen. This is an extremely important window to keep track of, as it measures both Ame’s all-important follower count and three aspects of her mental/emotional state: her stress level, her “mental darkness” which sounds related to but is distinct from her stress, and her affection towards P-chan. Every action you choose for Ame has effects on one or more of these stats: streaming almost always dramatically increases her stress along with her follower count, spending time with P-chan lets Ame de-stress and also increases her affection towards him, and while sleeping is a safe way to prepare Ame for her next stream stress-wise, it also takes up time that could have been used to find new stream ideas.
You can also tell Ame to take her meds at the recommended dose, or you can make her load herself up to the gills with drugs if you feel like being an asshole to her. But of course, there are consequences.
If Ame’s stress or mental darkness get too high, she may start acting strangely and refuse to listen to your commands, making decisions for herself that usually turn out poorly for her. You also don’t want Ame’s affection level to get too low (or too high!) since this will have consequences for P-chan’s relationship with her. And since P-chan is the (mostly) silent player character, if you fuck things up for him, your game is over and you’ll be kicked to the title screen to try to be a better boyfriend/producer in a new playthrough.
Texting Ame back and not ignoring her or telling her to go on dates with other guys on “Dinder” as the app is titled here is another important part of keeping her happy, but if you pick the third option here you obviously deserve to lose her. The second is also a dick response in my opinion, though less of an aggressive one than the third.
Needy Streamer Overload feels like a timely game. People who normally would have been going out over the last two years have been largely shut inside because of COVID (aside from those who act like it doesn’t exist, but again, a subject for a different blog than mine.) This seems to have driven online traffic a lot — I’ve seen the rise in my own site’s stats that track exactly with the beginning of the global virus in March 2020. I’ve seen theories that it also had to do specifically with the rise in popularity of livestreaming and especially of VTubers, who first became widely known in the US in that same year with a flood of translated Hololive clips on YouTube and then the development of English-language branches of Japanese streaming projects like Hololive and Nijisanji.
Ame isn’t a VTuber, but a lot of what I saw in Needy Streamer Overload made me think of the small amount of time I’ve been able to scrape up watching VTuber streams and seeing fan interactions on Twitter and other sites. This game does present an extreme case of a streamer who really shouldn’t be streaming at all, who belongs in school or a regular job and definitely in some kind of therapy considering her mental/emotional state. However, it also partly addresses the unusual and not always entirely healthy relationship between the streamer and her fans on social media and in chat during her streams, and that’s not particular to Ame or her KAngel persona.
Not even Doom streams are immune
From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of viewers are just dropping in to be entertained and have a pretty casual attitude. Fans seem to be pretty accepting of most any subject a streamer might want to bring up or an idea she might want to try out, even if the stream ends up crashing and burning (as happens a few times in Needy Streamer Overload, though KAngel’s reactions to these failures end up getting her more viewers than she would have had otherwise.)
Despite this casual and accepting atmosphere, there’s still a pretty common expectation, at least as far as I understand, that a streamer like KAngel or a VTuber who presents herself in a similar way shouldn’t be romantically involved, much less sexually active. Or if she is, as a lot of fans realize is at least possible, she should never even suggest or hint at that possibility that she might have a boyfriend.1 I’ve even heard about a couple of “incidents” in which viewers heard a male voice during a stream and the streamer had to explain the situation later (probably by saying “don’t worry that was just my brother” or something similar.)
Or “it was a ghost”, that might work too
That might sound like a silly or harsh standard to you, but there seems to be a practical reason behind it. A streamer who creates a persona as Ame does has to maintain that persona in front of the camera and on her social media accounts. Talking about personal issues isn’t necessarily discouraged, and in fact it can help viewers feel more closely connected to the streamer. However, part of the appeal of this sort of streamer, whether she uses a VTuber model or not, is her cuteness and weirdly enough her romantic availability — even though, practically speaking, she’s not romantically available to any of her viewers. Again, this is not true of all such streamers, but it certainly is of KAngel/Ame, who’s pretty open about using her looks and her cute persona to attract a probably primarily male fanbase.2
KAngel is pure, but luckily for P-chan, Ame sure isn’t.
This approach to the division between the streamer’s persona on one hand and her private life on the other seems to have been carried over from the idol scene, a subject I got into when I had a look at the film Perfect Blue. In both works, many fans express their adoration and/or love for the main character, and some express envy for the attention she receives.
But of course, that attention has a double edge. Ame looks to be suffering from a mix of depression and anxiety and maybe a severe personality disorder or two thrown in, and while taking medication helps her out a bit, it’s only a temporary fix in the game. Higher viewer counts get her excited for a while, but she soon becomes dissatisfied and wants more, and then it’s clear that she’s looking for something streaming alone won’t help her with.
At the same time, a lot of Ame’s viewers also seem to be depressive shut-ins or otherwise living on the margins of society. As someone with those tendencies (at least as far as I feel, since I disguise myself pretty well in public and society as a basic normal guy more or less — no time to mope around over here) I can completely understand why such people would seek an escape like watching streamers, especially since you can spend quite literally all day every day watching them live now. And that’s not even mentioning the nearly endless stock of VODs that I’m sure fans are obsessively archiving just in case a nuclear war or solar flare destroys the internet.
The definition of nerd: if you’re watching this, it’s you
I don’t want to overstate this point. The vast majority of interactions and talk in general I’ve seen around VTubers and fans has been positive. But the term “parasocial relationship” has been thrown around a lot lately for good reason. As much as it pains me to say it, while following one of these personalities can be fun, it’s not a substitute for having a social life of your own. Not even if the cute fox girl on the screen reads your superchat.
And no surprise, with all these strong emotions running and especially with five or six day-per-week streaming schedules, there’s always potential with this arrangement for things to get out of hand, with minor and even unintentional slips or incidents being blown well out of proportion. I’m not sure how much of this translates over from VTuber/liver work to “real 3D” or in-person livestreaming or whatever you’d call it, but I recognized a lot of what I saw in this game.
Avoiding textboards and imageboards is also a good policy, though /st/ seems like it’s mostly all right surprisingly enough. I miss ASCII art.
All that said, Needy Streamer Overload, despite its often dark tone and its dozens of bad endings to achieve, isn’t entirely negative. Ame does have serious problems she needs help with, perhaps even beyond the ability of you as P-chan to fix (and her extreme dependence on her P-chan is likely a serious problem in itself.) But she also seems to genuinely enjoy streaming sometimes, even if she likes to put down her viewers a bit as her “little nerds” in her private account, and most of her fans reciprocate that positivity.
If this game went full-on 100% dark all the time, I’d criticize it for that — despite how negative I can be, I find that sort of approach in any medium of art way too boring and simplistic, and it wouldn’t reflect reality all that much. Needy Streamer Overload already presents what seems like a purposely exaggerated situation, but it’s exaggerated in the right way and mostly has the right effect. A few of the bad endings do feel pretty weird and abrupt, but there are plenty of endings in the game. Almost all of them bad, but I get that too — I guess the game’s makers didn’t want to make it so easy for us.
Keep working towards that good ending
So reading all that back, I just bullshitted a lot about subjects I probably don’t have too much understanding of and read far too deeply into everything. But that’s the usual way for me. As for the game itself — I liked it. I’m a big fan of the art style and general look of it, it has some catchy and fitting background music, and I had fun watching Ame stream as KAngel when she wasn’t an out-of-control train five seconds from derailing, which I always felt responsible for because I was the one directing her life. Needy Streamer Overload is still another one of those works that’s not meant for everyone, or perhaps even for most, but if the style grabs you and you can deal with the subject matter, I’d recommend it.
1Or a girlfriend, I guess, but that possibility doesn’t seem to come up as much, and I get the impression more fans would be generally okay with their favorite having that sort of relationship (though certainly still not all of them.) I’m also not sure how much any of this might apply to male streamers — that’s a totally different world as far as I can tell, and if anyone reading this is deep into male VTubers, I’d be interested to know if there are similar hangups among those fan groups.
2To be sure, not all fans feel this way, and that difference in opinion is also depicted in Needy Streamer Overload. However, it seems like a common enough issue that it’s still worth bringing up. I’m also not trying to justify this feeling on the part of the more obsessive fans, since I do think it’s pretty unreasonable, but it’s worth trying to understand at least. For what it’s worth, the few VTubers I follow seem to have a healthy and practical attitude towards all this, though of course it’s impossible for me to say that for sure since I don’t actually know who they are behind the curtain. Not my business anyway.
It’s time for still another double feature, because I don’t have enough to say about either of these games for as full a post as I’d like. I did manage to fit them into a theme, however, so you can’t say I’m not trying here at least. This particular post also doesn’t have any proper reviews because I didn’t play enough of the games to actually review them, but said games are also weird enough for me to want to write about them, if only to relieve my annoyance. Maybe you’ll see something you like, or if you’ve played these maybe you can tell me if I’m missing something here.
Super Radical Solitaire
Remember Radical Solitaire? Developer Vector Hat has created a new version of its bizarre Klondike/Breakout hybrid, and it’s even weirder than before.
If you haven’t played the first one, the idea behind it was that you could win any game of Solitaire you started by dragging a useless card to a pile called “GET RAD”. GETTING RAD entailed playing a game of Breakout in which you attempt to hit the card behind the blocks to flip it, changing it to a hopefully useful card before your Breakout game ends. It was a novel concept, at least to me, though the presumably intentionally eye-destroying color palette gave me a headache.
Breakout, but this game calls it something else. It’s Breakout though.
Super Radical Solitaire features the same old Klondike Solitaire game, but now with two new mini-games added: a version of the extremely addictive Japanese gambling game Pachinko, and a Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move clone.
The image saved as a jpg and the colors were muted; it’s actually brighter than this.
There seem to be other, secret mini-games according to the game’s itch.io page, but I didn’t play long enough to find them. Because this game is even more eye-scraping than before, with flashing bright colors (which it does warn you about in the opening screen — the photosensitive should stay far away from this game) and the addition of a screeching robot voice that reads out each new card you play and makes a few other announcements. So now it’s ear-destroying too!
In the plus column, unlike its predecessor, Super Radical Solitaire is free. So credit to these guys for not charging for this game, but I still question what the fuck they’re thinking with these design decisions. I think this game is a meme or something, but I don’t even want to guess. Try it for yourself as long as you’re not prone to seizures from flashing lights. It’s certainly unique — I can’t accuse Vector Hat of making generic-looking games at least.
ART SQOOL
And now for a game that’s very different in style but equally confusing in execution.
And also just as hard on the eyes!
This is ART SQOOL. All in caps, apparently — fair enough. The gameplay in this one consists of walking around this school’s “campus” consisting of floating, mostly disconnected platforms while collecting art supplies, including different colors of paint and tools, and then drawing something that hopefully makes your AI professor happy enough to give you a decent grade. FROSHMIN as your character is called has their damn work cut out for them, because it’s not that easy to get a good grade. Or else I’m way too shit at drawing (this is the real reason, I’m sure.)
I didn’t know what “something wiggly” might involve, so I tried a sandwich, but I didn’t really have the tools or paint for it. Mustard is my favorite condiment. I deserved an F, but the professor was too nice to fail me.
Among the many games in the itch.io bundles (ART SQOOL was featured in both the racial justice and Palestine relief ones, so you have it if you bought either) this one was talked up quite a lot. Developer Julian Glander seems to be a known quantity, because one of the reviews on the itch.io page calls ART SQOOL “characteristically Glander.” It also mentions a lot of references to other artists in the game. If you’re deep into the visual arts then you’ll probably get some of them — if I even came across them, I’m sure I didn’t recognize them myself.
I do appreciate the use of Wingdings though; we had a lot of fun fucking around with this crazy Word font when we were kids. Can anyone translate these signs?
This game also hurt my eyes because the whole damn thing is a pastel nightmare (there’s the theme I mentioned at the top — it’s “eye-destroying” this post.) But some people really seem to like it, and maybe you’d be one of them? Feels a little too “lol random” for me, but then I wouldn’t get the inside art jokes anyway, whatever they are.
ART SQOOL promises five or six hours of gameplay, so there’s probably a lot more here than I found in my approximate 45 minutes of dicking around in it. If you own either last year’s or this year’s bundle, anyway, you own this game, so try it out and either enjoy it or be utterly baffled and annoyed by it like I was. Just like Super Radical Solitaire, this game gets the “unique” stamp, but with the qualification that it’s not my kind of unique.
That’s all for now. Next time in this series, I’ll look at something better suited to my uncultured dumb ass. Until then!
Everything is bad for you 