Makudomi

Well, long time no content here, eh. So, uhh, I started writing a diary when I poop. But it’s in bad Fapanese. I have some faint hope that seeing my amusing stumbles might inspire you to practice writing in Japanese. Yes, you over there in my target audience of maybe one person. The actual content of this entry is unlikely to inspire anyone, so it’s all the better that nobody will understand it anyway.
For authenticity (and hopefully showing that it’s ok to mess up a bit or something) I have preserved all the grammatical and kanji errors I made, noting what I spotted reading through it again below.
１１月２４日
２８日が近づつつ[1]、メールをまた書かなかった。ウェルフェーアのことも準備はなかった。正直に・・・この一月[2]は、リアルに対してゴミにしただけ。バーチュアルはもっと良かったけど、この生活はどうだろう？変化は難しいのはよく分かるでも、このゆっくり過ぎ流れは誰にも良くない。
まあ、ウェルフェア[3]限り[4]は今日するつもりにして・・・かもしれない。
・・・その適当すぎな感請[5]がきらい。でもそれ以上は出来ない。
いやでも、悪いでも、恥ずかしいでも、それは私の本当の気持ち。
それ以上の方には、負けの機会[6]っが沢山ある。
。。。また明日、うんこするなら。ってその終え方下手すぎ！ごめんなさい、みんな。
Fuckups
[1] I’m not even sure if the つつ grammar is any good here, but I made a more fundamental error. つつ needs to be attached to the actual stem of the verb in question (here 近づく), rather than what you get when I use ichidan verb rules on godan verbs. tl;dr this should be 近づきつつ.
[2] While 一月 apparently can mean “one month”, it also means “January”. What I meant to write was 一ヶ月.
[3] Pls decide if you want a chouon or not in the word you katakana’d because you don’t know the fapanese one, zaka.
[4] I wrote this kanji wrong, using 良 as the right side.
[5]感請 should be 感情 here.
[6] I wrote 機 without the tree on the left and kinda wrong in general. I have recreated my failure in paint for you to enjoy.
準備のことはまだ、でも今すぐやるつもりです。メーレは・・・まぁ。


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If some of you failed to notice, I've been going back over my list of ancient favorites amongst the moege/charage/slice-of-life genres.  Why am I doing this?  I actually have some good reasons, other than whims.
First, I keep recommending these things to people, but when you start talking about a VN you last played five years ago, people tend to let it in one ear and out the other.  I mean, my long-term memory for games and books is pretty good, but my brain is fairly compartmentalized, so I don't remember them actively unless I go through the effort to refresh that memory.  Can I continue to say that I honestly recommend something without playing it in the recent enough past that I can compare it to other, more recent VN experiences, through more jaded eyes?
Second, I want to know just how much nostalgia is coloring my viewpoint.  To be blunt, the longer you are away from your favorite games or VNs, the more the memory gets beautified by distance in time.  When I recently did a speed replay of G-senjou, I reaffirmed why I disliked the story structure while at the same time realizing that I didn't always do it justice due to my biases (no, I didn't blog on it, but I was mostly doing it for my own edification, anyway). 
Third, I like to think that I try to be as objective as possible, so I wanted to reexplore my VN roots when it came to my attitude toward charage/moege.  One thing I've noticed as I replayed certain charage from the past is that the best of the older generation wasted the least time on 'everyday' slice-of-life, ironically.  The gradual shift to put an excessive emphasis on the everyday life aspects of charage and moege is a relatively recent phenomenon, from what I've re-experienced.  A part of this is that, as the audience in Japan has aged, so has their nostalgia for an 'ideal youth' become much stronger.  The fact is, a lot of the 'devoted' moe-gamers in Japan aren't young people (at least not the ones who are also erogamers).  They are older people who want to experience an idealized version of youth through a non-person protagonist's viewpoint.  Ironically, this seems to be the reason why the market is shrinking, since younger generations don't find that kind of stuff as accessible as the older generation does, so you can tell to some extent what generation a company is appealing to by how weak the protagonist is and/or archetypical the characters are, lol.
 

I'M FUCKING DONE
Just look at this
I-I-I just can't. This is too much. This flipping game, man. It's just brilliant. Kamige, nothing more, nothing less.
Well, I guess I should elaborate even a little bit, given that I'm really just talking about a shit game full of baka gaijin punches and weeb references. Keikaku, desu, slice of bread, stupid Nipponese emotes, jabs at VN and anime tropes, fucking FACELESS side character named Classmate-kun that has a lenny emote as his face. Yup, this game is rather special, truth be told. Did I also mention that the menu is written with Comic Sans? Becuase it is. 
Anyways, the game follows the journey of.... I forgot. Forgive me, but the main character's name spans three dialogue boxes, so everyone just gives up on everything and calls him Protag-kun for short. Works, right? Right? Well, there on out he stumbles on a tsundere yankee (although her being a tsundere could be considered a spoiler, but who cares, roight?), who has a piece of goddamn toast in her mouth, and apparently the MC stumbles ALL over her face and she's still utterly unfazed. She's also a Mahou Shoujo in the pures Sailor Moon way, becuase... reasons? Twintails included. Get your own damn batteries, though.
Then he meets the just mentioned Classmate-kun, with whom you can have wonderful homoerotic, homodachi endings with, including:
Shitting together in a public bathroom Going totally gay together, like pure homoerotic bro-homodachis would Sleeping together in a hotel completely butt-naked, causing some hilarious, albeit cringy events together and making him not look like a cheap Saitama ripoff, and in the end getting married in 'Murica He also uses those oh so fun Nippon emotes that those boke gaijins couldn't understand, and some variations of lenny thrown in for shit good taste.
Then, the last of the bunch, comically dubbed 'Iinchou-chan'. Literally just 'Iinchou-chan' literally meaning 'class rep' for all the gaijins out there, who don't know the brilliance of Weebism.
Well, she's your average small, big-breasted deredere I guess, except that she adds those ridiculous end-suffixes (I think they're called that? Honestly, I don't give to kusos.). Yes, you heard me right. She adds a desu, -nyan or -uguu in every single damn of her sentences. It's funny for like the first five minutes, and then I feel like stabbing her in the abodmen and hanging myself with her entrails.
*cough*
Well, there are a few instances where it's still cringy as hell, but at least it's funny. Apparently she's also a yandere. Yeah, it came out of nowhere. She literally steals everything from School Days, fucking decapitates Protag-kun with a kitchen knife, stuffs his cold body in a duffel bag and sets on a voyage with his head a la School Days. I don't even.
The game has 24 endings, believe it or not, and after all that you get to answer the question 'What is the answer to life?', and the answer to life apparently is 'All your bases are belong to us. Wew.
There's also a Boku no Pico ending, but I doubt you want your psyche broken with several PTSDs, stacks on stacks, so I'll just give you a scene before that happens, k? K.
As you've probably noticed by now, the game has a terrific sense of humour. One of such classics is this
And this.
Also this.
Quite fitting humour for something accurately dubbed as shit. There is of course some other jokes, like that one ending resulting in a game over because everything didn't go according to keikaku.
One more for the road.
The game's a literal shitfest, but the funniest shitfest I've ever had the pleasure of playing.
9/11, 6/5, 1/1 Kusogest kamige to top all kamiges. Must play, enough water -IGN, GG Takeshi.
In all honesty though, play it if you like satire even the tiniest big.
That's all, thanks for sticking with me to the end.
Arigato! Minna!
Blegh, now I feel like a dirty weeaboo, kuso.

These are just a few thoughts that I've had after experiencing various gameplay VNs over the years. 
First, understand that I see VNs as reading material (in the same vein as manga but with the addition of voice, some animation, and detailed narration) first and games second.  Second, the type of gameplay most likely to be fused to a VN (strategy or turn-based rpg) are ones I played for well over a decade before I first encountered VNs, so I have at least some qualifications to evaluate them.
First, for the gameplay...  no matter how you express it, the average VN gameplay is several levels below the average console strategy game, srpg, or jrpg in terms of quality and design.  Some of the best of the type - such as the Ikusa Megami series - just barely reach the same level as stuff released before the turn of the century as far as those two aspects go. 
Second, balance... in a VN hybrid, having a good balance between the story and gameplay is vital.  In other words, the grinding needs to be minimalized and difficulty should be adjustable.  VN hybrids without adjustable difficulty levels (with an easy version that really is easy) tend to result in a VN where the story is told in snippets between long stretches of grindy gameplay (Softhouse Chara's games tend to have this flaw in excess).
Third is feature creep... a lot of hybrids have weird gameplay features that make the game confusing without really adding anything enjoyable to the game.  An example of this is the recruitment system from the 'breeder' Venus Blood games.  To be blunt, this game mechanic, while fitting in with the atmosphere in the story, made the games unnecessarily complicated, and not in a good way.
Fourth... story pacing.  A lot of hybrids have horrible pacing.  In particular, many of them start out really well, grasping the reader/player with a dramatic prologue or first few chapters... then suddenly become a complete slog or grind in the mid-game.  To be honest, the most egregious offender in this case are strategy-conquest VNs, where the story won't progress significantly until you've achieved an artificial goal, like conquest of a certain region.  Generally speaking, most strategy-conquest VNs (such as Sengoku Rance or Madou Koukaku) start out really well, with an interesting beginning to the story... and suddenly become devoid of story for about thirty hours if you don't act in exactly the right way.  The Sengoku Hime and Sangoku Hime series are classic examples of this.  Both series tend to have first-rate beginnings, but the story gets put to the wayside pretty early in the game.  As a result, you essentially get stuck playing a sub-par strategy game for ten to fifteen hours before you manage to restart the plot.  This is tiring and boring, to say the least.
My conclusion?  Generally speaking, VN hybrids can be good, but that is only if the VN aspects don't become an adjunct for the third-rate gameplay that tends to be tacked onto them.