saori

the yuri visual novel collective, prof lily, i'm in made a free visual novel for this specific day :-)

it's april first for a bunch of countries now. let's just say this game about march 31st is about the visual novels coming out on april first.

related:

This short visual novel is dedicated to game developers who have to sell their souls in order to make something they love. To workers and hobbyists alike.

(from: https://x.com/proflilyvn/status/1774476495492129217?s=46)

twenty five years ago today, to heart came to the playstation. while that's expectedly two years after the PC release, the default for galge ports in this era, it was actually always planned as the initial release to begin with, which allowed it to skirt usual sony rules that forced ports to give up their maiden ero name. although it's a console port with the usual upsell of full voice acting and redrawn CGs, it's also a legally distinct take on the base game, enough so that the route changes and improvements introduced by it were eventually ported back to the PC as a new release. to heart's success through this era was perhaps one of the most consequential moments for galge, kickstarting the nakige and belonging to the trilogy that imagined the visual novel, along with familiarizing players to the replayability of tightly segmented character routes. still, to heart was never strictly first in these respects, even as the commercial and critical success that it was. of course, not every genre-defining title should be expected to be a first, or even a blueprint that its successors borrow from. if you found yourself falling down the hole of limited editions for the first time, though, or saw the ground shifting below your feet with moe chara, it was likely always going to feel like one to you anyway.

twenty five years ago today, to heart adorned hanging posters on trains and promotional mats at four stations along the yamanote line. on each mat, a helpless multi pinned to the floor endured the trampling of weary businessman — undoubtedly, a concept that would have trouble being greenlit today. let's excuse the naivety with the rules for promotional moe not being codified yet. at akiba station, where she was placed most prominently as you descended the stairs from the upper platforms, multi's presence was more of a bellwether than an event unto itself. for a transitional akiba, before character signage perched atop every building and hobby shops had totally superseded the tables of independent merchants, this was a moment of social consciousness for otaku media, though perhaps more of an inevitable manifest to its zealots. for one of the first times, akiba was blowing out the computer dust to reveal a fresh, moe face.

twenty five years ago, the akiba station of yesteryear is almost entirely unrecognizable from what even a local would be familiar with today. looking in from the electric town exit (the one you probably meant to leave from instead of the other two), there are about half as many ticket gates to pass through. the brown tones of this old exterior look almost wood-aged, before the entrance would be pushed back to create additional space to meet up with friends outside. beyond the ticket gate, the singular staircase where multi was placed led up to the platform stairways that still flank today at each side, before there was a widened concourse that gave territory to country vegetables, walk-in salons, and pillars with digital signboards of fuyuko. the central gate exit wasn't here yet either, with there not being any yodobashi camera to visit or tsukuba express to ride, and there was no escalator that brought you directly to the showa dori gate exit — you had to first ascend up to the third floor platforms, only to then come back down. multi's arrival was contrarily not welcomed with the flurry of attention that would beget these station expansions, or even a deresute JR campaign, but as a bubbling ambience in a neighborhood that was undergoing rapid development in all corners. the dejiko building would arrive a few months after to pose for photos and to fully qualify akiba with an otaku signpost, but multi disappeared under regular commuter congestion at what was an awkward chokepoint for glamour shots. no one snapped her photo for their blogs, or to report about it on akiba PC hotline. instead, the surviving evidence of her existence is thanks, mostly, to one fanatic with a personal site. akiba's enduring myth, as an oasis for the socially fringe outcasts, has always been seeded from the obsessives like this that have imagined an enclave that supported their niche interests, and as one that couldn't be intruded upon. that mythos, along with reactive commercial interests, are what have arguably stewarded akihabara through a strong cultural boom that is still reverberating today.

twenty five years into the future, that identity is increasingly scrutinized and doubted. with the retreat of toranoana, the shuffling of traders harkening back to its blossoming out of the then defunct messe sanoh, and the shuttering of key landmarks over the past few years, there has been plenty to doom and gloom over akiba's health for the otaku that supervised it over a boom period. some, rightfully, may characterize it now as a tourist trap. talk with the hobbyists still around from the PC revolution a generation prior, though, and they'll gladly bemoan that moe was already the extinction event for them, even as they set up the scaffolding for it. akiba, more honest to any other identity it is known for, is the site of culture under transition, from produce market to electronics district. it's an insecurity and inevitability that seems emblazoned in the swath of otaku media that still regale it, grappling with diverging timelines and butterfly effects that see it erased of its moe history, and is one that is being retreaded through a nostalgic lens as much of the otaku luster has begun to wear from it. readers and watchers of these works, meanwhile, are vanishingly likely to have ever ventured up to the top floor of the old radio kaikan building, where a gaping hole is left in it during steins gate, to have seen a glimmering plaque from the long defunct bit-inn tokyo, a satellite NEC sales office, that once celebrated itself as the birthplace of personal computers. from 1998 to 2003, almost every shop in that building, once the crown jewel of the electronics district, would be displaced by hobbyist shops like volks, k books, and yellow submarine. that old radio kaikan, before it was relocated to a new building across from the electric town exit, fittingly celebrated the diverging wordline on its last day; dejiko as a defacto mascot, overlooking chuo dori, was always going to be subject to the same fate. the pachinko parasite, which also snuck in the door alongside her, will probably be more likely to outlive it all.

today, the chaos has dissipated. animate has absorbed half of the vacant space from the shops that have fled. the surviving junk shops, resiliant as they are, continue to retreat from the sunshine that peeked in from back alleys into basements further underground. even the maids, like the fly-by-night tables hawking bootleg cartridges before them, can no longer tout without being subject to the same sort of police scrutiny. today, it's still akiba. at least, it'll always feel as such, for as long as the kebab shops continue to hang around.

this is an hour or two long narrative game about two college students who tried to take a stab at game dev in their adult life. the game's writing is very plain and the graphics aren't flashy at all, but that's intentional:

it's depicting the ebb and flow of indie game dev life without any attempts to go beyond the premise.

the narrative is framed around storylets of the two characters meeting up and trying to work together. however, their story is not a fairytale story of success. the characters struggle to get their game published because the programmer wants to make games that's to their taste -- and you know what, good for them since everyone's making the same kind of popular game out there.

but that's hell you're walking into. making an indie game that follows the trends isn't easy to begin with; making a retro game that doesn't have anything modern won't cut it. throughout the game, you get some interactivity in the form of a retro platformer called BLOCKS on a gameboy. you don't have to beat the game, but it's quite a challenging puzzle platformer if you do and it makes you wonder who would play this game outside of the narrative game context.

and well, aren't we part of the problem then? the reason these people are having a difficult time making the game? etc.

GOODBYE WORLD is a melancholic game that doesn't present any salvation for indie game developers who choose the hobbyist side of things. and i think that's great. i've seen people discuss this as an "important" game in reviews, but i don't like that adjective since it makes the game sound like a cultural vegetable you have to eat someday. nah, i just think it's awesome that a game can be this bitter without compensating at all and it's something i like to see more.

in a way, this is a glorified itch personal game marketed at audiences that primarily use steam and consoles, but i quite like the framing and the characters resonate with me. it's not going to appear on my top games list, but i'm glad to have played this short game and it left me with an impression that makes me think about how i approach game dev not as a commercial venture but as an interpersonal relations space. i made friends in game dev, but i also feel concerned that said friends will judge me based on the games i made.

it's difficult and i think that's why the game works for me. i hope more people play it.

p.s. if you know japanese, the IGN Japan review is worth reading as it is a sympathetic read on the game and it makes me wish more japanese people could play personal games from itchio:

Cirnozardry is a freeware DRPG made by doujin developer Morisoba. Released in 2014 and translated by an anonymous 4chan poster in 2022 (really!), it seems to be all but completely unknown in the West. I think that’s a real shame: it’s a solid game with some of the best and most consistent dungeon design I’ve ever seen, easily beating out the vast majority of commercial DRPGs.

I always find it hard to put dungeon design into words, but if you’re familiar with the genre, you’ll have experienced games that get it and games that don’t. Cirnozardry gets it. Each floor is cohesive yet internally varied, never giving way to cacophony or formula; each floor is big enough to explore and get lost in, but not so large that it becomes a slog or runs out of ideas (hello, Mary Skelter). Unlike many DRPGs, including most Wizardry clones, floors are also quite dense: events and treasure chests (usually with good items; eat your heart out, Experience Inc.!) are everywhere. It’s reminiscent of Etrian Odyssey in that way.

The dungeon is always challenging and often mean, but almost never unfair: a one-way door on the first floor drops you into the game’s first Dark Zone*, but if you get lost, there are multiple ways back to the light; there are secret doors aplenty and a near-mandatory one on the third floor, but they follow the symmetry principle and an attentive player should be able to find nearly all of them. With neither an ingame map nor a way to see your coordinates (something even the original Wizardry had!), silent teleporters feel a bit unfair, but they aren’t overused.

What’s more, the variety between floors is excellent. 2F is a tricky maze; 3F is a monster apartment complex; 4F is a brutal mapping puzzle that is mercifully optional (if you found the hidden door on the last floor, at least). Claustrophobic 7F gives way to wide-open 8F.

The combat system is unremarkable (if you’ve ever played an RPG Maker 2000 game before, you know what to expect), but the playable characters are well-designed: Cirnozardry excels at differentiation within a niche. For example, opening treasure chests without triggering traps requires a thief-type character in the party, of which two are available from the start. The first, Nazrin, is a terrible combatant with awful skills and poor equipment options, but with a completely unique ability: an overhead view of the dungeon.

The other, Kogasa, lacks this ability but has better stats, helpful in-combat skills, and the ability to equip heavy weapons and armor: in short, she can actually contribute in combat. In this way, Cirnozardry throws a bone to people who struggle with mapping without giving them a free lunch.

When it comes to presentation, Cirnozardry takes a turn for the strange. Wireframe dungeons give way to the usual RPGMaker battle screen and, occasionally, overhead-view cutscenes. Sprites are a mix of WolfRPG resources and assets ripped from other games. When you kill an enemy, they play the player death sound from Touhou; each floor’s BGM is taken from a different Touhou stage. An unseen audience cheers when you find a rare treasure chest and gasps when you trigger a trap or fall down a pit. This strange collage works extremely well in practice if you can tolerate a little bit of clash.

So Cirnozardry is an excellent game. But there’s one caveat: it’s very, very punishing. Most obviously, there’s absolutely no ingame map; you have to draw your own. Floor sizes and starting locations are inconsistent, so I can’t recommend paper—you’re liable to go over the edge of the sheet. I used Graph Paper, a Japanese tool with a functional machine-translated English release whose name makes it almost impossible to Google in English; it’s linked at the bottom of this post.

The economy can be brutal. Reviving characters is incredibly expensive; your income never outscales the fees (imagine early-game Wizardry 1 if it were the entire game), nor does any character learn a resurrection spell. This is compounded by an unfortunate lack of money: random encounters drop no gold and treasure chests from respawning fixed ones drop gold or an item, not both (and when they drop gold, it’s always a bizarrely small quantity). The only way to stay afloat is to aggressively sell items, which can feel bad if you’re the sort of person who likes to keep one copy of anything.

This also intensifies the strange dichotomy of hallway battles and room battles. Without the pittance of gold afforded them in Wizardry and the like, hallway battles feel like a complete waste of resources and effort. So fine, seek out room battles—except that a handful of floors, most egregiously 5F, have large areas with almost none of them. Exploring these areas feels unrewarding, and if you keep dying, you might have to take a break to grind rooms to afford Eirin’s revival fees.

So: if you can stomach manual mapping and money trouble, go play Cirnozardry. If you can’t, read on as I spoil the final segment of the game.

After ten floors of relatively normal exploration, you take on the Shining Needle Castle, a brutal three-floor gauntlet with a Final Fantasy VI-like multi-party system. Here’s where the game asks you to form a second team and use eight of its eleven characters, and where you become very grateful that it has two healers. This doesn’t entail a grind—characters not in the party always receive full XP from battle, and, unless you’ve gone crazy with the sell button, there should be enough gear to go around—but if you’ve used the same four characters for most of the game, you’re going to have to experiment with the ones you haven’t.

Like in FFVI, you can swap between parties with a button press, and progressing often requires one party to step on a switch that lifts a gate somewhere else. Unlike in FFVI, this takes place in a nightmare labyrinth that’s tricky even to map. Eventually, you’ll unlock a switch that opens a shortcut from 1F to 2F, followed by one that opens 3F for business.

3F offers a different sort of challenge. It’s small and easy to explore—the stairs to the final boss are straight down south, and the switch that opens them for business is a few steps north—and it doesn’t have any real two-party switch puzzles. Instead, it hosts five minibosses, each of whom grants the final boss a special skill and respawns whenever you enter the dungeon. Naturally, a party that fights all the minibosses won’t be in any shape to take on the final boss, so you once again have to use both parties: one to do the prepwork, the other to fight the final boss with its resources intact. (A conveniently-placed save crystal means you don’t need to redo the minibosses every attempt.)

Or, of course, you can take on the final boss with its skills intact. That’s what I did, and it wasn’t terribly hard; I beat it on my second try after taking too many level-draining (!) attacks at the start of the first. The game gives you more than enough tools to make it work.
Go play Cirnozardry. More people need to know about this game.

Creator’s website: http://tktkokiba.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-50.html
Fan translation: https://archive.org/details/cirnozardry-english-translation
Graph Paper: https://graphpaper-news.blogspot.com/2022/09/1.html

*For the unfamiliar, a Dark Zone is an area in which the player is completely blind, forcing them to rely on two things: their map, and the sound that plays when they hit a wall.