Progress report: March ‘23 (a.k.a. No Thoughts, Head Empty)

I got back into watching anime! It’s been fun so far, but my self-inflicted insistence to watch everything with no subtitles (unless they’re in Japanese, I suppose; it’s good that I prefer slice of life stories) makes me want to watch a Chinese or Korean series, just to be able to take a break. (There are a few Korean series in particular that I’ve enjoyed over the years, they just hit different.) Other than that, not much of note: school, school and more school. Not even Easter’s gonna heal these wounds.

Here are this month’s assassinations:

• 100 hidden mushrooms
  

  0.1 hours playtime

  100 of 100 achievements

• Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink
  

  2.7 hours playtime

  19 of 19 achievements

• Kawaii Neko Girls
  

  3.4 hours playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

• King's Heir: Rise to the Throne
  

  2.8 hours playtime

  17 of 18 achievements

• Pretty Girls Klondike Solitaire
  

  1.9 hours playtime

  15 of 15 achievements

• Sakura Spirit
  

  2.3 hours playtime

  no achievements

• The Franz Kafka Videogame
  

  2.5 hours playtime

  12 of 12 achievements

100 hidden mushrooms - No, really, what else do you want me to say about these?

Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink - Another one of those HOGs that animate the character models to look like they’re speaking… I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t feel like static sprites are lacking in emotion, so much so that I would rather have a creepily animated one. Oh well. This one’s set in a vaguely German town and despite the steampunk theme, I don’t feel like it pulled me in very much. I remember liking Modern Tales: Age of Invention more (I suppose you could say the plot/setting is sort of similar?). The voice acting is also of dubious quality, though that can be explained as someone down the line lacking time or money - the additional voices were provided by people on the dev team… and it’s impossible not to hear. I don’t necessarily think it was a bad game, I’m just really “meh” about it.

Kawaii Neko Girls - This one saw an achievement update due to a small DLC release, as well as a sequel release. The DLC is stupid, it’s meant to unlock nude versions of the images, but they also locked one girl behind it (just to spite completionists, I guess). There’s also an achievement for spending three whole hours in the game, which… why. Really, just… why? Most of the game is free and even after the DLC, I was done with everything in about 50 minutes. And don’t even get me started on the donation achievement… it seems a few people thought that to unlock it, you need to buy one of the donation DLCs. I thought so as well at first (even though they also reported the achievement not unlocking), but then I tried clicking around the game, and… the achievement unlocked as I clicked the “donate” button. Way to confuse your players! I bought the donation DLC in the Spring Sale, so as of writing this, I am still waiting for a refund. Hopefully this will save someone from throwing away their money! (Not that I have anything against supporting developers, but I don’t think I’m the only one who enjoys getting to play games specifically like these for free.)

King’s Heir: Rise to the Throne - It’s been a while since I completed a HOG! Like, way too long! This one’s set in England and follows two brothers, who get framed for the murder of the current king. How will they prove their innocence? Well, one of them just so happens to be the heir to the throne! I enjoy this kind of setting and the swordfighting minigame is a pretty cool concept (although the shapes to trace get stupid big very early), but then the devs totally crossed the line with their “finish a HOG scene in less than 20 seconds”… I’m sorry, what? A bunch of the games have one for finishing within a minute, which is tough, but still doable, but 20 seconds? Madness… and the only reason I don’t have all achievements in the game yet. I’ll… be trying to get it.

Pretty Girls Klondike Solitaire - Naturally, I bought this one for the novelty of “anime solitaire? heck yeah!”, even if this isn’t the first game I played from these devs, but… man, was this annoying. They really just slap anime girls (which, fun fact, are all heroines from R-rated VNs) on game concepts that are simple on the surface, only to remove a mechanic or two in favor of artificially extending the playtime. This time around, undoing moves is a no-go, which… is a choice, alright. Easy difficulty is a breeze, but Medium and Hard become tedious for no reason other than the devs want you to suffer. Thankfully, this game didn’t take too long to complete, so… I guess I’ll be a slave to these for a while longer.

Sakura Spirit - Something something about a guy aiming to become a judo master, something match something pray for luck and suddenly, he’s in another world with blade-wielding girls and fox spirits… who are also girls. It’s exactly the kind of thing that dude who’s the first to argue about best waifu or the semantics of “translation” vs “localization”, but also writes “sorry my English not good” at the end of every message would read. The premise isn’t anything groundbreaking, especially almost 10 years later, when half the seasonal anime chart is filled with near-identical isekai stories, not to mention the already cliche and trope-y harem aspect; what makes it a miserable experience is how weeaboo it all reads. Most egregiously, characters address each other using Japanese suffixes, but there are also other words or phrases which are just so anime that there’s no way this was created for any other target audience than the one I just described. Apparently, the first version of this game read so much more poorly than the current one does, too; glad I wasn’t exposed to that atrocity. I may have somewhat enjoyed this when I bought it back in 2016, but now it’s possibly the worst written OELVN that also happens to look decent. Sadly, we’re living in one of those timelines where this universe has expanded beyond belief, and so I guess by proxy that means we’re inevitably exposed to that much more of this crap. I’ll at least try to get through the games I already own, can’t promise anything in regards to the rest.

The Franz Kafka Videogame - I’ll start by saying that I am not very familiar with Kafka’s works - I only read one book of his (and no, it wasn’t Metamorphosis), so besides “the vibes” I didn’t really get anything (assuming there was anything “to be gotten”). Head to toes, the presentation of this game makes it seem like a mobile port - it’s very clearly split into levels, with the opening screens to each act scrolling only by pulling the scrollbar (as opposed to just using the scroll wheel) and hints locked behind a time limit (super anti-player, but at least you don’t have to pay for them, amirite?). The whole game took me just under an hour (with external hints, that is), but then I had to spend over an hour to get the “use hints on every level” achievement… tell me you want me to play your game for over 2 hours without telling me you want me to play your game for over 2 hours. They manage to hold up the whole refined aesthetic of calm music and muted colors through most of the game… and then the ending sequence, I kid you not, is an explosive guitar track. And then the “Special Thanks to Franz Kafka” shows up… I don’t know, the dissonance is just uncanny. Any idea how Kafka himself would feel about that? ‘Cause it sure feels like one of those things that would make the person roll in their grave.

See you… next month… tired sigh