2021 a Retrospectivaganza®

Usually I prefer to restrict my retrospectives to only new content from the year I’m writing about, and I know that by straying from that this year it will seem like I just didn’t consume enough 2021 media to write a post. But I already did that for 2021 back in early 2019 so I’m turningthis into a Retrospectivaganza© instead. I will of course cover games but I’ll also dip into manga, music, and maybe even movies! I’ll do my best to keep everything coherent but I can’t promise anything. Music to read to or alternatively this

Oh yeah and of course a FAIR WARNING this Retrospectivaganza™ will talk about works that deal with everything from sexual abuse to suicide, I won’t go in dept about any of this content but just be aware pls thanks.

2021 in GAMING

It’s not exactly a secret that I’m a huge eroguro sicko and a Black Cyc fangirl, as evident by my last post on this blog from oh God a year ago huh I’m sorry. While I still haven’t fully completed their entire library but I finished a large chunk of their catalogue in late 2020 and early 2021, kicking off 2021 with Mugen Kairou originally released in 2005 and written by like 5 different people, with the planning and draft done by a sixth. I’m also not familiar with any non-Mugen Kairou work done by any of them. You don’t really need to be a hardcore erogamerhead (official termonology for novel game enthusiasts) to see all these red flags but since I’m a helpless fanboy I decided to give it a shot and oh man, Mugen Kairou is quite the experience I’m not sure where to start.

Mugen Kairou is a, I want to say existential horror story but I think that conjures up the wrong image, it’s definitely in part a horror experience and at its core very existential though. As the “mugen” (infinite) in the title implies it is of course a loop game but rather than focus on actions and their consequences Mugen Kairou focuses on perception and it’s here the horror elements come in. What separates the loops isn’t how the protagonist acts but rather how he percieves reality. The game keeps you questioning what is real, if anything, and I think the too many cooks situation with the writers almost helps in creating this constant unease. Another core concept to the game is identity as the protagonist lacks one and would rather give up his humanity and become a dog than go through the painful process of having to define himself. In other words reject humanity return to dog. Mugen Kairou is easily one of the real deal Black Cyc classics and manages to be a fun and interesting both horror and philosophical piece despite or maybe thanks to the myriad writers. The sequel which is written and planned by one of the writers of the original is not too hot however. Where the original left you lost and confused about what was intentional, and where the gaps made you ponder all the questions the game raised… the sequel is kind of the wikipedia “themes” section of the original. The sequel goes as far as straight up having a character point out that “wow this just like society” unironically. The original slaps though hard recommend.

I managed to finish the Mugen Kairou “series” just in time for the release of Dead End Aegis not strictly a Black Cyc game but featuring art (and probably direction) by Ueda Metawo (the artist, director, and planner for a solid chunk of Black Cyc games) and also the Black Cyc engine including the sick unlockable minigames. Writing however wasn’t handled by a Black Cyc staple but instead by Marutani Hideto. At the time I was unfamiliar with Marutani’s body of work other than of course having heard about France Shoujo’s infamous length and production issues so I was skeptical to say the least, fully expecting the game to be little more than nasty porn. What I ended up getting was easily my top release of the year and a game good enough to completely transform me into a Marutani fanboy.

Dead End Aegis is a game that perfectuly captures the spirit of an era, it’s a modern coming of age story. I did a tweet chain on the game shortly after finishing it and I still want to do a fully fledged proper post on it but I’ll try my best to give a quick lil peek at it. Dead End Aegis is a game about a brave and ambitious girl finally achieving her dream of fighting for humanity. She fights through constant suffering and abuse and is slowly but surely disillusioned as she is forced to face the fact that there is no greater benefit for humanity from her suffering, that she’s just part of a system designed to torture her and people like her. She realises that her initial struggle between being a “normal girl” or a “hero soldier” were just picking between two forms of systematic abuse. Eventually she wonders if even if the shared threat to humanity was real if humanity would even be worth saving. The game criticises everything from the military industrial workplace to the handling of sexual abuse in the work place. It’s difficult for me not to call this a feminist work even if it might have not been the intention. The main character seeing through the grand narratives building a false community to maintain the social hirearchy is not only the feminist blackpill since it’s in large part about the systematic abuse of women in Dead End Aegis but also a struggle I think basically anyone growing up right now has to face. How do I find meaning within a system I know is hateful and that I have very little ability to change? Now so far this all sounds real grim and it is, I found myself kind of passively crying through a lot of the game BUT, the Moon ending offers some very well needed catharsis and gave me a boost of desperately needed good brain chemicals. It’s an empowering game which does feel a bit weird to say considering how much of it is about girls being robbed of their autonomy. There’s a lot more to the game, for example international politics, which I didn’t touch on here so maybe someday I’ll write a full post but preferably go read the game and see for yourself instead! If you can stomach some really nasty nonconsensual sexual content as well as quite a lot of violence both sexual and not sexual it’s an easy to recommend to anyone living in PRESENT DAY, heh.

Having finished Dead End Aegis and being unsure how much of the magic was it being (basically) a Black Cyc game and how much was Marutani I decided to, half as a joke, dive into the infamous France Shoujo (official page is dead so have a vndb link). Despite having loved Dead End Aegis my brain was filled with nothing but the rumours and memes around the game so I went in expecting a mess. How could a game with 48 endings not be right?

So France Shoujo is easily one of my favourite eroge of all time. If Dead End Aegis is a lot to write about then France Shoujo would require a doctoral thesis. My initial thoughts upon completition ended up being far beyond discord’s character limit on their own. I don’t wish to make my thoughts on the game the majority of this blogpost so I’ll be super brief instead. France Shoujo is a piece of existentialist fiction that rivals my favourite book Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, if this sounds like an insane exaggeration that is because it’s my genuine feelings and feelings are wild like that you know? France Shoujo deals with an insane range of topics but is also a very coherent whole, some of the endings are only there to account for slight variations in choices but most of them are fully fledged thematically appropriate endings that are unique but manage to all tie into the core ideas of the game. When you see a game this open you expect that it will have to compromise, that at some point it’s going to be a bit inconsistent or conflict with itself. France Shoujo does not do this. France Shoujo has a fully realised world view that is not compromised. If you were to ask me what France Shoujo is about I would probably start rambling incoherently and then get embarrassed so please don’t. Since you didn’t ask though I think a pretty core idea to France Shoujo is objectification. Wether it’s about wanting to become an object to escape the harsh pressure to define oneself, or the desire to degrade someone else into an object to have power and ownership over, or if it’s the percieved PURITY of an object, there’s a lot. It’s an incredibly realised work in every way including the stunning presentation. The use of clashing visuals, God the use of sounds tied into the poetry of the work God. I could just go on and on about this game I’m sorry!! France Shoujo is a titan of a game so it’s not an easy thing to recommend. It takes a lot of time and brain space to work through but I absolutely think it should be considered a classic of the medium. The community narrative around the game is kind of strange to me since in terms of actual length it’s outdone by a lot of popular games. The very open choice system is definitely a bit intimidating and I don’t believe there’s a complete walkthrough to the game still but the fully patched version has guides for all the endings and it’s not a hassle to get them, not that you need to get every single ending anyway since the numbered ones are just accounting for choice variations. Personally I find the choice system pretty amazing, writing the game must have been a Herculean task. I believe there’s a handful of continuity errors that can happen but they’re rare and very minor. There’s always multiple ways to end up on a route from various points in time, sometimes you can switch from one route to another, it’s so open it’s kind of insane. For the most part the choices are all very impactful, appropriate, and interesting too. Even the choice to buy a goldfish has a huge thematic importance you get to unravel and explore. One section of the game in particular ends up with a lot of similar and repeated choices though and I could definitely see this section being the bane of many a reader but it’s absolutely a game worth finishing. I’m genuinely considering a reread which might say more about my lack of sanity than the quality of the game.

Going to cut myself short there to prevent further rambling and move on to another game I want to highlight. Is this one also an interesting existenial piece? No. It’s a furry porn game.

Kinosei or Haruki no Saidai no Teki wa Risei. is an indie (or doujin if you’re gonna be a dork about it) game released by the circle Toki Nokogiri in September 2021 with the aim of being a fully realised all furry heroine nukige (game you especially jack off to) that commercial games won’t deliver. The game fully delivers on this premise. The presentation is very professional and the game features art by some of the most notable artists in the Japanese furry scene, names that would make any furry pog out of their fuzzy little gourd. The stated goal of the game is to plan for the perfect study date. The system is a classic map movement and time management combination that I tend to get a bit frustrated with in older games but I found it generally really fun to try to get a PERFECT RUN (which funnily enough requires not getting any sex scenes). After you’ve filed on your schedule the game also features achivements to encourage trying to get various meme runs to work. Now the unstated real goal of the game once you’re done gaming is of course to do the sex with the nice furry ladies smell and hair nice booba good. When in a dangerously horny situation you’re presented with minigames which get harder depending on how horned up the softboy protagonist is, if you’re done gaming you ofc want to fail these. Every guest artist heroine gets her own scene and ending, CG count varies a bit but all the sex scenes are animated and juicy. Now I hear you “Zodi what does this game offer me if I’m not a furry?” and please go ahead and just bookmark the title in your brain for when you realise you are in fact a furry and thank me later.

Okay let’s jump way way back in time to the 00s (pronounced “naughties”) and to the now gone eroge brand Crossnet (later Apricot). If you’re not familiar they’re the brand behind Ayakashi, if you’re still not familiar they’re the brand behind the Maple Colors games (vndb) which I’m about to talk about, if you’re still not familiar you must be an eroge zoomer so please don’t leave just because these games are OLD I promise they’re totally radical and friggin sick dude.

Maple Colors 2 is the sequel to Maple Colors and I think it’ll be funnier if I only talk about the sequel so that’s what I’m going to do. Like the original the game is about a boy transferring to a new school and ending up in a class of outcasts and having to help bring them together to win the school festival. As a 00s crossnet game the presentation is insane. For Maple Colors 2 the CG count has gone down a bit and the lip flapping has been removed but the deft use of sprites breathes even more movement and life into it than the original. The old crossnet games probably have what I’d consider the best presentation quality in eroge. The clever use of sprites and CGs makes it feel more animated than animation ever could, they’re truly the Ningyō jōruri of eroge. In other words they look nice. When I picked up the Maple Colors games I was in a pretty bad place and needed something that would manage to produce good chemicals in my even dry old brain and I honestly couldn’t have made a better choice. Maple Colors 2 is just pure unabashed fun, most of the game has aged very well with a couple of exceptions for some iffy jokes which to be fair wouldn’t be out of place in modern eroge either. The gameplay suffered some sacrifices from the original as it’s more linear and less of an adventure game, the minigames are also generally a bit easier. These sacrifices were kind of necessary though for the new focus on the extended cast, a focus the original was severely lacking in. I love all my little freaks but more than any of them I adore the absolute gremlin queen that is Yuka. When having a quick peek at a walkthrough to make sure I wasn’t missing any side content I noticed the walkthrough writer offered a warning. The game has three main routes each with an additional split between two heroines for a total of six heroines… That is except for one of the three which did not feature this heroine split. The walkthrough writer said not to get your hopes up since there is no Yuka route split. My head was filled with the toxic eroge-brain feeling of “tfw best girl no route”, then I got to the Yuka not-route.

Instead of a route split the theatre arc, which stars the heroines Haruka and Yuka, has Haruka be the only heroine with Yuka playing a major supporting role. Upon finishing the route you get an epilogue where you first have to complete a series of minigames on hard mode, which was a pretty fun challenge more like the tougher minigames of the original. Once all the minigames have been beaten you start the Yuka not-route which yes is set chronologically after Haruka’s route. Yuka is an aromantic girl and the kicking off point to her route is her questioning what separates a friend from a romantic partner other than sex. Now generally with this kind of set up I expect the big strong boy protagonist to teach the girl what love is and make her into a good wife or whatever. Eroge, well moege in particular, have a pretty severe problem in treating heroines who are norm breaking as having a problem that is usually solved by cock in puss straight intercourse followed by a holy monogamous marriage. Yuka’s not-route however is not a route. The protagonist, who is my son by the way, do some pretend dating according to a script written by Yuka which leads to a lot of silly hijinks with the whole gang. In the end though Yuka is still aromantic and gets to live her own best life according to her own desires. There’s a confrontation and a moment of reflection but the issue raised isn’t her norm breaking. Not giving Yuka a route was the best possible move they could have done and I was really surprised and impressed. Now I don’t think the game was trying to be #woke #based #acepilled but breaking standard form for the sake of a character shows a lot of care and love.

I uh also played some other games but nothing I can think of to highlight really. Like there was some good stuff but I don’t think I have anything interesting to say about it. I guess my take that Cartagra is really funny (intentionally) is probably not too popular but I don’t have much to say about it other than the jokes were good. Asagao wa Ai o Shiranai. was pretty cute and good. I read some other Black Cyc games I want to talk about but I’ll have to just do like a big Black Cyc post sometime. Some good indie eroge as well but nothing to highlight here really, I might have to do a followup to my post on the SEQUEL series covering the games that have come out but I feel like there’s probably people who know the series and world better than I do now!

2021 in BOPS

I think the only time I’ve really discussed music on this blog was in retrospective highlighting the Croak Not Rue EP Hotchpotch Hitoribocchi but it wouldn’t be a real 2021 retrospective if I didn’t talk about music. Had a bit of a rough year in terms of both physical and mental health so I’ve spent a lot of time just lying down listening to music and I think the moods I’ve been in have really affected my listening. My music listening in 2021 can be separated into two key aesthetics. One is a kind of concrete romantic reality, tennis shoes and canned coffee kind of vibes. The other is “menhera” which is a derogatory term for someone suffering from bad mental health, usually, if not only, targeted at women. The term has been reclaimed and used as a way to talk about mental health but it’s also been aestheticised but for good and for bad. The aestheticisation of bad mental health is of course not a uniquley Japanese thing but since the bands I’ll be talking about have self described themselves with the term “menhera” it’s what I’ll be using. The discussion of what is representation and what is fetishisation, and what fetishisation is harmless or harmful is for sure an interesting one but not really in the scope of a retrospective.

Pretty early in the year I stumbled upon an artist of the second category, like with almost all music I listen to I found the songs in the recommendations of my music streaming service which I won’t name since they’re not sponsoring me. Milky Way is a self described “Upper menhera”, upperin the sense of how drugs can be uppers and downers not in a sense of being of higher class or quality. Her music has a strong classic rock influence with some rad guitar riffs and often an upbeat tempo, but where she really shines is through her raw lyrics and vocals often expressing real experienced trauma such as bullying. Her songs work through some very complex emotions which shine through her vocal performances. I’m not a big music reviewer man so I’ll just link one of her recent music videos if you’re curious.

In the first category I’ve been into the band yonige ever since I first heard them as the opening band at a tricot show in Nagoya in 2019. When I think of sneakers on asphalt and lukewarm canned coffee I think of yonige. Wanting to find more bands with a similar sound lead me to discover TETORA and Hump Back. At this point I was so deep in the three piece girl’s rock band pit that I was worried I’d never be able to listen to a band with four members again. Eventually I found my way back to yonige however with their latest EP sanzensekai which is easily the best thing they’re released so far. From start to end it’s all bangers. That good good concrete romantic realism is still there but they’ve evolved their sound and play around with it more. The music video to the opening track is a short film that I’ll just let speak for itself if you want to check it out.

Now the most interesting musical discovery I’ve made this year is without a doubt Tokyo Renbo, I’ll link their twitter since their homepage is… it’s a thing for sure. Tokyo Renbo was again recommended to me through the mysterious algorithm of the music streaming service I use despite having only one similar band listed: Shinsei Kamattechan, a band that while I’m aware of I don’t actually listen to so I sadly can’t comment on their similarities. Tokyo Renbo film their own music videos for all their songs, including ones they haven’t and might never put out on albums, and their by far most viewed one on youtube with 38k views is a song about cough syrup abuse. The comments are of course full of people talking about how they come to listen to the song when they’re on cough syrup. The band describe themselves as a “garbage human” band and it’s hard to really put a genre or sound to them since they switch between cheery lowfi electronic instrumentals to heavy guitar riffs, sometimes even for different versions of the same song. Their mantra of being a “garbage human” band shines through no matter if they’re doing a rap, a ballad, or a punk track though, and their aesthetic is… I’d say coherently chaotic. Even if they’re not always musically punk they’re spiritually as punk as punk gets but also firmly grounded in PRESENT TIME! hahahahaha! It’s hard to pick one song to give a good idea of what the band is like so I’ll just link one of my favourite recent music videos and the whole playlist .

I’ve found and listened to a lot of other music this year as well but again as with the games you kind of have to pick what to highlight for a retrospective. I don’t think I’ve written about this on the blog before but I’m a pretty big fan of the Japanese electronic music producer yunomi and he’s had a pretty cool change in style in 2021 doing some more experimental stuff even with his vtuber collabs. YUC’e and toriena have also released some real bangers if we’re talking Japanese electronic music. Also found myself becoming a fan of the Denonbu tracks with Tama Kurogane vocals (I don’t know who or what to link here I don’t fully comprehend the idea of having like a fictional anime character universe of EDM albums). Even if I’ve been on a j-rock kick I always find myself going back to my electronic roots even with the denpa genre being mostly dead at this point. Ready for the fourth wave of ska and denpa revival in 2022.

2021 in COMICS

Alright so I haven’t read a ton of manga in 2021 just going to be honest with you upfront. The two things I have read I want to highlight though so they’re getting their own section anyway!!

Miyazaki Natsujikei is one of my favourite mangaka so this isn’t a wowie new discovery but I’d like to talk a lil bit about her latest series Anata wa Bun-chan no Koi, which started publication before 2021 but it had two volumes released out of the three so far in 2021 so I’m gonna count it as a 2021 release. Now I’ve only read the first two volumes so far but they’re good enough that I feel like I need to highlight them even before the series is done. Miyazaki’s works are what I’d call emotional realism, they’re usually surreal in both story and visuals but the elements that are heightened from a literal physical perspective show an emotional reality. Bun-chan is slightly toned down and grounded compared to Miyazaki’s anthology style works but hits even harder. Bun-chan is a love triangle but rather than focusing on just relationship drama it focuses on the emotional experience of the titular protagonist Bun-chan. It’s a painfully real read which reminds me a lot of Miyazaki’s earlier work Yuugata made ni kaeru yo which up until the release of Bun-chan was perhaps my favourite work of her’s. If you haven’t checked out any of Miyazaki’s works please do they’re all amazing and while Bun-chan isn’t complete yet it’s an easy recommendation from me.

It’s no secret that I have been fully transfurmed into a nyanbinary yiffreak at this point and through Japanese furry twitter (which is great and full of amazing artists btw) I discovered a lil twitter comic called kemofujin (I believe the artist, whom I’ll call Fujisou but they have an endless amount of pen names, likes the translation “madame beast”). The comic absolutely blew up and at this an official publication has been announced as well as an ASMR version which I’m… still not quite sure how you turn a comic into ASMR but I guess I’ll find out eventually. What got me into the comic was of course the cute furry hitoduma (married woman) protagonist but when I dug into Fujisou’s earlier works I very quickly became a fan beyond the long muzzle of madame beast. I’d like to give their work a more proper write up someday and I’ve only read a small chunk of their pretty large bibliography so I will try to do a quick intro and touch a bit extra on the works I find especially interesting.

Fujisou experiments a lot with the limits of the comic medium, and since they aren’t a professional artist and use their manga as a way to practice they also experiment a lot stylistically. Neko-chan no Chou Bouken, which I wrote a twitter chain on a bit ago is a good example of this since it consists of a couple of very distinct parts. Neko-chan begins with a personal journey expressed mostly through expressions. The chapter is an exploration of an alien landscape but has a tight focus on the protagonist and her loneliness. This then leads into a hard science fiction chapter about a conflict of two ideologically different camps of super (cat) humans. Which then leads into a chapter of poetry. Which then leads into another hard science fiction chapter but this time focusing both on a character’s loneliness and the construction of a system. Which then finally leads us to a chapter about going out and getting some nice food with your best friend. The parts are all distinct in presentation, focus, style, and genre but form a whole as a piece on lonliness and communication and also a story of a relationship between two people (despite the chapters often not sharing casts). Fujisou works a lot with scale and seems very much interested in how everything is built up by a series of smaller complex systems. Neko-chan is both a small story about a lonely lil cat girl and a grand narrative about humanity and how we attempt to connect with each other. Neko-chan quickly became a new favourite manga of mine but I feel like I have to move on and talk about another of Fujisou’s works to get their focus on shifting scales and intricate systems across.

Ark Azana will be hard to describe without sounding insane. Unlike Neko-chan the genre is consistently yuri hard science fiction throughout but it’s not at all what you’d expect from seeing that combination of genre words. Ark Azana is not a science fiction story combined with a lesbian romance story, Ark Azana is a hard science fiction description about the creation and evolution of a system that is sustained through a process similar to metabolism except it consumes girls and produces yuri (as well as waste products in the form of for example high school graduation degrees). The yuri powered system grows more and more complex and through it the universe is discoverd. Like Neko-chan there’s a core idea of human communication but Ark Azana isn’t really about any characters, instead it’s about how perception creates the universe and how language affects perception. I don’t know if Ark Azana can be called a story in the traditional sense. It does kind of have a protagonist and a lot of the manga consists of interviews with her but more than a character she is a representation of the force of yuri. She is also just a girl and an aspiring yuri creator but primarily she is a force of nature. There’s also not really a plot? It’s more of an exploration or a study than it is a story. There are story elements for sure but they take the backseat. What it reminded me the most of is the Alien Biospheres series of speculative evolution videos by Biblaridon, seeing the system evolve is a pretty clear parallel to the evolution of life. Unlike speculative evolution videos though the system can also read as a societal system and then beyond that is the greater philosophical look at language and communication. Ark Azana is a lot, like just a whole lot. I love Neko-chan more because of the personal and emotional aspects of it but Ark Azana is for sure the wildest thing I’ve read from Fujisou so far which… really does say a lot.

2021 in conclusion

Okay so I was considering doing a section for movies as well since I’ve had the pleasure of watching a nice selection of eroguro and eroguro adjacent cinema this year but I think I’d like to have a separate space to talk movies in. I do have a letterboxd now with a handful of reviews and a lot of questionable star ratings but I’ll refrain from going in deeper on any movies for now.

The game section being all 18+ games is because the only non-18+ game I’ve been playing is Super Auto Pets and I’m not going to talk about an Auto Battler in a blogpost, I have an image to live up to.

Oh I would be amiss in not mentioning how I made two games of my own this year, probably should have included this in the gaming part so people could see it before they gave up on this mess of a post. Both of the games I made can be found and downloaded for free here. I guess I’ll do a quick lil comment on them here exclusive for the people patient enough to make it this far. Garfpg was in part born out of my recent obsession with garfs and in part born out of just a general frustration. As a Q+ of the LGBTQ+ I occasionally get the dark forbidden desire to see representation of things I struggle through or jokes about the stuff that’s weird and silly about life as a grade A queerdo (a combination of queer and weirdo meaning to be a queer weirdo). Sometimes I just get a bit fed up with reading boy problems and the joy of going “MY SON!!!” fades from the world as the black dog comes knocking on my door with his uh depression paws or something. Periods like this often leave me feeling annoyed and creatively starved, which is why I ended up making both Garfpg and sCum sQuad. Even though I may not have been fueled by the most positive creative juices while making them, they’re both made with the intent of being fun silly lil games with stuff I love seeing or would love to see more of in games. Like creative dick destruction for example. Both games are pretty heavily influenced by Sonic Inflation Adventure which is still my favourite language novel game and a definite recommend even though the first part sadly requires a newgrounds account to play nowadays. Both games were made within a week each and while I think Garfpg has wider appeal (since there’s no cock crushing in it) I’m really pretty proud about how sCum sQuad turned out. Trying to get the presentation quality I wanted out of RPG maker and out of my 6 year old level art skills was definitely a challenge but I found some fun creative solutions. I think I’d really like trying to make more games in the future but it’s pretty time and work consuming so it’ll probably be harder and harder to find the time for it.

Thank you for reading all the way through this mess of a Retrospectivaganza℗. I hope you found something in here that got you pogging out of your gourd and if not I’m very sorry for wasting your time!

Lots of hugs and smooches,

Your definitely one and only best friend,

Zodi

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO 😘😘😘😘😘😘