Suzuka's Garden

After Five Hundred Years of Rain, the Sky Clears at Last: Thoughts on the Murasame Route of Senren＊Banka

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:00:00 +0800

It was sometime in 2024. A friend who adored Nakano Ichika asked me to gift him a Galgame, and the one he named was precisely Senren＊Banka. It was the first time I had ever heard of the genre—though by then I had already spent a month or two with yuri visual novels, so it did not feel all that foreign to me. And so I bought Senren＊Banka for myself as well.

Before I opened it, I had always assumed I would only ever be drawn to yuri. Yet the moment I actually started the game, on little more than a whim, everything changed.

In a Town Hidden Among the Mountains

Senren＊Banka is set in a small town called Hoori—ringed by mountains, long cut off from the outside world, and still steeped in tradition and faith in its local gods. The town’s main shrine enshrines a holy sword named Murasamemaru, and the protagonist, Arichi Masaomi, happens to be the one who draws it.

This is my first meeting with her. As the holy sword leaves its scabbard, a tiny girl speaking in the stiff, archaic cadence of a bygone age appears out of nowhere and gives Masaomi a real fright. She is Murasame, the spirit and keeper of the holy sword Murasamemaru. Five hundred years ago she became its guardian as a sacrificial offering, and ever since she has quietly watched over the land of Hoori. Now she acknowledges Masaomi, the one who drew the blade, as her master. The further the story went, the less I could pull my eyes away from her.

The One Who Could See Her, and Touch Her

Murasame’s situation hides a very deep loneliness.

She has existed for five hundred years in a form much like a ghost’s, though she flatly refuses to be called one; ordinary people can neither see her nor touch her. Only those who carry the blood of the Asamu family—Yoshino and Mako—can see her, while Lena, from long contact with the sword’s fragments, can barely make her out. Masaomi alone can both see her and truly touch her, because he once breathed in a fragment and was, on top of that, chosen by Murasamemaru itself. When he first reached out and actually felt “something hard, something undeniably there,” Murasame, beneath her surprise, was a little embarrassed.

After becoming her master, every one of Masaomi’s days had her in it. In the morning she would rouse him by plopping herself down on top of him; by day the two of them would run all over town, dealing with the uncanny things that ordinary people can neither see nor handle.

I’m especially fond of the small tendernesses along this route. Murasame has no body—she cannot eat, cannot bathe—yet she can feel the presence of spiritual energy, so the sake offered to the gods and the hot springs steeped in such energy bring her real comfort. She asks to have her head patted, and when that hand finally comes down, she shows a warmth and delight—something human—that she has not known in five centuries; she can even taste, through Masaomi’s senses, food she has not tasted in hundreds of years. There’s another contrast I love: the people of Hoori all address her with reverence as “Lady Murasame,” while Masaomi alone simply calls her “Murasame” or “little Rain.” To everyone else she is a guardian deity set high above; only with him is she treated as an ordinary girl, one who blushes and sulks and wheedles.

It is precisely these unremarkable moments that, little by little, thaw the word “loneliness” off of her.

A Spirit That Fears Ghosts

Murasame has more than enough charm, but the part that most makes me laugh is this: for all that she is a being who is not human, she herself is utterly terrified of ghosts.

She is a sword spirit who has lived five hundred years, and yet, faced with actual ghosts and apparitions, she goes to pieces. On the mountain path to an exorcism, she pressed herself tight against Masaomi’s back because she was afraid of the dark, and sang the old folk song “Bird in a Cage” to steel her nerves—“Cage, oh cage, little bird within the cage, when, oh when will you fly free.” Meant to chase off the fear, the melody only made the air more eerie, until she was the first to start shivering.

Far from feeling out of place, that contrast makes her “I’m the greatest” bravado all the more endearing. She puts on five hundred years of airs, but at heart she is a girl who frightens, frets, and wheedles. And it is exactly these little cracks that turn her from a concept out of legend into a living, breathing person—someone you find yourself wanting to protect.

“I’ll Cut Your Every Worry Down Where It Stands”

As they grew closer, the two of them finally crossed the line between friends and lovers. Of everything along the way, the line I remember most is Murasame’s—

“I shall cut your every worry down where it stands.”

The first time I heard it, I only thought it was a clever, very Murasame thing to say. But as the years have gone on, with graduation approaching and the tangled worries I’ll have to face alone, I find I can weigh that line far better now. If only someone really could cut down every last one of my troubles where it stands—I sometimes can’t help thinking.

And what makes the line moving is not that it can actually cut anything down. It moves me because someone is willing to grip a blade and stand in front of you, telling you to leave the rest to them. She may not be able to shoulder all of your hardships, but she lets you be certain that, whatever comes next, you will no longer face it alone.

The Girl Named Aya, and Her Five-Hundred-Year Duty

The further the story went, the clearer Murasame’s origins became—and the truth was more moving than I had imagined.

After one banquet, Masaomi came upon her weeping alone outside, gazing up at the moon, and only then learned that before she became a sword spirit she too had once been a human girl with a name of her own: she was called Aya. More wrenching still, the “sacred body” hidden away in the shrine turned out to be her own human body, preserved intact to this day. Long ago she had fallen gravely ill with pneumonia—all but incurable in that era—and so, as a sacrificial offering, she let her soul take up residence in Murasamemaru and became the sword spirit guarding this land. That vigil lasted more than five hundred years.

Once he understood all of this, Masaomi only wished more and more to make her truly human again. Mercifully, the disease that had once been a death sentence holds no terror before today’s medicine; and the real turning point came when Hoori decided to revive the dedication rite that had lapsed after the holy sword was drawn. To return Murasamemaru to the sacred rock with his own hands, Masaomi sought out his grandfather once more and threw himself into near-demonic swordsmanship training. At last, on the day of the rite, he carried it out flawlessly and set the holy sword back in its place. Murasamemaru offered its praise and blessing to its master and to the one it had housed—and Murasame, too, finally laid down the duty she had borne for over five hundred years, and became, completely and at last, a whole human being.

From “Master” to “Husband”

Having regained her human body, Murasame was taken in as an adopted daughter of the shrine family and, under a new surname, walked into everyone’s classroom to begin the school life she had been five hundred years late for.

And what warmed my heart most is the ending that gathers up all that long waiting: Masaomi invited his own parents to Hoori, and there, before them both, he solemnly proposed to Murasame—and received everyone’s blessing.

There’s a tender detail tucked in here. Murasame has always called Masaomi her “master”—goshujin-sama. And in Japanese, that very word, shujin, is also what a wife calls her husband. So the same form of address, from “master” to “husband,” quietly deepens by a single degree. The “master” she had called out as a sacrificial offering for five hundred years could, at last and by every right, be called “husband” instead.

Five Hundred Years of Rain, and a Sky That Finally Clears

At the story’s close, this deity who had given up her humanity and kept her vigil alone for more than five hundred years finally won back the happiness of an ordinary girl. Reaching that point, I couldn’t help but be moved to the core.

I love the feeling this ending leaves behind. Murasame’s wait was so long—long enough that one might have taken it for nothing more than the dying ember of an obsession. And yet the work refuses to leave her stranded forever in waiting and solitude. Five hundred years of loneliness are answered at last, and the belated spring duly falls. She who once believed she could only watch over others’ happiness from afar becomes, in the end, the one fiercely protected, the one to whom a whole life is solemnly promised.

I later learned that her ending theme is titled “Two as One”—no longer a shadow standing alone, but a form and a shadow that finally have each other. Those words are about the best note this route could end on. On the cover of her character song, I’m told, the red flowers blooming at her side are spider lilies, whose flower language is “love without end.” Looking back now, that is at once a hint at her nature as a sword’s spirit and a gentle prophecy laid down early for this very ending.

Looking again at the title Senren＊Banka, I feel it speaks of exactly this—that across five hundred years of time, and a wait stretched almost without end, the moment that person finally arrives, all the loneliness that came before is given its meaning.

That, I think, is what the Murasame route left with me.

Not a story about who can cut down every worry in the world, but about this: even after a wait of five hundred years, so long as there is finally someone beside you willing to draw a blade for you and to hold your hand as well, the road ahead is worth walking with all your strength.

Brief as a Blossom, So Dance for Me: Thoughts on the Chris Route of Hana wa Mijikashi, Odoreyo Otome

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:00:00 +0800

I first heard of this game while browsing a gaming community app. I’ve forgotten who posted about it and what exactly they said—only that they mentioned there was a very beautiful CG with the heroine, Chris. I happened to have a soft spot for cross-dressing stories at the time, so I took the plunge.

This is the scene where the two leads first meet. The hero, Yamashina Rin, is the son of a celebrated kabuki onnagata—a male actor of female roles—and naturally inherited his father’s craft. Skilled as he is in that art, he nonetheless suffers a serious setback on stage one day, and runs all the way to this lakeside, where he meets the heroine, Chris. Chris is an exchange student from England, born into an old and distinguished noble house; her full name is Christina White—a blonde tsundere loli, and I fell for her instantly. After finishing the game I also developed a keen interest in her voice actress, Kitami Rikka.

This is ensemble’s 28th project, part of their long-running “Otome series”—stories about a hero who infiltrates a girls’ school in disguise. The stage is set in the tenth year of the Taishō era, roughly a century ago: an age when kimono and Western dress, schoolgirls and noble ladies, all coexisted in the same frame. The onnagata of kabuki is already a man performing an idealized femininity, and this game simply pushes that premise to its limit: a man whose profession is to play women goes and becomes a woman for real.

“Yes—it was a kabuki performance. But that ended long ago. So I’ve been wondering what to do next.” When Chris said this at the lake, I hadn’t yet grasped its weight. Only much later would I learn what that “kabuki performance, ended long ago” meant to her.

A Man, Disguised as a Maiden, Slipping into a Girls’ School

Roused by a few words from Chris after his performance fell apart, Yamashina Rin decides to enroll at the girls’ school under the assumed name “Fujinami Rin,” hoping to refine his art as an onnagata. Waiting for him is the “Eikakai,” an elite group representing the whole student body, and an election to choose the “Nadeshiko no Kimi”—the single maiden at the summit of the school—from among the Eikakai’s five members.

The headmistress positions our hero as the lead candidate of the traditionalist faction, set squarely against the lead candidate of the Westernizing faction: Chris. From the very start, then, their relationship is nailed into an awkward spot—the person he has to defeat is precisely the person he cares about most.

“Chris’s support is overwhelmingly high right now; I can’t even compare myself to her. Honestly, I have no idea how I could possibly win against her.”

Chris is the kind of person born to stand in the spotlight. Petite as she is, she’s described as “small, yet magnificent and brilliant as golden light.” She’s accomplished at speed-reading and Western swordsmanship, and carries herself with a knightly gallantry that has the Westernizing girls swooning over her. She dislikes chopsticks, dislikes relying on others, and dislikes men—and yet, toward Rin alone, her pride carries a hint of something she can’t quite name.

Her Days at School, and the Cuteness She Can’t Hide

The election aside, what really drew me in was Chris herself. She’s a textbook tsundere, forever putting on an unyielding front toward Rin—but the longer they spend together, the more cracks show beneath that proud armor.

“E-enough! You don’t have to say that out loud!”

Dressed in kimono at school and teased to her face by her Eikakai companions, she panics in an instant—worlds apart from the dashing “golden prince” on stage. It’s in these little gaps of everyday life that I gradually understood: beneath that armor lives a girl who blushes easily, and who very much wants to be truly seen.

When We Became Lovers, She Still Thought We Were Both Girls

The most interesting thing about this route is that it first lets the two fall in love “as maidens.” Chris takes “Fujinami Rin” for a fellow girl the whole time—the person she’s drawn to, grows close to, and finally commits her heart to is someone she believes is also a girl.

This is the very CG that got me into the game. Dark-haired Rin (in his female guise) and golden-haired Chris are entwined together; in the blue glow, their long hair spreads out like a tide. Honestly, this single image alone made the whole thing worth it.

“Chris always throws herself at me with everything she has, and even at a time like this, that didn’t change.” She does everything at full tilt—even sweetness and closeness come without a shred of holding back.

“…Though honestly, I don’t really know what lovers are supposed to do between two girls.”

That line lays bare the color of their relationship right then: in Chris’s heart, this is a romance “between two maidens.” She’s nervous, clumsy, utterly clueless about how to be with “another girl”—and yet deadly earnest about it.

From Rin’s side, this sweetness is always strung taut by a single wire—he knows perfectly well he is hiding a secret that cannot be kept forever. The closer the two grow, the tighter that wire pulls.

A Secret That Couldn’t Stay Hidden

No matter how well it’s hidden, this disguise was never going to last. After they become lovers, Rin notices a small locket hanging at Chris’s neck, holding a single photograph. It is, she says, of someone immensely important to her—someone who once gave her strength.

That night, Rin is alone in the bath, lost in thought about that locket, when Chris suddenly bursts in—afraid he might be jealous over it, anxious to explain herself. But the moment the door opens, the male body Rin has hidden for so long falls bare into her sight. The two stand speechless; Rin hurriedly throws on his clothes and flees back to his room, unable for the life of him to think of how to begin explaining, certain that everything is over.

Afraid of Men as She Was, She Still Kept Him

To understand the weight of this moment, you first have to know why Chris fears men so much. Her father—a diplomat posted to this country and a leader of its Westernizing reforms—only ever praised her older brother. No matter how desperately Chris excelled at swordsmanship and horsemanship, leaving her brother far behind, in her father’s eyes “a woman shouldn’t do anything unnecessary,” and her efforts never earned her a single word of recognition. Her fixation on becoming Nadeshiko no Kimi began, at its root, as a wish to win her father’s acknowledgment. That a girl rebuffed again and again by her father would come to regard “men” as a whole with wariness is only natural.

And yet fate played a not-so-small joke on her—the very person she’d tried so hard to draw close to, the one she finally chose, turned out to be a man. Anyone else might well have turned and fled the instant the truth came out. But Chris didn’t. She came after him, without the slightest disdain, and instead quietly asked his real name. What she fears is the abstract category of “men”; what she has chosen is this one specific person. By all rights it should have ended there—and it was she who let the story go on.

We Had Met Long, Long Ago

The real name she asked for uncovered the most important card of this route: Rin and Chris did not meet for the first time at that lake.

“I’m… Chris.”

Rin’s stage name is Yamashina Ichika. And the photograph Chris has treasured in that locket all her life is of this very “Ichika.” Many years ago, the child Chris watched a kabuki performance, and the figure she took for a “prince” on that stage was the young Rin. A boy whose trade was to play women, who looked to that foreign little girl like a prince through and through—that contrast in itself is one of this game’s finest touches.

“When I grow up, you have to come see me again. By then I’ll have become beautiful enough not to lose to you—just you wait.”

After that performance, the young Ichika met the doll-like Chris. He told her how much he loved kabuki, and how little he cared for the gossip of others—and it was precisely that openness, that ability to “truly be himself,” that moved her so deeply. Before leaving, he even teased her: “When we meet again, marry me—by then I’ll have become even prettier than you.” That one line, “you’re so terribly pretty and cute,” Chris carried with her all the way to today.

So that “kabuki performance, ended long ago” in Chris’s heart was the first meeting she could never forget, even across an ocean; and the girl who competed so fiercely at this school was, at her core, still a little girl longing to see “Ichika” again. When Rin pieced it all together, that sense of fate—“we exchanged a promise back when we were both so small”—recolored every clash that had come before. From the very beginning, they were never rivals.

What She Loves Is Me with the Disguise Stripped Away

What truly moved me about this route is not the “the hero is actually a man” twist itself, but Chris’s reaction once she knew the truth.

“When I was crying all alone in the pitch dark, you’re the one who showed me the light. You’re the most important person to me… the person I love most. To me, that’s who you are.”

When she fell for “Fujinami Rin,” she thought he was a girl; now that she knows Rin is a man, knows he is the very “Ichika” of long ago, the person she loves hasn’t changed in the slightest. The one who first pulled her out of the dark, and the one beside her now, were the same person all along—Fujinami Rin, Yamashina Rin, Ichika: three names, one soul. What Chris loves was never any single identity.

“…And that’s why I love you most of all. You don’t care about things like feminine charm… you simply look at the real me.”

I stared at this line for a long time. The whole game plays with these stacked-up disguises—the onnagata, the cross-dressing, the idealized woman—yet at the heart of the feeling, what both of them want is something utterly plain: to be loved by someone who doesn’t care whether you’re “womanly enough,” who simply looks at the real you. Chris has always been treated as that flawless “golden prince,” and Rin let her set that halo down; Rin has spent half his life “playing someone else,” and Chris was willing to see past every disguise and recognize only the real him. Two people who had lived too long inside a performance finally took off the costume in front of each other.

“Marry Me”—the Truth That Slipped Out

One night near the story’s end, Chris has fallen asleep against Rin. Gazing at her sleeping face, he finally pieces back together the childhood memory he’d forgotten for far too long—the figure in his dream really was Chris.

“Ah, what an idiot I am…! A fool…! How could I have forgotten something so important?” In his frustration, he mutters, almost to himself, “…Marry me, or something.”

He thought Chris was asleep. He didn’t expect—

“I-I will…!!”

Chris, who should have been fast asleep, springs up and answers fast and breathless. A half-joking, half-earnest murmur he never meant to be heard was caught, squarely, by her. And that “marry me” connects right back to the very same promise the young Ichika made her all those years ago—back then he was the one who said it first, and now, having forgotten and remembered again, it’s still him who says it first. One makes a proposal sound like he’s scolding himself for being forgetful; the other shouts her answer like she’s buzzing in first on a quiz. It’s these two, all over, exactly as they’ve always been.

On Stage, Speaking the Truth as Lines

Their relationship can’t be hidden any longer, and the students simply decide, as one, that the two of them should be Nadeshiko no Kimi together. But that would break the rules, so the teachers hit upon a compromise—let Rin and Chris settle it with a stage play. They perform Romeo and Juliet: Chris as Romeo, Rin as Juliet, two lovers forced to part—a perfect mirror of the school’s own situation in that moment.

On stage the two cross blades, and after who knows how long, there’s a sharp crack—both swords shatter at once. Seizing the gap, Rin pulls Chris in and kisses her before the entire audience. The hall erupts in screams—this play, half-real and half-acted for so long, lands at last, at the center of the stage, back on something true.

Among the audience sit two people watching with particular intensity—Headmistress Chinami, and the special-appointment teacher Spark. As it happens, Spark too is a man hiding under a disguise, just like Rin; he and Chinami had once been kept apart by the very same divide of tradition and the West, and years ago even tried to elope, only to fail—after which he stayed disguised for years on end, just to remain at her side. Watching this pair finally cross the very threshold the two of them never could, the old headmistress only sighs: just this once, then. This quietly buried subplot is almost a mirror of Rin and Chris—the same cross-dressing, the same wall of the times standing between them—except the previous generation lost to that threshold, and this time, the young ones won it back.

“—Yes. Until the very moment this body perishes, I’ll always be by your side…”

The proud noble lady who once hated relying on anyone, who had to tough out everything, in the end handed her whole self over. Afterward, the Nadeshiko no Kimi election ended without a winner—too many ballots either bore both their names or were left blank—so the school simply declared Rin and Chris the joint first Nadeshiko no Kimi. As they clasped each other’s hands on the podium, Chris had long since stopped clinging to her father’s approval: the person she loves most, and most wants approval from, was standing right beside her.

Brief as a Bloom, and So All the More to Dance

Looking back at the title after finishing—Hana wa Mijikashi, Odoreyo Otome, “the blossom is brief, so dance, maiden”—I find it beautifully chosen. A kabuki performance comes to its close; the girls’-school days of one’s maidenhood will end; and along with them, that gorgeous female costume and that golden prince must one day take their final bow. Precisely because the blossom is so brief, all the more reason to dance with all your heart while it’s still in bloom—just as Rin and Chris did, in the end, on that stage.

I came for the novelty of the cross-dressing premise and that one beautiful CG, and was unexpectedly struck by the conviction at the heart of this route: “no matter which layer of identity you wear, the one I love is the real you.” Chris first thought she’d fallen for a girl, then found out he was a man—the very “prince” she had looked up to as a child—and yet her heart never wavered from beginning to end. For a hero who has taken “playing someone else” as his fate, to meet someone willing to see through every disguise and recognize only the real him is, perhaps, the most lasting thing this story—brief as a blossom—leaves him with.

Three Days Through Bailushe's Linghua Yuri Series: From Jisheng to Nanzhi

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0800

My first visual novel was one I opened on the afternoon of February 27, 2024.

Before that day, “galgame” and “visual novel” were still only vague labels to me—“games where you read text,” as others put it—and I had no real idea how they differed from an e-book or a piece of animation. It wasn’t until the screen lit up, the background music came flowing in, and the first line of text paused there, waiting for me to click it forward myself, that I realized “reading,” too, could be something you take part in with your own hands.

The one I opened was Bailushe’s Jisheng. Only later did I learn this was the starting point of an entire series. Bailushe set these yuri works in a single fictional “Linghua Girls’ Academy,” their timelines linked one to the next, and gave them all English subtitles landing on the same word—Symbiotic Love, Melancholy Love, Eternal Love, Unwavering Love—four kinds of “Love,” corresponding to Jisheng, Qianmian, Yeyong, and Nanzhi.

What I did over those three days was simply read from the first word straight through to the fourth.

Jisheng · Symbiotic Love: A Seemingly Sweet Romance with Tragedy Buried Beneath

The afternoon of 2024-02-27, the story begins in the garden of Linghua Academy.

The two leads of Jisheng are nearly opposite in temperament. Zisha comes from an ordinary single-parent family; her mother is chronically ill, and she carries life on her shoulders while studying—yet she’s bright and cheerful, and a top student. Zihua is the reverse: born into wealth, cold outside and warm within, but standing behind her is a mother of overwhelming, almost merciless control—one who keeps her hemmed in, forbids her from associating with anyone, and is convinced that everyone who comes near her has ulterior motives.

It’s amid this family shadow that Zisha draws Zihua, bit by bit, out of her shell, and the bond between them crosses past friendship and slowly turns into love. In the garden on a rainy night, Zihua, startled, buries herself in the arms of a suddenly-appearing Zisha; at the Mid-Autumn lantern festival they watch the program side by side, lift a sky lantern into the night together, and then lace their fingers tight.

Later, when Zisha runs a high fever from a cold and grows delirious, she instead pours out the feelings she’d been hiding all along, and Zihua answers her openly and head-on. In that stretch even sharing a single matcha chocolate stick was sweet.

But the subtitle “Symbiotic Love” was never only sweet—at its core it’s a modern yuri Romeo and Juliet. Around Christmas, the truth detonates like a bomb: Zisha and Zihua are in fact half-sisters by the same father (Zisha, slightly older, born to the father and a former partner; Zihua born to the father and his current wife)—and crueler still, the death of Zisha’s mother was brought about by Zihua’s mother’s own hand. What lies between the two of them is not only the difference in station of Romeo and Juliet, but the taboo of blood and a blood feud from the previous generation.

That moment of consciousness slipping away is perhaps the heaviest single frame in the whole work:

“Zihua, her consciousness draining away, let her body go completely slack, tilted her head past the obstacle of my nose, and kissed me, firmly.” A kiss, and yet more like a farewell. Fate has already driven them to the very end, and all they can do is hand over this one kiss, firmly, before they lose each other entirely.

Jisheng has five endings in all, every one named after a “flower”: Twin Flower, Flower of Frenzy, Flower of Martyred Love, Flower of Reincarnation, Parasitic Flower. Most paths lead to tragedy—Zisha resists an unjust fate in the most extreme way, while Zihua almost always ends up losing her mind. Only the true ending, “Twin Flower,” leaves the faintest sliver of hope: perhaps Zisha didn’t truly die, but went far away, planting spider lilies all across the ground, waiting for the day she might reunite with Zihua. The spider lily is the image running through the whole work—when the flower blooms the leaves are unseen, when the leaves grow the flower is unseen; longing for each other yet fated to find meeting hard.

This game hides blades even in its names: read aloud, the two leads’ names—Zisha Zihua (紫娑梓婳)—pun on zì shuō zì huà (自说自话), “talking only to oneself”; and the rare character in the title, 甡, written out, is almost two 死 (“death”) characters standing side by side.

Looking back at that opening embrace on the grass—“clutching that slender body desperately, pouring unraveling emotions onto her shoulder”—I finally understood it wasn’t the clinginess of new love, but a near-despairing grip held tight by someone who already sensed she would lose the other in the end. Choosing a tragedy steeped in spider lilies as the very first visual novel of my life was, in hindsight, fairly bold—but it was also exactly what made me feel, for the first time, the weight of text, character art, and voice layered together and clicked forward by my own hand: something unlike reading a novel or watching animation.

Oh, and there’s Qianyu, the pink-haired girl on the right of the frame. She doesn’t get much screen time, but she’s lively and striking, the one bright spot I took an instant liking to in this heavy work. At the time I didn’t yet know this would be among the very few times I’d see her in the whole series—but that’s a story for later.

Qianmian · Melancholy Love: Ten Years Later, the Sweetest of Them All

The next day, 2024-02-28, I went on to open Qianmian.

Its timeline is set at Linghua Academy ten years after Jisheng, and the Zihua of back then is by now the headmistress of this very school—and so the series ties the older generation to the younger. This installment tells of a new pair: Mianxue, labeled a “delinquent bad student” but in truth kind-hearted, and Qianxun, the class president and model honor student who seems well-behaved yet inwardly craves freedom.

The title “Qianmian” is both a fusion of the two names “Qianxun” and “Mianxue” and a pointer to the theme—everyone has another, hidden side. Qianxun is forever going out of her way to bother Mianxue, when really she’s drawn to and secretly yearns for the free, unfettered air about her. The trouble is that Qianxun is too afraid her true self won’t be accepted, so before Mianxue she pretends that cheerful, unbound self is “her own twin sister.”

So the one Mianxue falls for is, in fact, the true self Qianxun has kept hidden all along—and yet Qianxun has hung that side on a “sister” who doesn’t exist. “Maybe, no matter how I answer, she won’t be satisfied”—that anxious push-and-pull is the keynote of this installment. Its English subtitle is “Melancholy Love,” but that melancholy isn’t despair; it’s the flutter that comes built into romance itself, the fear of being found out alongside the longing to be seen.

The true ending, “Thousand-Layer Snow,” is a happy one: Qianxun’s double identity is accidentally exposed by a prank of Mianxue’s, and she finally asks to “be friends one more day”; the two at last find the courage to face their true feelings, untangle the misunderstanding, and end up together. (The other two endings, “Tuberose” and “Forget-Me-Not,” lead to bad ends.) And precisely because it slowly unfolds, one by one, all those most maddeningly ticklish moments of a crush—drawing close, dodging away, words caught in the throat, and finally the confession—Qianmian became, in my mind, the sweetest of the whole series. After the tragedy of Jisheng, it was like being granted permission to be properly, thoroughly sweet.

Yeyong · Eternal Love: The Epiphyllum and the Cocoon, the Steady One

By 2024-02-29, I’d begun the series’ third work, Yeyong.

It picks up half a year after Qianmian, with the lead now Qiuling, who had already appeared in the previous work. This installment lands its theme on the “epiphyllum” and the “cocoon”: two girls who each keep a first love buried in their hearts, binding themselves up as if in a cocoon of their own making, and how they let go of the past and turn instead toward loving each other. “In the hush of the night, I could even faintly hear the violent pounding of my own heart, along with the blood rushing at full speed through my body”—descriptions like this, of a heartbeat magnified to the limit in the dark, are actually quite delicate taken on their own.

Yeyong left the faintest impression on me of the four. Its ending isn’t a knife at all—it’s even quite sweet, with three generations of leads sharing the frame and a gentle mood throughout. But perhaps because it’s so steady—the buildup of the two’s affection isn’t very vivid, and the “couple chemistry” before the ending comes a touch slowly—it couldn’t seize me the way the first two did. Read all four back to back, Yeyong is probably the piece that bridges what comes before and after yet can’t outshine its neighbors: it puts “Eternal” in its title, while the story itself feels more like a quiet interlude. That’s not necessarily a flaw—it just looks unremarkable standing between two brighter installments.

Nanzhi · Unwavering Love: I Caught Up to It on the Very Day It Released

And then came the luckiest thing of the whole journey.

I finished the three earlier works—Jisheng, Qianmian, Yeyong—on exactly February 29, 2024. And the series’ fourth and then-newest work, Nanzhi, had a release date of precisely 2024-02-29—chasing along over three days, I caught up to it, neatly and exactly, on its very release day. The warmth of the previous works hadn’t yet faded when the new one was placed in my hands.

Nanzhi picks up a year and a half after Yeyong. What moved me most is that it turns the lens back onto the series’ very first pair: Zisha and Zihua. After that heart-aching parting in Jisheng, this installment uses the occasion of Luna returning from an exchange abroad, bringing people back to the country, to let Zisha and Zihua meet again after many years, and to decide anew where their relationship goes. This reunion—“a little rueful, and full of apology”—almost makes good on the slim hope buried in Jisheng’s true ending: the one who, years ago, planted spider lilies across the ground and waited alone did, in the end, get her reunion.

I love its way of wrapping sorrow inside a joke—like that line, “There, there, you can go back without worrying. Oh, and watch a little less anime from now on.” It’s plainly speaking of parting, yet said in so homey, so playful a way that it stings all the more. And what truly struck me was this line:

“You adorned my six years, then swept across a full cycle of years to sweeten my eighteen, and after wandering a full circle, found your way back to my thirty.”

Six, eighteen, thirty—most of a person’s life, strung together by this one feeling. Here the subtitle “Unwavering Love” takes on weight: it isn’t intense to the point of breaking like Jisheng, nor scaldingly sweet like Qianmian; instead it stretches time very long, long enough to prove that “no matter how long apart, they will find each other again.” As the close of a tetralogy, Nanzhi gives the series a very gentle place to land.

A Selfish Little Regret: I Never Saw Qianyu Again

With all four finished, beyond the heartache of the plots, I’m also left holding one very personal regret—right up to Nanzhi’s close, I never got to see Qianyu again.

She’s the pink-haired girl from Jisheng, with little screen time, yet she left an unusually vivid impression on me. I’d quietly kept hoping that, since the next three works share the same Linghua Academy and the timelines run one into the next, she’d surely turn up again in some form. But work after work, new leads came and went, the faces at the academy changed batch by batch—and that pink-haired girl never reappeared.

This is no fault of the works, of course—a series can’t find a proper place for every beloved side character. But as a reader, that absence—“she’s clearly still in this world, yet never appears again”—stays with me even more than the tragedies in the plots. Call it a small, unfillable regret this journey left me with.

A Few Closing Words

Looking back, those three days at the end of February 2024 were really two things happening at once: I finished Bailushe’s Linghua yuri tetralogy, and I finished the very first batch of visual novels of my life.

It was Jisheng that, with a tragedy like spider lilies, first showed me how heavy this medium can be; Qianmian that let me taste how sweet it can be; Yeyong that taught me a series will have its relatively plain link too; and Nanzhi that, with a coincidence on its release day plus a reunion years overdue, drew this whole getting-into-it experience to a close that almost seems arranged.

Four kinds of “Love” read through, and I suppose I’d officially stepped through the door of visual novels. Ever since, opening a new galgame is, for me, no longer “reading text,” but once again an encounter I’m willing to take part in with my own hands.

Guestbook

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Wish I Made on a Shooting Star Was to Share Ordinary Days with You

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0800

The opening of Nagareboshi -a wish star- takes a thoroughly typical Galgame wish and drops it directly in front of its protagonist, Kanata Mihoshi.

Kanata wishes upon a shooting star for a petite, adorable, peerlessly beautiful girl, unlike his sister, to become his girlfriend. Then, on a sweltering night just before summer vacation, a silver-haired girl truly appears. She calls herself Mikoto, also calls herself a “god,” and promptly tells Kanata, “I have come to be your girlfriend.”

The wish comes true so quickly that it feels suspicious. An ordinary romance should begin with two people meeting, then pass through uncertainty, growing closeness, and confirmation. Mikoto seems to skip every step and places herself in Kanata’s life as though it were the most natural thing in the world. She knows nothing of human common sense, has unshakable confidence in her own beauty, and possesses an appetite wildly out of proportion to her small frame. However one looks at her, she resembles trouble fallen from the sky.

But looking back after finishing the game, I realized that what it truly wants to explore is not how fortunate it would be for a wish to suddenly come true.

It asks how a being who does not belong to the human world, brought here by someone else’s wish, gradually comes to have wishes of her own through days spent eating, going out, helping others, and keeping one another company. And when will the boy who casually asked a shooting star for a girlfriend understand that loving someone is not the same as receiving a prize from a god?

The “Peerlessly Beautiful Girl” Who Fell from the Sky

Mikoto makes an unforgettable first impression.

Long silver-white hair, red eyes, a pure white dress, and the night sky filled with starlight: her design practically writes “an inhumanly beautiful girl” across the screen. She is indeed beautiful, and knows it very well. Whenever Mikoto solemnly emphasizes that she is a “petite, lovable, peerlessly beautiful girl,” she seems less like an exalted god and more like a child who has just learned a handful of compliments and cannot wait to use every one of them on herself.

Her vanity is not unpleasant because there is no shrewd calculation behind her words or behavior. Most of what she understands about human society comes from limited knowledge and preconceptions, so she often says absurd things with absolute certainty. She is not pretending to be foolish or acting cute to control the mood. She truly does not know any better.

Kanata must therefore explain common sense to her again and again, keeping each situation from growing more outrageous. Formally, they are “boyfriend and girlfriend” from the beginning, but their interactions more closely resemble a temporary guardian and a newcomer who has only just entered the world. Mikoto charges straight ahead and Kanata cleans up behind her. Mikoto treats “things lovers should do” as assigned tasks, while Kanata has to tell her that human feelings are not so simple.

This makes the first half of the work easy to settle into. It spends little time manufacturing misunderstandings, nor does it keep pulling the pair back and forth through a prolonged ambiguous phase. Mikoto’s affection lies openly on the table from the first scene. The question is not whether she likes Kanata, but where that unreserved closeness comes from, and whether living together will transform it into a feeling that truly belongs to her.

Of course, Mikoto’s most convincing personality trait may simply be how much she can eat.

When an enormous dessert is placed before her, the satisfaction on her face is almost more direct than anything she shows Kanata. The story repeatedly uses food to express Mikoto’s fascination with the human world, and I love that choice. Appetite is neither sacred nor romantic, but it is the most tangible sense of being alive. What first captivates a “god” newly arrived in this world is not a grand mission, but sweetness, a full stomach, and sitting at the same table as someone she loves.

It also makes her later attachment to daily life feel more natural. Mikoto does not decide to cherish life after reading humanity’s definition of happiness. First she genuinely tastes delicious food, feels the breeze on a summer night, sees the sea, and laughs with other people. Only then does she understand that these seemingly ordinary things can be terribly difficult to leave behind.

A Wish Is Not the Same as Love

Kanata’s original wish is a little childish. Handsome and capable, he is used to looking after his carefree older sister Akari, yet he reduces his romantic hopes to “a petite and adorable beautiful girl.” It resembles a character template tailored to his preferences rather than a person with joys, anger, desires, and choices of her own.

Mikoto’s appearance answers that template precisely. She is petite, beautiful, and assertive, even announcing on the night they meet that she will be Kanata’s girlfriend. On the surface, Kanata need offer nothing at all; his ideal partner has been delivered to his door.

But Nagareboshi does not treat this convenience as the destination of romance. On the contrary, the story asks Kanata to discover who the girl before him actually is. He has to learn what Mikoto likes to eat, why she loves dogs, and how she reacts to unfamiliar things. Gradually he must also see the innocence behind her extravagant confidence, and how that innocence will eventually be wounded by parting and helplessness.

The Mikoto beside the fountain is no longer merely “the beautiful girl granted by a wish.” She has expressions, habits, and rhythms the player can recognize. When I see her smile, I no longer think only that the character has been drawn beautifully. I remember their noisy conversations, the earnest way she misunderstands an ordinary remark, and how completely she trusts Kanata without lowering her guard.

Love begins after the wish comes true. To me, this is the work’s most interesting idea.

A shooting star can place two people together, but it cannot spend their days for them. It can send Kanata a girl who matches his tastes, but cannot ensure that he truly understands her. At first, Mikoto too approaches Kanata only because of her origins and purpose. Through daily life she must likewise decide whether she wants to remain beside him because that is what she is supposed to do, or because she can no longer accept a life without him.

Their feelings therefore appear to begin at one hundred percent affection, but in truth still begin at zero. They skip the wariness of a conventional romance route, but cannot skip the process by which an abstract wish becomes a particular person.

A God Begins to Make Wishes of the Human World

The CG of Mikoto praying at the shrine is one of my favorites.

She calls herself a god and should, by all rights, be the one who listens to wishes. Now she closes her eyes like an ordinary person and earnestly clasps her hands before her chest. Their roles subtly reverse in this moment: the giver of miracles now has a wish she cannot fulfill through her own power.

I feel that Mikoto truly draws closer to humanity not through the amount of common sense she learns, but when she begins to want something and fear its loss.

A god who can accomplish anything and lose nothing would struggle to understand human feeling. Wishes are precious precisely because reality may refuse them. We hope to eat together again tomorrow because tomorrow may not arrive as usual. We hope the person we love will be happy because we may not always remain beside them. We hope this summer will never end because no season has ever stopped for anyone.

At first, Mikoto always speaks with certainty. She is certain she is cute, certain she is Kanata’s girlfriend, and seemingly certain that every problem can be solved in the manner of a god. But as the story progresses, certainty gradually gives way to hesitation. For the first time, she experiences attachment; for the first time, she faces pain that goodwill alone cannot resolve. Such helplessness is especially cruel for a “god.”

The central conflict is therefore simple, yet direct enough: can a girl who came into being through a wish possess a life not dictated by her original purpose? Is her love for Kanata part of that wish, or something the time they truly shared has left within her?

Their kiss beneath the stars offers the clearest answer.

This image brings Mikoto’s unearthly quality to its most beautiful expression. Her silver hair and white dress nearly merge with the river of stars, as if she might dissolve into light and vanish in the next moment. Yet the arms she wraps around Kanata hold him very tightly. She is no longer only someone who descended from the night sky to his side. Knowing their time is limited, she actively reaches for another person.

The first is a miracle. The second is a choice.

Summer’s Meaning Lies in Its Useless Little Things

Nagareboshi is a small, single-route work. According to VNDB’s statistics, it usually takes only around four hours to finish. It has no vast worldbuilding and no complex branches among multiple heroines. Most of its time revolves around Kanata, Mikoto, his sister Akari, and the dog Love.

Its scale makes the work feel like a slim summer novella. Mikoto arrives at their home and everyone begins living together. They go out to help people in trouble, play by the sea, eat in town, and pass from daylight into nights of stars and fireworks. Taken alone, none of these events is momentous enough to change a life.

The swimsuit episode, giant dessert, and dates are all plainly meant as fan service, and the game never hides its desire to make Mikoto look adorable. Yet these scenes are not entirely detached from the main story. For Mikoto, they are precisely how she comes to know the human world.

Why do people love summer? Not because summer serves some useful purpose. The water is simply cool, the sunlight bright, and a chilled dessert especially delicious on a hot day. At night there may even be fireworks. Everyday life has always been made of many pleasures without grand significance.

The more Mikoto enjoys these small things, the more weight her tears carry in the latter half. What she is reluctant to leave is not an abstract “human world,” but a life made specific in tastes, sounds, and the warmth of one person’s body. She knows how Kanata will tease her, and understands the care hidden beneath Akari’s seemingly casual attitude. She even forms a closeness with Love that needs no explanation in words.

These relationships mean that she is no longer a passerby who can depart once the wish that summoned her has been fulfilled.

I love how the phrase “beautiful girl” is always on her lips. By the end, it is more than a recurring character joke. Every boast feels like Mikoto affirming her own existence: my name is Mikoto, I am a beautiful girl, I love these things, and I love the person before me. Through this childish yet resolute self-introduction, she gradually changes from a role summoned by a wish into someone with a self of her own.

A Sister, Love, and Another Kind of Affection

If Nagareboshi featured only Kanata and Mikoto, it would probably be a purer but thinner romantic confection. Akari Mihoshi and Love carry the question of what it means to love someone beyond romance.

Akari is Kanata’s older sister and the original center of their home. Kanata is skilled at caring for others largely because he has always looked after his free-spirited, somewhat troublesome sister. They tease each other, and are close enough that outsiders mistake Kanata for a sister fanatic, but this intimacy is not there to create romantic ambiguity. It shows the player that even before Mikoto appeared, Kanata already knew how to give of himself for someone important, though he may not have been able to face the fear behind that devotion honestly.

Love brings emotion to a simpler level. The dog cannot explain the difference between gods and humans, nor ask why Mikoto came here. Affection means drawing close; wanting companionship means staying beside someone. Perhaps Mikoto loves dogs in part because an animal does not demand that she first prove what she is.

When the story allows a farewell to truly occur, these relationships that previously enlivened the mood suddenly reveal another side. The remaining toy, drawing, and naming card hurt me more than a deliberately emotional monologue. Death and parting compress a living presence into objects: the things once touched remain, but the familiar voice will never sound again.

Here, Mikoto truly understands why “I hope we can always be together” becomes a wish. Saying it cannot resist time. People hope for it precisely while knowing that they cannot resist.

This understanding also changes her love for Kanata. When she first appears, she treats becoming his girlfriend as a settled fact. Later, she finally understands that being lovers includes the possibility of loss. The deeper the love, the more painful the departure. Yet she does not use that pain to deny their meeting, nor conclude that never having something would be better than losing it.

What moves me most in the latter half is therefore not the revelation of the premise, but Mikoto’s willingness to admit that even if tears are the price of love, this summer was worth living.

The Art Draws Mikoto as a Shooting Star

It is difficult to discuss Nagareboshi without mentioning Nanakamai’s art.

The work’s appeal is very clear: Mikoto, with her silver hair and red eyes, occupies the visual center of almost every important CG. Her hair often spreads broadly across the frame. Strands of hair, ribbons, and the hem of her dress form flowing curves, while points of starlight, lens-like glimmers, and bright rim lighting make her appear surrounded by light.

Even in the scene where she cries at sunset, she remains almost dreamily beautiful. Warm backlighting illuminates her hair, but her tears make that beauty seem fragile for the first time. Throughout the first half, Mikoto always faces forward with confidence. Here, she looks back at Kanata with an expression that seems to want to smile, cry, and remember everything she sees for the last time.

The image of the “shooting star” is reinforced again and again. Mikoto appears in the night sky and falls in love beneath the stars; her white hair resembles a streak of light crossing a deep blue background. A shooting star dazzles because it will not remain forever. The art places this transience before the player very early, but in the first half I was more easily drawn to its brilliance. Only near the end did I realize that the starlight had always carried the meaning of farewell.

The high quality of the art does create a small imbalance. Some everyday backgrounds are noticeably less detailed than the central CGs, and the visual presentation suddenly rises to another level whenever a character enters an important illustration. That is understandable for a short work on a doujin scale, but it does make some ordinary scenes feel like transitions linking one CG to the next.

The music works in a more conventional but effective way. The opening theme, “Hikari no Kanata,” echoes both Kanata’s name and the image of light from its title onward. Cheerful everyday tracks support Mikoto’s jokes, while the melodies around the stars and farewells lengthen the pauses between lines. The title of the ending theme, “Everyday LOVE!,” suits the work especially well. What it ultimately wants to leave behind is not an earth-shattering miracle, but affection expressed each day and accumulated across those days.

The Strength of a Short Work Is Also Its Clearest Regret

Nagareboshi’s length keeps it focused. The player need not manage multiple routes or become lost in elaborate worldbuilding. From Mikoto’s appearance, through the pair acknowledging their feelings, to facing their farewell, its emotional direction remains clear. For anyone wanting to finish a beautiful, airy pure-love story with a few tears in an evening or over a weekend, it fits well.

But its problem comes from the same place: everything moves too quickly.

Mikoto and Kanata assume the form of lovers from the moment they meet, which avoids pointless misunderstandings but also compresses the space in which their feelings can gradually warm. Just as some everyday episode makes me feel their relationship beginning to unfold, the main story hurries into its next stage. The latter half’s material about Mikoto’s identity, Akari’s circumstances, and the cost of wishes could have been woven together more tightly; instead, it can feel like several emotional passages arriving one after another.

I understand why the story wants me to feel sad, but at times, before that sadness has had time to settle, the next beautiful CG and next turn have already arrived. Akari in particular carries heavy material. More scenes of her beyond Kanata’s perspective would have given her choices greater depth and made Kanata and Mikoto’s final decision feel more firmly grounded.

The interface and direction are similarly modest. The screenshots still show a fairly plain control interface, and some video material does not entirely match the clarity of the beautiful CGs. It feels more like a doujin work that concentrated its limited resources on the original art and heroine than a commercial production polished in every respect.

These shortcomings do not erase its most sincere qualities. The work knows exactly whom it wants the player to love and which colors should preserve this summer. Mikoto has a vivid personality, several starry-sky and sunset CGs are beautiful enough to remain in memory, and the lively daily scenes of the first half genuinely give the final fireworks a meaning beyond farewell.

By the Time the Fireworks Rise, the Wish Has Changed

The image that remains with me at the end is not the one in which Mikoto first appears and seems most like a god, but the backs of Kanata, Mikoto, and Love as they sit on the grass watching fireworks.

Fireworks resemble shooting stars. Both exist in the night sky for only a brief time. Their value does not lie in lasting, but in people looking up together and witnessing that instant of light.

At first, Kanata wishes upon a shooting star for a girlfriend who matches his ideal. The wish centers on “what I want.” After the whole summer, what he truly hopes for is no longer to possess a beautiful girl, but for Mikoto to live by her own will, to keep smiling and eating the things she loves, and to find happiness even within a reality where they cannot walk together forever.

Mikoto’s wish changes too. She goes from a god who fulfills another person’s wish to a girl who wants to share a life with someone. She does not long to be worshipped or to prove what powers she possesses. She wants only an ordinary tomorrow so precious that it nearly feels extravagant: waking to familiar faces, eating together, sometimes going out, and sitting side by side beneath fireworks on a summer night.

This is what moved me most about Nagareboshi -a wish star-.

Its story is not complicated. One can see at a glance that their meeting will lead to tears. Its pace is occasionally rushed, and there is much more room to explore its characters and premise. Yet through one very lovable girl, it reminded me that a miracle need not be the sudden appearance of a god.

The true miracle is that a being with no past and no understanding of the human heart is welcomed during one brief summer, tastes food, experiences affection, and leaves behind memories of her own. She is no longer merely the wish brought by a shooting star, but someone for whom another person will earnestly wish when a star crosses the sky.

The fireworks will fade, and summer must end.

But because the three of them once sat here together, that moment is not an illusion the ending can erase.

Mikoto came to the human world to fulfill Kanata’s wish. By the end, she herself has become the wish worth treasuring.

When the Cargo Became a Daughter: Thoughts on Stella of the End

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0800

The story of Stella of the End begins with a delivery job.

Jude is hired to take an android girl named Philia to a distant destination. The object of the job, the route, and the payment are all clear, as though everything will end once he crosses the ruined world and hands over his cargo intact at the appointed place.

But when he finally reaches the destination, Jude says, “What I transported was… my daughter.”

I stopped for a long time at that line. It does not deny the long journey that came before, but brings back all the driving, resting, arguing, and looking after one another at once. At some point, the being headed toward that destination had ceased to be cargo. What this job accomplished had long since become more than a delivery.

When I began the game, I was not thinking that far ahead. Philia simply seemed like a very lovable robot girl: direct in speech, curious about the world, and occasionally willful in a way that quickly lowers one’s guard. Characters like her are not unusual in Galgame, and I even assumed the story would follow the familiar course of “a cheerful girl heals a distant older man.”

Stella of the End does portray healing, but it does not hurry to make the two of them a close family. First it makes them walk. It seats them in the same car and has Jude repeatedly perform acts that appear to be no more than part of his job. Only at the ending did I realize that, like Jude, I had changed what I called her without ever noticing.

What She Wants Is to Be an Ordinary Person

Philia stands before a clothing-store window, looking at the white dress inside. It is easy to read this image as a girl’s fondness for pretty clothes, but what she truly longs for is the utterly ordinary life behind that dress.

The first time I saw this CG, Philia and the white dress naturally caught my eye. It is a beautiful image, and she looks adorable standing before the window. But after learning the ending, I pay more attention to the pane of glass. The dress is close enough to touch, yet the display seems to hold an entire daily life she does not possess: choosing clothes she likes, entering a shop, wearing them for someone she cares about, and then worrying about what to wear tomorrow.

These wishes are not grand enough to save the world. They could even be called “useless.” Their uselessness is precisely what brings them closer to life. As an android, she was given a function from the moment she was made. What she wants is a white dress that need serve no task at all, and the freedom to say for herself, “I like this.”

For Philia, “becoming human” therefore does not mean acquiring some higher qualification. She only wants to be treated as an ordinary person, able to like things, look forward to tomorrow, and decide for herself who she will become.

The very ordinariness of that wish makes her original circumstances feel especially cold.

The Philia first presented to the player is not the girl who stops at a window for a dress, but an android lying in a mechanical chamber. Cold light falls across her, and she resembles an object just removed from a container: her body can be inspected, her condition verified, and then she can be loaded into a commission whose destination was written long ago.

She has a human appearance, yet enters Jude’s world as “cargo.” Jude must care whether she remains intact, but has no need to understand what she thinks. The distance between them at first is not intimate but professional.

I love that the story does not immediately erase this distance. Jude’s detachment can even become frustrating, but it fits who he is and leaves a visible trace of every change that follows. Had the opening gently told the player, “They will become father and daughter,” the final word daughter would merely confirm an established relationship. That is not what happens. They truly have to travel an entire road to earn it.

From Cargo to Traveling Companion

When Jude picks Philia up and carries her forward, the image resembles a rescue, but this is not yet the beginning of a tender story. He has simply accepted a job, and she is the object that must be delivered. He protects her first because a transporter is supposed to keep his cargo safe.

This distant beginning matters. Stella of the End does not use one sudden event to transform them. Their relationship develops little by little across a long, dangerous, and mundane journey. Much of the time, even the characters may not notice it.

At rest, Philia is quiet and entirely unguarded. She grows tired, can be hurt, and entrusts her safety to the person beside her. Her vulnerability cannot prove that she is human, but it makes the word “cargo” increasingly difficult to sustain. Faced with a being who depends upon him, Jude cannot forever calculate only routes and risks.

The first time I clearly felt Jude’s attitude change was not when he said something tender, but precisely because he still did not know how. His words retain the tone of a transporter, while his actions begin to move ahead of that hard language: stopping to wait for her, checking her condition, and instinctively putting her before himself when danger comes. The requirements of the job can explain any one of these acts, but struggle to explain them all.

The car continues toward the same destination, but the relationship inside has already changed. Philia can sleep beside Jude because she trusts him to keep driving. Jude, too, begins to notice not only whether the cargo is damaged, but whether she sleeps peacefully and can endure the journey.

To be honest, the middle of the trip is not always tense. Driving, finding somewhere to stay, dealing with trouble, and setting out again: some stretches even feel slow, and the structure becomes slightly repetitive. While playing, I occasionally wished the next major event would arrive sooner.

At the ending, however, I felt that this slowness could not have been removed. Caring for someone rarely happens dramatically. More often, it is simply remembering to let her rest today, then standing before her again when danger comes tomorrow. Similar days accumulate one by one until an action changes from a job requirement into a habit. Jude may not be able to say where that boundary lies, and neither can I. But by the time Philia can sleep soundly in the passenger seat, they are plainly no longer the people who departed together.

Care and transport look similar on the surface: providing food, avoiding danger, and keeping to the journey. The difference lies in small places. Transport asks whether an object can be delivered intact. Care wonders how she will feel when she wakes, whether she is afraid, and what kind of scenery she hopes to see.

Philia looks through the car window at the world outside. The ruins do not return to their former state for the sake of her curiosity, but to her, the clear glass, passing light, and unseen landscape at the end of the road remain worth watching.

I love the expression on her face as she looks outside. Post-apocalyptic stories often allow us to see only decay, but she looks as though she is discovering for the first time how much the world contains. Her curiosity is not childish. It reminds me that these ruins were once someone’s ordinary life, and that death need not be all that remains after ruin.

She begins to observe the road, understand this world, and form choices through what she experiences. What sits beside Jude is no longer cargo waiting to be received. They have seen the same wasteland and shared the same silences. It is in these moments that “traveling companion” slowly becomes the right name.

Who Deserves to Be Called Human Among the Ruins?

The apocalypse in Stella of the End is not a beautiful backdrop placed behind its characters. Bodies break, resources always run out, and many choices offer no perfect answer. Again and again, it brings forward a question easily set aside in peaceful life: where does the boundary between human and machine truly lie?

When Delilah lies broken, the inside of her mechanical body is exposed among the ruins. My first response was not to calmly consider whether she “counts as human,” but to feel pain. The bare components remind me that she is indeed different from a human, but what came before makes it impossible to treat the sight as a machine being scrapped.

This hesitation carries more force than a standard answer. Flesh can be damaged and machinery can be damaged. People are changed by their surroundings, while androids are likewise shaped into different selves by memory and harm. Structure can explain a body, but not every reason that brought her here.

Delilah is also a mirror for Philia. Similar construction does not lead them to the same ending. What was written into them at manufacture certainly matters, but so do the people they later meet, the treatment they receive, and the choices they make when there is nowhere left to retreat.

Philia receives trust and companionship on her journey; Delilah presents another possibility. “Philia is becoming more human” can no longer be offered as casual praise. Possessing a will does not automatically bring happiness. The world can hurt her, and she must bear the consequences of her choices.

When Philia raises a gun with glowing red eyes, she is no longer the child who can only wait for Jude to protect her. She has begun to use her own strength to guard what matters to her.

The scene is powerful, yet I cannot simply call it “cool.” The girl who once looked at a white dress through a shop window has now learned to aim a weapon at someone. She has indeed grown, but the cost is plain. Jude can teach her how to survive, but cannot forever keep the world’s cruelty beyond her sight.

The colossal mechanical remains press down upon the wasteland, making Philia’s figure seem very small. This world never welcomes her gently merely because she wants to be human. It teaches her curiosity and forces her to learn to shoot. It gives her a traveling companion and makes her understand that loss cannot be avoided.

She does not “upgrade” from machine to human. What truly changes is that she no longer accepts a purpose prescribed by others. Why she acts, whom she is willing to protect, and what price she will pay are questions she begins to answer herself. By this point, she no longer needs the construction of her body to prove whether she is human.

Tenderness Among Cold-Colored Ruins

When writing about the journey in Stella of the End, it is difficult to separate SWAV’s art from the experience. The first thing this world gives me is cold. The skies and mechanical spaces carry translucent blues. Metal surfaces hold little warmth, and abandoned cities are so quiet that even their echoes seem to have vanished. The images rarely paint the apocalypse as a dirty blur. On the contrary, they are always clean, spacious, and almost transparent.

That transparency makes the desolation more apparent. Philia’s white clothing is both conspicuous and fragile within it, while greenery returning among the ruins preserves a trace of life in a world long dead. Farther away, the remains of giant machines vastly exceed the human scale. The characters stand tiny before them, as though they could be swallowed at any moment by the shadow of the old civilization.

Yet many of the images I remember are moments of tenderness within these cold colors. Philia asleep in the passenger seat, her eyes looking through the car window, and Jude’s unspoken concern are all supported by broad, quiet backgrounds. The colder the image, the easier it is to see the warmth just beginning between two people.

The CGs are not rewards handed to the player after reading a section of the story. They are more like milestones. The white dress in the window marks Philia’s wish. Her sleep in the car marks the trust that has formed. Her red eyes and raised gun fix the cost of growth upon the screen. At the ending, several CGs with similar compositions deliberately refuse to let the player escape. We can only remain there and watch the two finish speaking the name they have finally found.

The music does something similar. Melodies on the road rarely force themselves ahead of the dialogue. They leave room for the repeated journey, making it feel as though the wheels truly have been turning for a very long time. In their quiet moments together, the sound recedes, allowing unexplained acts of care to linger. When the farewell arrives, familiar feelings return, and all that seemingly uneventful time presses down at once.

I find it difficult to summarize this experience as simply “the music is beautiful.” It is closer to the air of the journey, not something noticed in every second of play, but something that, once I stop, I realize has supported much of the lingering emotion. Especially the silence between the final lines. The story does not hurry to demand tears, and instead gives us time to understand: they truly are going to say goodbye.

Stella of the End naturally has regrets as well. It is not an enormous, multi-route Galgame with many characters and paths to revisit. The middle of the journey is not always eventful, and some incidents follow similar rhythms. Fascinating parts of the setting often show only one corner before the travelers move on. I certainly had moments of wishing a particular idea had been explored more deeply.

But its length and restraint also keep the main story from ever scattering. The undeveloped setting leaves some regret, and the slower road sections occasionally test one’s patience, but neither damages the final emotion. On the contrary, when the story draws its focus back to Jude and Philia, I know clearly that what I have awaited throughout the journey is not the answer to some mystery of the world.

It is what they will call one another.

What He Transported Was His Daughter

After the gunfire, the story leaves its final time to the two of them. There is no greater enemy and no new answer. Philia looks at Jude through tears, and all the care, dependence, and attachment left unspoken along the road must finally be given a name.

From here, I could barely keep myself outside the story. The earlier dangers made me tense, and Delilah’s fate hurt, but only when the image became quiet did I truly understand that this journey was ending. The story does not rush into the next scene. It lets Philia look at Jude, and makes the player wait beside her for those few words.

Jude gives Philia the surname “Gray.”

At the beginning, names, model numbers, and the object of a commission seem little different. All are symbols used to identify her. But “Gray” is different. It comes from the road they traveled together, not an ownership label affixed to an object. Philia no longer needs to introduce herself only by model and purpose. Even if Jude cannot accompany her through the rest of her life, she can carry this name with her.

Nor is this a ceremony that turns Philia into a human. When she gazed at the white dress, grew curious about the world beyond the window, and raised a gun to make her own choice, she was already living a life of her own. Jude merely speaks at last the change that had long since occurred between them. He no longer hides behind his identity as a transporter.

By this point I could guess what he might say next, yet the actual wording still went beyond what I expected. Not a partner, not an important person, and not the vague word “family.” Jude chooses one very specific name.

“What I transported was… my daughter.”

This is the most important line in all of Stella of the End.

“Transport” originally belongs to the language of a profession. It requires Jude to safely deliver the specified cargo to the specified location. Once it is handed over, the relationship ends, and payment settles everything spent along the way. “Daughter” belongs to another language entirely. A daughter cannot be replaced, and caring for her has no price that can be settled. Even after the job ends, she will remain in Jude’s life.

Jude does not deny that this was a delivery. He still uses that hard, even impersonal word. That is precisely why it bears so much weight at the ending.

The first thing that returns to my mind when I hear “my daughter” is not a decisive battle, but Philia asleep in the car. I remember Jude carrying her, waiting while she rests, and taking her away from each stopping place to continue onward. Scenes that had seemed like mere procedure suddenly carry weight. The actions have not changed; what has changed is that I finally understand the relationship to which they belong.

The words “my daughter” reinterpret the same road, the same job, and the same destination from the beginning. What he protected was not merchandise that needed to remain intact. Before he even realized it, he was learning to be a father; and in the last thing he could do, he left his daughter a path on which to live.

Thus, “I delivered my daughter… to her destination” sounds at once like a transporter’s report and a father’s acknowledgment of his final escort.

The two identities overlap in this moment. As a transporter, he completes the commission. As a father, he delivers a child once treated as cargo to a place where she can possess a name, make choices, and live on her own. The destination is no longer simply a coordinate on a map. It is the place from which Philia can set out again under the name “Philia Gray.”

Calling himself her father does not give Jude ownership of Philia’s life. The last thing he does is let go. He cannot walk through her future for her; all he can do is bring her to its entrance. And then, watch her go.

“Well then, I’m off, Papa.”

Reading “Papa” hurt me even more than seeing “daughter.” Jude offers the name first, and Philia answers him with this one word. Only here do father and daughter cease to be merely my interpretation of their relationship and become the name they choose together.

And just after they finally say it, they have to part.

Philia does not say merely “I’m leaving,” but “I’m setting out.” The meanings are close, but the emotions are entirely different. “I’m leaving” easily holds one’s gaze on the farewell. Setting out turns that gaze toward what lies ahead. She accepts the name Jude gave her and also accepts that the remaining road is hers to walk.

In the distant view without dialogue, Philia carries her case and walks away. The game does not make her stand there crying forever, nor use more dialogue to summarize her feelings. She turns around and truly takes her first step.

This image makes me sad, but not only sad. The name Jude gives her does not bind her to the place of their farewell. It is more like luggage she can carry on the road. She will remember who brought her here and take that memory into a world Jude will never see.

At the journey’s beginning, she was picked up, loaded, and transported by someone else. At its end, she chooses a direction on her own feet. Everything Stella of the End accomplishes for Philia’s growth lies between those two images.

The World Ended, but the Journey Continues

The world of Stella of the End lies broken, yet green growth covers the ruins again. A city stands silently in the distance, the sky remains vast, and the road does not disappear at the edge of the image.

This final distant view does not seal the emotion inside a sorrowful close-up. The people grow small and the world opens again. My strongest feeling here is that she has truly set out. Not as cargo waiting for the next recipient, nor as a child who can only follow Jude. She carries her own belongings and her own name toward somewhere she has never seen.

Looking back, Jude delivers far more than Philia’s body. He brings her from “cargo” with a prescribed function to the companion sitting beside him, and then delivers that companion to the place where she can begin her own life as his daughter.

That is why “delivered to her destination” gives this job a weight far beyond a handoff. It does not say that the cargo has arrived. It says that a father has completed his last escort, and that a daughter begins living on her own from here.

The job ends, but their relationship will not be settled along with the payment.

After finishing the game, I still think of Philia standing before the shop window and looking at the white dress. At the time, she longed for an ordinary human life as though a pane of glass still separated her from it. At the end, she receives no promise of happiness, nor does she wait for a world completely restored. She simply has a name, once had a father, and then sets out on the road herself.

That is enough to change everything.

The world may have ended once. Her journey has only just begun.

Remembering the Forty-Five Days We Shared in a Summer Sinking Beneath the Sea

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:00:00 +0800

When I first encountered ATRI -My Dear Moments-, I thought it would be an easy story to summarize: a near future after rising sea levels, a town slowly sinking beneath the waves, a boy who has lost both a leg and his direction in life, and a robot girl salvaged from a wreck on the ocean floor.

Yet after I finished the game, what stayed in my memory was not any of those premises, but an extraordinarily bright summer.

There are ruins left by the rising sea, lives constrained by energy shortages and a future with no visible way forward, and pain reaching out from the past. But whenever I look back, the first things I see are always the shade of trees, white clouds, and light upon the water. And Atri taking Natsuki’s hand as though she has no intention of letting him refuse.

She Burst into His Life Like Summer

Atri’s arrival leaves Natsuki almost no room to remain despondent. She confidently declares herself a “high-performance” robot. She gets smug, sulks, makes a mess of things, and pulls him out of his closed-off life in the most direct way possible.

That energy matters. The story’s setting is, in truth, quite heavy: civilization is being swallowed little by little by the sea, familiar places can never be recovered, and those who remain on the island must live with limited supplies and a future they cannot make out. Natsuki resembles the town itself. On the surface he continues to live, but inside he has lost the impulse to move forward.

His prosthetic leg gives every movement a tangible weight. It is not merely a detail intended to make the character more distinctive. It is tied to the trauma of the accident and to Natsuki’s sense of his own damaged body. He returns from the city to his ocean-bound hometown with nowhere in particular to go, keeping his distance from others and expecting little of the future. Detachment is how he protects himself: if he never invests himself again, he will never have to face another loss.

Atri therefore does not “heal” him with one beautiful line. She is often noisy enough to give him a headache. She simply keeps barging into his schedule and placing the immediate problems in front of him, leaving him no time to stay trapped inside his own thoughts.

Atri is his complete opposite. Everything interests her, as though the world cannot truly be over as long as she can still run forward today.

I love the small routines of the game’s first half. Repairing broken equipment, returning to school, looking for a way to power the island, and then working with everyone to turn an idea into something real. Every problem is concrete: which materials are missing, why a machine will not run, whether the lights can come on tonight. These immediate, practical questions lead Natsuki to use his knowledge again and to return to the space between people.

Generating electricity is especially important. To the islanders, power is not an abstract symbol of civilization. It means light at night, working equipment, and children able to study somewhere that feels more like a school. What Natsuki does may not reverse the rising seas or save the whole world, but it truly makes tomorrow a little better than today for the people around him.

The abandoned school likewise ceases to be merely a post-apocalyptic ruin. People sit in its classrooms. Some argue and slack off, while others seriously discuss what to do next. The building has not returned to what it was, but life has returned to it. This is how the island’s community comes together: no one is a savior; everyone simply joins the small thing they can do to what the others can offer.

Atri is always present in these everyday moments. She helps and causes trouble, breaking through the gloom with far too much confidence. As she repeatedly drags Natsuki along to solve problems, he slowly becomes accustomed to being depended on, and to answering other people’s hopes of his own accord. He does not suddenly pull himself together one morning. By repairing one thing, agreeing to one request, and going to school once more, he rediscovers the sense that he can still take part in life.

What Atri gives Natsuki, then, cannot be described as love alone. She lets him believe again that although his body carries a wound that cannot be erased, his life did not end with it. He can still solve problems, still be needed, and still reach out a hand to someone.

A Heart Needs No Certificate

The game keeps asking a familiar question: can a robot possess genuine emotion? What moved me about ATRI is that it never insists on technical proof.

Atri’s feelings may come from a program, and her expressions may be imitations of human behavior. Yet when a few words can hurt her, when she treasures the time they spend together, and when she makes her own choice despite knowing the ending cannot be changed, whether those feelings are “real” seems to matter much less.

The latter half of the game brings this question closer and makes it crueler. How Atri understands her own emotions, and whether Natsuki is willing to believe her, in turn changes their relationship. I wavered here too: if some of her reactions can be explained by programming, does that diminish the joy and sorrow we felt before?

But the question quickly returns to humanity itself. Human emotions are also shaped by memory, experience, and instinct. We cannot open another person’s heart and confirm that it contains a love one hundred percent pure. We can only see what they say, what they do, and what they choose when it matters. If that is enough for us to understand a person, why should Atri be required to offer more exacting proof?

The kiss beneath the water is moving not because it finally labels their relationship as romance. At that moment, neither of them has been promised a future. They simply answer each other’s feelings within the time they have, treating a heart they cannot prove as something real.

To me, Atri is most nearly “human” not when she cries or says she loves someone, but when she finally gains the ability to choose. She no longer merely follows orders, nor is she willing to remain a replacement left behind by someone else. She knows what she wants to protect and is willing to bear the cost of her choice.

Natsuki makes a choice as well. He stops asking whether Atri can pass a test for possessing a “heart” and accepts that she has already changed him. Belief itself carries risk, especially when parting has been written into their relationship from the very beginning. Even so, he reaches out his hand.

Why Forty-Five Days Feel So Long

ATRI is not a long game, and the two of them spend only forty-five short days together. But the story does not compress that time into a handful of fate-changing events. It lets the days pass one by one.

They go to school in the morning, repair equipment by day, and worry about power and supplies. When there is time, they visit the shore, bicker with familiar faces, and spend a while looking at the stars after nightfall. Many scenes feel light when taken alone, sometimes no more than a few lively exchanges between characters. Together, however, they give life on the island a texture one can almost touch.

Gradually, I could distinguish the warmth of those days. The school holds the voices of people gathering again. The sea lies so close that it seems ready to spill over at any moment. After the generator succeeds, its light briefly returns a sense of safety to the night. Everyone on the island knows their circumstances will not easily improve, yet they remain busy preparing to study, eat, and use electricity tomorrow. This modest earnestness keeps the end of the world from becoming an empty premise.

Forty-five days thus feel longer than the number suggests. Natsuki and Atri do not merely share one miracle. They spend many ordinary mornings and evenings together. Their feelings gain places in which to settle: a classroom, a repaired machine, a road beside the sea, and an idle conversation with no special meaning that somehow remains in memory.

The story does not deny their parting. On the contrary, it reminds the player from the beginning that Atri and Natsuki’s time must eventually end. Precisely because it cannot last forever, their relationship is not a beautiful dream that can be saved and reloaded without limit, but a reality they must live with care.

The image of them embracing beneath the stars preserves this feeling for a long time. The stars seem distant and eternal, and forty-five human days are almost negligible beside them. But for the two people living through those days, they are all the time needed to change the rest of their lives.

Looking back at the title My Dear Moments after finishing the game, I feel it speaks of precisely these moments that cannot be extended, yet were lived in earnest. Being unable to keep someone forever does not rob the days shared with them of their worth. Memories may blur, but the changes those days created have already entered the life that follows.

A Bright Apocalypse, a Fleeting Summer

Though ATRI’s world is being swallowed by the sea, its art rarely paints the end of the world in gray. The ocean is a brilliant blue, sunlight falls through the leaves, and plants still grow beside abandoned buildings. Even submerged places often take on an almost dreamlike beauty through the water’s clarity and reflected light.

This brightness does not lessen the disaster. Instead, it creates a peculiar sense of distance. The old world truly will not return, but summer continues all the same. The weather grows hot, spray shines in the sun, and the sea breeze moves Atri’s hair. The characters live on land left behind by the ebb of civilization, yet the images keep telling the player that there are still things before them worth loving.

In the story, the sea is both a threat and a vessel for memory. It drowns Natsuki’s hometown and seals the past in depths that cannot easily be reached, yet also returns the sleeping Atri to his side. By day, the ocean is broad and dazzling. At night, the stars and water surround the characters with a vast quiet. The same sea therefore takes away a life and grants them one brief meeting.

The music sustains this coexistence of light and shadow. In the lively daily scenes, its melodies make the bickering and school life feel brighter. When the image turns toward the shore or night sky, the sound leaves enough room for silence. It does not constantly tell the player, “This is where you should be moved.” More often, it simply lengthens an evening a little, letting an unfinished sentence linger.

Near their parting, the melodies and images accumulated through those ordinary days return together. The sorrow is not sharp; it resembles a slowly rising tide. By the time you notice, familiar scenery has already been covered with another meaning. The sea, sunlight, stars, and sunset are therefore more than changes of setting. They create the sense of time across those forty-five days, beginning at summer’s brightest point and moving step by step toward the dusk where it must end.

This is also the work’s most vivid aftertaste for me. It tells of a world in decline, yet the colors in my memory remain bright. Sorrow does not obscure the summer; instead, it makes every ray of light feel fleeting.

A Few Regrets

ATRI is modest in scope, not a long Galgame whose many routes can be explored at leisure. Its focused main story creates a clear emotional arc, but also makes some turns fairly easy to anticipate. Some ideas about future society and rising sea levels barely take shape before the story returns to Natsuki and Atri. The island’s supporting cast is lovable, but they receive only limited time.

At times I wished the school and the island community had been explored a little further, and I wanted to see how more people lived in this world. These regrets do not shake the story’s core. It knows exactly which forty-five days it wants to portray and is willing to end when their time is over. In a sense, its brevity perfectly matches its theme: it does not explain everything until no blank space remains, but lets a finite time together leave a long enough echo.

Above the Sea, Tomorrow Still Comes

I love the feeling ATRI’s ending leaves behind. It carries regret and a romance peculiar to science fiction, yet it does not keep its characters forever inside their grief. The sea has drowned the old world, but people will still seek a new life. After a fleeting encounter ends, those left behind will go on carrying its memory.

Long after finishing the game, I may forget some events, but I doubt I will forget Atri running beside the sea. The wind catches her skirt, Natsuki struggles to keep up, and the sunset colors the sky in tones that hardly seem real. The image feels like the whole work in miniature: the world is not gentle, and their time together is not long enough, but while their hands are still joined, they should run forward with all their strength.

It also shows how different Natsuki has become from the beginning of the story. At first he has no direction and meets the future with silence. At the end he still wears his prosthetic leg and still must face loss, but now he knows why he is taking the next step. Atri does not erase his pain for him. The forty-five days she spends at his side teach him again to treat the road beneath his feet as a life worth living.

That, I think, is what ATRI -My Dear Moments- left with me.

Not a story about eternity, but about why fleeting things deserve to be remembered forever.

Why I Want to Leave Traces in the Digital World

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:00:00 +0800

The internet is always moving forward.

A page we read yesterday may suddenly disappear. A familiar community may change beyond recognition, and once-lively chat windows slowly sink to the bottom of the list. We have more ways to express ourselves than ever, yet many of the things we truly loved still end up as a screenshot buried deep on a hard drive, or a save file we never open again.

That is why I wanted to build a little site of my own.

A Screenshot I Do Not Want to Lose

Rather than leave screenshots buried on my hard drive, I want to give these cherished moments somewhere I can return to.

The girl in the picture is Yaotome Suzuka, one of the main heroines of SMEE’s sweet romantic-comedy visual novel LOVEPICAL-POPPY! (ラブピカルポッピー！), and the younger sister of the protagonist, Yaotome Tetsuya.

The game begins in a bit of a rush. A fire leaves the siblings temporarily without their old home. Suzuka moves into the dormitory at Hoshikuzu Academy, while a twist of fate makes Tetsuya the live-in dorm mother of the girls’ residence, with a second job helping at the attached crepe cafe. The story unfolds from this new everyday life.

But I do not want to retell an entire route here, nor turn this post into a character profile. What made me want to keep this image was something much more personal, a feeling that quietly accumulated as I played.

Wanting to Rely on Someone, and to Be Their Support

Suzuka has long blue hair and blue eyes that are easy to remember, along with the gentle, refreshing air of a younger-sister heroine. But describing her as merely “cute” seems to leave out the part that matters most to me.

She is diligent and earnest, excels at school, and is capable in almost everything she does. At the same time, she has very little stamina, is poor at sports, and struggles with communal life. She becomes especially guarded around unfamiliar men. She is not someone who handles everything with effortless composure. Even amid her weaknesses and anxieties, she keeps trying to do things well.

She is very close to her brother and plainly adores him. She relies on Tetsuya, yet does not want to remain forever the little sister who is cared for. She wants to become independent, and she also hopes her brother will rely on her more. That wish to stay beside the person who makes her feel safest while becoming someone he can safely lean on makes her fragility and competence feel not contradictory, but especially real.

That is the Suzuka I like. She is not a symbol whose only purpose is to be adorable, but someone who feels fear, depends on others, and still earnestly tries to take one step forward. The bond between the siblings is not protection flowing in only one direction. When neither of them is entirely dependable, they gradually learn to support each other.

Making a Place for the Stories I Love

Liking a character does not always become a complete review. Sometimes what remains is a single line, a short stretch of time together, or the feelings from those days of playing that return when I see a certain screenshot. These feelings are small and difficult to fit into scores or lists of strengths and flaws, but that does not make them unimportant.

Here, I do not need to chase recommendation algorithms or compress every feeling to fit a timeline. I can write about the lingering emotions a Galgame left behind, note why a certain character stayed with me, or simply post one screenshot and place a few quiet paragraphs beside it.

Later, I began calling this site “Suzuka.” It is more than a convenient name to remember; it also feels like a bookmark left inside this affection. Whenever I see the site’s name and that pale blue figure, I remember why I was willing to spend the time building this place little by little.

A Note to My Future Self

The point of keeping a record is not necessarily for many people to see it. Perhaps years from now, I will be the only one who happens to return here, sees Suzuka’s smile again, remembers LOVEPICAL-POPPY!, and recalls how I felt sitting in front of the screen at the time.

That would already be enough.

I hope this blog can be a tiny digital garden. It does not need to be lively. It only needs to quietly preserve the works, characters, screenshots, and feelings I once loved. Even if all of it is ultimately left for my future self, it will still be proof that I was here, and that I once cared for these things with all my heart.

About Suzuka

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello. This is Suzuka’s garden of words.

This site belongs to a devoted Suzuka fan, so naturally Suzuka has a place here.

I like Suzuka for more than her cuteness. She is clever and earnest, and handles many things well, yet she lacks stamina, struggles with group life, and tends to push herself too hard. She can be guarded and stubborn, but still holds the people who matter to her close in her own awkward way.

That earnest, imperfect charm feels right at home in this little site.