VN Demo Round-Up!

I have 17 demos installed in my Steam library, most of them are spicy gay visual novels.  I need to get through them to decide if I want to buy them or not.  I'm going to play each one until I reach an ending, then write down my thoughts and judgements here.

HKIA: Tea Garden Hype!

OMG, I love tea, and the fantasy of tea parties.  This is so fucking cute!  I know, I haven't finished base game, or Wheatflour Wonderland, or City Town, but I'm still gonna get this when it launches.

15 clothing items with 300+ variants means they're DYABLE!  My favorite thing!  I love dyable clothes.

2 new food stations?  I bet one's a tea pot and I'm so DOWN FOR TEA!

50 decor items?  Great!

A new questline?  Great!  I hope I don't need Wish me mell maxed, because I'm still pretty far behind on that.

All this for ten bucks?  Sign me up! I guess I better get back to gifting Wish me mell rare fish...

2026 Media Goals update 3

I've been going super hard on my other hobbies, so my media backlog is barely touched, but I have made some new progress.

An Older Guy's VR First Love Manga Review

An Older Guy's VR First Love was written by Violence Tomoko and published in English in 2022.  It's about a middle aged man and an elderly man who meet in a VR world, with the avatars of young ladies, and fall in love.

As a person who's fallen in love with people online before, this story really resonated with me.  It's sad, beautiful, and familiar all at once.

I suppose it could be considered both BL and GL, since the characters are both men, but both have female avatars, but really, I just feel like it's neither, and just a unique story about an experience probably more common than people would like to admit. 

I finally watched Kpop Demon Hunters!

Okay, okay, I FINALLY sat down and watched Kpop Demon Hunters.  The soundtrack kept popping up on my Kpop radio station.  And the merch is so cute, but I refused to buy any until after I saw the movie.

I'm on board.  It took a good 10-20 minutes for me to get used to the animation style, but once I did, it was pretty smooth sailing.  It was a fun movie and I had a great time.  I love Kpop, so the soundtrack was right up my alley.  The choreography was very familiar.  The songs were catchy.

Rumi, Zoey, and Mira?  I think those were their names.  They're demon hunters.  But Rumi is half demon and forced to hide it.  Bummer.  But in the end, that secret is blown, but they all sing their problems away while violently destroying demons, and it all works out.

The villains, the Saja Boys, were fine.  Their numbers were good.  Aside from Jinu, none of the other guys got any real character development, so I guess they're not important.  I would have liked to get to know them better, but fuck it. 

2026 Media Goals Update 2

Well, the good news is I've done a considerable amount more gaming.  The bad news is I'm still not really cracking into my backlog.

Books.  I'm behind on this.  I completely stopped reading on Kindle for a while.  I've been pushing myself really hard in other areas, so I need to take a step back from them and let myself sit and read more.  My Kindle might need a charge.

Why I changed my mind on Hello Kitty Island: City Town

Okay, hear me out.  I know I said I wasn't going to buy Hello Kitty Island's new expansion, City Town, because it costs more than Wheatflour Wonderland, until it went on sale, but I've done some serious thinking in the meantime, and I feel in the current cozy game market, Hello Kitty Island Adventure is still significantly more honest, upfront, and reasonably priced than other cozy games being pushed right now.  Sure, there are a lot of free to play games coming out, but listen, the games run on servers, and servers cost money, so they'll get the money out of you one way or another, and I feel that HKIA's competitors are doing so much more deviously.  I feel more comfortable giving my money to Sunblink for solid expansions full of content and costumes, then getting individual outfits sold to me in lucky boxes or whatever.  I still feel that Sunblink is being honest and fair, and they have yet to introduce gambling mechanics and predatory microtransactions.

Could they potentially turn around and introduce gambling mechanics and predatory microtransactions?  Of course, we're in the worst possible timeline.  Everything horrible that can happen, is happening.  But I don't feel that Sunblink has reached that point yet.  Yes, they said they were going to introduce smaller content packs this summer, but I'm not going to judge them until they're out.  I only have a few months to wait.  In the meantime, I'll check out City Town, and judge it on it's own merits.