Rundown (5/25/2025) Natalie.TF Hit 2 Million Lifetime Views!

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Natalie.TF Hit 2 Million Lifetime Views!
• Power to the Payment Processors (The Biggest Winner In Modern Gaming)
• Fortnite’s Back on The Apple App Store! (The Epic v. Apple Battle Has Finally Ended)
• Scroll to Infinity & Natalie’s Horse-Blinders (Akumako Explains Why Natalie’s a Dumb-Dumb)
• Shuten Order Formally Announced (Too Kyo Games X Neilo Multi-Genre VN Joint)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie.TF Hit 2 Million Lifetime Views!

Akumako: “Yo, Nat!”

Yeah, cuz?

Akumako: “…Okay, now you’re just doing this intentionally! Ugh. Did you check your site stats as of late?”

Nah. I look at the Natalie.TF stats every now and again, but aside from my annual year-end blow-out, I don’t pay them much mind. Not unlike the site health in general.

Akumako: “When’s the sticky header coming back?”

When I feel like fighting with OceanWP again and potentially compromising everything! So, what’s going on with the stats?”

Akumako: “Natalie.TF finally broke two million lifetime views!”

…Damn, really? That’s pretty cool.

Akumako: “…What the hell’s with that muted reaction? Be happy! Be excited! Getchu some hype in yo bitch-ass!“

Oh, don’t get me wrong I am plenty happy that Natalie.TF continues to accrue readers willing, if not excited, to read the things that I write. I am grateful for the dedicated reader base that I have. I am fortunate to have enough evergreen content that I regularly see a thousand views per day from 400 visitors. Especially in the modern environment, where so many people are inclined to stay in their little apps, never venturing out into a basic-ass WordPress site. However, my excitement toward any statistical discoveries is tempered by a few things.

One, I have been monitoring my stats for so long that I pretty much know what works. I know what gets more traction, I know what my readers want, and I know that if I wanted to uphold perpetual growth, I should just keep writing about TSF, Student Transfer, and Press-Switch. …Or go back to producing softcore erotica with my homegirl Vee Dee. And unlike a fallen queen I could name, I would not resort to peddling AI trash! I would steal busty candids the honorable way!

Two, I don’t give a shit about my stats. Back in 2012 to 2014, I was just writing, writing, and writing all sorts of shit with no real care in the world, no big plan, and if I got any comment or feedback, it was something worth celebrating! Annual viewership in 2012 was 3,701 views. Then 12,821 in 2013. Then 22,504 in 2014. Time went on, number went up, but after the exponential growth from 145,084 in 2019 to 281,956 in 2020, I kind of stopped caring. Because regardless if the number goes up or down… I’m not going to change anything. I write, first and foremost, for myself, as a form of entertainment and mental health maintenance. Which is why I do things like produce novels that nobody reads. Even if I need to take Natalie.TF offline, I will not stop writing until I am physically, or mentally, unable to write. So if you want to stop me, kill me and rape my corpse, you fascist fuckwits!

Three, the more people read my work, the more pressure I feel like I need to behave. There is a certain brilliant freedom that is found in being obscure, in being able to spout whatever insane deranged bullshit you can think of, and be left completely unaccountable. Because nobody knows you exist. Since I have readers, and a reputation of debatably dubious quality, I need to keep true to my promises to do things, and maintain a level of quality and consistency.

Akumako: “Babe, the bar for quality around here is so low that not even Sakanishi Tamasaburo with his retractable boobs and dong could limbo under it.”

Yeah, because you of all people know everything there is to know about quality.

Akumako: “You stole me from KO Beast!”

I stole you from from mid!

The point is that I am very glad that I have an audience, but they are not what drive me to create, and the numbers… are just numbers. I lose money running this site, and treat all of this like a hobby done for the love of the game. The love of yapping, working my brain, showcasing something I love, or making something for the pure satisfaction of making something.

Still, thank you all for sticking with Natalie.TF enough to accrue this many views, and supporting my endeavors for the past… thirteen years. …Wait, when is this coming out— OH SHIT!

AKUMAKO! IT’S NATALIE.TF’S 13TH ANNIVERSARY!

Akumako: “OH DONKEY BALLS! What are we gonna do to celebrate?”

The same thing we do every year, my love! Nothing!

Akumako: “…Seriously?”

It’s just the 13th anniversary, not even a cool round number, like 37. The number of the Wu-Tang. I simply do not have anything cool or fun that I could share with the kind people reading this on their phone/desktop, as I’m still trying to work through my current slate of stuff—

Akumako: “Meaning playing The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy.”

—And I am almost certainly not going to release any new novel this year, despite my lofty intention on delivering two of the bloody things. …But I will release something of narrative substance by the end of the year. Probably on my birthday, maybe on Christmas.

Akumako: “You mean TSF Series #019: Suicide to Success and TSF Series #020: Doctor Bitz’s Hunt For Justice?”

Why you gotta spoil it for the people? Now you’ve gone and said it, meaning I gotta do it now— Ugh. Guess I’ll need to read The Most Dangerous Game and The Island of Doctor Moreau sometime this year! …Wait, The Most Dangerous Game is just a short story? I thought it was a novel of public domain ish I could snag! Fate has bamboozled me yet again!

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Power to the Payment Processors
(The Biggest Winner In Modern Gaming)

Publishers pay Nintendo 30% on every sale, and Nintendo dumps their game onto a tiny, laggy, list full of crap. Meaning they cannot even rely on the inherent marketing of being on a store shelf. Also, you cannot take screenshots of the eShop. I guess it’s to avoid credit card leaks?

This week should be relatively mild for gaming news, as we are in the PRE3 season, or Pre-S3 if I want to bring back the nomenclature of Segmented Summer Showcases this year. So I’m going to go on some tangents this Rundown, starting with one inspired by a GameDeveloper.com article I was directed to. The article mostly discusses how the traditional professional studio structure of the games industry is becoming less prominent, leading to a wave of unprofessionalism. Which is shorthand for apartment-based teams small enough to fit in a minivan working in their jammies to create the next hit indie game. Currently, the game to beat is Balatro, though the mega hit tastemaker changes every two or so years. Balatro‘s just an ideal target, as you could make a Balatro clone in, like, 6 months if you know what you’re doing.

The article is a good analysis of a troubling trend that could prove to be disastrous for the career viability of many positions in the industry. However, that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is this poignant bit of insight included at the end of the article:

“But don’t rush off to start your indie dreams—it’s still as true as it was for years that most indie games do not succeed. And those that don’t succeed can still be financial fodder for the shovel merchants of the worlds—your technology companies, your payment processors, your game platforms, your investors, etc. Plenty of companies are standing ready to profit on the devs gunning to be the next Schedule I.”

…Which is where the gears kicked into place for me. I have routinely struggled to comprehend how most games make money unless they sell half a million copies or have a dev team that could fit in a ‘starter home.’ The answer is that they don’t, or they get someone else to foot the bill. I have been posturing at the super games gobbling up people’s time and money as gaming’s enemy number one since I talked about that Matthew Ball article in January. But there is another genre of people who are making mad bank off of gaming, as they are the ones responsible for the egregious industry standard 30% cut plaguing digital sales.

Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Valve, and CDProjekt all make money on every transaction that takes place on their platform. Every game bought, every fiat to game token conversion, every DLC purchase, every cosmetic, it all translates into not only revenue for the publisher, but revenue for the platform holder. They run the store, make the rules, and if you want to buy games, you need to go through one of them, giving them your money. This means that, even if companies are struggling, so long as people are spending money on games, they are going to do pretty alright. They will thrive even as the vast majority of developers are teetering toward bankruptcy.

There used to be some justification to the 30% cut, as it was competing with physical retail. and had a lot of innate advantages. A 70% profit margin was way higher than anything that one could hope to make selling disks, let alone cartridges. There was no need to worry about overstock, shipping, or retailer negotiation. You just had to be on the store, and once you were on the store, you were on a shelf of a curated storefront. New things came out every week, but keeping up with new releases was far easier, as the number of annual releases was in the hundreds.

The Xbox 360 had a huge library across ‘full’ games, Xbox Live Arcade titles, and Xbox Live Community Games. But just a cursory look every week or month prevented games from getting lost in lists, and the storefront, while not the most ideal in its layout, was functional. Steam, before 2014-ish, was a platform with a similar level of curation, allowing smaller releases to garner more eyes by virtue of being a new game on Steam. It allowed games like Recettear and Cthulhu Saves the World to be front page items that sold well due to their low price, ability to fulfill a niche, and by being Steam games.

Just being on a digital storefront was a form of marketing, and a highly valuable one. Because it meant that millions of people would see a game. Its icon, its banner, and they would have the opportunity to click on the game’s page, see some details, and decide to either make a purchase or add it to a wishlist. Compare this to the Switch eShop, modern Steam, or the PS5’s online store.

You see years-old games that have managed to retain a large playerbase by being 10+ million unit selling megahits. You have the aforementioned super game live services. You have a few surprise older games that just suddenly spike up in popularity for reasons. New releases with hype behind them. And some indie darlings for good measure. Steam especially has taken to burying new releases. The top of the page typically has some banner, often advertising a big new title or sales from big publishers. Then you have a showcase of various games, mostly big already successful titles. Then a list of genres for people to have an algorithm spit out big popular titles to them. Then Steam Deck advertisements. Then a Discovery queue for tag-based recommendations. Then more deals. And finally a list of “new and trending” games.

Now, Steam does some work to justify their 30% fee, offering community guides, forums, and social features that blow every other store out of the water, in addition to offering an easily linkable page. While every console… is charging a fee for being on that console. Something that used to be a debatable deal, but the Switch eShop is a notoriously awful thing to navigate as a storefront, while the PS5 is not much better. GOG though? GOG is good. Because they do something that every bigger storefront has given up on… unless it involves an underaged looking cartoon girl in a game that was fairly rated by a major ratings board. Curation.

Sometime in the last 2010s, arguably early 2020s, the console gaming storefronts just stopped curating what was allowed on their stores. I have to imagine that they made compliance more lenient and/or cheaper, with people just OKing games so long as they don’t turn the system into a toaster. Though, I know part of this is the fault of the ratings boards. Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, it was expensive to get your game on consoles, as you had to get it rated by the ESRB, PEGI, and whomever else in whatever regions you were looking into, and pay the same fee for each platform. This barrier of, often, several thousand dollars was a significant hurdle, and there were calls to get rid of it. So they basically did for digital games.

Now, if you load up your PS5 and/or Switch, you will find that the games do have ratings, but they likely did not pay for them, thanks to the International Age Rating Coalition. They operate a website where developers can fill out a survey, describe their game a little, maybe provide some footage, and are assigned ratings in every partner country. So ESRB, PEGI, Australian Classification Board, Korea’s GRAC, Germany’s USK, Brazil’s Classino, and Taiwan’s committee thing. All for the low, low price of FREE! …So long as your game is a digital only release. If you want it to be on store shelves, I think you need to pay a couple thousand dollars.

Oh, and the dev kit? Per some forum sleuthing, they cost like $450 to $2,500. A loose range that varies depending on the system and era. For any business, that’s cheap.

So, how can this situation be changed? Ideally, with a combination of two remedies. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Valve should be more stringent about what games are released on their platforms. It will help the smaller devs with quality products, while making the act of browsing a digital storefront less of a sensory overload. And they should just lower their cut. Yes, yes, payment processing costs money, especially when going through the likes of Visa, Discover, MasterCard, AMEX, JBC, Stripe, and PayPal, whose fees can reach upwards of 5% in the most unfortunate scenarios. Yes, they want to make money on each sale, because it is their store. And yes, they need to pay for every GB of data they let people download. Gigabytes of data aren’t free, ya know! …Should they be? Eh… that’s a topic for another day!

But does all of this justify 30%? No. 15%? Yes, that is far more reasonable. Hell, 20% would be a seismic shift for a lot of game businesses. In general, an extra 10% is what a LOT of companies and ventures need to go from the red to the green. It helps bring more money to publishers/developers while selling the same number of units.

Now, this will NOT happen, as what I am doing is asking companies to do extra work for less money in order to make their userbase and business partners happier. In order to make the prospect of playing new games, more games, enticing. Hell, Steam would have the most leeway to do this, being a private company only beholden to shareholders who could change any given day. They could have a rigorous series of quality assurance procedures and turn Steam into a domain of the best games Of the Canon games. Instead, they just ask for a $100 submission fee and then you’re good-to-go. They’re free market lovers and believe that allowing 18,000 new games a year is somehow sustainable. Rather than rely on Greenlight, which was a good system conceptually (they needed to reject more games), they decided to just become the de facto PC game platform outside of game specific launchers.

…In conclusion, I want to clear the games market of cash-grabbing, artistically weak, cynically for profit drivel. However, implementing that would be hard, because for every game that is just a shitty asset flip with GenAI bullshots, there’s a game that had heart that only sold a couple hundred units, barely getting enough reviews to have a visible rating. Good measures could have prevented this, but instead they just allowed the crap to fester. Either the storefront owners could impose standards and clean the slate, or they could keep doing what benefits them while taking the least amount of work. Golly does capitalism suck.

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Fortnite’s Back on The Apple App Store!
(The Epic v. Apple Battle Has Finally Ended)

Well, this was a long, drawn out, yet generally positive way to end things. After years of litigation, the Epic Games v. Apple lawsuit has finally come to a resolution. A dispute between two tech giants over payment processing fees has been one where there was not really any right side to root for, but things somehow managed to work out for the best in the end. The US justice system, for all its flaws, has been refreshingly aggressive towards Apple, with this past month being home to a landmark ruling preventing them from charging their usual 30% payment processing fees outside of the App Store. (They tried to skirt around this with a 27% fee, but the judge, rightfully, told them to piss off.)

The gist is that Apple cannot impose fees outside of their App Store. They cannot track, monitor, or audit developers to ensure they are paying Apple their cut. They cannot restrict how developers handle their purchases. They cannot prevent apps from redirecting users to payment sites. They cannot do anything more than inform users that they are being sent to an external site. I am not sure on how well these changes have been implemented on a practical level. Because I don’t play any games on my phone anymore. But this has allowed Fortnite, after nearly five years, to finally return to the App Store!

In the end, app developers (including Epic Games, I guess) won and they can do their own payment processing rather than pay Apple’s fees. This case has established precedent that could bring an end to the 30% platform fees that I just said would never go away. And when combined with the rise in alternative App Stores across the world, mobile game publishers may find a way to make an extra 15% or more on each sale. Which would be pretty incredible.

However, this is a country-specific victory at the moment, and this would not really help packaged game sales, as those are made on the storefront, and the store owner is still allowed to take their 30% fee on the storefront itself. This seems like something that would mostly affect free-to-play live services, because it is, but there may be ways for developers to work within this framework by divesting from storefronts. This is just a theory, but it may be possible for a AAA title to be released for ‘free’ only to bombard the player with the ability to unlock the full game an hour or two in, prompting them to navigate to a website on their phone to purchase the game without giving a penny to the storefront owner..

Now, Sony, Nintendo, Valve, and Microsoft would all HATE this, but this is a possibility, and it could be an improvement over whatever balance we currently have. …Or the storefront owners could just preemptively lower the fees so that they can skirt by without risking a lawsuit and look like heroes for benefitting devs of all shapes and sizes. Being nice and generous is a great way to avoid lawsuits.

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Scroll to Infinity & Natalie’s Horse-Blinders
(Akumako Explains Why Natalie’s a Dumb-Dumb)

Two weeks ago, when I was talking about AI in education, I had a lot of thoughts, and concerns, for the children. I received some very much appreciated responses from my readers— thank you for that— but the topic stuck with me. …As it should, as children are always the future. But one particular thing that stuck with me was actually not AI related. But related to how the children are using their phones. I’ve said before that I’m not big into these newfangled smartphone things. I got on the bus about a decade out of style, and I think it’s just a less efficient desktop computer, best used for making phone calls and watching YouTube away from my desk. And even that is harder than it used to be, since they stopped making ’em with audio jacks! Combine this with how I do not have any relatives younger than me, nor co-workers younger than me (my only co-workers are in their 60s), and there are some things I just don’t understand. Like this idea of constantly scrolling for hours upon hours, just allowing content to be delivered to them.

Now, I naturally scroll to get to things, and I of course rely on algorithms to deliver some content. But what I do not understand is an alleged lack of curation amongst younger people. Such as relying on home pages, ‘for you’ tabs, feeds of what is popular, of what others are engaging with, and automatic playlists or ‘mixes.’ I have universally just ignored this guff, but the more I look around, the more I cannot help but see it everywhere. I just did not notice it because… I’m an RSS retrograde-ass bitch. I subscribe to individuals, follow them, maintain feeds of new content sorted chronologically, and work through it in roughly chronological order. Then I engage with it, and leave. I might come back several times a day, as a nervous tick, but I ultimately leave once I checked the new stuff.

My Bluesky feed? It ends when I see things I saw a few hours ago. Then it’s time to do something else. ResetEra? Check every few hours, then I leave after confirming that I’ve seen anything. Pixiv? Heck the home page. I just check my followed creators, look for new stuff, download if it I want it, manage the files, then move on. ElectricHentai? Check on Friday nights— like a virgin— grab what I want to check out using the premium version of a free download utility, keep going until I see stuff I saw last week, then promptly close the private window. If I want to explore, then sure, I can use the algorithms to find stuff, as they are sometimes good at showing stuff that I like. I clear up my YouTube home page regularly when looking for something to watch while eating, on an exercise bike, or when I want background stimulating while doing routine work. But that is for a clear purpose, part of a multitasking activity.

I’m not saying there is a right way to use the internet. Yet this approach makes so much sense to me, is so efficient, and I have done it for so long that I cannot fathom why someone would just… not bother collecting and arranging things in accordance to their interests. Why avoid this and just accept what The App feeds you? What is compelling the teens of today to act this way?

Akumako: “Natalie, quick question. When you were a teen, did you understand what the average teenager was interested in, invested in, or generally liked?”

No, of course not. I did not even like the average person at age 17, let alone understand them. When I walked through the overcrowded halls, I would fantasize about a bomb going off, or an explosive spear being fired from a lone terrorist of justice, killing a couple dozen with an expertly aimed shot.

Akumako: “…Why a spear?”

Bioshock 2, bay-bee! Also, I was nihilistic, depressed, and slowly having my spirit poisoned by testosterone, thinking that was just part of being a teenager.

Akumako: “Did you think that most of your peers were smart? Or did you think that like half of them gave neither a shit, nor a fuck, about classes, and were just coasting, doing the bare minimum?”

Uh… you’re making a good point there. Yes, a lot of them were dumb and content with it, just there because they legally had to be there. Hell, my College Prep English class, which was technically an Honor’s class, did such a bad job paying attention to Macbeth that we wound up reading a crummy comic version of the story near the end. Then we watched two film adaptations of it, writing essays about them instead of finishing the bloody book.

…There was also that guy at my school with terrible teeth who was really into lynching. He got excited whenever we did something with ropes in gym class.

Akumako: “For context purposes, you went to a great high school with good teachers and ample funding. There are a lot of schools where things were worse than yours.”

What are you getting at?

Akumako: “That you are not supposed to understand the youths of today.”

What does that mean?

Akumako: “It means you’re a dummy who does not understand certain things, and you should know when to just throw your hands up and say you don’t get it. Because you won’t get it. Because you think about the world in a way that’s too narrow, and too broad, at the same time. You need someone to break things down and carefully explain them to you, as otherwise you will not get it. Because you do not, and cannot, think like a normal person. You never have, and you never fucking will!”

…Yeah, that checks out. But—

Akumako: “There’s always a but with this tiny-booty-ass ho!”

I also did not really care about a lot of things discussed in school when I was a teenager. I just wanted to get the knowledge, get on with my life, do the things I wanted to do, and get money. And it worked out wonderfully for me! I guess I’m just surprised that so many teenagers seemingly missed the fact that education builds upon everything that comes before. That bad habits will compound and make it harder for someone to improve going forward. That whatever you do in life, it’s important to put some effort into it, to put some synthetic passion into it.

This lack of effort that I have been hearing about, plugging everything into AI and looking for the best way to no-ass assignments, is concerning, but it’s something I can understand. But another thing that I’ve seen in the recent wave of American educators talking about the state of education is that students apparently don’t have any personality. No taste, no preferences, and little in the way of passion about things in general.

This is something where I have to question if teachers are reading their students incorrectly. COVID-19 messed up most students’ social skills, and some people are just not good at projecting their personality. I know, because I was one of them. I HATED sharing my thoughts as a teen, as I was embarrassed to tell adults that I liked video games, internet comedy reviews, anime, and jerking it to TG captions. (The masturbation was the second most embarrassing.) I hated sharing myself with others, and was so afraid of expressing myself, of being judged, that I would ask to be assigned topics for projects. But I still had a fucking personality.

Akumako: “Yeah, you were the quiet kid with a godawful lisp who would bash their head against a brick wall if they were having a bad day. Or if they had to skip out on lunch because there wasn’t any homeroom. …You ate lunch in homeroom, ya freak.”

However, assuming that the teachers are right on the dollar with their assessment, I do not understand why this is a problem with The Youths of today. They were raised on personality, on people expressing themselves, on YouTube and its derivatives. One of the most popular career prospects is to become an influencer, and people are attracted by personality. …I think.

Akumako: “They are, but some people have shitty tastes and are fucking morons. Why do you think one of the biggest creators on YouTube is a generic Caucasoid with eyes that have not glimmered with life in years.”

I love/hate how that can describe so many people… Still, don’t people want to try, want to do things, and pursue passions, rather than just sit on a log? Don’t they want to become a content creator? I still wish that I made the pivot to making stuff for the internet when I was 14 instead of 17. Instead, I thought I just wasn’t good enough to make anything. I had a terrible voice that nobody could understand, so video was out of the question. I had bad motor skills, so I gave up all artistic aspirations in elementary school. I was in remedial English for reasons that were never properly explained to me. Beyond how I used because too much, because because is a good filler word, just because. After fumbling the ball with my first fanfic, Metal Gear Switch, I was convinced I did not have the skills to be a writer. I thought I was useless, and—

Akumako: “—And you were planning on killing yourself after high school, as you thought you were too stupid to succeed in college. Just like how when you were a little kid you thought you’d need to kill yourself before you started attending high school, as you were too stupid. Yeah, yeah, you’ve said this much before. I get what you are saying but, again, Natalie, dumb-dumb, you are making the same mistake in the same fucking segment. You are viewing the world from your narrowly defined lived experiences. You think too much. You are too fixated on details. You have a high level of self-congruity, and understand yourself a deep, fundamental, level. But you just do not get most people.”

…So, should I just give up trying to understand the youth?

Akumako: “You can only understand so much from afar. You can start understanding the youth when you start working with them at your next job, Miss Senior Accountant.”

…Shit, I’m going to need to become Nattie-senpai in the next few years when my boss finally sells the practice. I don’t know if that’s exciting or terrifying.

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Shuten Order Formally Announced
(Too Kyo Games X Neilo Multi-Genre VN Joint)

Well, this was revealed surprisingly quickly. For those that did not catch the last minute addition to last week’s Rundown, Too Kyo Games, DMM Games, and Spike Chunsoft announced a new adventure games from Danganronpa series creator Kazutaka Kodaka. …Except they announced it with a vague trailer that did not reveal much of anything. I always hate when publishers do this, rather than just revealing what a project is from the outset, and this approach is extra silly if they wind up revealing the game next week with a full trailer and synopsis.

…Which is what they did. Oh well. Too soon is better than a few months.

Shuten Order is the next ambitious venture by Too Kyo games, and this one’s hook is a bit complicated. Firstly, the game is all about cults and religion! Shuten Order is a doomsday cult that has formed their own sovereign-nation-compound, amassing oodles of followers until their founder is murdered. Through the “the Power of God”, the founder is resurrected as Rei Shimobe, but the resurrection was incomplete, giving them a zombie-like appearance, amnesia, and a lifespan of four days. Rei must identify and kill their murdered before the time is up to complete their resurrection, but we all know it cannot be quite that simple.

That’s a weird freak game concept for weird freaks, like me, but this freak factor is amplified by the fact that this game features five different scenarios, each with their own unique adventure game mechanics.

• A mystery adventure game set in a mansion where the player must find the holes in peoples’ arguments while investigating a murder, complete with some familiar Danganronpa elements. Mansions are the classic place for murder mysteries to happen, and the deluge of gameplay elements thrown about makes this seem like a more involved puzzle-driven affair. Which I appreciate.
• A first-person maze-based escape room game that is framed as a live stream, with a girl regularly emoting in the corner while a chat populates a good chunk of the screen. An idea that… I find fascinating on its own. It is simultaneously a throw back to the labyrinthine navigation that was common in a lot of earlier ventures in the series, even dating back before graphical adventure games. So it’s an old idea… but with some modern streamer flair! (I say modern, but this type of streaming has been common for a decade.)
• A multi-perspective dual protagonist novel adventure game. This is a call back to a highly underrated sub-genre that dates back to the likes of Desire: Haitoku no Raisen (1994) and Eve Burst Error (1995), but with the flowchart-navigating freakitude I would expect of a Too Kyo Games joint. …Though the fact that you’re switching between two dudes is kind of breaking an unspoken rule. All the big ones use a male and female protagonist! …Though, two girls would work for a moe game.
• A romantic adventure (?) game where the player needs to identify someone in a school full of interactable girls, using responses to swoon their hearts in order to loosen their lips. Which… sounds like it is only technically a romance game, but I’m sure there is some unspoken twist based on that deliberately chosen question mark.
• And a mostly overhead stealth horror title about fleeing from a robot. Which I guess falls under the prevue of adventure games if you consider RPG Horror titles adventure games. And, I mean, what else would they be?

All of this is rendered in a vibrant, slick, and striking visual style from Shimadoriru, the other Danganronpa/Too Kyo Games artist, giving the game a distinct look, eye-catching key art, and a visual identity that doesn’t make it feel like a Danganronpa offshoot. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Rui Komatsuzaki’s work, but their style is so distinct that everything looks like it belongs in the same universe.)

This all sounds promising, but who’s the developer? Why, none other than Neilo! …Never heard of them? Me neither! But they worked on Left 4 Dead: Survivors (2013), the Japanese Left 4 Dead arcade game you played with a keyboard and mouse and Alternate Jake Hunter: Daedalus – The Awakening of Golden Jazz (2018). Daedalus is probably the reason they were chosen as the developer, as it showed off their artistic skills and ability to construct an investigative adventure game. Not a particularly good one, which is unfortunate as it was the only Saburo Jinguji game to hit the PC, and one of three to ever be localized.

Another reason they were probably chosen is that Kodaka actually cut his teeth on writing Saburo Jinguji novels and a few game scenarios. So he probably knew a guy at Neilo and they made something happen. It’s how the world of business works.

While Kodaka is the main frontrunner here, he’s actually working alongside two other fairly familiar faces. The first being Takumi Nakazawa, who really has not had the same following as Kotaro Uchikoshi or Kazutaka Kodaka, despite basically being their peer and a founding member of Too Kyo Games. I’d ask why he is not as well known, but the answer can be found in his gameography. He worked alongside Uchikoshi on the cult classic Infinity series— Nakazawa directed while both collaborated on the scenario—but after that, Nakazawa chose not to work for a bigger company like Spike or Chunsoft. Instead, he worked for a tiny company called Regista.

There, Nakazawa was productive, directing a game every year, but none of them received a western release until *Root Double: Before Crime * After Days (2012)*. A multi-route sci-fi adventure visual novel with oodles of additional endings, twists up the wazoo, and something that any *Zero Escape* fan should check out, as it’s spiritually a spin-off of the series. …Which I say despite having not played the game for more than an hour eight years ago. Nakazawa then worked with 5pb on Punch Line, a video game adaptation/expansion of a time jumping anime of the same name, and another collaboration with Uchikoshi. …And then Nakazawa, Uchikoshi, and Kodaka worked together on World End Club (2020), which should have been a dream game, but it wound up being pretty mid. At least according to the streets. I really need to play more adventure games. And games in general. Nat likes games!

Meanwhile, the second secondarily billed writer is Takekuni Kitayama, Kodaka’s co-writer from Rain Code (2023) and the “Trick Cooperation” person on Danganronpa V3 (2017)‘s scenario. (No, I do not know what that means.) Kodaka clearly likes him if they’re working together like this.

Honestly, I’m a bit stunned at the sheer amount of stuff that Too Kyo Games is putting out this year. There was the EOS’d Tribe Nine, which they mostly did art, music, and worldbuilding stuff for. The brilliant The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. The upcoming side-quel No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files— oh, they probably called it that because they don’t want people to think their game used AI! And now, they are coming out with another new IP in Shuten Order, coming out on September 5 for Switch and Steam.

…Huh. Kind of weird they aren’t even doing an obligatory PS4 release. It realistically would not cost very much to produce and even a few thousand sales would cover the hassle.

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Progress Report 2025-05-25

Great song, better music video, and something I listened to on loop for about two hours this week while doing stuff! So, yes, it is addictive! Also, this song was created by a 20-year-old trans girl in Chicago, which is pretty dang neat in my book.

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2025-05-18: 5,700 words on TSF Showcase 2025-06. Hell yeah! I still got it! I didn’t fall off or nothing! And this was after devoting like 5 hours to anime with the girls! Did not finish the draft though, as this one is a chonky gal.

2025-05-19: Wrote the last 2,000 words for TSF Showcase 2025-06, finishing the draft. Then I played Tribe Nine, as I felt I should experience more of the game before EOS. It’s actually rather good. Would buy and play this if it were a real game instead of an untrue game. God, am I also going to play the Persona 5 gacha after this?

2025-05-20: Wrote 2,600 words for the Preamble and curation bit. Wrote 700 words for the Scroll to Infinity bit. More Tribe Nine.

2025-05-21: 1,200 words for the Shuten Order bit. 500 words for the Fortnite bit. More Tribe Nine, ‘cos I wanna review it. Then made some header images because somebody’s gotta do it, and I’m the only employee at Vice and Verde Productions LLC.

2025-05-22: Editing day! 6,700 words in the back, some expansion here and there and ev’rywhere! Made some more headers for good measure.

2025-05-23: WET CLAMS! I had like nothing else planned for today, but it still look me nearly 6 hours to edit and get the images for TSF Showcase 2025-06. Combined with how I spent all morning chatting it up with Cassie, I was moving slooooowly!

2025-05-24: Not much progress on anything other than playing more Tribe Nine for review. I DID NOT expect this game to have 50 hours of content, but I always underestimate live services. Also, here’s my Steam profile if anybody is curious about my game playing hour stuffs. I swear I’ll be done with the game next week.

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