There are times when I look back and think to myself, why am I doing this? If you want a Japanese speaker, there are other people much better than me, and if you want an English writer there are even more people better than me. There are people more talented than me, more enthusiastic than me, and probably deserve more attention than me. Time spent being taken by me could have been on others, so why me?
There are times when I forget and even if I remember, I ignore. Someone else can do, there is no reason for me specifically to step up and do it. There can only ever me more and not less people capable and willing to do these things. As long as birth rates is higher than death rates it’ll be fine. Time is a rare commodity and the price will only go and not down. Someone else with more free time than me can do it.
There are times when I do start, I also think to myself, why am I doing this? Will people read this? Will people even understand what I’m going at? Why bother if I could just write in Japanese and reach an audience just as big or even bigger, an audience who can relate more to what I’m saying?
Through these times, it’s nearly always the same doubts and questions. And then I remember why I ever started.
My first and only anime blog, if I remember correctly, started around April 2006. It was called “Makenai Desuwayo”. A rather weird phrase to name your own blog. What did it mean, was it self conceitedness? A proclamation that my blog will not fall into heap of mediocrity? A warning that I was gender confused? No, surprisingly in the blog’s lifetime I never explained the meaning behind choosing that name. And its meaning?
It was a phrase that Satoko of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, a recently PC visual novel turned anime, had said somewhere.
That was all. The reason I started blogging, and kept blogging, was a simple one, just a very simple one. It was the feeling you get when you finished reading or watching or experiencing something great. That oppressed feeling in your chest, wanting you to stand, jump up and scream to world that you are the new prophet of what you just saw and your life goal is to share to everyone how great that something is.
While this isn’t something as romantic as that, the feeling is similar as an appreciator of a hobby wants to share his great ‘discoveries’ with other people with the same hobbies. Higurashi no Naku Koro ni and Tsuyokiss, and later on to my pleasant surprise, Gore Screaming Show, Sharin no Kuni and Sengoku Rance were amongst the stuff I talked about and wanted to share to people. However the English eroge community at that time, if one existed, was small and buddling, so my approach was to open it up from the left side with a broader community, anime. But that’s all in the past.
My policy with reviewing eroges is that I absolutely will not write a review about something I have not play through a 100%. If I stop halfway for whatever reason, then I will not review that game. It is not fair of me to say something as a whole when I only seen half of it. A band-aid solution of warning that the review is only about half of the game will not work neither.
Of course as an consequence of this policy, you will likely not see an overly negative review from me. While someone might say, well, you only need to read a book halfway before realizing that it’s crap and stopping; I will still say it is not fair. Maybe up to the very end everything comes together or maybe it’s a horrible book with crap story and transparent characters but the climax or the ending could be very well executed. Someone has spend their time writing these, and it’s just not fair of me to say something is crap or whatever while only reading up to half of it. If I stay to the very end and up to the very end it’s utter crap, then yes I will mercilessly denounce it as shit. So I will only review eroges I have played through 100% so you can expect an honest opinion and review. If what I write fails to express what I want to mean, then I will not publish that review. This my policy, this is my pride as an eroge reviewer.
ayyo
