Today’s deck is the Sea Witch Tarot.
This “Sea Witch” refers to the same one from The Little Mermaid, the one that Ursula is based on in the Disney one.
No, not Divine, the other one.
The original Little Mermaid was more about the mermaid in question fucking around and finding out, with the witching helping her and warning her, warnings that go unheeded. The deck is actually nothing but the Sea Witch in different scenarios which makes it very charming.
Today’s reading is an interesting warning on Imposter Syndrome. “Fight the impulse to sabotage yourself in moments of internal victory”. Kinda like if I’m happy, don’t go and stress that something bad is about to happen.
You know, before anything I should really talk about Natsu no Sakari since I’ve been playing it so much since release and skipped talking about it for like two days. Keep in mind that none of the characters have their default looks in the screenshots, though.
Natsu no Sakari, which I’ve called Summer Sakari thanks to Google TL translates to roughly “summer blooming”. It’s both a sex simulator and a 3D visual novel.
That format is… a bit of a relic by now it feels like. Even Custom Order Maid 3D 2 carries it more as a tradition from the first game. This game, however, feels like a proper evolution of that idea.
Normally those games have the sex sim and the story as different elements. Even in past Miconisomi offerings that was the case.
For example, Insult Order is about “educating” a catgirl and getting comfortable with a bunnygirl, and while there’s story sections and a few of those have sex scenes, they’re for the most part brief scenes with little interaction. Flavor to add to the Free Mode.
Natsu no Sakari spices this up by adding fully interactable scenes that exist withing specific points of the story and provide their own interactivity.
So in context, the game is about a temporary janitor that starts working in a rural town, in the same school as his niece and the game offers two routes: One is with your niece Otoha and the other is with Otoha’s childhood friend Rino.
They’re quite different, one is (by default though reflected in voice) the small unassuming girl that starts a sinful relationship with her uncle and descends into more depravity, and the other is the school’s idol that also falls into depravity.
This isn’t just context to enhance the Free Mode, the whole point is that story offers interactable scenes not available in said Free Mode.
For example, Rino’s route has a chapter where she’s being railed while chatting with her friend Cocoa and you can choose how hard to go at it during the conversation. Moreover in every scene you can choose to talk with the girl and see how she reacts to what she’s been pushed to do, which also adds to the context of falling into depravity as you see the replies go from reluctant to excited.
Not even just the replies, Otoha basically goes from meek to taking the intiative herself, and Rino goes from annoyed to tying her old boyfriend while she gets fucked.
This is a game that understands the importance of context making things hotter and as a result, despite having a Free Mode available, I often go back to just revisit specific scenes over and over. Even for things that are just readily available in Free Mode.
The thing is that whether we’re talking about scenes or free mode, the animation in this game is so good.
Miconisomi’s other games were already great because the expressiveness of the animations (both with actual expressions but also the motion) was amazing and got better from After School Gangbang Addicts to Insult Order, but here? Man…
Perhaps one of the biggest accomplishments is the way that breasts feel like they have a physicality to them, where they feel (though no clue how much of it isn’t pre-baked) more reactive to other elements.
There’s also stuff like how if a girl is using stockings, when they’re “half off” it’s not hanging off one leg, you see it stretching right there and THAT’S the sort of detail that awakens THINGS in people.
Me, I’m people.
If you wanted to get pedantic about it, one factor at play is that the animations are all working within a body rig of limited customization. Compared to Illusion, Illgames, or KISS, you have less control over the breast shape and proportions for example, but that criticism is a bit moot because this game isn’t trying to be a “do whatever you want” simulator, it’s a specific story with specific characters that you just happen to be able to customize, and to be honest in terms of character selection this one is such a perfect set.
Meek small girl, proud bigger girl (though not a lady, notably), scorned MILF, and promiscuous gyaru. All of them at different stages from reluctant participant to devoted participant.
And the thing is… any of you remember all my ranting a while back about porn quality and narrative and whatnot? This game feels like it was answering all of my pleas in that context.
It is a great game, I don’t see it falling from my own GOTY pedestal anytime soon. It’s not just a story about falling into depravity with good animation, it’s a GREAT story about a fall into depravity with GREAT animation that understands that things in a void are way less hot than they could be in context.
Here’s one extra detail for the discourse about quality I’ve been building up: Playing COM3D2 reminded me of a very specific kind of narrative that these stories tend to have. Especially if you go to a very specific type of Visual Novel, the characters tend to be in certain extremes, they’re either more innocent/infantile or they’re raunchier from the outset.
My criticism isn’t the infantilizing specifically because this is all fantasy (and it’s tied to a different general topic altogether), but one thing I always end up talking about is the idea that authors tend to go for extremes while ignoring a vast middle ground available to them. And I bring it up because this game specifically manages to strike that specific balance. The characters aren’t raunchy from the outset because you gotta sell the fall, but at the same time the girls in this game feel less childish than those in other similar games.
While obviously hyper-ized for the sake of the porn narrative, the undercurrent of it all DOES feel like you’re in a small town where all people have to do is fuck.
Game’s good, so good that it honestly overwrites the past miconisomi entries to an extent… unless the game gets updated to add scenes fucking with more than one girl or gangbangs in which case it will COMPLETELY overwrite the other games for me.
Back to reality, I woke up with an inbox fuller than usual which was… worrying. At least until I noticed that a lot of it was that some girl I followed in Fantia basically deleted everything so I got the “she deleted this but you can still download it for the next week” emails.
Checking around, I suspect she might be trying to shift into ASMR content and away from sex work since even her socials were wiped clean.
Best of luck to her with that. Sex work is a kind of field where you can’t really take back what you put in without a lot of effort. You know, on a sidenote, I’ve never gotten why sex workers get the sort of hypothetical mark on them that they do, mainly because in my head I’m like “people have sex all the time, what difference does it make if you know for a fact this one person did and put it out there?”.
I mean, I’m not naive, I know why it’s that way, but it’s more of a “learned” thing than something that feels logical to me, basically.
In the midst of this barrage of there was also an email from my accountant asking some questions for the tax filing which is… such a nice thing to see on a Sunday y’know…
That’s on me for taking too long at the end of last year, though.
The day was shaping up to be a lazy one, but I decided to at the very least get food outside to take a walk, because I’m like a dog and if I don’t take a walk a day anxiety takes over me.
I was more surprised there weren’t more people out considering it’s both Sunday and Setsubun.
I read a bit more Romance of Three Kingdoms while waiting for my food and shoutouts to this Looney Tunes ass bit.
On the way back I decided my general goal for today would be to unclutter my bed so that I’m not sleeping on effectively half its surface. I also looked up the ferries to Otaru and… I kinda expected them to be more continuous for some reason? They’re not, so I’m out of luck in using those and had to get plane tickets.
It’s fine, it’s just two hours of flight but two hours of flight is two hours too many.
Not much new beyond that, I’ll just think about what’s in store next week, probably.