Today’s deck is the Midnight Magic Tarot.
Yay! Mushrooms!
Today’s reading is reminding me that if I feel tired, I have people I can rely on. Which is a good thing to be reminded of, like, in general.
Day started with a meeting at like 1PM, it was supposed to be at like 11AM but I was not gonna be fully awake by that point, so…
It’s routine stuff, half chatting with a friend half catching up with all the pending work stuff.
After that I was killing time by playing a DLsite game called 賢者タイムのスッキリ人妻冒険記! which roughly translates to “Refreshing Sage Time with Married Women”.
The title is a slightly layer pun because you play as an RPG sage archetype (your main arsenal being spells and such), but the main mechanic is actually based around “Sage Time” or what we in the west call “post-nut clarity”.
Basically the mosters in the game are monster girls, after their “armor” breaks you get hit with lust and if the lust hit 100 your stats get cut in half. And so, five of the married women in the town (the only women in town, really) have agreed to help the main character with this dilemma. You can have fun with any of them after you return from your dungeoning and then go back.
Now, this by itself would be neat, but the thing is that this is one of those games where the ambition was clearly bigger than the means. And I don’t necessarily mean it just on terms of like, skill, I mean that it’s one of those where the author is like “you can skip the prologue but I would really like it if you didn’t”. Then the story is very wordy (though not rambly or long, just that there’s a lot of it) and there’s even things like “here you can see the girls’ profiles after the game ends and here you can get the backstory for the main character”.
The game has a neat thing going on where each monster has an elemental weakness and resistance so you gotta remember and test around… and you gotta because the encounter rate here is kinda insufferable sometimes. It’s tied to the flow so it’s not like it’s getting actively in the way of other things (there’s no treasure chests, the dungeon is just a labyrinth) but it can kinda get to you.
Honestly, the actual plot sections with characters interacting and whatnot were so good that I kinda wish it had more of that and less of the RPG fighting.
I went out to get my meds and when I got back I decided to finally open these packs of cards I found at a discount in Akiba last year.
The box doesn’t lie, it’s 2011 as all hell and I dig it for that alone.
Checking on the usual suspects I can’t find much stock of them so I’m probably gonna keep an unopened box just for the heck of it.
Amazon did recommend me a framed print of ギャルゲーマーに褒められたい and it ALMOST got me to bite and buy the manga again before I remembered that I TRIED to go through the manga and dropped it at the second volume.
The thing is that I love the art and the designs and then they added a tan gyaru that’s also shorter and I should be eating that shit up, but the manga itself is so… dull. Again, art is great, but the games presented are such in the most superficial way (there’s no in-depth obsession going on), the story isn’t particularly funny or even saucy, it’s basically the most basic example of that sorta kinda fetishistic “gamer girl” thing where it’s not even about the joy of sharing a hobby but just Girls Being Into Games being tantamount to having a big ass.
I wrote about it ages ago but this one and 2.5D Temptation exist in my head in diametrically opposite places, in that “Girl liking thing is hot” vs “girl liking thing means new friend” spectrum.
I still got the framed thingy though. A singular illustration cannot hurt me, and unlike with Ichigo 100% I bailed out long before the hate calcified.
It’s more like Kantoku in that sense. Kantoku has been one of my favorite illustrators ever since I’ve discovered them, but whenever they do something that goes beyond pretty pictures like Hentai Ouji ot Warawanai Neko or Prism Nana (the latter being more of a Shaft thing, admittedly) I get… frustrated.
I’ve already gotten a couple of those prints in the past by the way, in fact today I was moving these two specifically to a new spot (the one on the right was by my PC but I’ve been lowkey refreshing the house in general) and I really like how they’re both signed on top of it all. I actually preordered some signed ones from Kurikara and Kujiran and I’m so excited for them to arrive in a few months.
Speaking of illustrations, Oekakizuki is another one of my favorites and on one hand it’s a bummer most of their output is covers for ASMR stuff, but on the other I’m happy they get that sort of consistent work.
By that point I just kinda tuned out, but it was a nice day overall.