♡ Heroine Otome Game ♡

Shijuu Hachi (Kakkorkari)

This article is part of our Japanese Obscurities feature. We put out a whole book about them, which is available as both a full color hardcover and a Kindle ebook from Amazon! If you’d like to see more of these features, please check out the book and if you enjoyed it, leave a five star review so we can convince the publisher to do a follow up with even more interesting, offbeat, or historically important Japanese games!

Shijuu Hachi (Kakkokari) is nothing if not ambitious. The title translations to “48 (Temporary Title)”, and the game purports to tell a spooky story based on an urban legend from each of the 47 prefectures of Japan (plus one extra one). You learn about the Tomb of Christ in Aomori, investigate human fish in Yamagata, and ponder a series of tunnels in Osaka. The meta concept is that the player has won a contest and received a prerelease disc for a new video game filled with scary stories…but once you start playing, strange things start happening in real life.

♡ Heroine Otome Game ♡

The fateful day has come! FD’s demo has been released.

You can get it on the downloads page.

Just read and reviewed Borderline (Arcadia Project #1) by Mishell Baker (click on the pic to get to my review).

Trigger warnings for this novel: attempted suicide (frequent mentions); cutting (one scene, plus mentions).

Oh man. OH MAN. I was worried about all the hype surrounding this book, but this is one of those rare, RARE books that actually lives up to its hype. The reason for all that hype? A lot of things, I think, but for me, I think it’s Baker’s main character/protagonist.

See, here’s the thing you need to know about Millie: she’s not right in the head. Like at all. See, she has borderline personality disorder (BPD), which is no small problem to have. I can’t make an expert judgment call on whether or not Millie’s BPD has been written accurately (my only point of reference is the NIMH website, and based on that I THINK it’s been done right), but that’s not my point. My point is that Millie’s problem is major, and it’s kind of at the heart of her life at the moment, but SHE DOESN’T USE IT AS AN EXCUSE. Like, she knows that her BPD makes her hard to be with, but she knows when something happens as a result of her BPD versus when it’s something she does because she’s being a shitty person, and while sometimes the two overlap she knows better than to blame everything on her mental illness. When she knows she’s in the wrong, she apologises for it - which I love, by the way, because she’s such a proud person and the books shows just how HARD it is for her to apologise for anything, but at the same she’s enough of a good person to know that she does it anyway, because it’s the RIGHT THING to do.

And this makes her the kind of character I just LOVE. Okay, I might not want to be friends with her, but as a CHARACTER? Oh man, she’s WONDERFUL. I especially love her narrative voice: girl knows how to tell a story, and how to tell it with style - which is all I really ask for from a first-person narrator. Her voice sucked me in and didn’t let me go (actually had be quietly internally screaming towards the end - which is, as always with me, a very good sign).