Happy New Year, brothers! I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year and have been able to enjoy any time off they might have gotten!
The info DMM released for the year was very interesting! I'd love to see even more info, but I especially liked seeing the different rankings based on age group. To clarify a couple points, loli and shota actually are both included. As my buddy stupid_army said, Loli is classified as 'mini-kei' by DMM. They made the switch a couple years back. Shota is still classified as shota or shounen, which is amusing, but it's much less of an issue because... reasons? Loli shows up as number 11 on the global list. Shota didn't place. Not exactly surprising considering it's a list of most popular tags and a lot of the highest-ranked overlap. Between all the variations, you can slap an NTR tag on damn near anything these days. Maybe that's why the psychos on the panda try to bomb it to oblivion as a backlash?
Sorry, I had hoped to do something a bit more detailed, but here are my favorite games of 2018. Ordered by release date because I'll never stop if I try to start ranking things:
他人棒物語 - Mekujira: A nice little series of 4 situations that are all done fairly well. The situations are all a bit cliched, but there's just enough detail to draw you in and each has mystery options. Hard to pick a favorite girl of the four, but I think I'll go with the nerdy girl turned gyaru because I love seeing physical alterations to help show how much someone has changed from their former self.
彼女が野球部の性処理マネージャーに… - Pin-point: Not much to say here. Pin-point plus the artist is pretty much guaranteed to turn out something I'll go back to time and time again. I wish I could say the same about the netorase one, but it's just not quite in the same league for me.
寝取られ淫母物件～沙也加～ - PichiPichiGarouR: These fuckers need to do more NTR! I've enjoyed their teacher training series as well.
僕ママ×友ママ交姦ハメップ性活 - Anim.TeamMM: Anyone who's ever bothered to read my dumbshit ramblings could predict this one. It's a shame I didn't get around to hyping it a bit more--I had copied and was doing a silly translation of the game page, but ran out of time before the release.
Honorable Mentions(I enjoyed all of these, but can't really recommend them as highly):
カノビッチ - Jinsei Tsukoudome: Fun, sweet little game that's tied together by a bombshell heroine. In a more perfect world we'd have more games with 23's art.
Nラブ - Gear Stone Software: Hoping to see more from this circle. A bog-standard idea but with good, interesting execution.
妻が隠していたビデオ… - Pin-point: Solid, but for me it was missing something to make it really great. And this might be blasphemy, but this is one of the first times that I've ever thought giant tits might be just slightly too huge for me. I think it's their shape, but they just don't do it for me, and I'm a Bastard that is usually all for Orcsoft-style milfs with huge racks! (That mom game, by the way, was fucking dynamite, but I'm not including it cause it's not NTR.)
Several games from Atelier Sakura: I get their business strategy, but I really wish these guys would pull their heads out of their asses and produce a more complete game. I'd gladly pay an extra ￥2000-3000 if it meant more scenes and a better fleshed out story. Mariko is adorable and some of her scenes were lightning, but the overall story just isn't quite on the same level. Gentle Sasaki's god-tier girls are being put to waste.
RELEASE