skin and song of the day:

☆ skin: "dante from devil may cry"
☆ song: bad people by ucciani

so recently i was using windirstat to clear out a shitload of old data on my laptop and i came across iphone backups i made back in 2017. i believe i had just upgraded to the newest iphone so i was just backing up my data and getting ready to transfer it. but in that old data was a history of every app i have ever fucking downloaded off the app store. like EVER. and among those apps were these CRAZYYY ASS TITLES i had completely forgotten about, most of which are completely wiped from the app store at this point in time. so i thought it'd be fun to talk about the various 2012 - 2018ish otome games and bl games i would play on the iphone. hopefully there are some other people out there who have had the same experience with these apps who nostalgically look back on this time in app store history with fond memories!!

let's start off with an app that is STILL AVAILABLE in the app store, and more importantly, IS COMPLETELY UNTOUCHED BY TIME ITSELF: ANIMAL BOYFRIEND!

animal boyfriend was developed by ambition, the same big brained developer behind bungo stray dogs: tales of the lost. you can tell just by looking at it the TOTL came MUCH later in the history of this company. animal boyfriend seems to be the very first app created by ambition, predating their later titles like "dream girlfriend" and "moe can change". this game has a spiritual successor that i will also talk about next!

this game basically involves you making a customizable anime bishie guy whose animal species you choose when you start the game. he reverts to his adorable chibi animal form when he gets really tired. it's your job to teach your "student" how to be a proper anime boyfriend, dress him up, make him cute or handsome, and train him with jobs and activities that will determine his personality. the clothes all come fram in-game gachas that are very free-play friendly. i didn't spend a dollar on this game in my youth and i still had a plethora of outfits for my lil anime guy.

me and all my friends were EXTREMELY invested in this game around 2014-2015. it's great for making OCs! it's also great for people like me who have this extremely predictable 'type' of anime dude you're into, because you can basically mishmash your objects together and create your ideal husband. the game gets pretty in depth with how you create his personality too. i definitely worked really hard to get his personality perfect, because you have a 'main' personality and a 'sub' personality, you can layer the personalities and really customize the shit out of him. here is my beautiful animal boyfriend, whose name is shouri and whose personality is 'mysterious'.

he is so completely my type it actually hurts. this game is still available for iOS and is completely fucking intact and untouched from the way it was 10 years ago. the music is SO NOSTALGIC to me. this also means that if you start playing it right now, you're not going to get anything new. ambition stopped working on this game and updating it at all many many years ago, but you can still download it and play, visit other anime guys, and collect all the existing gacha items for fun.

ambition seems to have dropped it so they could work on this game's big brother: dream boyfriend, astral days. ALSO STILL FUCKIN IN THE APP STORE RAHHHH!

dream boyfriend was basically the same as animal boyfriend, but with no animal aspect, and fancy advanced AR models for certain rare outfits. its mechanics work EXACTLY like animal boyfriend, working and activies contribute points toward getting certain personality types, and in-game currency can be used to pull for gacha. the AR models are very old looking at this point, but back in 2016 when i played this, they looked absolutely dope.

i ground the shit out of this game tbh. i played it to death because i NEEDED my boy to have his mysterious personality back. i had so much fun with this one, though i admit i'm more emotionally attached to the art style of animal boyfriend simply out of nostalgia. but i still adore my astral days dream boyfriend to death! you can still play and enjoy this game exactly as it was in 2016-17 and it's still up on the app store! also here is my guy, he is named shouri after his predecessor (is it obvious that this is simply my favorite word?)

the next app i'm gonna talk about predates both of these, and it has perhaps the longest and most convoluted fuck ass name that i couldn't remember for the longest time which prevented me from finding it online. The game is: My Lover of Darkness, Boys Love(BL) Free Dating Game: Vampire Darling (Free Romance Game Like Manga).

yes. that is the fucking name. the title in the app store. i believe it was SUPPOSED to be called My Lover of Darkness: Vampire Darling, but the people who made it, Arithmetic, really wanted it to be found by searching lots of search terms on the app store, so it got that god awful fuckin name.

arithmetic was an absolutely prolific otome game developer back in the early 2010s, with titles like arabian nights, the cinderella contract, contract marriage, and the idol dormitory, just to name a few. they were a japanese company but their apps were translated into a variety of languages, like korean, french, and english. i believe vampire darling was their only BL title, so it was the only one that held my interest.

i remember the protagonist of vampire darling vividly because he looks like a pallette swapped baby version of eiden from nu:carnival, with his white shirt and blue jacket. the first time i played this game, i played the route of the main vampire guy, clay louvenslash. i can't even make these fuckin names up yall. i got pissed off while playing, because i immediately found lau, the vampire hunter who wasn't included in the first part of the story, to be a much more compelling love interest to me, but i was already too deep in clay's route to turn back.

this was basically a twilight style love story where you have to pick between your vampire love interest (clay) and your werewolf love interest (shiro), OR you could end up with your secret third option: the vampire hunter (lau). i remember the story being compendiously long, and in the free version, you could only play 5 chapters every day or something like that. by paying you could unlock the ability to play further in the story. various dialogue choices racked up affection points with the love interests, and the endings branched off based on how many points you had with all the guys. i got the good ending but i can't remember how many endings there were.

i shit you not it took me actual months to finish the story of this game. i really wanted to go back and play again to do lau's story, but i think i forgot about it before i could do that... this had to have been in like 2012 or 2013. i remember being hyped to find an actual BL romance game on the app store, because up until that point the only things i had seen for iphone were the 'faceless brown-haired female MC you're supposed to name after yourself' type of games.

to my knowledge, this game is no longer on the app store, but i'm not sure if you can watch it or play it online anywhere. descending fully into hell and without any other BL games to entertain me, i ended up playing a random game with a female protag that just randomly caught my eye one day: Love Academy by KOYONPLETE.

KOYONPLETE are the absolute psychopaths who are responsible for love! sushi rangers, a game in which your romance options are personified forms of sushi. i shit you not, the dudes would transform into a piece of sushi under various conditions. i did also play that one but it was just a lil too silly for me, and i always thought it would have been more fun if it was a game like food fantasy, where there was a gacha and battle element. anyyyyyweyyyyyy!

love academy was pretty unremarkable as far as otome games go, i picked the guy who looks like tsurumaru for my first play-through back in 2014. his name was haku, and if i recally correctly, his story had to do with him singing. i remember that at some point, something horrific happened to his throat, either he had a disease or someone tried to poison him via chocolate and he ended up in the hospital. there was a long part of the game where he was silent because he was all fucked up from it. i did think that was a really interesting aspect and i enjoyed his story!

i don't remember anything else about this honestly, but it did lead me down the KOYONPLETE rabbit hole. love academy had a BL spin off app that was basically a one-shot story, that was described by KOYONPLETE as their "masterpiece". i feel like these people really were deep in the yaoi trenches but they could only reveal a tiny fragment of it to the world lol. the app was simply titled Love Academy: Yaoi Story. riveting, right??


this was in the era of "if it's a BL thing, it needs to be taboo in some way", because that was just the flavor of the day in the 2010s. the app was a single route with no branching options that centered around a school play taking place during the main story of love academy, and it centered on the guy playing the main character, whose name was jun. he fell in love with the theater director, who was also a doctor for some reason. again, this kind of dynamic was very common for BL stories during that era, even though it's controversial today, i didn't think anything of it when i played the app because it was just par for the course for 2010s yaoi.

i actually don't remember shit about it, which i guess speaks to the story not being anything special, but i was hyped that it basically confirmed yaoi exists in the love academy world lol, which made me just ship all the love academy love interests with one another.

after finishing that one but wanting to explore more KOYONPLETE works, i found what I MYSELF would consider to be their actual masterpiece: the cradle of thorns.

this was the only app that i actually paid for, because i was so hooked on it. i feel like i've mentioned before that i've been a huge fan of rule of rose since it was released in america in 2006 and my mom bought me the game at best buy (not knowing what it entailed at all) and i've also been avidly following the black butler manga since the beginning of its translation that same year in 2006.

this game was like rule of rose + black butler with an extra side of cannibalism. it was right up my alley. one of the characters even shared a name with a key character in rule of rose which totally cemented my thought that someone just loved that rose garden orpahanage aesthetic and mixed it with ciel phantomhive. which im like. okay period.

i can't recall the plot word for word, but it was basically a manga one-shot with no branching storyline. you just played through and watched the story unfold. somewhere far away from civilization, there's an old mansion covered in roses. twin brothers are its only occupants: older johann and younger joshua. johann is very possessive about joshua and there is an implication that johann killed their parents to keep them away from joshua, leaving just the two of them isolated in the mansion alone. they hunt rabbits in the garden and eat recipes involving roses for many of their meals- rose ice cream and rose sauce on meat and so on.

one day a girl named birdie wanders into the rose garden outside the mansion through a hole in the wall, and meets joshua. they started talking about the outside world, and joshua explains that johann always told him that the outside world was scary and horrible. they become friends, and birdie visits joshua several times over the following days. johann takes notice of this but didn't reveal it to joshua.

at some point, birdie stops visiting joshua just as she was starting to convince him that maybe leaving the mansion wouldn't be so bad. joshua talks to johann about it and explains that he met someone in the garden who is nice, and johann feigns indifference. birdie doesn't show up again in the story. johann explains to joshua a few days later that he noticed their food was going missing for the time leading up to birdie's disappearance and how he thought they might have a rat/mouse problem, but there was a LOT of food missing. he lets joshua put it together and lets him think that birdie just wanted to steal food from them, and joshua breaks down crying to johann. he says that people really are awful and he just wants to stay with johann together forever in the mansion.

johann has joshua come to dinner, where joshua comments that their dinner is different than usual and that the meat has a weird, bad flavor. johann agrees and says he'll just use the rotten meat as fertilizer for the roses. joshua thanks him for the meal, reinforces that he loves his brother and wants to stay with him in the mansion forever, and asks johann what kind of meat it was. johann tells him it was "just a little birdie he caught in the garden", and the game ends.

bro when i tell you i was unhinged about this. I LOVED THIS WHOLE THING SO MUCH. i love secret cannibalism lol, and i also love whatever trope it is that's like 'we gotta isolate ourselves because everyone else is the enemy'. i was so in love with the story of this game. it had a really beautiful piano soundtrack as well. i have no idea what happened to it, because eventually it just went off the app store, and opening the app just gives you an unavailble error before the app closes itelf. but i do remember paying $2 to replay the story whenever, which was totally worth it. OH YEAH, and the game didn't end EXACTLY when johann told joshua the "a little birdie" line, there was like half a chapter afterward that cemented that the sentence 100% went over joshua's fucking head and he had no idea what johann had done and he was still like wow i love my big brother he always protects me! lmao it went crazyyy

so yeah those are my picks for the various unhinged, cute, and entertaining apps that i used to pass the time like 10 years ago. nowadays we've all got our uma musumes and nucarnivals to entertain us, but every now and then i feel like we gotta remember the apps of ye olden times!! i wish so many weren't gone off the app store because it was just a fun era. i have no idea how to end this post honestly so i shall simply fucking explode and die like the warframe exploiter orb and scream out: so i turn, from the tumult of the world, toward home: that sweetest spot 'neath the circuit of the sun!!