Gin'iro

※This article is a repost of an article originally published about 4 years ago.

　“Gin'iro"(Silver) first chapter is beautiful.

　By covering the top and bottom of the screen in black to create a cinema-like frame—choosing immersion over everything else—NekoNeko Soft’s approach itself is already wonderful…

　Back to the point: if someone asks me what my favorite visual novels are, I’ll name Gin'iro without hesitation as one of my all-time top five. Especially the first chapter—its level of completion is exceptional.

　In Gin'iro’s first chapter, the story follows a girl who doesn’t even know her own name, who has lived by servicing men since before she was old enough to understand anything—yet still tries to leave something, even just one thing, as proof that she existed.

　After escaping the brothel and seeing fireflies for the first time in the outside world, she asks—overlapping their light with her view of life and death:

　“If it doesn’t glow, is it dead?”

　“If it’s glowing, does that mean it’s alive?”

　A girl with no goals, no dreams—someone who has lived only because she happened to be born—can’t help but wonder: if a firefly doesn’t shine, can you really call it “alive”? Does it have any value in existing at all?

　And then she says it:

　“Was I… glowing?”

　The reason I’ve been selling off pieces of my life and broadcasting them through blogs, social media, and diaries like this—without exaggeration, Gin'iro’s first chapter is a major influence. Even someone like me wants to leave behind some proof that they lived. I want to light up the night, even if only for a moment, like a firefly.

　With that in mind, I opened a Twitter account as a place to talk about the works I love—and in a way, that might have been the first moment I ever truly existed.

　So I already know what I’ll say when I retire from the internet someday:

　“Was I… glowing?”