Apathy Series

So there's this series of Visual Novels that I'd like to introduce. They've never been translated to English, but from what I've seen of them and what I have been able to play of them, I've been lead to believe that they're brilliant.

One day I was innocently trying to ID eroge cg as I often do when I came across a blog containing this picture and the caption "MiColle's Arai-san's 'Nice Smile☆'----Too cute! lololol" in Japanese.

ミッコレでの荒井さんの　ナイス・スマイル☆ ----可愛すぎるｗｗｗｗｗ

This image fascinated me greatly. For one thing, the art style is eerily flat and non-revealing yet detailed and proportional, and the expression on Arai's face is incredible. After much searching, I found that the game in question is called Midnight Collection, and is a collection of horror stories presented in Visual Novel form. It comes from a set of games sharing the same characters and is called the 'Apathy' series. The series started with the 1995 game 'Gakkou de Atta Kowai Hanashi'(lit. A scary story that was/happened at school school) for the super nintendo and has had several releases. The Visual Novel Database shows 4 games, but Japanese Wikipedia shows a couple more. After scouring Youtube for videos of gameplay or fan videos I came across a couple videos which continue to fascinate me. One of my main purposes of this post is to shows those videos to you, but I also hope to introduce you to the series, and perhaps also drive up demand for a translation of the series, by however little. In all honesty, games like this motivate me to study Japanese in my spare time.