EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

A friend you have always been at ease with looks, one night, like someone else entirely. Tomodachi no Saitou ga Dekkai catches that small shift in 32 pages, and it stands in the hall because readers have kept finding it more than three years after release.

Ishikawa and Saitou, a man and a woman who have been friends for years, spend New Year's Eve together as two people with no one else to see it in with. A chance moment of contact makes each of them aware of the other, and friendship turns into love. It is a tender romance about a first time, set in a room with a loft.

Reviewers agree above all on how naturally the distance between the two friends gives way. Neither is a beauty; down to their clothes and belongings, they feel like people one might actually know. Some readers point out that on a second reading the intention was there from the very first scene.

Gallery Craft began releasing work in the summer of 2018, and this is the circle's biggest success. One reviewer reads it as a warm story in a field crowded with cuckoldry and bleak turns, and requests for a sequel are many.

Released in February 2023, it was still turning up in DLsite's daily and weekly rankings in the summer and autumn of 2026. Doujin titles containing the word "friend" grew more than fourfold between 2019 and 2025, and the book can be read as part of that current. It stands 100th among the hall's doujin works.