That pretty much sums up the rise and fall of Hihou in a nutshell. My friend and I were regular players on Shin Hyakuji High School back then, and the former said, "What if we borrow Hyakuji High's "anything-goes" premise, but expand upon it x100?" It was a neat idea on paper, but in practice what we ended up with was one hell of an overdesigned setting with overly bloated rules filled with unnecessary legalese, templates for just about every possible anime archetype under the sun (that we don't even know will even see any RP action to begin with), and too many IC location subforums.

It's not helped that I wasn't really into this project to begin with, and was only roped in because I didn't wanna disappoint my friend. (I.e. I knew deep in my gut this was never gonna catch on, but I didn't have the heart back then to outright say "no" to him) To nobody's surprise, the site failed to draw in anybody besides the two of us and a couple of RP partners we made on Hyakuji. Turns out, the sheer open-endedness (as I said earlier, it aspires to be what Hyakuji was but "do it bigger") turned out to be quite an audience-alienating premise in and of itself.

Hihou pretty much taught me 2 lessons. 1) How not to make and run a site, and 2) never to be a people-pleaser, I.e. Sometimes, you just have to say "no", even to your closest friends.