I really tried to like this game. I was a big fan of the Parasite Eve series though I still tried to keep an open mind while playing this, which means I didn't let nostalgia ruin my experience. But this is just a really bad game overall. Part of it can be blamed on the system it was made, the PSP, due to lacking the right analog stick which made the controls very clunky. Although even if it had better controls, the gameplay is still very frustrating and RNG dependent and makes which it so bad to play. I really don't know what they were thinking when making this game.

A redeeming quality of this game is that the Body Switching mechanic is fun and unique to it. And the graphics are great for a PSP game, I suppose. But it ends there.

So for the bad things:
The enemies can one or two shot you even at normal difficulty making the game very frustrating, if it had good controls it would be a little bearable but it doesn't have that. And good luck dying! Because you're retrying that 10 to 15 minute level from your last checkpoint.

Passive skills also have RNG activations which makes them useless at tough situations. Seriously, a skill can sometimes only activate once in an entire chapter even at level 25 (the max level of it)!

The AI allies are so dumb that you have to body switch to them just to keep them alive and helping. And when you run out of AI allies, sometimes reinforcements will arrive after some time and there are times that there will be no reinforcements at all. But there's nothing that indicates that! So yeah, good luck waiting for that reinforcement whenever it'll come.

The camera is also really bad. It doesn't show what's directly above you. So if there's a flying enemy above Aya's head, the camera will look up but you won't see where the enemy is. The game also likes to throw homing missiles at you but they're so hard to dodge because the camera won't let you see where they're coming from.

I don't really want to comment on stuff like the characters and story because then, I'll be comparing it to its predecessors (and I will be trashing this game a lot more) which I don't want to do. This review is only about The 3rd Birthday as a standalone game.

i think there's a lot of credence to the idea that chrono trigger is the greatest jrpg ever made. it's a collaboration between the two most important guys in the genre's golden years, it's got a bangin' yasunori mitsuda soundtrack, and the pacing and cinematics are really top-notch. seriously, this game does so much to streamline the process of playing and absorbing it to the point that a single session feels like you've made serious progress each and every time.

chrono trigger is the peak of what the first major wave of jrpgs was seeking to do; it's got those fantasy and early sci-fi/steampunk aesthetics that dominated square's output through the mid-90s, a cast of zany and colorful characters, and some great little story beats to keep things interesting. i absolutely see why this game resonates with so many people, especially if you sank a ton of time into it growing up.

as for me, i played this game pretty early into my adventures with jrpgs and enjoyed myself, and since then i've played it to completion probably like three or four times - started it up or completed another random ending maybe a dozen more. it's entertaining and engaging, which to a genre outsider i could see very few jrpgs being.

i think where trigger and i sort of shake hands and don't really find intimate ground is just based on the fact that it doesn't really touch me emotionally the way other jrpgs have, but that's largely due to what interests me in games and stories. it's a streamlined and air-tight package but i'm not moved or blown away by anything it shows me. even moments and sequences from its genre contemporaries like final fantasy vi, or terranigma, or dragon quest v, or earthbound - admittedly less perfectly clean-cut games, but more daring, outspoken, and therefore more personally significant titles for me - leave chrono trigger's narrative and drama feeling... admittedly somewhat unremarkable in comparison.

don't get me wrong, chrono trigger is about as tight and precise as jrpgs come, and a genuine joy to play, but those are the things i admire most about it - largely leaning into its entertainment value more than its artistic dominance over me. it's why i admit to liking and resonating with chrono cross on a far more personal and powerful level than this game. but by all means, if you haven't played chrono trigger, play chrono trigger, it's probably the best place to start with jrpgs and it tops endless charts for a reason.

revisiting this masterpiece with some close friends at a pretty emotionally vulnerable place this winter was an experience i'm not likely to forget any time soon. more than anything, i'm grateful to have had the ability to revisit such a teenage-dependent game as a burgeoning adult and value its world, characters, mechanics and stories through more experienced eyes.

i'll start things off making enemies - final fantasy gameplay has never been as engaging and exciting as it was in final fantasy viii. the difficulty of the game and how your time with it plays out is entirely dependent on your engagement, and ideas like junction-based stat boosts and enemy level scaling are GREAT ideas that keep this game feeling fresh every time. you don't HAVE to grind out magic draws, you don't HAVE to avoid levelling up, you don't HAVE to learn all those gf skills, but each time you approach the game again you're presented the option to vie for a different composition, a different strategy, a different flow of battle. last time i grinded to lv. 100 and maxed things out and it actually made certain boss encounters really intense - and i mean like, drop zell to minimal hp and hope to god i pull off limit breaks over and over to perfection intense - and i LOVED it. triple triad with friends was a joy and shifted a minigame i was aversee to engaging with something i enjoyed so much that i actually played the game with a real deck when we visited eachother last month.

uematsu's score is indicative of the tone of the title itself; experimental, off-kilter, and boundlessly passionate. "force your way" is the be-all end-all main boss theme in the series, "blue fields" is uncanny enough to leave the wilds feeling a tinge unkind and mysterious, and the various incarnations leading into the final reveal of the faye wong-featuring "eyes on me" gets me, corny as it may be, blubbering on a regular basis, THE definitive squaresoft pop ballad; "suteki da ne", eat your heart out.

i'm not really looking to open up specifically about how and why squall's story of self-expression and admittance of loneliness and aimlessness touched me on the intimate level it did, but i'll say this much - like raiden or shinji ikari, i feel these are characters widely misunderstood by people looking first and foremost to be entertained by the art they engage with, instead of being asked questions or challenged to reflect on experiences of their own. not every beat of ffviii's story is perfectly executed, but there's no squaresoft title in which that does happen (even in its predecessor, my favorite game of all time).

the critical re-evaluation of final fantasy viii by a younger crowd is a joy to watch. out with the old, finger-pointing youtube critic personas of yesteryear bitching and moaning about change and art. in with the new.

Many people looking for the art in the video game industry are looking for specific things they can take away from each game, a specific message whether posed narratively or thematically. I don't mean to imply Shadow of the Colossus is lacking something deeper in regards to a message, but it proves the most artistic element of video games as a medium, is all in the name; the visuals and interactivity, packaged as one. Mechanics and spectacle became effectively inseparable in Shadow of the Colossus due to the heavy reliance on the camera, placement of fur and everchanging hitboxes of the Colossi which are perfectly mapped to sync up with what you see, thus meaning the two most core elements of the medium are in harmony. This is all important as Shadow of the Colossus is a mechanically simple game reliant on puzzle-centric bosses where the most truly crucial element is how it makes you feel, yet it's separated from a "movie game" by the fact interaction is never really taken away from you. The most clear example of this in Shadow of the Colossus is how it uses R1 to force you to cling on for dear life; you cannot let go for a second or you need to restart the boss fights intended sequence which allows for some beautifully tense moments of hope and exhilaration that no other medium could ever possibly replicate. These are all simple technical descriptors of a game that quite simply cannot be described on pure technicality; it embodies everything that make video games my absolute favorite form of art in that you cannot climb a giant and describe it only through words or pictures. Memories form based off of experiences and not based off of descriptions, video games tell stories through experiences and the artistic merit is entirely about the importance that experience had to you in life rather than just an intended effect. You couldn't get the same feel of awe from someone telling you the story of their personal fight against a great Kaiju via climbing it, you have to do it.

Video version/with photo accompaniment

CW: Sexual assault, sexual violence, bestiality, incest, pornography, victim-blaming/shaming, misogyny, sexualisation of minors, gore, obscenity, descriptions of the aforementioned. The four-letter 'R-word' is also invoked repeatedly without censoring or obfuscation.

This review is split into sections. While you can read them all at once, I advise taking breaks as necessary due to length and subject-matter, as well as to better digest the text.

I also wish to stress I am not endorsing these sorts of games. I am just presenting my own understanding of media in a culture different from my own, with my own Western perceptions and biases. Draw your own boundaries when it comes to the media you consume.

Introduction

On the 'List of controversial video games' page of English Wikipedia, there's an entry for a 1986 PC-8801 game by Macadamia Soft titled 177.[1] It has one incorrectly archived citation. The only article for 177 itself is on Japanese Wikipedia. Given that 177 allegedly "ignited a public furor that reach the National Diet of Japan," this absence of concrete evidence puzzled me.[2] However, as there remains an abundance of media of its ilk in contemporary Japanese culture, I was also curious as to what that furor achieved, and the why of 177's production. In this review, I will argue that 177 and similar such works represent gendered power dynamics in Japanese culture, operate in intentional contradistinction to moral sexuality as an extension of nation-building and family-making, and that these titles reflect Japan's interpretation of ethics -- in relation to pornography -- in a manner incongruous with Western perceptions, necessitating a knowledge of their context.

Rife

There's an undeniable prevalence to rape and sexual assault in eroge generally not seen in Western produced erotic games. The obvious keystones include AliceSoft's Rance series and Illusion's titles like RapeLay and Battle Raper. However, these works are not anomalies in the sea of eroge. Searching the Rape tag on VNDB gives over 5,400 total results. 3,855 have a tag score above 2.0, meaning a step up in importance above "the tag certainly applies."[3] 517 garner a 3.0 meaning "the tag applies, is very apparent and plays a major role."[4] These numbers do not account for the plethora of doujin works on platforms like the NEC PC-88 and PC-98, or contemporary releases on storefronts like DLsite. Furthermore, this only quantifies visual novel releases. A cursory search of DLsite bears 282 eroge titles tagged Rape. And this says nothing of Rape anime/manga hentai or erotica. ExHentai has over 81,000 doujinshi, manga, and CG galleries tagged Rape in Japanese, even then only representing uploads from 2007-onward. That's out of over 770,000 total works in those categories. Though a wider and more thorough analysis would garner more accurate numbers, what I am trying to convey the presence, prevalence, and pronouncement of rape in Japanese pornography.

None of this is new, as the 1986 release of 177 would already intimate. Depictions of rape in Japanese visual art go back at least as far as the late 18th century, seen in the ukiyo-e prints of Koryūsai and Utamaro. Even as far back as the Heian period, rape plays a prominent, if not important, role in Murasaki Shikibu's Genji Monogatari. Widely considered one of the first literary novels, Genji Monogatari is a critical work in its detailing of aristocracy in Heian Japan, including its moral code. Furthermore, its role in the cultural zeitgeist of Japan to this very day has it informing other works from nougaku theatre to television adaptations to manga to women's gossip magazines. Rape is by no means the primary focus of Genji Monogatari, to the extent that most discussion of the work either eschews mention of it or relegates it to a footnote, but I bring it up because it is undeniably a part of the work.

Esteemed translator of Genji Monogatari into modern Japanese, the late Jakucho Setouchi, noted that the clandestine and tasteful acts of sex therein were "all rape, not seduction."[5] English translator of Genji Monogatari, Royall Tyler, takes umbrage with this assertion of rape, stating that in this time period, no woman could properly give consent in a decent or proper manner, thereby making any first-time sexual encounter within established social bounds meet our contemporary definition of rape.[6] The particulars of a 'correct' reading here are far too complicated to dive into (and I don't consider myself well-read enough to argue one way or the other), but the chapters following Genji's death are so fervent in their description and criticism of rape that even if Genji is not a rapist, Murasaki's world is still abound with rape. Returning to Tyler's position, Genji can be understood to not be raping his victims because they are seduced prior to, during, or after sex. Regardless of if this is valid for those women, the work and this reading thus perpetuate a litany of rape myths we still deal with contemporarily, and that are still seen in the pages of hentai manga or the scenes of eroge. I bring this up because the claim of 'alleged' rape being a preliminary step to marriage is critical to 177, as well as RapeLay, the Rance series of titles, and a large swath of eroge.

An Overview of 177 by Macadamia Soft

「強姦…ゲームなら罪になりません」[7]
「Rape… it's not a crime if it's a game」

On the title screen for 177, we see a young red-haired woman flanked by trees on either side of the path she walks. The path splits into three branches. The woman wears a white sleeveless blouse and red skirt. She looks over her shoulder and breaks into a jog, accelerating to a rapid pace. The internal speaker of the NEC PC-88 clicks in time with her footsteps. As the game loads you hear a deep heartbeat. There's no build up to the chase here, it happens before the player even gains control.

The manual (emblazoned with 177 and an all-caps RAPE beneath it) stipulates that to enjoy the game, one must 'become' a rapist.[8]

The game screen features an animated sprite of the woman in the top left, constantly looking over her shoulder. Beside her is a map showing the start point, winding and branching paths, her home, and a graveyard.

The woman's name is Kotoe Saito. She is a 21 year old pink-collar worker for a foreign computer company. She is 160.9cm tall. Her blood type is A. Her three sizes are 82-60-83. She has a bright personality and a partner named Akira Shindo. Her parents approve of their relationship.

The player character is a 26 year old man named Hideo Ouchi. He has been working at an automotive factory for eight years. His hobby is browsing manga in convenience stores at night. His personality is serious but taciturn. He is poor at socialising. The other tidbit of biographical insight we get is that his 'target' is Kotoe Saito. This is a premeditated rape, as Hideo has been scouting out Kotoe's commute to and from work to determine how to chase and rape her. Hideo doesn't want to enact a sexual violence onto any woman, he wants to hurt this specific woman.

The bottom of the game screen shows Kotoe and Hideo in a mad dash to the left of the screen. Stumps, stones, graves, fans, cats, skunks, turtles, dogs, and moles stifle your chase of Kotoe. The player can throw bombs to increase their score, destroy obstacles, and slow Kotoe down. Picking up street signs changes Kotoe's escape route to keep her from getting home. Everything in your path hampers your movement, and the closer you get to Kotoe, the less time you have to react. When you're within striking distance of her it's a pure gamble as to whether or not you'll succeed. When the player reaches Kotoe, they strip an article of her clothing off as her portrait shrieks. First the blouse, then her skirt, then her bra, lastly her panties. The difficulty is obscene to the point of frustration, perhaps deliberately to make the eventual 'reward' of rape and sexual gratification all the more satisfying. Catching up to her a fifth time has Hideo pin Kotoe to the ground as the heartbeat returns. Thus concludes Act One of 177.

The screen goes black and shows us Hideo raping Kotoe. In the top we see percentages assigned to the four cardinal directions. Next to it is a Power metre rapidly counting down. Below that, a Desire metre changing its reading rapidly. Underneath the percentages is a pink orchid which slowly opens its petals fully in bloom. Drops of water land on it. The bottom left corner displays the four cardinal directions the player can maneuver themselves as they rape Kotoe. Assuming a position which obfuscates the penetration, we see Kotoe's distressed face and sometimes an exposed breast, the rest of her covered by Hideo and his undulating hips. Kotoe lets out the occasional yelp.

Should Hideo's power metre reach zero, he is arrested and Section 2 of Article 177 of the Japanese Criminal Code is quoted, which altogether states:

"Article 177. (Rape)
A person who, through assault or intimidation, forcibly commits sexual intercourse with a female of not less than thirteen years of age commits the crime of rape and shall be punished by imprisonment with work for a definite term of not less than 3 years. The same shall apply to a person who commits sexual intercourse with a female under thirteen years of age."[9]

This ending comprises one of two 'bad endings' in 177, the other happening if Kotoe reaches her home. In that event, she jumps for joy and the game ends, no punishment for battery or attempted rape.

If the player instead gets the Desire metre high enough for long enough, the orchid will quiver and Kotoe screams in a pink speech bubble instead to indicate her orgasm. The Desire metre isn't Hideo's own lust, it represents Kotoe's growing attraction to Hideo, suggesting continual rape eventually crosses a boundary of becoming ordinary, consensual sex. The screen fades to black again before we see a photograph of Kotoe in bridal attire with a demure expression. The sun rises behind Mount Fuji, and Hideo lays on the ground in the same clothes from Act One, propping his head up and wearing a weary expression. Below the picture reads "Well, I'm beaten." The implication is thusly, similar to Genji Monogatari and representative of rape myth beliefs, the victim's orgasm means they weren't raped, that she wanted it, and that this is an act of seduction rather than assault. Considering her protestation throughout the course of her rape, the genuine terror in her eyes during Act One, and her incredible glee if she makes it home successfully, her alleged enjoyment is a laughable falsehood, perpetuating rape myth acceptance by wrapping it all in a happy bow. So supposedly smitten is Kotoe that her relationship with her partner Akira is called off so she can wed her rapist. Hideo is meant to be an target of pity, doomed to domesticity with a woman he lusted after but perhaps did not love.

The 'Story' of 177

Across all discussions of 177, not a single one makes mention of the manual. I present here a transcription of the story of 177 presented therein, machine translated with some light edits for readability:

"強姦…ゲームなら罪になりません
[Rape… it's not a crime if it's a game]

「１７７」物語
このゲームを楽しむには、強姦魔になりきることが大切です。気分をもりあげる意味でもこのストーリーを読みましょう。クリアするためのテクニックもお教えします。
[177 Story - To enjoy this game, it is important to be a rapist. Read this story to help life your mood. We will also teach you some techniques to clear the game.]

[強姦]。 美際の行為に及ぷ者はいない。なぜならば刑法第177条「強姦罪」に触れる事になるからだ。しかし、ゲームなら可能である。このゲームは、世の男性・女性諸氏の健全かつ正常なる愛の営みを願い開発されました。あなたの心に潜む、その危険な願望をゲームの世界で存分にお楽しみください。決して現実の世界に足を踏み入れないために。
[[Rape.] No one should engage in the act of rape. This would be a violation of Article 177 of the Penal Code, outlining the crime of rape. However, it is allowed in a game. This game was developed with the hope that men and women in the world will have healthy and normal love lives. Please enjoy the dangerous desires that lurk in your heart to the fullest in the game world. Never bring these acts into the real world.]

Chapter 1
21歳のOL斉藤琴恵は、残業で帰りがすっかり遅くなってしまい、いつもの道を足速に家へ向っていた。ガサガサと、後ろの草むらから音が聞こえる。振り向いた琴恵の顔のすぐ近くに、目をギラギラさせた男の顔があった。「ねーちゃん、ええことせえへんか」男は琴恵のふくよかな胸を鶩づかみにした。琴恵は男の手をふり切って、一目散に逃げ出した。
[Kotoe Saito, a 21-year-old office lady, was heading home along her usual path at a quick pace after working overtime and leaving late. She heard a rustling sound coming from the grass behind her. When she turned around, the face of a man with glazed eyes was close to Kotoe's. The man grabbed Kotoe's plump breasts. Kotoe shook off the man's hands and ran away at once.]

Chapter 2
琴恵は必死に走った。今はとにかく逃げるしかない。あんなのにつかまったら何をされるかわからない。考えるだけで鳥肌が立ってくる。男は一瞬ひるんだが、二ヤリと不敵な笑いを浮かべるとまた、琴恵をめがけて追ってきた。だんだん琴恵に近づいてくる男の足音…。「追いつかれる…」男は琴恵の服をつかむと、カー杯引き裂いた。
[Kotoe ran desperately. Right now, she had no choice but to run. If that man grabs me, I don't know what he will do to me. Just thinking about it gave her goosebumps. The man flinched for a moment, but then he gave a wry grin and ran after her again. The sound of the man's footsteps gradually approached Kotoe… The man grabbed Kotoe's clothes and tore them off.]

Chapter 3
男は一瞬自分がが引き裂いた服に見とれていた。琴恵はその隙に逃差点まで来た。右側はいつも通っている近道だったが、琴恵は迷わず左へ曲がった。この男はつ琴恵を髪うのも計画的犯行だった。男は数日前から秘かに彼女の後をつけ、この辺ー帯の地形を把握し、スイッチを操作すれば、自動的に動く標識を交差点全部につけていたのだった。
[The man looked for a moment at the clothes he had torn off. Kotoe took the opportunity to run to a crossroads. On the right was a shortcut that she always took, but she did not hesitate to turn left. The man's attempts to rape Kotoe were premeditated. He had been secretly following her for several days, and he knew the topography of the area and had placed signs at all the intersections that moved automatically at the flick of a switch.]

Chapter 4
琴恵の必死の逃走も空しく、スかート、ブラジャー、パンティー、次々と脱がされ、全裸にされてしまった。「次で最後だ」男は期待に胸と下半身を膨ませて、こう思った。琴恵はもうこれ以上速く走ることはできなかった。だんだん男の荒い吐息が近付いて来た。琴恵はついに押し倒されてしまった。
[Kotoe's desperate attempts to escape were in vain, as she was stripped of her skirt, bra, and panties one after the other, until she was completely naked. "The next time I catch you will be the last," the man thought, his chest and loins heaving with anticipation. Kotoe could not run any faster. Gradually, the man's rough breathing came closer and closer. Finally, Kotoe was pushed down.]

Chapter 5
男は素早く服を脱ぐと、ぐったりした琴恵に乗っ掛ってきた。愛のないセックスは琴恵にとって苦痛だった。そんな彼女をよそに男は腰を動かすのに必死だった。なぜなら、「腰をうまく使って彼女が温れてしまえば、このセックスは同意の上ということになる。もし起訴されても罪に問われないだろう」男は患かにもそう考えたからだ。
[The man quickly removed his clothes and climbed on top of the limp Kotoe. The loveless sex was painful for Kotoe. The man was desperate to move his hips in spite of her. "If I use my hips well and make her cum, it means that this sex is consensual," thought the man. Even if he was prosecuted then, he would not be charged with a crime.]"[10]

The (Hi)story of Macadamia Soft

The specifics of development studio Macadamia Soft are difficult to pin down precisely, not only due to most resources being in Japanese, but also because early computer software was seen as ephemeral and inconsequential enough to not warrant extensive documentation. This section is my attempt to piece together the origins of Macadamia Soft and 177.

In 1980, a Sapporo-based computer shop was founded under the name 'Computer Land Hokkaido' (株式会社コンピューターランド北海道). As was typical of many developers in the infancy of the home computer revolution, 'Computer Land Hokkaido' was a store which sold computer software and hardware, with software development happening behind the counter as a secondary commercial endeavour. That department, under the name '7 Turkey,' released at least seventeen titles for the NEC PC-6000, PC-8000, and PC-8800 series of 8-bit home computers.[11] Around 1983, '7 Turkey' changed their name to dB-SOFT alongside the release of one of their most important games, Flappy.

dB-SOFT's first adult title, Don Juan, was released in March 1984. A 'game of debauchery,' it tells the story of a casanova trying to seduce a woman named Madoka while avoiding debt collectors.[13] Madoka can be sweet-talked into sex with a highly difficult pickup line guessing game. Eventually presenting her 'flowers' to Don Juan and having sex with him, her buttocks undulate similarly to Hideo's in 177. Don Juan is of low quality in terms of its gameplay and graphical goods, but this anti-social function of holing yourself away with a woman paved the way for dB-SOFT's later eroge releases.

By 1985, as recalled by Yasuhito Saito in a 2013 interview, 'Computer Land Hokkaido' was still operating as a general computer store in the front of their building.¹² Behind it were the administrative and sales departments, then a planning division, a Japanese-style work area (desk all together, no cubicles), and lastly a cordoned off area known as the 'secret development room.'[13]

That year saw the publication of Macadam: Futari Yogari [Foreplay for Two] under dB-SOFT's new Macadamia Soft imprint, created to further differentiate their adult works from their other titles as Don Juan had failed to do.[14] Not all reputable software firms created such imprints (though Koei did create their own "Strawberry Porno Game Series" label, for one), but what cannot be understated is how pervasive eroge was for those firms. Browsing databases for the era's Japanese home computers, and retrospective review sites like erogereport, show countless erotic works developed and published by the likes of Hudson, Enix, Square, Nihon Falcom, Championsoft, ASCII, JAST, and Pony Canyon. It should come as little surprise that the team that brought us Flappy also made Don Juan and 177; their contemporaries who would create Dynasty Warriors released 1984's My Lolita, an erotic surgery simulator; the makers of Dragon Quest slapped their publisher label on a contest winner's Lolita Syndrome in 1983.[15] There wasn't much shame in creating these works as a company as they satisfied a market niche and helped fill corporate coffers.

Macadam tasked the player with using vibrators, candles, their mouth, a feather, and a whip on four different women to bring them (and presumably the player) to orgasm. Each women presents herself in seven poses (stages), with their pleasure being increased by targeting their weak points (marked by stars) with their preferred implement. The astute reader might already be drawing parallels between Macadam's gameplay and Meet and Fuck flash games. The comparison is apt given the strict progression of pleasure therein, though Macadam has actual challenge to it, particularly in the 'final action scenes' for each woman which involve rapid keyboard presses of increasing difficulty.[16] This same style of quicktime gameplay reemerges in 177, just as the presence of candles and whips betray the softcore nature of Macadam like an ill portent of what was to come.

Macadam was allegedly a bit of a shock upon its release partly due to its novel gamification of foreplay, earning it the description of a 'touch game' (similar mechanics had actually been seen earlier in CSK/LOVECOM's 1983 卍 MANJI for Fujitsu FM-7 and NEC PC-88).[17] By pure coincidence, Macadam released in close proximity to Mike Saenz's MacPlaymate, wherein players similarly seduce a woman with different 'toys.' Though MacPlaymate took off like wildfire, Macadam was relegated to a more quiet interest as it required players to have a mouse back when they weren't standard with home computers.

In 1986, with two moderate eroge successes under their belt, dB-SOFT's development team sought to create another title for their new label. One employee who specialised in adult software, described by Saito as an ojii-san "who used to be a taxi driver," came up with the proposal for 177, with Saito charged as main programmer and composer, and graphic design being headed by an unnamed female employee.[28] Also known as Shibata-san, this employee, in addition to the core game, came up with the idea for the 'good ending'. Throughout development and following 177's release, there was allegedly never an air of concern at dB-SOFT. As Saito puts it, "We didn't think we were making something bad. It just happened to become the topic at the diet. But of course none of us were able to tell that to our parents, and even now my parents don't know that I was involved in creating 177."[19] That lack of worry towards their craft was purportedly due to the work culture of dB-SOFT, with employees working on a litany of software from word processors to games to erotic works. Their rotational schedules meant they regarded the work on 177 less as making a game about rape, and more as just programming, combining audio and visual parts with code. Takaki Kobayashi noted that "even female staff were debugging 177, and [they] would just do it without any particular emotion. [They weren't] embarrassed, and would say "Why can't I take her clothes?"" This would-be condemned title was internally considered fundamentally no different from working on productivity software. "It was what they did, and even the package was created by a female member of staff in the advertising section," recalled Kobayashi, just as female art students had reportedly made the scenes in Macadam as well.[20]

The 177 Controversy

On October 10, 1986, Councillor Shozo Kusakawa, member of the religious-conservative New Komeito party presented 177 to the Japanese National Diet to demonstrate that hurtful software should have its sales restricted. The lack of restrictions already in place, as he argued, had children effectively competing with one another for the purchase of eroge, to the point of children shoplifting them at times.[21] He asked the Diet to open the sealed plastic bags containing the software he had brought, and spoke firstly of 177. This was the first time eroge had been brought up in the National Diet. In Kusakawa's eyes, the title coupled with the packaging's claim that the rape experience is thrilling manifested a mockery of Japanese criminal law.[22] With computer use skyrocketing in the mid-1980s to the point where most Japanese households owned a computer of some form (including game consoles), the concern was that this space was unregulated and, in part, unknowable.[23] Independent doujin releases could be made in the privacy of a home or behind the closed doors of a computer shop's backroom, copies could be made rapidly and cheaply, they could be sold with little to no scrutiny by those same computer shops, they could be illegally duplicated with basic equipment; when a title like 177 released, it could theoretically spread like wildfire, including publication in magazines catered to computer users, long before parents could even be aware of its presence or content.[24] Worse yet, children and teens seemed to have more interest in using computers for games (including eroge) rather than what they were being pushed for, education purposes.

Kusakawa's issue with 177 and eroge was not merely its content, but its context. His argument centred on the notion that, "while people can read about or look at illustrations of such situations, the context of rape transformed into a game was far more problematic."[25] The manual may have stated that not to bring the contents of the game into the real world, but that required one to actually read the manual (resplendent with complex kanji without accompanying furigana) if players even had the manual. If a player had a copied version, they might not have the supplementary materials. Further still, one would have to read the manual's text without seeing it as a sarcastic afterthought, taking its stress on leaving rape purely in the game at face value; given the lighthearted tone and argumentation of what is and is not rape, such a serious reading seems unlikely. Kusakawa and Shiokawa Masajuro, then Minister of Education, firmly stated that, though these works were protected due to freedom of expression, there still needed to be an onus on developers and retailers to refrain from promoting and selling such software titles to minors. Concrete steps were not taken at first when the Ministry of International Trade and Industry implored the software industry self-regulate its content. It would not be until the arrest of Miyazaki Tsutomu in 1989 that the issue would re-emerge for debate.

The team at dB-SOFT never thought 177 would become a topic of national concern, particularly due to the anarchic state of software development in the early to mid 1980s. If anything, the ending was intended to ebb any consternation as Hideo was, in effect, 'taking responsibility' for what he had done by marrying Kotoe.[26] Even in the wake of the furor surrounding 177, dB-SOFT was largely unaffected. The national moral panic partly influenced their decision to pull out of the eroge space, though Konyamo Asama de Powerful Mahjong in 1988 would still bear light erotic elements. dB-SOFT was in fact pleased with the media coverage as it led to increased sales and notoriety afforded to them.[27]

The controversy might itself seem minor and quaint compared to the United States' 1993-1994 congressional hearings on video games in the wake of DOOM, Mortal Kombat, and Night Trap. That moral panic saw tangible effects with the development of the ESRB and countless other rating systems self-imposed by publishers, but the same was not the case for Japan. Even when eroge was under scrutiny in the 1990s, little firm action was taken, and CERO wouldn't be established until 2002. The RapeLay controversy did not stymie the development of rape-centric eroge either, instead Japanese publishers chose to deny access to their works to those outside of Japan. What the 177 incident demonstrated was an intense reluctance on the part of the Japanese government to impose censorship outside of what laws were already in place. The moral panic asked parents to be mindful of what content their children were or might consume, rather than punish the industry or its intended customer base more broadly. The following section goes into why Japan wasn't as concerned with the production of rape-centric work as the Western world has been.

Commodified Sex & Rape (Culture)

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Japanese erotic works knows the abundance of rape, bestiality, scat, gore, incest, and sexualisation of minors therein. It would be irresponsible to say it applies to a majority of works, but the point is these aspects are hard to miss. As demonstrated near the beginning of this text, rape plays a prominent role in innumerable Japanese-language works, but rape hentai and eroge have entered the zeitgeist outside Japan as well; consider the popularity and awareness of the aforementioned Rance series by Alicesoft or ShindoL's Metamorphosis. These 'disgraceful' works, be they about sexual disgrace, sexual assault, or rape, certainly stand out as Nagayama Kaoru highlights in their history of eromanga, but 'pure disgrace' works like 177 are a relative rarity, at least in theory.[28]

To understand the cultural context that permitted then condemned works like 177, we need to look at how erotic content is consumed in the Japanese market, particularly before the advent of the Internet. As Yakuza players are likely aware, vending machines did (and still do!) carry erotic works and sexual paraphernalia in a rather open context, as did (and do) konbini. These materials were not cordoned off in the same way they were in the western world; arousing items were everywhere to the point of their visibility effectively being an invisibility. While erotic photography was made to abide by strict guidelines vis-a-vis production, consumption, and promotion, ficticious works like eroge and eromanga were more openly tolerated and gazed upon.[29] The partaking of eromanga was thereby common, with a market saturated and open enough for prices to plummet and to breed a culture of rapid, consistent purchase. With skyrocketing land prices in the 1980s and 1990s, most Japanese workers in cities lived in the suburbs with potentially astoundingly long commutes by train. Those commuters were easy to convert into consumers in no small part due to the liminality of transit; a commuter train car is not conducive to a maximally realised relaxation, nor productive labour in a pre-Internet landscape. It should come as little surprise then that those commuters accounted for sixty percent of all printed mass media sales around 177's release.[30] This mass consumption would thus suggest a commonplace standing of the typified male dominance, female victimisation, and sexual violence/assault in Japanese eromanga and erotic works more broadly. As cultural anthropologist Anne Allison argues, this generalised and universalised reading of pornographic material as (re)producing male dominance, chauvinism, violences, and privileges -- proffered by anti-pornography radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon during the feminist sex wars of the 1980s -- ignores and erases cultural contexts and that non-cishet-males "have found pleasure and empowerment in particular pornographies […] which has the effect of moralizing against, rather than advocating, the sexual agency of women."[31]

Erotic works consumed in this mode by no means account for the totality of these sales, but they operate in service of a similar goal as other printed mass media. Consider the plethora of Japanese print mass media works dealing with the relatively mundane: slice-of-life, romance, sports, drama, mahjong, comedy. These are often as popular as more outlandish, bolder, fantastical works. What journalist Shinichi Kusamori claims regarding those grounded light novels, manga, and magazines, is that a lack of time for substantive engagement in hobbies or socialising necessitates the consumption of this material.[32] As a fan of mahjong unable to make time for actual play, Shinichi partook in the Baudrillarian simulacrum of mahjong, playing the game vicariously through manga. Counter to the notion that increasing popularity of mahjong manga would correlate with rising popularity of the physical game, Shinichi demonstrates that their relation is inverse, the simulacrum in effect supplanting the real.[33]

We can extrapolate this to other genres with ease and validity. Japan's birthrate has been on the decline since the mid-1970s, with the rigours of capitalism demanding ever more time and energy be devoted to work rather than the home life. With less time to enjoy non-work life, slice-of-life manga fills that void. With less time to pursue romance, romance manga fills that void. Without time and energy to engage in sexual relations, eromanga brings satisfaction without the actual act. It stands to reason that this is not unique to print media either. Mahjong, sports, romance, and sex are all time and energy commitments that can be approximated through play. Eroge thus serves a similar purpose to eromanga and pornographic works as a whole, but bringing it into the confines of the home (or computer cafe) without the additional effort and labour of the act. Skip the foreplay, get to the point of release. This can be taken even further with the popularity of soaplands, image clubs, pink salons, nuru/sumata massage parlours, compensated dating, fashion health shops, peep shows, mistress banks, and salacious karaoke bars. Sex and romance have and had become commodities in and of themselves, a labour on the part of the 'product,' paid for with the spoils of labour by the purchaser, the fiduciary cost being offset by the lack of time investment.[34]

Japanese commentators (as quoted by Allison) Kusamori, Takeru Kamewada, Tadao Sato, and Akira Nakano argue that sex fit the medium of manga better than anything else because the content depicted, usually of an 'offensive, secretive, dark, violent, evil, dirty, and lewd' nature reflects the attitudes in Japan towards sex as a whole. It is not some unconscious, accidental by-product that was willed into existence. Japanese erotic works are, as visual culturalist Sharon Kinsella puts it, "the end product of a series of complicated conscious social exchanges and intelligent cultural management," a deliberate realisation and commodification of acts which might not be attainable due to time, anxiety, or social knowledge.[35] The hows and whys of sex didn't stay in eromanga either. One of the first erotic games ever, Koei's 1982 Night Life was marketed not just for its lewd imagery, but as an aid for sexual education for couples, including a period tracker and questionnaire to suggest sex positions. Night Life and erotic works should thus be understood not purely for personal sexual gratification, but for sexual knowledge and the promotion of intimacy as well. Not that that stops the consumer from seeking pleasures off the page or screen, however, as the phenomenon of chikan on public transit demonstrates.

It would be disingenuous to describe eromanga or eroge on the whole as elucidating and informative to the public, or as some wholesome if lascivious body of work. It is a fact that erotic works largely recreate the male gaze, the Freudian fetish, the Lacanian objet petit a. What is placed on the page or screen is a recreation and representation of sexual fantasy and desire, reinterpreted, reiterated, and reproduced by and for a culture. The female body is frequently transgressed upon, be it through molestation, harassment, being gazed upon voyeuristically, rape, or sadomasochism. Whether these fictitious women are shown enjoying this transgression or not, they bear physical, mental, or spiritual marks of violence imposed upon them, as men see, possess, penetrate, and hurt them.[36] Should women demonstrate their own will and initiative, they are often put back in their place as subordinate to men, subservient to the gender order. And yet these works were and are available with astounding openness compared to the Western (particularly, American) compartmentalisation of sex into the realm of privacy.[37] In the mid-1980s there was more clamouring from the government and advocacy groups about depicting pubic realism than there was about showing rape, or the sexualisation of minors.[38] By 1993, it was reported by the Youth Authority of Somucho that approximately 50% of male and 20% of female middle and high schoolers frequently read eromanga, yet the Liberal Democratic Party's 1991 introduced legislation to reduce sales of eromanga to minors floundered.[39] Japan at the time had a Child Welfare Law which prohibited child prostitution, but no law against child pornography; even the consumption of pornographic materials by minors was more a moral concern than a legal one. Maybe it really is no big deal. Japan has one of the lowest rates of rape in the world after all; perhaps this openness and contextualisation of sex actually serves its purpose as a sort of release valve for frustration. Perhaps they know something we don't.

The (In)Visiblity of Rape in Japan

Allow me to problematise the notion of Japan's low rape rate. A reading of sex crime statistics done at face value shows a clear downward trend for already obscenely low numbers.[40]

This downward trend from 1972-1985 seems concomitant with rising sales and production of sexually explicit material, including that which depicts rape. Similar trends were historically seen with the rise of sexually explicit materials in Denmark, Sweden, and West Germany following the legalisation of pornography therein in 1969, 1970, and 1973, respectively.[41] Sexologist Milton Diamond and cultural anthropologist Ayako Uchiyama emphasise that rape has always been taken seriously in Japan, and that inhibiting factors for the reporting of rape (and other sex crimes) have diminished, thus making this trend reflective of an actual decrease in rape cases.[42] Furthermore, the Japanese Ministry of Justice espouses its own rationale for Japan's low crime rate, citing, among others, a highly law-abiding citizenry, a web of informal social control in local communities, a highly cooperative spirit of the citizenry towards the criminal justice system, and efficient, just, and effective investigations and functions by criminal justice agencies.[43] If we work with the numbers for 1985, when Japan's population was 120.8 million, that means there was only one rape victim for every 67,000 citizens. In the United States that same year, 88,670 forcible rapes were reported, or one per 2,680 citizens. That Japan could have, per capita, only 4% the number of rapes as the United States should raise eyebrows, particularly when so much sexually explicit material caters to sexually violent proclivities.

It is difficult to outline the situation for rape victims in 1985, but we can look at the situation in other years to see how Japan's still low numbers do not add up. A 2000 survey by the Gender Quality Bureau founds 48.7% of women over the age of 20 had at least one experience of being groped.[44] Similar surveys in 2001, 2003, and 2004 found a wide range of between 28.4% and 70% of young women being victim to chikan incidents. By all accounts, chikan constitutes sexual assault even according to the Japanese Criminal Code, but a mere two to three thousand chikan are arrested annually. Immediately we see a phenomenal discrepancy between the number of incidents, and the number of reports/arrests; chikan is such an epidemic in Japan that women only trains have been operating in Tokyo since 1912. Such settings were not exclusively to limit the incidents of sexual misconduct - there was belief that women were unsuited to crowded commuter trains - but it was informed by it nonetheless as their rise in prominence came after the newspaper Yomiuri reported on chikan incidents.[45]

Sexual violence too has been tremendously under reported according to the Japanese government's own statistics. Around 2015, over 95% of such incidents were not reported to the police, in so small part due to the culture of shame around rape in Japan, typically placing blame on victims rather than their rapists.[46] In a period before 2017's reform of Article 177, rape was also difficult to prove and only constituted violent, force vaginal penetration by a man's penis. Oral or anal rape, or forced penetration with implements thus didn't constitute rape, making it more difficult to report and to see justice served. Returning to 177, there remains a popular misconception that rape is part of the courting act, that it is a flattery, that it is not rape if a woman 'enjoys' it; Kotoe was in effect seducing Hideo rather than Hideo enacting a sexual violence upon Kotoe. Even when rape victims do try to seek help, they are subjected to ridicule, trauma, and apathy. By way of example, when Catherine Jane Fisher, an Australian woman, was raped in 2002, she was brought back to the scene of her rape, questioned relentlessly by male officers, and denied the opportunity to go to a hospital as rape victims did not constitute urgent patients.[47] Following her gangrape in 2000 Mika Kobayashi sought from and provided support to other rape victims, finding that only 1% of them had made a report to the police.[48] When Shiori Ito was raped in 2015, the Japanese legal system undermined and ignored her, unable to get information on where to get a rape kit without going through a preliminary in-person interview. Police discouraged her from filing a report, she was told her career would be in jeopardy, she was told she didn't act like a victim, she was discouraged from pursuing legal action, she was forced to recreate the scene of her rape and the act of the rape itself while investigators photographed her.[49] In the wake of Ito's story, a 2017 survey by Japan's central government found one in thirteen women said they had been raped at some point in their lives.[50]

Make it make sense, make it add up

It is my sincere hope that I have demonstrated that Japan's widespread plethora of rape-centric sexually explicit materials do not, in fact, represent a release valve for societal frustration, and do not explain a 'shockingly low rape rate.' The prevalence of 'disgraceful' works seems to have no direct causal effect on rape rates at all, and certainly not to the extent that advocates for Japan's pornographic leniency would have us believe.

Over 7,000 words and I don't have a conclusion. I thought my research would give me an answer to the prevalence of rape media in Japan that was more nuanced than that people enjoy it. It didn't.

I was paralysed by fear of what talking about 177 would entail. How can I talk about a culture that isn't my own and impose upon it my own morals and ideals? The answer is that I can't without coming across as aggressively neutral, and so I'll put aside that hang-up for a moment. This is off the cuff so forgive the brain dump.

I don't personally have a problem with rape playing a central role in works of fiction. So long as it is not overly glorified, I consider it akin to any other fetishistic representation of depravity in explicit material. I don't think it should be readily available with the same openness as, say, PornHub's frontpage content, but prohibiting its circulation and creation only breeds an atmosphere of want. We want what we can't have. When I read that 177 had caused a controversy, I thought it would be substantial with wide-reaching effects towards an ethical betterment of Japanese society. Rape itself is bad. Rape is deplorable. Rape should not be enacted on anyone. The carefree attitude the Japanese government and Japanese society had (and largely still have) towards rape and rape victims is appalling. Not only does it perpetuate the same patriarchal notions of male dominance over women, but it reinforces the stifling of progress for and by anyone who is not a cishet-male. Call me an SJW if you'd like, if it means not being on the side which is defending rape, I'll wear the label with pride. It isn't that I want Japan to be more like the Western world. Far from it. It is that I want women, queer people, and minorities to be afforded the same opportunities, the same privileges as men have. It is that I don't want my heart to ache when I read some unrepentant weeaboo defending rape or lolicon or guro as evidence of an 'enlightened culture'. What I want more than anything is for people to consider the cultural contexts of that which they consume. I want people to understand this being considered okay, that not looking at these works critically is itself abhorrent and ignorant. I want people to be able to live their lives without fear.

I want there to not be hurt in this world.

Is that so wrong?

----------------------------------------------------

[1] "List of controversial video games," Wikimedia Foundation, last modified November 14, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversial_video_games.

[2] Ibid.

[3] "Tags & traits," The Visual Novel Database, accessed November 26, 2022, https://vndb.org/d10.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Kaori Shoji and International Herald Tribune, “Setouchi Jakucho Takes Japan Back 1,000 Years,” The New York Times (The New York Times, January 23, 1999), https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/23/style/IHT-setouchi-jakucho-takes-japan-back-1000-years.html.

[6] Royall Tyler, "Marriage, Rank and Rape in The Tale of Genji," Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 7 (March 2002): note 2.

[7] Macadamia Soft, 177 Manual, 1986, https://archive.org/details/177_manual/page/n6/mode/2up.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Japan, Penal Code: Act No. 45 of April 24, 1907, Tokyo: Ministry of Justice, https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/1960.

[10] Macadamia Soft, 177 Manual.

[11] See PC-6001活用研究 プログラミングの基礎からマシン語の応用まで (Dempa Shimbunsha: 1983).

[12] "『ドンファン』　概要," エロゲ調査報告書, accessed November 26, 2022, http://erogereport.blog.jp/archives/1301698.html.

[13] John Szczepaniak, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers (United States: Hardcore Gaming 101, 2014).

[14] Ibid, note 282; "『マカダム』　概要, エロゲ調査報告書, accessed November 26, 2022, http://erogereport.blog.jp/archives/1301712.html.

[15] Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon and Martin Picard, “Beyond Rapelay: Self-Regulation in the Japanese Erotic Video Game Industry,” in Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Matthew Wysocki and Evan W. Lauteria (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 30-31.

[16] "『マカダム』　概要," エロゲ調査報告書.

[17] Ibid.; "Macadam 二人愛戯 （マカダム）," Macadam 二人愛戯 （マカダム） - 1985年発売 (美少女ゲーム マイヒストリー, January 11, 2022), https://bishojoghist.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-271.html; "『卍(まんじ)』　概要," エロゲ調査報告書, accessed November 26, 2022, http://erogereport.blog.jp/archives/1301696.html.

[18] Szczepaniak, The Untold History.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Japan National Diet, "First Meeting of the 107th Members' Committee of the Balance of Account of the National Diet [第107回国会　衆議院　決算委員会　第1号　昭和61年10月21日]," Kokkaikaigisen kesna shisutemu, October 21, 1986, transcript, no. 169.

[22] Ibid., no. 169-171.

[23] Pelletier-Gagnon and Picard, "Beyond Rapelay," 32.

[24] Japan National Diet, "First Meeting," no. 173.

[25] Pelletier-Gagnon and Picard, "Beyond Rapelay," 32.

[26] Szczepaniak, The Untold History.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Kaoru Nagayama, Patrick W. Galbraith, and Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Erotic Comics in Japan: An Introduction to Eromanga (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 169.

[29] Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics,and Censorship in Japan (S.l.: Routledge, 2019), 54.

[30] See Lawrence Ward Beer, Freedom of Expression in Japan: A Study in Comparative Law, Politics, and Society (Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1984).

[31] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 54-55.

[32] Kusamori Shinichi, "Mizu no Ranpi," Juristo 25: 235.

[33] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 59. See Nagisa Oshima, "Bunka.Sei.Seiji," Juristo 5401: 39.

[34] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 59.

[35] Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Routledge, 2015), 14.

[36] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 62, 64-65.

[37] Anonymous, "Racy comics a labeled lot now in Japan," Sunday Honolulu Star Bulletin and Advertiser, March 31, 1991, E-7.

[38] Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires, 150-151.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Anonymous, "Racy comics," E-7; Milton Diamond and Ayako Uchiyama, “Pornography, Rape, and Sex Crimes in Japan,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 22, no. 1 (1999): pp. 1-22, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0160-2527(98)00035-1, 6-7.

[41] Diamond and Uchiyama, "Pornography, Rape, and Sex Crimes in Japan," 9.

[42] Ibid., 11.

[43] Ibid., 12.

[44] Minoru Shikita, Crime and Criminal Policy in Japan from 1926 to 1988: Analysis and Evaluation of the Showa Era (Tokyo: Japan Criminal Policy Society, 1990), 353.

[45] Mitsutoshi Horii and Adam Burgess, “Constructing Sexual Risk: ‘Chikan’, Collapsing Male Authority and the Emergence of Women-Only Train Carriages in Japan,” Health, Risk & Society 14, no. 1 (2012): pp. 41-55, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698575.2011.641523, 42.

[46] Teppei Kasai, “Japan's Not-so-Secret Shame,” Sexual Assault | Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera, July 29, 2018), https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/7/29/japans-not-so-secret-shame/.

[47] Karryn Cartelle, "Victims finally learning to speak out against Japan's outdated rape laws," (Japan Today, April 21, 2008), https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/victims-are-finally-learning-to-speak-out-against-japan%25e2%2580%2599s-outdated-rape-laws.

[48] National Police Agency, "Notes of crime victims," Fiscal Year 2009: Measures for Crime Victims, 26-28.

[49] Julia Hollingsworth and Junko Ogura, “Japanese #MeToo Symbol Wins Civil Court Case Two Years after She Accused a Prominent Journalist of Raping Her | CNN Business,” CNN (Cable News Network, December 18, 2019), https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/18/media/japan-shiori-ito-legal-intl-hnk/index.html.

[50] Ibid.

As the only clown on this website who has played the whole game (in one sitting right at release to secure a free Pickle Rick back bling in Fortnite), I can say with confidence High on Life is dreadfully weak. And that's a bit of a shame since it theoretically has good bones.

The most glaring problem is, of course, the dialogue. The pre-release comparison to Borderlands 3 is apt as characters literally do not cease their oral spew, and you are forced to listen to them before you can progress at key points. Borderlands has ameliorated this in part with the ECHOnet transmissions, keeping you apprised of plot elements as you messed about on Pandora. Save for key story moments, the dialogue therein is accompanied by your mad dash for loot and slaughter. High on Life quivers in its boots at the mere thought that you might miss a single phoneme. There is no means to skip dialogue. There is no opportunity to play the game when characters are talking. If you are not physically glued in place, you are locked in a distraction-less room. And should you dare to break from the tedium of a suburban hardwood floor and off-white walls by heading upstairs, you are scolded by your guns to pay attention. In a properly written, compelling narrative this would be fine, but a substantial chunk of the game is NPCs yammering incessantly. Fake arguments become auditory static, the white noise penetrated only by mention of racism, misogyny, or a cavalcade of 'fuck's. Does a holstered gun have something to say? Worry not, they'll speak to you over radio. That there is so much dialogue is rather interesting in and of itself, particularly seeing how your different weaponry will engage in conversations with NPCs, but there is not a moment where speech is not occurring. The only moment of respite is if you stay in place.

And some of the writing is passable, some even bordering on good. But it never comes out of Justin Roiland's many mouths. The closest I came to cracking a smile was when Zach Hadel, Michael Cusack, Rich Evans, Jay Bauman, Mike Stoklasa, or Tom Kenny was the focus. In a vacuum, some of their witticisms might have earned a chuckle or at least a considered exhale, but these moments are paltry oases after being duped by an infinitude of mirages. You know in your bones that a joke will not be allowed to stand on its own, and that Roiland or his other hack voice 'actors' will need to get their own two cents in. It is a Reddit comment thread not only in content, but in presentation, someone always retelling the above poster's joke but worse. In Roiland's world, stuttering is a feature, not a bug. His stammering makes Porky Pig seem eloquent. A one-take wonder.

"Is the gameplay good?" This question was asked more times than I can count during my marathon. As I emphatically repeated there, "no." There's a weightlessness to every second of combat that betrays the animations and premise of your guns being living things. There is more weight, more oomph, more impact to Spore's creature stage combat than there is to this gunplay. Your bullets genuinely feel as if they are lobbed foam balls. The only times at which there is some punch is when detonating sigh Sweezy's crystals with her charge shot. I can't tell if it's all a consequence of your enemies being shrouded in goop or not. Your shots take away the goop to expose their regular flesh, but this somehow imparts little feedback. Is it because there is so much flash and bedlam occurring that I can't even tell where and when my shots are landing? I have no idea. At the very least the juggling of enemies is semi-novel (even if it comes after Kenny begs lustfully for me to use his 'Trickhole'), and Creature is semi-satisfying if only because you can launch his children and go find a quiet[er] corner to recuperate mentally in. You get some basic manoeuvrability upgrade which makes this a Metr- Search Action game in some sense when coupled with returning to planets to find extra cash. You can upgrade your weapons and unlock modifiers for them but the changes are so minute I couldn't really tell how much of an impact they were having. What the mods do do is change the colour of your weapons. Given that so much of your screen real estate is occupied by their "beautiful dick-sucking lip" visages, this is the most substantial alteration you can make.

The music is like Temporary Secretary by Paul McCartney but bad.

Visually there is something of value here (in theory). While many of the alien inhabitants blend together with their amorphous sausage anatomies, the unique NPCs typically bear striking designs. Sweezy notwithstanding, the guns are cute as well, even if I feel Kenny is perpetually doing the Dreamworks smirk. Kenny and Gus' iron sights are adorable, and the way Gus clamps onto your hand indoors melts my heart. Creature reminds me of that Skylander that had the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Inoffensive! Until you see his actual full model and you realise he has three tits and a prolapsed anus for a barrel. And Gus looks like he has a turtle's cock.

Errant thoughts:

Boy howdy is there a lot of mpreg talk.

One of the scenes you can warp in is a movie theatre where you can watch all of Demon Wind with the RLM crew. That would be okay but I don't think the MST3K style commentary works for a film that belongs in a Best of the Worst episode. There's a reason why they show you fragments of them watching it, and why their film commentaries are for more compelling films.

There is so much overlapping of dialogue that I genuinely got a headache that intensified over the game. A horror during a Tylenol shortage in Canada.

I put more effort into gathering my thoughts than they did making this shit.

I wish that I had always been in a grave.

nothing will help you understand the necessity of consistency boosting in your deck in actual card games than playing this game.

I wanted to like this game and I think up until the finale gauntlet I actually did, but when you hit the gauntlet all of the games problems hit the forefront and it stops being fun little novel system and becomes incredibly frustrating uphill battle where you're force to choose between praying to rng or hitting an outrageous grinding and praying to more reasonable rng.

Being made in the early days of the YGO IP and concepts like "the game's rules" being far from set in stone, FM plays off a very barebones version of even early yugioh rules; there are no monsters with effects, you are limited to one card per turn, the list of spell trap cards are very limited, even things like "the graveyard" dont exist, fusions exists but it's a completely different system.

Ultimately the name of the game is making the strongest beatstick you can. There is a reason THTD is so memed in this game; it's not just the speedrunner efficient creature to build your deck around, it's just the second best creature the player can get in the game (the first being a creature with low drop rates and cant be fused into). Fusing in this game involves putting creatures over each other while playing them, and they will fused into a creature from predetermined list of fusions, often based on creature types and atk values. In turn, because the game is focused on making the beefiest beatstick between each player's decks, the game's deck building is focused on making sure you can turbo out the strongest fusion your deck, and hitting it up equips to make sure it stays above the rest. This is the only real way to make a deck, and focusing on thunder/dragons to pump out THTD because it's the best.

"But do i have to do that? surely I don't have to focus exclusively on one strategy if you want to beat the game" you uhhh kinda need to.
Early game not so much ( first zone > most of World tournament) you can get away going with what you got and hitting a gameFAQ page to find out what you can fuse . But the furhter you get in you're gonna find you're gonna hit what feels like breakpoints; if your deck doesn't have the ability to get past X amount of ATK points, you're very likely just going to lose.
It becomes very a blatant when you hit the 2nd to last section of the game, the mage hunt. Most of the final mages have some sort of big badass that they will likely play; and they're real badasses. If you don't have a way to beat past the 3750atk gate guardian, you're praying you draw one of your incredibly limited options for removal (again, you can play 1 card a turn, so dropping a removal also means you ahve to choose between removing threats or building your board, which I think is actually a fun gameplay decision but it does lead into the situation i'm about to describe) and pray that he doesn't drop another GG.

It's already difficult when approaching the mages, but the mage hunt is reasonable enough imo if you're atleast trying to build a strong deck and do a little grinding at Rex and isis (more on this later) you should be able to get through.

Not so much for the final gauntlet. it's infuriating. It's pretty well know that the gauntlet actually cheat; in particular they dont actually have 5 card hands. They have 20 card hands. Particularly in the final 4, a THTD with one +500 boost is not enough. that's just 3300 atk. every single one dropping monsters in the 4000+ range almost every turn; seto 3 statistically has like a 50% chance to drop blue eyes ultimate at 4500 on turn 1. If you want THTD to beat it, you need 1700 damage just to trade. 90% of the boosts in this game are just +500. You're starting to se the problems here right?
So how do you win?
1) you pray you get lucky. You can, sometimes opponents in this game will actually just give up. You can get away with this individuals fights, but the gauntlet requires 6-7 fights in a row and you get sent back to the beginning if you lose. You might get a freebie in your runs, but you can't bet on it.
2) you grind. you need an ultra consistent deck. Any fusion less than THTD is a brick, and you've got a tight clock when they're dropping 3000-4000 monsters a turn. Your THTD also needs buff, and 500+ are somehow too slow at the gauntlet, you want megamorph which is atleast 1000+. You also want removal, but literally the only good removal (outside of raigeki/BH you get in your starter deck) is widespread ruin, which is rare. If you really want an ace you want meteor B. Dragon, who is a big badass with just 1-2 equips can compuete with even the biggest of boys, which is also a very rare drop.
Did I mention you get 1 drop a duel?

if you play this game I highly recommend downloading the 5/10/15 card drop mode. I did it at 5 because i already felt weird modding a game the first time I play it. I disagree with that now, you should hit this bad bitch with the 15 card drop and save yourself a lot of time. I cant imaging hitting this game up at 1 card a duel, just mind numbing.

I've been hating a lot but I really think it's just the final gauntlet of this game that kills me. I was having plenty of fun going through it, especially if you do know whats good and where to look for it (i also recommend reading the speedrunnin guide for this game, the advice there is just as useful in a casual run), but the finale of this game feels like a brutal slot machine even if you grind out a deck to be as strong as you can get it and it makes me lose all my energy for the game.

Otherwise it's neat. It's got a remarkably good soundtrack, I'm always a sucker for early Duel Monsters era Takahashi art and designs, but the actual card game just lacks the depth to be much more than beatstick turbo, and the way they worked out the fact that there's technically only around 25~ necessary duels in the game is making it that many of the end game duelists simply do not fuck around and require a lot of grinding out the best to have chance at winning.

Still, on an kinda unrelated note, this game was technically the first in a trilogy with a reoccurring villain in all 3. The second, duelist of the roses, reused a lot of the systems of FM but was also a weird psuedo TRPG, while the third game, falsebound king, is a rts/jrpg hybird. I dont think FM is very good, and i also know that FK is not good at all, (idk about DOTR), I sorta miss when they were a lot more experimental with the YGO IP, especially as the actual card game these days has a fair amount of lore and interconnected stories that last multiple sets that you can build on. Aside from 1 weird 5DS racing game, everything since then have just been fairly accurate to the current relevant anime season or just stuff like duel links/master duel. Just go make your sky strikers game and make some weeb money you motherfuckers.

In my opinion, this is one of the best Tales of game I've played. The story is excellent. The characters are great, and are simply the best part of this game. Sadly, the boring gameplay and bland dungeons has put me to sleep a few times. Honestly, I would have rated this a 5 star and a masterpiece if the gameplay wasn't so dull.

Story - 5/5
It is not your typical save the world JRPG, but rather a tale of Velvet's revenge against the person who killed her brother. The first hour of the game is very fast paced and shows us the reason for Velvet's quest for revenge. After that, there is a significant period where the story slows down. Sure, there will still be stuff that's happening, but it won't pick up the pace again until you're near the end. And when it does pick up, it will bombard you with twists and turns and it will never stop until the credits roll.

Characters - 5/5
All of the characters you get in your party are excellently written and have their own motivations on why they're sticking with Velvet. Like her, almost all of them are pretty much flawed and/or keeping a dark secret. Except one, there's one character that I can say is good. Even the main antagonist has a really good reason for his actions and not just because he's evil. Overall, the characters are simply the best part of this game.

Gameplay - 2/5
Sadly, I did not enjoy Berseria's gameplay so much. The combat is very button mash-y, bad character progression options which baffled me for a long time (I liked Xillia's progression more). The killer though are the boring dungeons. I'm glad they've abandoned this engine in Tales of Arise because these dungeons are so bland and uninspired, it made me put down the game a couple of times because I was so bored. I started playing on Hard difficulty (because I'm used to JRPGs that treat Hard as Normal, and Normal as Easy) but had to put it down to Normal, because the difficulty just increases the HP the enemies have without making them difficult. When I put it down to Normal, the game became much more enjoyable to me and it made me go through the dungeons much faster to get to the next part of the story.

Overall, I still recommend this game for the story and the characters and for the fact that it has an unconventional story that is not typical in a JRPG.