Woodaba
831 Reviews liked by Woodaba
177
1986
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.
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.
the plot is nothing and your investment in it is only as thick as your willingness to go with the shreds of characterization Ethan gets (he can be charming in his own way, but let's face it, he's a faceless horror protagonist). the systems are tight and well designed but hindered by some insanely repetitive enemy design, horrifically obtuse level layouts, and one of the most perplexing control schemes i've ever been forced to get used to.
really don't know why this blew up the way it did, especially considering i've never played resident evil before and as a result can't understand what it brought to the series beyond an obvious change in perspective and setting, but even those just feel sort of weird to me: from an outsider's point of view i've always associated resident evil with a particular aesthetic and feel, and at many points i found that so gone that resident evil's trademark inventory management and crafting systems felt a bit out of place. this game feels like outlast with chainsaw duels and flamethrowers, and i don't mean that in a good way — it lacks personality and character of its own. when ethan picked up that samurai edge at the end i felt the only amount of elation or joy this game ever gave me, if only because it reminded me that wait, yes, i recognize that gun! this is resident evil!
anyways, i played this just to play village, so maybe i'll have more fun with that. and i did have fun with biohazard and i think it was a good way to break in my ps5 and get to know the controller! but in spite of that i don't really think it's very good.
really don't know why this blew up the way it did, especially considering i've never played resident evil before and as a result can't understand what it brought to the series beyond an obvious change in perspective and setting, but even those just feel sort of weird to me: from an outsider's point of view i've always associated resident evil with a particular aesthetic and feel, and at many points i found that so gone that resident evil's trademark inventory management and crafting systems felt a bit out of place. this game feels like outlast with chainsaw duels and flamethrowers, and i don't mean that in a good way — it lacks personality and character of its own. when ethan picked up that samurai edge at the end i felt the only amount of elation or joy this game ever gave me, if only because it reminded me that wait, yes, i recognize that gun! this is resident evil!
anyways, i played this just to play village, so maybe i'll have more fun with that. and i did have fun with biohazard and i think it was a good way to break in my ps5 and get to know the controller! but in spite of that i don't really think it's very good.
Pokémon Violet
2022
Disappointment after disappointment, when will I ever grow up? Every damn game I am underwhelmed, yet I seem to never learn. I will never love an entry in this series again, the magic that I experienced from days long past will never be seen or heard from again. Forever I am chained to this merchandise-pushing bulldozer of a franchise. Why does my childhood keep pestering me? Is it a curse? Why do I bother? Just let it die already.
Being someone whose username looks like it's based on Pokemon and formerly having an Eevee PFP for quite a while on here, it would feel like my take on seemingly the most divisive entry in the series yet will come off as something easily discarded. An open world game that is apparently super buggy and super empty? No way I could love it. It's a despicable game that would probably steal my dog's lunch money if it got the opportunity. I can't believe they would release such a broken game in 2022, etc, etc, yadda yadda. Whatever, you heard it all already.
Lend me your ears though... I loved this game.
As I lie here on my bed and rest myself on my Slowpoke pillow, I think to myself "is this a dream?". Not since the early days of playing on my purple Game Boy Color with my copy of Blue version have I felt this same feeling of grand adventure. The ability to go wherever I please without a completely nothing rival constantly challenging me at every other route, or having someone stop me from going down a certain route because they dropped their contact lens. Even the overworld trainers have grown to finally get some manners, and allow me to walk around freely without being demanded to waste my time fighting their crappy low level Scatterbug that wouldn't even give me a single XP point. Finally, a game that eschews all of that so that I may feel free. Free to experience the world of which I seem to never grow out of.
This is MY adventure.
The best part? This game will only get better for me. I played Violet in pretty much the worst way possible, via portable mode on my Switch. I experienced the worst frame rate drops possible, I experienced the worst pop-in, and despite all the doomer talk on Twitter....I never once experienced a crash or even one of the funny glitches or bugs. (may have helped that I bought it digitally) It turns out you can't trust judging your incoming experience based on what you see on the internet, especially when everyone everywhere can easily record stuff that happens to them in what might be the new best-seller in the entire universe. Personally, that stuff actually endears me more to this game. There's a clip of a Jigglypuff that flew off into space out there somewhere that's actually perfectly in-character, and would've made me laugh my ass off if I had experienced it in my own game. To say that I can't wait to replay this later on either a patched version, on better switch hardware or emulator would be an understatement. I cannot imagine how much I would love this once I experience it at a consistent frame rate.
Despite the tacky school uniform you're saddled with at the beginning, I found the setting very charming. Clothing options suffer thanks to it, but these are probably my favorite set of characters since Black/White. Mela having to move her legs like a robot because of her ridiculous boots is more fun and entertaining than anything Leon and his merchandise-moving Charizard did in the last game, and Arven is someone who I want to fight for to the very end. Don't talk to me or my cybernetic lizard motorcycle son again. The last 5% of this game goes beyond words in how much of a step up it is from Sw/Sh's wet fart of a climax.
They say an image speaks louder than words, but here it is.
Call me a fanboy, call me chopped liver. You could even call me late for dinner, but...I enjoyed myself immensely...and that's all that matters in the end.
It's then that I ask myself again, "is this a dream?"
No, the sky has not fallen.....no cats and dogs are not currently living together.... Pokemon Scarvy is my game of the year. This is reality, and I still can't fucking believe it.
Ten.
Years.
Ten whole years since B/W, and they finally do it again... holy shit.
I refuse to grow up.
Being someone whose username looks like it's based on Pokemon and formerly having an Eevee PFP for quite a while on here, it would feel like my take on seemingly the most divisive entry in the series yet will come off as something easily discarded. An open world game that is apparently super buggy and super empty? No way I could love it. It's a despicable game that would probably steal my dog's lunch money if it got the opportunity. I can't believe they would release such a broken game in 2022, etc, etc, yadda yadda. Whatever, you heard it all already.
Lend me your ears though... I loved this game.
As I lie here on my bed and rest myself on my Slowpoke pillow, I think to myself "is this a dream?". Not since the early days of playing on my purple Game Boy Color with my copy of Blue version have I felt this same feeling of grand adventure. The ability to go wherever I please without a completely nothing rival constantly challenging me at every other route, or having someone stop me from going down a certain route because they dropped their contact lens. Even the overworld trainers have grown to finally get some manners, and allow me to walk around freely without being demanded to waste my time fighting their crappy low level Scatterbug that wouldn't even give me a single XP point. Finally, a game that eschews all of that so that I may feel free. Free to experience the world of which I seem to never grow out of.
This is MY adventure.
The best part? This game will only get better for me. I played Violet in pretty much the worst way possible, via portable mode on my Switch. I experienced the worst frame rate drops possible, I experienced the worst pop-in, and despite all the doomer talk on Twitter....I never once experienced a crash or even one of the funny glitches or bugs. (may have helped that I bought it digitally) It turns out you can't trust judging your incoming experience based on what you see on the internet, especially when everyone everywhere can easily record stuff that happens to them in what might be the new best-seller in the entire universe. Personally, that stuff actually endears me more to this game. There's a clip of a Jigglypuff that flew off into space out there somewhere that's actually perfectly in-character, and would've made me laugh my ass off if I had experienced it in my own game. To say that I can't wait to replay this later on either a patched version, on better switch hardware or emulator would be an understatement. I cannot imagine how much I would love this once I experience it at a consistent frame rate.
Despite the tacky school uniform you're saddled with at the beginning, I found the setting very charming. Clothing options suffer thanks to it, but these are probably my favorite set of characters since Black/White. Mela having to move her legs like a robot because of her ridiculous boots is more fun and entertaining than anything Leon and his merchandise-moving Charizard did in the last game, and Arven is someone who I want to fight for to the very end. Don't talk to me or my cybernetic lizard motorcycle son again. The last 5% of this game goes beyond words in how much of a step up it is from Sw/Sh's wet fart of a climax.
They say an image speaks louder than words, but here it is.
Call me a fanboy, call me chopped liver. You could even call me late for dinner, but...I enjoyed myself immensely...and that's all that matters in the end.
It's then that I ask myself again, "is this a dream?"
No, the sky has not fallen.....no cats and dogs are not currently living together.... Pokemon Scarvy is my game of the year. This is reality, and I still can't fucking believe it.
Ten.
Years.
Ten whole years since B/W, and they finally do it again... holy shit.
I refuse to grow up.
bitch youuuuuuu are a stranger. this broader aesthetic sense of making art thats like an overtly long talk therapy session with some two faced white woman is becoming maddening to me. i dont think its appropriate to belabor this because the "quiz" here is such a harmless & secondary example of it, and maybe is more self-aware than im pinning it, but also i had a pretty stark realization in here that i've heard this exact voice, story, talk, expression, diction, & conclusion more times than i ever thought possible. u kno both folks here probably said "power differential" 1 too many times in the relationship. forgive me but i gotta talk my shit for a minute: yall's own self-admitted lack of agency & disproptional reactivity dont bother yall?????? self-pitying shit is as much of a power play as anything else u woulda known that if you were up on ur nietzsche by now. might as well let ur fucking nuts hang & make art and say shit about what you would do if you had things your way instead of what would you woulda done were you the perfect lil tweebell them PhDs is tryna get you to be. like the final conclusion here is an overtly self-conscious epigraph about how being too self-conscious is bad. you bitches need an intervention!!! i may be a broke ass bitch ass nigga but trust that rapping along with pap when he goes "hunnid on me...these bitch ass broke ass niggas better not say nothing to me" prepares me to tackle life's problems more than anything coming from this lane. maybe im a sociopath and got a impaired sense of empathy & dont get it but also ian seen nary a post or analysis or even a interpretative lens that would reward deeper investigation of smthn that got this "autoethnography" or whatever stench on it. another big whiff from itch.io 4 me.
Along with Animal Crossing: New Horizons and DOOM, Call of Duty: Warzone formed part of what I've been internally referring to as "the saviour trilogy" - the three games that were up to the task of keeping me in the game of the early pandemic when everything was uncertain, indeterminate and appalling. Warzone was by no means a perfect game - it was janky, it was buggy, it was stupid (in both pejorative and complimentary senses) - but it was more than capable of performing the crucial "zoom call with the boys" function: while my girlfriend and my grandmother and my work colleagues hopped onto group video calls to play murder mysteries and do pop-quizzes, me and the fellas used Warzone as an excuse to war-room about what was (or, more accurately, what wasn't) happening in our lives while the viral battlefront raged outside.
The gameplay was mostly ancillary, but had plenty of highlights: BIG-team Call of Duty with proximity voice chat and "death screams" combined with semi-invincible vehicles and 1km+ sniper rifles lead to a lot of hilarity and outside-the-box gameplay you wouldn't expect from the franchise - chasing dudes up staircases with quad bikes, throwing tomahawks at UAVs, having a smoke+riff sesh with your dudes in a helicopter that's flying too high for the guys with SMGs and shotguns in the Final Circle to reach... the possibilities were more or less endless, and the creators of 1.0 seemed happy to permit revelry in regressive behaviour (though in reality I imagine patching a 100GB+ game in April 2020 was a living nightmare for Infinity Ward and the 13 other Activision studios who supported them).
The day Warzone asked me and the squad to download two 100GB patches in one week was the day the game died for us. We were all playing on Base PS4s with default hard-drives, luddite gamers who had no interest in Pros and Plus and Platter-Externals for the sake of a F2P Zoom call. We trailed off into the world of Hunt Showdown and Fortnite and never looked back at the gigabyte-gomorrah we uninstalled ourselves from; like Animal Crossing, there was probably some degree of post-covid relief to be found in that digital distance. I only ever really heard about the game again via the bizarre phenomenon of grown men in their thirties and forties telling me, with surprising frequency, that they'd queued for 8 hours or spent £1000 to get a PlayStation 5 specifically so that Warzone would load faster and could be installed alongside other games. Crazy, huh? Imagine being that invested in video games.
Ironically, it wasn't any new feature or map or content that brought me back for Warzone 2.0 - it was the simple announcement that the install size of the game had been reduced by 80%. The wonders of next-gen gaming! As you might expect from a project that has 23,000 people in the credits, the game itself is almost completely unchanged from Warzone 1.0; while there's an initial awkward adjustment period in exchanging East European forests for Middle-East Asian fields, it's surprising how familiar everything feels - almost as if someone's run a Google Translate AI filter over all the Кока-Кола billboards to make them say الكوكا كولا instead; difficult questions re: globalisation that emerge in trading out Ukraine for Iran are mostly side-stepped by simply having the new war-country act as a toybox for generic PMCs. War has changed in order to become unchanging. An eternal battleground that persists regardless of what language the 400MB road signs are in. And as far as gameplay goes, my only complaint is that they made the cars and trucks are weak as shit.
DMZ, the new Tarkov/Hunt/DayZ mode, comes under much tighter scrutiny. Or it would, if it was capable of running for more than 20 minutes at a time. Essentially a mini COD MMO with anywhere-PVP, it's a classic case of a gamer's platonic dream-ideal making way for a CEO deadline-induced nightmare: progress lost; parties blocked; playlists broken; queues abound; hard crashes at crucial moments - arguably it's all launch-week teething issues that will pass like unconvincing PhysX dust on the plains of Notpakistan, but this is a mode where every mote and moment of progress is supposed to count for something: all decisions are final, and there's only one way out. Losing progress to the desktop's void stings all the tighter when so much of the moment-to-moment gameplay here involves inventory management that doesn't matter - inventory management in games never matters all that much, but it really doesn't matter here: weighing up whether to stow the Aged Wine or the Vintage Wine for the difference of $50 (to buy a gun that costs $5000+) only to walk over a lagged-out landmine moments later and lose three hours of progression... That's life, I guess, but it's not exactly condusive towards the life-escaping levels of Zoom Call With The Boys.
Feels impeccably timed that this would drop at the same time as the Qatar World Cup - a broken Middle-East-bound versimilitude of something that once existed in a cleaner, sturdier but no less morally-ethically dubious form. Why was it palatable then, but not now? We're still chewing on it with some degree of gratitude, but there's a look of hypocritical disgust in our eyes. I guess the difference now is that the wheels are now coming off of everything everywhere and we can see the cracks that 'workers' once had the time to paper over. When everyone's connected all at once, there can be no blind eyes. Hopefully they patch in the ability to gib people with chopper blades again.
The gameplay was mostly ancillary, but had plenty of highlights: BIG-team Call of Duty with proximity voice chat and "death screams" combined with semi-invincible vehicles and 1km+ sniper rifles lead to a lot of hilarity and outside-the-box gameplay you wouldn't expect from the franchise - chasing dudes up staircases with quad bikes, throwing tomahawks at UAVs, having a smoke+riff sesh with your dudes in a helicopter that's flying too high for the guys with SMGs and shotguns in the Final Circle to reach... the possibilities were more or less endless, and the creators of 1.0 seemed happy to permit revelry in regressive behaviour (though in reality I imagine patching a 100GB+ game in April 2020 was a living nightmare for Infinity Ward and the 13 other Activision studios who supported them).
The day Warzone asked me and the squad to download two 100GB patches in one week was the day the game died for us. We were all playing on Base PS4s with default hard-drives, luddite gamers who had no interest in Pros and Plus and Platter-Externals for the sake of a F2P Zoom call. We trailed off into the world of Hunt Showdown and Fortnite and never looked back at the gigabyte-gomorrah we uninstalled ourselves from; like Animal Crossing, there was probably some degree of post-covid relief to be found in that digital distance. I only ever really heard about the game again via the bizarre phenomenon of grown men in their thirties and forties telling me, with surprising frequency, that they'd queued for 8 hours or spent £1000 to get a PlayStation 5 specifically so that Warzone would load faster and could be installed alongside other games. Crazy, huh? Imagine being that invested in video games.
Ironically, it wasn't any new feature or map or content that brought me back for Warzone 2.0 - it was the simple announcement that the install size of the game had been reduced by 80%. The wonders of next-gen gaming! As you might expect from a project that has 23,000 people in the credits, the game itself is almost completely unchanged from Warzone 1.0; while there's an initial awkward adjustment period in exchanging East European forests for Middle-East Asian fields, it's surprising how familiar everything feels - almost as if someone's run a Google Translate AI filter over all the Кока-Кола billboards to make them say الكوكا كولا instead; difficult questions re: globalisation that emerge in trading out Ukraine for Iran are mostly side-stepped by simply having the new war-country act as a toybox for generic PMCs. War has changed in order to become unchanging. An eternal battleground that persists regardless of what language the 400MB road signs are in. And as far as gameplay goes, my only complaint is that they made the cars and trucks are weak as shit.
DMZ, the new Tarkov/Hunt/DayZ mode, comes under much tighter scrutiny. Or it would, if it was capable of running for more than 20 minutes at a time. Essentially a mini COD MMO with anywhere-PVP, it's a classic case of a gamer's platonic dream-ideal making way for a CEO deadline-induced nightmare: progress lost; parties blocked; playlists broken; queues abound; hard crashes at crucial moments - arguably it's all launch-week teething issues that will pass like unconvincing PhysX dust on the plains of Notpakistan, but this is a mode where every mote and moment of progress is supposed to count for something: all decisions are final, and there's only one way out. Losing progress to the desktop's void stings all the tighter when so much of the moment-to-moment gameplay here involves inventory management that doesn't matter - inventory management in games never matters all that much, but it really doesn't matter here: weighing up whether to stow the Aged Wine or the Vintage Wine for the difference of $50 (to buy a gun that costs $5000+) only to walk over a lagged-out landmine moments later and lose three hours of progression... That's life, I guess, but it's not exactly condusive towards the life-escaping levels of Zoom Call With The Boys.
Feels impeccably timed that this would drop at the same time as the Qatar World Cup - a broken Middle-East-bound versimilitude of something that once existed in a cleaner, sturdier but no less morally-ethically dubious form. Why was it palatable then, but not now? We're still chewing on it with some degree of gratitude, but there's a look of hypocritical disgust in our eyes. I guess the difference now is that the wheels are now coming off of everything everywhere and we can see the cracks that 'workers' once had the time to paper over. When everyone's connected all at once, there can be no blind eyes. Hopefully they patch in the ability to gib people with chopper blades again.
Cosmo D: is simply a master of video game scenery. It reconfigures the aesthetic sense of visual collage through the architecture itself, leaving the seams that hold any video game level exposed, from textures and models to the Skybox, all mixed, with experimentation and without shame or desire to be impressive, pure architecture. digital surreal.
Nothing of coherent proportions or conventional spatial sense, something that, on the other hand, is quite common in the medium, much as contemporary AAA video games and their cinematographic and photorealistic ambitions want to deny. An observation room with a window to another room, with windows that show a landscape built like an old photograph. Representation of psyche and desire, also of memories.
- The pizza at the level of art, and the human activity of creating it at the level of any articulation and artistic practice, the result? At the delivery of each pizza, a semi-criticism between one or several characters of the piece created, with their counterpoints and their infulas written through small dialogues that float in the air of places sunk in music, full of sculptures, records, books and instruments that generate the sensation of being "bricks" to complete spaces rather than artifacts with an aesthetic and communicative function. A space so consumed by capitalism that there is no real aesthetic scale on practically anything.
100% new millennium Volatile and changing like our cultural and social dynamics.
Nothing of coherent proportions or conventional spatial sense, something that, on the other hand, is quite common in the medium, much as contemporary AAA video games and their cinematographic and photorealistic ambitions want to deny. An observation room with a window to another room, with windows that show a landscape built like an old photograph. Representation of psyche and desire, also of memories.
- The pizza at the level of art, and the human activity of creating it at the level of any articulation and artistic practice, the result? At the delivery of each pizza, a semi-criticism between one or several characters of the piece created, with their counterpoints and their infulas written through small dialogues that float in the air of places sunk in music, full of sculptures, records, books and instruments that generate the sensation of being "bricks" to complete spaces rather than artifacts with an aesthetic and communicative function. A space so consumed by capitalism that there is no real aesthetic scale on practically anything.
100% new millennium Volatile and changing like our cultural and social dynamics.
Yakuza Kiwami 2
2017
This one’s fine, I guess.
I do understand why older fans probably don’t like the Kiwami games. Certain moods aren’t carried over when you compare cutscenes, whether through presentation or sound choice. Sotenbori in the Dragon Engine (an engine I’m also mixed on in general) has to be made with the intent to reuse that version of the city for the next ten years of Yakuza games. That means they don’t have the time or the interest in capturing the original Yakuza 2’s noir vibe. I understand that from a production standpoint. Still a bummer.
But also, I just really did not enjoy this story. For how much Ryuji Goda was hyped up, other games have just done… better antagonists since then. Kaoru starts as a strong new addition to the cast before rapidly losing her speak. And beyond that, there’s only so many “Secret Korean Mafia” plot twists this game can handle before you really have to sit back and go. Goddamn. What’s going on there.
But on the other hand, I still played 70 hours of it, so Yakuza is still working it’s charms on me.
I do understand why older fans probably don’t like the Kiwami games. Certain moods aren’t carried over when you compare cutscenes, whether through presentation or sound choice. Sotenbori in the Dragon Engine (an engine I’m also mixed on in general) has to be made with the intent to reuse that version of the city for the next ten years of Yakuza games. That means they don’t have the time or the interest in capturing the original Yakuza 2’s noir vibe. I understand that from a production standpoint. Still a bummer.
But also, I just really did not enjoy this story. For how much Ryuji Goda was hyped up, other games have just done… better antagonists since then. Kaoru starts as a strong new addition to the cast before rapidly losing her speak. And beyond that, there’s only so many “Secret Korean Mafia” plot twists this game can handle before you really have to sit back and go. Goddamn. What’s going on there.
But on the other hand, I still played 70 hours of it, so Yakuza is still working it’s charms on me.
Digimon Survive
2022
I think what’s going on here is a lot of really fun and interesting ideas that play on the base concepts of Digimon Adventure and I do really for the most part quite like the story here and I really like the characters but I think this game is almost completely sabotaged by it mechanical structure that has you spend so much time in menus and really barebones fights that take a good 80% of the game to get fun, interesting, or most importantly, NOT SLOW.
I don’t have as much of a problem with having to talk to everybody every time anything happens as most other people seem to because I do like these characters a lot (shoutouts to Saki, shout-outs to Falcomon and Dracmon) but damn the amount of slow menuing you have to do constantly to make anything happen even outside of battle grinds everything down, especially when this game has such a hard time keeping it all going under the hood in a smooth/fast way.
This stuff isn’t a deal breaker and like I said I do think it’s worth it when I’m in the right mood but I haven’t felt compelled to finish any of the other three routes I didn’t initially see, even though it seems like there’s cool stuff in at least two of them!! The game has so much personality but I do think this is a thing where you wanna know what you’re getting into.
Incredible Little Guy stuff though, Digimon Survive extremely understands that the most important part of Digimon is having between three and nine little guys be cute and say funny things and there is a LOT of that so truly who can say whether it’s good or bad
I don’t have as much of a problem with having to talk to everybody every time anything happens as most other people seem to because I do like these characters a lot (shoutouts to Saki, shout-outs to Falcomon and Dracmon) but damn the amount of slow menuing you have to do constantly to make anything happen even outside of battle grinds everything down, especially when this game has such a hard time keeping it all going under the hood in a smooth/fast way.
This stuff isn’t a deal breaker and like I said I do think it’s worth it when I’m in the right mood but I haven’t felt compelled to finish any of the other three routes I didn’t initially see, even though it seems like there’s cool stuff in at least two of them!! The game has so much personality but I do think this is a thing where you wanna know what you’re getting into.
Incredible Little Guy stuff though, Digimon Survive extremely understands that the most important part of Digimon is having between three and nine little guys be cute and say funny things and there is a LOT of that so truly who can say whether it’s good or bad
Air Twister
2022
not exactly sure how interested i am in grinding out runs of this (it takes far too long for stages to really provide much friction, scoring doesn't seem to have an interesting hook, it suffers from having a prototypical f2p progression system that ensures playing the game a lot is enough to play the game more effectively, etc.) but it's a genuine shame a title this inventive from someone as generally renowned as yu suzuki will no doubt crumble to dust in the wind after it inevitably stops being supported after a few years. this is nothing new for mobile games i suppose, and it might just be that the control scheme of this one is more-or-less intrinsically tied to the hardware it was built for, but there's no doubt in my mind this game will inevitably die with the iphone.
no clue how this plays on mac - i just found out as i'm writing this that there's a version for that device - but the control scheme for portable devices genuinely delights me and honestly is enough to carry the whole experience for me. having to constantly handoff control of moving and shooting between hands is a really cool idea that i haven't seen elsewhere, and one that i don't think would translate quite as well to two analog sticks, at least not in quite the same way. it feels really cool to have a new game with juggling control of your character being at the forefront of the experience, so many modern titles are obsessed with having such modular and customizable controls that naturally lend themselves to easier preservation and portability, but rarely if ever provide an inventive play experience like one you’d see in a fucked up little mobile game. give it a fair shot and you might be surprised!
despite all that, the biggest surprise was easily the soundtrack and general sound design. whoever decided enemy plasma shots should sound like blowing bubbles while layering queen knockoff music on top of the whole thing deserves the nobel prize
no clue how this plays on mac - i just found out as i'm writing this that there's a version for that device - but the control scheme for portable devices genuinely delights me and honestly is enough to carry the whole experience for me. having to constantly handoff control of moving and shooting between hands is a really cool idea that i haven't seen elsewhere, and one that i don't think would translate quite as well to two analog sticks, at least not in quite the same way. it feels really cool to have a new game with juggling control of your character being at the forefront of the experience, so many modern titles are obsessed with having such modular and customizable controls that naturally lend themselves to easier preservation and portability, but rarely if ever provide an inventive play experience like one you’d see in a fucked up little mobile game. give it a fair shot and you might be surprised!
despite all that, the biggest surprise was easily the soundtrack and general sound design. whoever decided enemy plasma shots should sound like blowing bubbles while layering queen knockoff music on top of the whole thing deserves the nobel prize
Devil May Cry
2001
"Hasn't aged the best" nigga you haven't aged the best
hehehe, hi, um... so we have a problem. So Sonic Frontiers came out, very recently, as of writing the speedrun.com boards are only like half open (you can only submit cyberspace ILs)... and it kinda did shit, shit that kinda impacts shit that I've been saying in this review series, I think I straight up need to make an addendum on the Knuckles review, once I can get a whole picture on what it did because hey, I can't actually play the game right now. Thanks me of a few months ago, you really planned this shit out. You know what tho, this is good actually, I think the bits I've seen and the discourse I've had with friends over this has clarified the points I wanted to make but didn't know how to, because you know what time it is. It's the Big Time. Let's talk about Sonic's Friends.
Quick history rundown I guess, it all starts with Tails in Sonic 2, a genesis game, so there's not much to him in-game besides some tidbits and the gameplay feature of flight, a mechanic that I know some of my friends were pretty convinced that it just didn't exist in that game, so that's funny. After we have Amy, it is what it is. Finally of this era we have Knuckles, the og rival of Sonic 3 who turns ally in & Knuckles, also positioned as an optional character for a separate campaign which unlocks no content afterwards. These are the OGs, the squad that due to the nature of their origins, not to mention the fact that they are the origins, no one really has a problem with them, so this really is not historically what people derisively refer to as "Sonic's Friends" and that fact almost makes it kinda clear the sentiment of "Sonic's Friends mucking up the franchise" is mostly used by ultra boomers wanting to return to their "golden age", but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Also not normally a consideration when talking about "Sonic's Friends", Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel, the Japan only arcade debuting SegaSonic homies. Even while Mighty will go on to be a part of heavily derided game Knuckles Chaotix, the game which birthed the absolute certified "Sonic Friends" Espio, Vector, and Charmy, Mighty himself does not seem to be a consideration when talking about "Sonic Friends", granted because he's obscure, but also because he and Ray seem to garner enough respect from important fan dev, and absolute certified coward and boomer, Christian Whitehead, in order to become playable characters in Sonic Mania, a game filled with fanservice for many, many characters from a very specific timeframe within the Sonic franchise.
Also not included in the discussion are the countless scrimblos of Sonic animated TV series', comics, side games, and no, not even Chris, Donut Lord, or the Sonic Adventure Man who Owns The Building. The specific subset of characters who were a major negative talking point for a long period of Sonic's history, were the additional playable characters, that have speaking roles, are required to unlock 2% of their respective games, in Sonic Adventure, Heroes, and 06, and continue to appear on some level throughout the mainline series. There is admittedly something kinda funny imagining a single bee sending AVGN knock-offs into enough rage as to spawn Sonic 4 as well as the entire game design direction from Unleashed onwards,but damn does it feel like this one ancient piece of discourse just poisoned this franchise.
Let's start breaking down some shit, is Sonic's wider cast as playable characters "padding"? I mean, sure, there's really nothing to say to stop you from defining it as such. If we define just playing as Sonic as, da game, then it would follow that these other campaigns are just filling for playtime. Question, is Mighty and Ray Mania Plus padding? They are side characters that are by all means, injected into levels that already existed before them, they're hardly a fully fledged inclusion. Is the Werehog padding? I feel most people would be inclined to say yes, it's ultimately viewed as an alternate gameplay style that takes away time from engaging with the core Sonic gameplay, the fact you're still playing as Sonic isn't quite relevant. Is Shadow The Hedgehog of SA2 padding? He's roughly the same gameplay style as Sonic and has his own levels, even if he is a different character. Is solving a GameMaker tile puzzle in order to spawn grind rails and stat-increasing collectibles in an open world padding, or is it the alternate gameplay style in the physically and structurally different Boost style cyberspace levels? The answer may shock you. Is Super Sonic, the alternate gameplay style locked behind all these other alternate gameplay styles, also ultimately padding? I spent 2 years not playing SA after beating Sonic's Story, could it really be that important? I'd like to think I made my point, that regardless of how one may answer any of these questions that actually defining an airtight criteria for what is the equivalent of an anime fan looking at Eva and saying that "Magma Diver" is the only "filler episode", is ultimately kinda arbitrary and just not as helpful as just calling Amy's story mid and moving on.
Perhaps more to the core is if there is any room for alternate playstyles at all and again we mostly just see more line drawing. Generally it seems like people are more appreciative when the alternate characters are only kinda alternate playstyles in the form of Shadow, Blaze, and the whole classic crew, maybe bringing a few mechanical changes but still ultimately engaging with the game in a manner that is comparable to Sonic... but the Chao Garden is also generally fine. Sitting around a square and feeding a creature in order to make its numbers go up is pretty much the least Sonic that you could be doing,but people value it anyway, it's a cute pace breaker and distraction for those that enjoy it, and for everyone else it's just out of the way, they don't force you into it like Unleashed or deny the human brainworm called "Closure" its satisfaction by delaying the true ending that you definitely absolutely cared about. Calling it a brainworm seems a bit dismissive, it kinda is "a brainworm" but, we live with it so I will admit that having some compulsory factor for engaging with all these modes that you just may not care for regardless of execution, is ultimately a bit of wrinkle. Were not for that tho I think there wouldn't be a whole lot of disagreement to be had that these non-core modes, tho not all conceptualized and implemented equally, do ultimately fill out the experience of these games.
Beyond that tho is just how low-key essential all these scrimblos are to actually writing these games. Like it cannot be over-stated just how much more interesting thing and flavorful things are when these games are an ensemble cast dealing with Deities and Government Conspiracies and not just Sonic and Tails fucking around in an amusement park. Like I know I spent a long time in my last review establishing Amy as one note, but the problem is definitely in like, how boring of a note it is, none of Sonic's characters are particularly full of depth no matter how many youtube video essays get thrown around. The character with the most is easily Shadow, he has like 3 character arcs over 4 games that can be easily summarized as "I wanted revenge but now I remember what my friend truly wanted, I will now sacrifice myself for everyone", "My past doesn't matter, I am myself and that's all that matters", "Ok that was kinda raw, let's make that a whole game instead of 3 cutscenes", and "Even as the world will turn against me, I will stay true to my beliefs". It's not much, and one of those was literally from 06, but it's cool, and rather importantly, Shadow isn't the only character in the game, not even in Shadow the Hedgehog. Just looking at these characters through that kind of lens doesn't really capture the effect they have as they bounce off of each other and the events of the games. Big the Cat is ultimately just a dumb fisherman, but part of what makes him hilarious is the fact that he's a dumb big cat fisherman that gets so wrapped up in the events of SA for no reason that he ends up having to fish his friend out of a god, you can't not have a big dumb smile on your face as it's happening.
This feels like very basic writing shit, right? Yet it feels like after 06 they simply became absolutely afraid of doing much of anything with Sonic's cast in the mainline. The last real non-antagonistic addition to the cast was Chipp, a nasally scrungo that they knew would be disposed of by the end of that game. After that you have... Classic Sonic, which like... no. Then you have "The Recruit", your oc of Sonic Forces, so again not really much of a character. The returning cast doesn't exactly fare well either, Shadow basically becoming "Hey, you remember this guy, right? That cool edgy guy from SA2! Buy our dlc". Where am I going with this tho... let's talk about Sonic Frontiers. Only bits and pieces tho, it's all I know after all. How does Frontiers handle the cast? Well besides Sonic you got Amy, Tails, Knuckles, and Eggman... I'm obviously not gonna say that the entire Sonic cast should be active at the same time all the time, that would be ridiculous, but damn, if that's not a cowardly selection if I've ever seen one. So the story has Sonic going around Islands as he works to save his friends, all the while his friends are left with not much to do besides reflect on the Island they're trapped on as well as their own past,the most important of these for our discussion being Tails... in essence kinda just going through his SA arc again. In a long running multi-installment thing like this, I'm not exactly entirely against characters falling back into old trappings, that's an incredibly human thing to depict. The thing I want to illustrate here is that, in the approach lacking much of anything new in regards to what the characters deal with, with the mission being to investigate the more melancholic aspects of these characters, then yeah, of course the one course of action is to simply re-iterate on the places these characters have already been, the road's been paved, there's no where else to go, "damn am I glad the characters are acting like themselves again". This is ultimately what I landed on as the importance of all those new characters just showing up to the story pre-Unleashed, even if it's something small like Big, or as Ultimate as Shadow, it's a new deal brought to the table, it's something new for the characters to bounce off of. You can argue for Frontiers that it isn't the point... the point might be kinda mid tho, and besides, Frontiers also illustrates this, because there is a new character. Sage like all the other Sonic characters has a simple deal going on, she's an AI character like many AI characters, and introduces herself as an antagonistic force against Sonic... and not Eggman. Eggman has had robot helpers before, that's nothing new, but Sage's screentime in this game is spent slowly showing a father-daughter relationship which, succeeded if the fan art of Eggman getting Sage McDonalds is any metric, and also created this facet of Eggman that wasn't there for the other 30 years of his existence and simply wouldn't exist without a character like this by which to create this dynamic. So old begets old, new begets new, that seems like a simple point to take away from this. If they don't let Ian Flynn throw in new fucked up Sonic ocs into the next game like they do for the comics regularly then I think it's safe to say that the whole "Frontiers experiment" has flopped tremendously, and that not even Sonic can outrun the culture of stagnation.
All of this is to say, Sonic's friends are cool.
How great it is then, that this is a Big the Cat review.
"You like fishing, shitty jungle shacks, loitering in strange places, and a frog. You can't fly, you can't spin dash, and you can't fight more than a monkey. Face it, you're never gonna make it." I don't wanna make it, [I just wanna-][This joke is still under construction, please come back at the end of these reviews]
Big is the Mystic Ruins' local cryptid. He's a simple creature, he hangs around his humble makeshift house, goes fishing, and takes care of his friend Froggy. Perhaps he is a role model to surpass even Man Who Owns the Building. At the start of his story Froggy gets possessed by the tail of Chaos, and Big takes it upon himself to chase down his friend. As we make it to the city, we find the Man Who Owns the Building, playing the role of the Man Who is Scared Shitless by Frogs, he is truly a multi-faceted building owner.
So Big's story has you go fishing your friend froggy inside pools of water in small isolated sections of existing levels. The devs clearly knew that this is a simplistic departure from any of the gameplay styles going on so they clearly didn't get too distracted making anything new for it, nor did they ask much of a minimum amount of playtime to be spent on it. The objective, Froggy, is set to a fixed spawn that is never really too far from Big. Ice Cap, the second of three levels, has one additional pool with an upgrade that you can explore for, but Froggy is always swimming around under the first fishing hole you see spawning in (Ice Cap is also kinda jank, you're gonna want to not be standing on the ice while you fish, the water tends to reject you otherwise). Fishing itself is of course not as complex as say, Sega Bass Pro, you cast your line, you move it bit by bit til the creature you cast it at bites, then you pace yourself, reel it in, move the rod with the fish, don't let the line get too tense. It's probably a familiar formula for this kind of minigame game, the Yakuza series fishing mini-games don't tend to be much more than this either. It is very much a mode that despite the patient aesthetics of fishing, knows that it doesn't really want to keep you waiting long, nor really do much of anything testing, it's hardly uncompromising.
To say that anything bad you can say about it hardly lives up to the performative anger of youtube Sonic reviewers is a given really. You're either kinda unimpressed for 30 minutes, or find it a cute distraction, not too dissimilar to the admittedly less compulsory Chao Gardens. Then of course you fish Froggy out of Chaos, which, is definitely one of the top 10 Sonic moments that will ever occur. There's absolutely something to be gained out of approaching these things not so seriously, not in the ironic "haha, there's no way his name is seriously Doc Ock" sense, but just actually indulging in these silly moments. Big just is what he is, and that's cool.
Lazy Days -Living in Paradise-, is a very silly song, and spawned some serious arguments in vc over if the lyrics is a convo between a metaphorical Chicken and Egg or just Big and Froggy.
Come around next time as we explore Gamma's story and why Eggman is the ultimate lifeform.
Quick history rundown I guess, it all starts with Tails in Sonic 2, a genesis game, so there's not much to him in-game besides some tidbits and the gameplay feature of flight, a mechanic that I know some of my friends were pretty convinced that it just didn't exist in that game, so that's funny. After we have Amy, it is what it is. Finally of this era we have Knuckles, the og rival of Sonic 3 who turns ally in & Knuckles, also positioned as an optional character for a separate campaign which unlocks no content afterwards. These are the OGs, the squad that due to the nature of their origins, not to mention the fact that they are the origins, no one really has a problem with them, so this really is not historically what people derisively refer to as "Sonic's Friends" and that fact almost makes it kinda clear the sentiment of "Sonic's Friends mucking up the franchise" is mostly used by ultra boomers wanting to return to their "golden age", but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Also not normally a consideration when talking about "Sonic's Friends", Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel, the Japan only arcade debuting SegaSonic homies. Even while Mighty will go on to be a part of heavily derided game Knuckles Chaotix, the game which birthed the absolute certified "Sonic Friends" Espio, Vector, and Charmy, Mighty himself does not seem to be a consideration when talking about "Sonic Friends", granted because he's obscure, but also because he and Ray seem to garner enough respect from important fan dev, and absolute certified coward and boomer, Christian Whitehead, in order to become playable characters in Sonic Mania, a game filled with fanservice for many, many characters from a very specific timeframe within the Sonic franchise.
Also not included in the discussion are the countless scrimblos of Sonic animated TV series', comics, side games, and no, not even Chris, Donut Lord, or the Sonic Adventure Man who Owns The Building. The specific subset of characters who were a major negative talking point for a long period of Sonic's history, were the additional playable characters, that have speaking roles, are required to unlock 2% of their respective games, in Sonic Adventure, Heroes, and 06, and continue to appear on some level throughout the mainline series. There is admittedly something kinda funny imagining a single bee sending AVGN knock-offs into enough rage as to spawn Sonic 4 as well as the entire game design direction from Unleashed onwards,but damn does it feel like this one ancient piece of discourse just poisoned this franchise.
Let's start breaking down some shit, is Sonic's wider cast as playable characters "padding"? I mean, sure, there's really nothing to say to stop you from defining it as such. If we define just playing as Sonic as, da game, then it would follow that these other campaigns are just filling for playtime. Question, is Mighty and Ray Mania Plus padding? They are side characters that are by all means, injected into levels that already existed before them, they're hardly a fully fledged inclusion. Is the Werehog padding? I feel most people would be inclined to say yes, it's ultimately viewed as an alternate gameplay style that takes away time from engaging with the core Sonic gameplay, the fact you're still playing as Sonic isn't quite relevant. Is Shadow The Hedgehog of SA2 padding? He's roughly the same gameplay style as Sonic and has his own levels, even if he is a different character. Is solving a GameMaker tile puzzle in order to spawn grind rails and stat-increasing collectibles in an open world padding, or is it the alternate gameplay style in the physically and structurally different Boost style cyberspace levels? The answer may shock you. Is Super Sonic, the alternate gameplay style locked behind all these other alternate gameplay styles, also ultimately padding? I spent 2 years not playing SA after beating Sonic's Story, could it really be that important? I'd like to think I made my point, that regardless of how one may answer any of these questions that actually defining an airtight criteria for what is the equivalent of an anime fan looking at Eva and saying that "Magma Diver" is the only "filler episode", is ultimately kinda arbitrary and just not as helpful as just calling Amy's story mid and moving on.
Perhaps more to the core is if there is any room for alternate playstyles at all and again we mostly just see more line drawing. Generally it seems like people are more appreciative when the alternate characters are only kinda alternate playstyles in the form of Shadow, Blaze, and the whole classic crew, maybe bringing a few mechanical changes but still ultimately engaging with the game in a manner that is comparable to Sonic... but the Chao Garden is also generally fine. Sitting around a square and feeding a creature in order to make its numbers go up is pretty much the least Sonic that you could be doing,but people value it anyway, it's a cute pace breaker and distraction for those that enjoy it, and for everyone else it's just out of the way, they don't force you into it like Unleashed or deny the human brainworm called "Closure" its satisfaction by delaying the true ending that you definitely absolutely cared about. Calling it a brainworm seems a bit dismissive, it kinda is "a brainworm" but, we live with it so I will admit that having some compulsory factor for engaging with all these modes that you just may not care for regardless of execution, is ultimately a bit of wrinkle. Were not for that tho I think there wouldn't be a whole lot of disagreement to be had that these non-core modes, tho not all conceptualized and implemented equally, do ultimately fill out the experience of these games.
Beyond that tho is just how low-key essential all these scrimblos are to actually writing these games. Like it cannot be over-stated just how much more interesting thing and flavorful things are when these games are an ensemble cast dealing with Deities and Government Conspiracies and not just Sonic and Tails fucking around in an amusement park. Like I know I spent a long time in my last review establishing Amy as one note, but the problem is definitely in like, how boring of a note it is, none of Sonic's characters are particularly full of depth no matter how many youtube video essays get thrown around. The character with the most is easily Shadow, he has like 3 character arcs over 4 games that can be easily summarized as "I wanted revenge but now I remember what my friend truly wanted, I will now sacrifice myself for everyone", "My past doesn't matter, I am myself and that's all that matters", "Ok that was kinda raw, let's make that a whole game instead of 3 cutscenes", and "Even as the world will turn against me, I will stay true to my beliefs". It's not much, and one of those was literally from 06, but it's cool, and rather importantly, Shadow isn't the only character in the game, not even in Shadow the Hedgehog. Just looking at these characters through that kind of lens doesn't really capture the effect they have as they bounce off of each other and the events of the games. Big the Cat is ultimately just a dumb fisherman, but part of what makes him hilarious is the fact that he's a dumb big cat fisherman that gets so wrapped up in the events of SA for no reason that he ends up having to fish his friend out of a god, you can't not have a big dumb smile on your face as it's happening.
This feels like very basic writing shit, right? Yet it feels like after 06 they simply became absolutely afraid of doing much of anything with Sonic's cast in the mainline. The last real non-antagonistic addition to the cast was Chipp, a nasally scrungo that they knew would be disposed of by the end of that game. After that you have... Classic Sonic, which like... no. Then you have "The Recruit", your oc of Sonic Forces, so again not really much of a character. The returning cast doesn't exactly fare well either, Shadow basically becoming "Hey, you remember this guy, right? That cool edgy guy from SA2! Buy our dlc". Where am I going with this tho... let's talk about Sonic Frontiers. Only bits and pieces tho, it's all I know after all. How does Frontiers handle the cast? Well besides Sonic you got Amy, Tails, Knuckles, and Eggman... I'm obviously not gonna say that the entire Sonic cast should be active at the same time all the time, that would be ridiculous, but damn, if that's not a cowardly selection if I've ever seen one. So the story has Sonic going around Islands as he works to save his friends, all the while his friends are left with not much to do besides reflect on the Island they're trapped on as well as their own past,the most important of these for our discussion being Tails... in essence kinda just going through his SA arc again. In a long running multi-installment thing like this, I'm not exactly entirely against characters falling back into old trappings, that's an incredibly human thing to depict. The thing I want to illustrate here is that, in the approach lacking much of anything new in regards to what the characters deal with, with the mission being to investigate the more melancholic aspects of these characters, then yeah, of course the one course of action is to simply re-iterate on the places these characters have already been, the road's been paved, there's no where else to go, "damn am I glad the characters are acting like themselves again". This is ultimately what I landed on as the importance of all those new characters just showing up to the story pre-Unleashed, even if it's something small like Big, or as Ultimate as Shadow, it's a new deal brought to the table, it's something new for the characters to bounce off of. You can argue for Frontiers that it isn't the point... the point might be kinda mid tho, and besides, Frontiers also illustrates this, because there is a new character. Sage like all the other Sonic characters has a simple deal going on, she's an AI character like many AI characters, and introduces herself as an antagonistic force against Sonic... and not Eggman. Eggman has had robot helpers before, that's nothing new, but Sage's screentime in this game is spent slowly showing a father-daughter relationship which, succeeded if the fan art of Eggman getting Sage McDonalds is any metric, and also created this facet of Eggman that wasn't there for the other 30 years of his existence and simply wouldn't exist without a character like this by which to create this dynamic. So old begets old, new begets new, that seems like a simple point to take away from this. If they don't let Ian Flynn throw in new fucked up Sonic ocs into the next game like they do for the comics regularly then I think it's safe to say that the whole "Frontiers experiment" has flopped tremendously, and that not even Sonic can outrun the culture of stagnation.
All of this is to say, Sonic's friends are cool.
How great it is then, that this is a Big the Cat review.
"You like fishing, shitty jungle shacks, loitering in strange places, and a frog. You can't fly, you can't spin dash, and you can't fight more than a monkey. Face it, you're never gonna make it." I don't wanna make it, [I just wanna-][This joke is still under construction, please come back at the end of these reviews]
Big is the Mystic Ruins' local cryptid. He's a simple creature, he hangs around his humble makeshift house, goes fishing, and takes care of his friend Froggy. Perhaps he is a role model to surpass even Man Who Owns the Building. At the start of his story Froggy gets possessed by the tail of Chaos, and Big takes it upon himself to chase down his friend. As we make it to the city, we find the Man Who Owns the Building, playing the role of the Man Who is Scared Shitless by Frogs, he is truly a multi-faceted building owner.
So Big's story has you go fishing your friend froggy inside pools of water in small isolated sections of existing levels. The devs clearly knew that this is a simplistic departure from any of the gameplay styles going on so they clearly didn't get too distracted making anything new for it, nor did they ask much of a minimum amount of playtime to be spent on it. The objective, Froggy, is set to a fixed spawn that is never really too far from Big. Ice Cap, the second of three levels, has one additional pool with an upgrade that you can explore for, but Froggy is always swimming around under the first fishing hole you see spawning in (Ice Cap is also kinda jank, you're gonna want to not be standing on the ice while you fish, the water tends to reject you otherwise). Fishing itself is of course not as complex as say, Sega Bass Pro, you cast your line, you move it bit by bit til the creature you cast it at bites, then you pace yourself, reel it in, move the rod with the fish, don't let the line get too tense. It's probably a familiar formula for this kind of minigame game, the Yakuza series fishing mini-games don't tend to be much more than this either. It is very much a mode that despite the patient aesthetics of fishing, knows that it doesn't really want to keep you waiting long, nor really do much of anything testing, it's hardly uncompromising.
To say that anything bad you can say about it hardly lives up to the performative anger of youtube Sonic reviewers is a given really. You're either kinda unimpressed for 30 minutes, or find it a cute distraction, not too dissimilar to the admittedly less compulsory Chao Gardens. Then of course you fish Froggy out of Chaos, which, is definitely one of the top 10 Sonic moments that will ever occur. There's absolutely something to be gained out of approaching these things not so seriously, not in the ironic "haha, there's no way his name is seriously Doc Ock" sense, but just actually indulging in these silly moments. Big just is what he is, and that's cool.
Lazy Days -Living in Paradise-, is a very silly song, and spawned some serious arguments in vc over if the lyrics is a convo between a metaphorical Chicken and Egg or just Big and Froggy.
Come around next time as we explore Gamma's story and why Eggman is the ultimate lifeform.
Yakuza 3
2009
I don't know if I can properly "review" this game because i've played it in several ten hour bursts every like six months for the last three and half years and that's a difficult way to get one's head around a long story's Whole Deal so I guess in a quick and scattershot way I'll say that while this is certainly the messiest and most overtly stupid installment of the first three games, it's also BY FAR my favorite. You can really feel the change in writers, and this is clearly the start of the Vibes Road the series is gonna continue down for better and worse. We're in full soap opera mode here and while I think that really muddles the potential this series had to homage the yakuza cinema it so often overtly loves and loves to pay respects to (steal from?), I don't think these games have ever worked particularly well as the awkward blend of first and second wave yakuza movies that they so clearly want to be so I can't say I miss it SO much.
The plot of this game is unfocused and often nonsensical but what this means is that it plays more like a collection of smaller stories that are actually often really good? The early drama with the Ryudo family in Naha, the mini-Tojo power struggle with those three really great asshole weasels in the midgame (sidenote it's very funny that every game sees the Tojo Clan's fortunes somehow fall lower and lower, some of the most perennial losers in all of gaming, truly cruel of Kiryu to take advantage of his relationship with Majima to handcuff him to that sinking ship lol) , spending a night showing Rikiya around town, and of course, two separate, very long stretches of nothing but Running Your Orphanage, being the best paternal figure Kiryu knows how to be, wearing a COMICALLY inappropriate Sonatine cosplay all the while.
The orphanage content is far and away the best stuff in the game, probably in the series up to this point. Where these games always portray Kiryu as a guy whose life in the yakuza has a lot to do with how closely he values really really old timey values that never really existed in real life but would make him a perfect fit for the chivalrous ninkyo eiga films of the 50s and 60s, Yakuza 3 I think tends to overplay his Essential Goodness and overstate how much his value system is worth materially. He is a borderline messianic figure, giving speeches about the literal powers of friendship, extolling virtues of forgiveness and belief in his fellow man no matter what even in moments where he believes he’s actively dying as a result of his own misplaced trust. Other adult characters revere him for this, almost everyone he knows has mythologized him beyond the level of his famous deeds in previous games. These games have been critical of Kiryu before, and having played 0 I know that this same writing team will someday get a lot of dramatic irony out of the fact that application of this exact ideology will completely destroy his life and kill everyone he loves more than once, but in this game particularly it’s played up ridiculously.
When he’s acting as the paternal figure for the orphanage is the only time we see a truly naturalistic side to our guy. He is still able to solve every problem, charm every person, and get it all done by the end of the day in time for a good family supper, but we often see Kiryu obviously out of his depth. He’s one of those adults who feels like he’s just always existed fully formed in his mid-40s and does not remember what it’s like to be a kid, and as much as his honesty and realness with them is a generally good thing, Kiryu is also brash and temperamental and prone to honest mistakes. He’s a good guy though, and because you have access to his internal monologue at all times you see a lot of his anxiety. Big picture stuff, like making sure the kids feel at home and like they are part of a real group in a society that places particularly high value on traditional family dynamics and where orphans face a really intense stigma, like making sure they can all afford to eat and to live on the land their building sits on. But small stuff too, like fretting over how harshly he chastises kids for small infractions sometimes or how stupid he sounds when he’s like “i’m gonna scold all nine of them for this thing” only to realize halfway through that three of them don’t really have anything to do with it. It’s also good to see the game formalize the parts of Kiryu that are warm and friendly and solve problems without his fists? That stuff is so often reserved for side content that putting it front and center for the first long chunk of the game and again towards the end is really refreshing.
The orphanage has wider thematic implications for the game too; a lot of stuff plays out there in miniature that the game will return to over and over again. One kid is bullied at school and also by one of the OTHER KIDS at the orphanage for his dark skin and this is treated like normal racism and addressed but it’s a specific racism that comes from Japan’s long imperial history in Okinawa (this kid specifically has mixed African heritage but his story echoes the racism present in other parts of this game and certainly in real life). This tension is represented in the main plot by the orphanage being threatened by a government land deal that wants to place EITHER a resort complex (the tourism industry destroying indigenous culture in the pacific islands damn such a familiar tune) OR a US-backed military defense complex (I feel this does not require elaboration lol). Okinawa’s culture being slowly erased from its own land is an omnipresent motif in the substories that take place in the game’s Naha map. Mainlander scammers selling cheap imported pork at premium prices with meaningless but exciting marketing gimmicks that undercut a longstanding local industry. When someone asks the owner of a long-closed local juice stand to make a cup of a famous drink for them, Kiryu is asked to retrieve the ingredients but the juice lady lists the names of the ingredients for him in Okinawa’s native language rather than Japanese, and the kid who wanted the drink, himself a native Okinawan but a very young one, has no idea what any of the words mean. It’s all creeping away but it’s not happening naturally, it’s happening by force. There’s not much anyone can do about it individually in real life but in Yakuza 3 Kiryu can certainly punch enough people that eventually that fucking resort won’t get built and displace all his neighbors and children.
There’s more right, there’s so much more – the way the ultimate villain’s story mirror’s Kiryu’s but also Haruka’s (who is becoming old enough that her Childish Wisdoms are giving way to adolescent naivete as she enters a world she cannot academically apply herself to beneath the notice of everyone else because she's being actively coerced into participating it as a teenager who is recognized as preyable by the systems that exploit vulernable people) and every other kid at Morning Glory’s. The dark echoes between Taichi’s asthma scare and the advice of “don’t do more than you can do now and burn out before you have a chance to do anything” and an adult character’s story being cut tragically short because they couldn’t overcome their impulsive need for yakuza justice. It’s incredible stuff all the way around, I would love to see these characters grow up alongside Haruka for the rest of the series but I assume they’ll be relegated to cameos at best; ideas this un-formulaic rarely stick and with what I must assume is a reduced presence for Kiryu in the coming multi-character entries I can’t imagine there’s a lot of room for them.
I think the villain is a much better anti-Kiryu than Goda from Yakuza 2, there’s a lot more to his character and being driven by specific ideology makes him much more effective as a moral and intellectual counterpoint to our guy. He’s cool and scary and he has one moment in particular that I think is absolutely incredible A+ shit (it’s when he says “you’re all his victims” and the stuff that comes after that it rules so hard.)
uhhhhh what else what else
oh yeah the combat right uh the blocking sucks and how unaggressive enemies are sucks but really if you take the time to unlock the moves on offer via side content you can get around that stuff pretty easily, I think this is, again, the best combat in the first 3 games. No Yakuza has much depth to the fighting but you get a ton of options and it starts to open up the versatility space in a way that will be elaborated upon significantly by 0’s time.
So I dunno clearly I ended up writing a lot actually but I don’t have a coherent point like I said I played this game weird but obviously it’s floating around a lot in my thoughts. I think there’s a lot on this game’s mind and maybe part of why I can’t come to a point here really is because I don’t think the game does either? It certainly ESPOUSES a point very clearly right at the end but that point is STUPID and NONSENSE and BARELY FOLLOWS the events of the game lol. That’s okay though. A thing doesn’t have to be clean to be good, and if nothing else I have a hard time imagining Yakuza is gonna be this INTERESTING for at least checks to see when Dead Souls came out one more game lol.
The plot of this game is unfocused and often nonsensical but what this means is that it plays more like a collection of smaller stories that are actually often really good? The early drama with the Ryudo family in Naha, the mini-Tojo power struggle with those three really great asshole weasels in the midgame (sidenote it's very funny that every game sees the Tojo Clan's fortunes somehow fall lower and lower, some of the most perennial losers in all of gaming, truly cruel of Kiryu to take advantage of his relationship with Majima to handcuff him to that sinking ship lol) , spending a night showing Rikiya around town, and of course, two separate, very long stretches of nothing but Running Your Orphanage, being the best paternal figure Kiryu knows how to be, wearing a COMICALLY inappropriate Sonatine cosplay all the while.
The orphanage content is far and away the best stuff in the game, probably in the series up to this point. Where these games always portray Kiryu as a guy whose life in the yakuza has a lot to do with how closely he values really really old timey values that never really existed in real life but would make him a perfect fit for the chivalrous ninkyo eiga films of the 50s and 60s, Yakuza 3 I think tends to overplay his Essential Goodness and overstate how much his value system is worth materially. He is a borderline messianic figure, giving speeches about the literal powers of friendship, extolling virtues of forgiveness and belief in his fellow man no matter what even in moments where he believes he’s actively dying as a result of his own misplaced trust. Other adult characters revere him for this, almost everyone he knows has mythologized him beyond the level of his famous deeds in previous games. These games have been critical of Kiryu before, and having played 0 I know that this same writing team will someday get a lot of dramatic irony out of the fact that application of this exact ideology will completely destroy his life and kill everyone he loves more than once, but in this game particularly it’s played up ridiculously.
When he’s acting as the paternal figure for the orphanage is the only time we see a truly naturalistic side to our guy. He is still able to solve every problem, charm every person, and get it all done by the end of the day in time for a good family supper, but we often see Kiryu obviously out of his depth. He’s one of those adults who feels like he’s just always existed fully formed in his mid-40s and does not remember what it’s like to be a kid, and as much as his honesty and realness with them is a generally good thing, Kiryu is also brash and temperamental and prone to honest mistakes. He’s a good guy though, and because you have access to his internal monologue at all times you see a lot of his anxiety. Big picture stuff, like making sure the kids feel at home and like they are part of a real group in a society that places particularly high value on traditional family dynamics and where orphans face a really intense stigma, like making sure they can all afford to eat and to live on the land their building sits on. But small stuff too, like fretting over how harshly he chastises kids for small infractions sometimes or how stupid he sounds when he’s like “i’m gonna scold all nine of them for this thing” only to realize halfway through that three of them don’t really have anything to do with it. It’s also good to see the game formalize the parts of Kiryu that are warm and friendly and solve problems without his fists? That stuff is so often reserved for side content that putting it front and center for the first long chunk of the game and again towards the end is really refreshing.
The orphanage has wider thematic implications for the game too; a lot of stuff plays out there in miniature that the game will return to over and over again. One kid is bullied at school and also by one of the OTHER KIDS at the orphanage for his dark skin and this is treated like normal racism and addressed but it’s a specific racism that comes from Japan’s long imperial history in Okinawa (this kid specifically has mixed African heritage but his story echoes the racism present in other parts of this game and certainly in real life). This tension is represented in the main plot by the orphanage being threatened by a government land deal that wants to place EITHER a resort complex (the tourism industry destroying indigenous culture in the pacific islands damn such a familiar tune) OR a US-backed military defense complex (I feel this does not require elaboration lol). Okinawa’s culture being slowly erased from its own land is an omnipresent motif in the substories that take place in the game’s Naha map. Mainlander scammers selling cheap imported pork at premium prices with meaningless but exciting marketing gimmicks that undercut a longstanding local industry. When someone asks the owner of a long-closed local juice stand to make a cup of a famous drink for them, Kiryu is asked to retrieve the ingredients but the juice lady lists the names of the ingredients for him in Okinawa’s native language rather than Japanese, and the kid who wanted the drink, himself a native Okinawan but a very young one, has no idea what any of the words mean. It’s all creeping away but it’s not happening naturally, it’s happening by force. There’s not much anyone can do about it individually in real life but in Yakuza 3 Kiryu can certainly punch enough people that eventually that fucking resort won’t get built and displace all his neighbors and children.
There’s more right, there’s so much more – the way the ultimate villain’s story mirror’s Kiryu’s but also Haruka’s (who is becoming old enough that her Childish Wisdoms are giving way to adolescent naivete as she enters a world she cannot academically apply herself to beneath the notice of everyone else because she's being actively coerced into participating it as a teenager who is recognized as preyable by the systems that exploit vulernable people) and every other kid at Morning Glory’s. The dark echoes between Taichi’s asthma scare and the advice of “don’t do more than you can do now and burn out before you have a chance to do anything” and an adult character’s story being cut tragically short because they couldn’t overcome their impulsive need for yakuza justice. It’s incredible stuff all the way around, I would love to see these characters grow up alongside Haruka for the rest of the series but I assume they’ll be relegated to cameos at best; ideas this un-formulaic rarely stick and with what I must assume is a reduced presence for Kiryu in the coming multi-character entries I can’t imagine there’s a lot of room for them.
I think the villain is a much better anti-Kiryu than Goda from Yakuza 2, there’s a lot more to his character and being driven by specific ideology makes him much more effective as a moral and intellectual counterpoint to our guy. He’s cool and scary and he has one moment in particular that I think is absolutely incredible A+ shit (it’s when he says “you’re all his victims” and the stuff that comes after that it rules so hard.)
uhhhhh what else what else
oh yeah the combat right uh the blocking sucks and how unaggressive enemies are sucks but really if you take the time to unlock the moves on offer via side content you can get around that stuff pretty easily, I think this is, again, the best combat in the first 3 games. No Yakuza has much depth to the fighting but you get a ton of options and it starts to open up the versatility space in a way that will be elaborated upon significantly by 0’s time.
So I dunno clearly I ended up writing a lot actually but I don’t have a coherent point like I said I played this game weird but obviously it’s floating around a lot in my thoughts. I think there’s a lot on this game’s mind and maybe part of why I can’t come to a point here really is because I don’t think the game does either? It certainly ESPOUSES a point very clearly right at the end but that point is STUPID and NONSENSE and BARELY FOLLOWS the events of the game lol. That’s okay though. A thing doesn’t have to be clean to be good, and if nothing else I have a hard time imagining Yakuza is gonna be this INTERESTING for at least checks to see when Dead Souls came out one more game lol.
Every Jackbox pack got the;
- New version of one of the mainstays which is better in most ways but has one very stupid decision
- Dogshit
- Game which is one joke
- Anxiety inducer
- Actually great newcomer they will drop immediately
I like plenty of these things at this point but it is truly getting old how after 9 times Jacky is still lacking a combined launcher and the packs still fail to put it all together is getting more and more annoying. To get one good pack of these games you need at least 3 installed - and being the one to suggest switching them in the middle of your game night is definitely cause for people to spam the 🤓 in the voice text.
Please Jacky just get a dang launcher or make a pack that has both quiplash, fibbage, good trivia and champd up/ tee ko it shouldn't be this hard.
- New version of one of the mainstays which is better in most ways but has one very stupid decision
- Dogshit
- Game which is one joke
- Anxiety inducer
- Actually great newcomer they will drop immediately
I like plenty of these things at this point but it is truly getting old how after 9 times Jacky is still lacking a combined launcher and the packs still fail to put it all together is getting more and more annoying. To get one good pack of these games you need at least 3 installed - and being the one to suggest switching them in the middle of your game night is definitely cause for people to spam the 🤓 in the voice text.
Please Jacky just get a dang launcher or make a pack that has both quiplash, fibbage, good trivia and champd up/ tee ko it shouldn't be this hard.
Sonic Adventure
1998
Honestly kind of inspiring overall. Didn't finish as it wasn't engaging enough (I liked sonic's the most), but the re-use of levels is cool for its time, as is the hub area... honestly I just liked exploring the hubs the most. Especially with Sonic - the level design, while flashy, didn't feel as interesting as exploring the jungles or ruins and just dashing around. Movement felt best when I was just free to dash whereever, not trying to dodge a weird assemblage of spike balls.
Cosmic Smash
2001
honestly a testament to the vastness and sheer quality of the dreamcast that a virtually-unadorned arcade port of this dropped in japan months after the announcement of the console's discontinuation. reports from this era reveal a sega so heavily creator-driven that it financially threatened the company. this may explain why the racing-focused sega rosso (who would go on to kick off the beloved initial d arcade stage series) plopped this into arcades at the turn of the millenium.
the game is coolly minimalist with its series of abstract corridors and translucent blocks, all of which melt to black at the end of each level within the veneer of an endless interstellar subway tunnel. the hud is equally minimal, containing only a timer in skewed perspective placed within the right side of the floor behind the player character. each hallway level features a series of blocks of varying sizes at the opposite end of the hall from the player that must be hit with a small, springy ball a la squash. comparisons to breakout come to mind here.
comparatively however, the input depth of cosmic smash is quite remarkable. much like the also-excellent virtua tennis, the dreamcast's stiff, snappy joystick lends itself well to keying in specific shot angles. this is assisted by the game's rich character contextual state space, which allows the player to stretch for balls well above their head with the same inputs that allow shots from close to the chest or at a horizontal length apart from the player (this results in a satisfying dive). this also solves the issue of the game's behind-the-back perspective, as the character will subtly alter its input time in order to hit the ball accurately even within a range of distances the ball might be at. this adds a level of intuition that satisfies the game's strict demands on accurate positioning in order to line up particular shots. after all, compared to breakout which only features a static bar to bounce the ball back on, using a racket requires much more nuanced swings to achieve the same range of angles.
level design is as solid as one would expect across the board. every aspect of the game's limited kit is tested, from lining up specific small shots to clearing as many bricks as possible in a short period of time to more puzzle-focused rooms with moving/reactive obstacles in your path. shot routing, aim, and timing are all tested in equal measure. sega rosso's racing background becomes more apparent with the timer system, which uses a familiar style of having a base time to work with (around 90 seconds on arcade settings) increased at "checkpoints" at the end of each level (anywhere from 10 to 50 extra seconds per level completed). since the game allows you to choose level routes within a map reminiscent of a sprawling metro, carefully watching your time spent per-level and evaluating how soon you need to tackle one of the ending rooms is key as a heuristic for increasing score.
there are other elements to scoring high as well. there is a trick shot that grants the ability to quickly chew through a series of blocks that otherwise would bounce the ball back with careful aim; the downside to this is that it sucks up time on the clock at an expedited rate. use of this technique is vital since it allows for marginally different angle setups (the manual claims 28 variations depending on the player's prior state) and for fast clears in levels with many stacked or multi-hit bricks. clearing the level with one of these trick shots yields further points, and clearing all stages with a trick finish provides a gigantic score bonus on top of that accrued from all prior levels. the same goes for using a variety of different styles of trick finish (using the contextual state space mentioned prior) and keeping up perfect rallies where the ball is never dropped. although reaching one of the easy endpoints does not take much practice, combining this with the extra scoring requirements and the ability to choose different stage routes yields much more complexity than may be clear.
some extra thoughts:
play this with a high timer to begin with via the options menu. this will allow you to adjust to the controls and level design before attempting to play with the regular timer as intended.
the game's biggest flaw in its console form is that there are absolutely no bells and whistles. even having played hotd2 recently that game featured a mission mode, an "original" mode (however slight it is in actuality), and a boss rush. this game could've at least used a level select, or perhaps an alternate starting set of levels after the initial seven or so have been played to tedium.
if you've gotten at least eight trick clears throughout a run, you can attempt to clear a stage with a "goalie" of sorts taking shots back at you. what surprises me is that the game tells you "Silence Your Cell Phones" before this level starts... isn't this game from 2000? I never thought that phrase went back so far.
there's a wealth of different costumes to obtain via cheat codes on the main menu. some of them are surprisingly cool...
as the manual boasts: "A return to the essence of gaming produces... the perfect blend of skill and strategy."
the game is coolly minimalist with its series of abstract corridors and translucent blocks, all of which melt to black at the end of each level within the veneer of an endless interstellar subway tunnel. the hud is equally minimal, containing only a timer in skewed perspective placed within the right side of the floor behind the player character. each hallway level features a series of blocks of varying sizes at the opposite end of the hall from the player that must be hit with a small, springy ball a la squash. comparisons to breakout come to mind here.
comparatively however, the input depth of cosmic smash is quite remarkable. much like the also-excellent virtua tennis, the dreamcast's stiff, snappy joystick lends itself well to keying in specific shot angles. this is assisted by the game's rich character contextual state space, which allows the player to stretch for balls well above their head with the same inputs that allow shots from close to the chest or at a horizontal length apart from the player (this results in a satisfying dive). this also solves the issue of the game's behind-the-back perspective, as the character will subtly alter its input time in order to hit the ball accurately even within a range of distances the ball might be at. this adds a level of intuition that satisfies the game's strict demands on accurate positioning in order to line up particular shots. after all, compared to breakout which only features a static bar to bounce the ball back on, using a racket requires much more nuanced swings to achieve the same range of angles.
level design is as solid as one would expect across the board. every aspect of the game's limited kit is tested, from lining up specific small shots to clearing as many bricks as possible in a short period of time to more puzzle-focused rooms with moving/reactive obstacles in your path. shot routing, aim, and timing are all tested in equal measure. sega rosso's racing background becomes more apparent with the timer system, which uses a familiar style of having a base time to work with (around 90 seconds on arcade settings) increased at "checkpoints" at the end of each level (anywhere from 10 to 50 extra seconds per level completed). since the game allows you to choose level routes within a map reminiscent of a sprawling metro, carefully watching your time spent per-level and evaluating how soon you need to tackle one of the ending rooms is key as a heuristic for increasing score.
there are other elements to scoring high as well. there is a trick shot that grants the ability to quickly chew through a series of blocks that otherwise would bounce the ball back with careful aim; the downside to this is that it sucks up time on the clock at an expedited rate. use of this technique is vital since it allows for marginally different angle setups (the manual claims 28 variations depending on the player's prior state) and for fast clears in levels with many stacked or multi-hit bricks. clearing the level with one of these trick shots yields further points, and clearing all stages with a trick finish provides a gigantic score bonus on top of that accrued from all prior levels. the same goes for using a variety of different styles of trick finish (using the contextual state space mentioned prior) and keeping up perfect rallies where the ball is never dropped. although reaching one of the easy endpoints does not take much practice, combining this with the extra scoring requirements and the ability to choose different stage routes yields much more complexity than may be clear.
some extra thoughts:
play this with a high timer to begin with via the options menu. this will allow you to adjust to the controls and level design before attempting to play with the regular timer as intended.
the game's biggest flaw in its console form is that there are absolutely no bells and whistles. even having played hotd2 recently that game featured a mission mode, an "original" mode (however slight it is in actuality), and a boss rush. this game could've at least used a level select, or perhaps an alternate starting set of levels after the initial seven or so have been played to tedium.
if you've gotten at least eight trick clears throughout a run, you can attempt to clear a stage with a "goalie" of sorts taking shots back at you. what surprises me is that the game tells you "Silence Your Cell Phones" before this level starts... isn't this game from 2000? I never thought that phrase went back so far.
there's a wealth of different costumes to obtain via cheat codes on the main menu. some of them are surprisingly cool...
as the manual boasts: "A return to the essence of gaming produces... the perfect blend of skill and strategy."