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Anime 'Visual Novel' Game DVDs Debut In West
Thanks to Insert Credit for pointing to a Namako Team story revealing new Japanese 'visual novel' DVDs coming to the West via publisher Hirameki. Insert Credit explains: "Hirameki has been slowly releasing English-language ports of Japanese dating sims in the US. They play basically the same on a PC, DVD player, PS2 or Xbox [using Dragon's Lair style branching narrative], which is the appeal of the format." The new "Summer 2004"-due DVD releases include the wonderfully named Tea Society Of A Witch, as well as Hourglass Summer, apparently "A summer vacation that crosses the boundaries of space and time."
Is there any dating sim in which you can be eaten by a grue? Or, *shudder* date a grue?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Sure this company brings them across, but they kill the erotic content if present when they do (I've confirmed this was done to Tea Society, others no doubt as well). The sex scenes and being able to go all the way with exotic/interesting/friendly cuties is pretty much the driving force of this genre. For an example, here's the 18+ only gallery page for the japanese version of the Tea Society game mentioned in the article (they are young for my taste here, but obviously different games for different folks ^^). Other companies/more modern games will also have voice samples you can check out as well.
So any game Hirameki brings across is going to get any of the sex edited out and the only option for fans who want to play in English is to put up with the neutered version. Yes there are games without this part that do well in Japan, and games that have clean versions that are successful, but there's no denying the core of the industry. Without the sex you're back to the Myst type games and the flood of "interactive multimedia CD-ROMs" that followed them that people once thought were going to be such a big hit, but flopped terribly.
Anyway, for people who want the full experience, better to stick with the more faithfully brought across games like those available at g-collections. Some are all sex and little story (like Do You Like Horny Bunnies, which does the sex very well and animated, btw ^^), but others are quite funny and entertaining like Heart de Roomate and others have touching stories like Kana ~Little Sister~. And none of those three has had the erotic scenes edited out so you can go all the way and experience the full game if you so desire.
Of course, I take issue with the idea that any dating sim has an "interesting story," but that's another debate.
Even if you limited the discussion to dating sims (which technically describes a much smaller set of games into which none of the Hirameki titles falls), I'm not sure how you can write off an entire genre as never going to have an interesting story.
But the Hirameki games are what the Japanese call adventures and visual novels (the latter term is the one Western fans prefer, since "adventure game" suggests something along the lines of Monkey Island). And if you can, with a straight face, dispute that any visual novel has an interesting story, then I can only conclude that you don't know the first thing about the subject.
Consider Fate/stay night, for example, which is based around a group of mythical heroes being summoned from the past to take part in a ritual battle for the Holy Grail - and features a plot so intricate that the entire game has to break off at one point while a particularly clever contrivance is explained with diagrams. How uninteresting - it's obviously just a shallow cover for underage sex, right?
Or Key's famous AIR, which is so lacking in plot that it's currently being made into a movie and a TV series simultaneously. Oh, sure, along with its predecessor Kanon it spawned an entire industry of merchandising and doujinshi, but hey, just 'cos its story has reduced hardened critics to tears doesn't mean it's interesting, right?
Or Kid's Infinity series - who could ever be interested in games that rely on quantum physics to drive plots based around time loops and people exchanging bodies? Oh, how dull and derivative these games are...