Today’s scuffle in the lands of Warriors Orochi sees Xiahou Dun and Xiahou Yuan entering the picture, as Cao Pi does his best to gather the forces required for an effective rebellion.
The two proud warriors, ever loyal to Wei even after they felt its leader had abandoned it, are going to take a bit of convincing, though. And by “convincing”, I mean “poking repeatedly with sharp objects”.
New recruit Zhang He also gets a bit of time to shine. His claw work is beeeeautiful, don’t you know…
Since we’re about to kick off a veritable estival (sic) of Senran Kagura funtimes here on MoeGamer, I thought we may as well start with a relevant Waifu Wednesday.
At this point, even if you just take the console and handheld games into account and discount the two mobile games, Senran Kagura has an absolutely massive ensemble cast so it is, of course, tricky to pick a favourite from among them.
Ikaruga has been there since the beginning, however, and captured my heart and attention immediately. So it’s her under the spotlight today.
Ikaruga hails from a longstanding and wealthy noble shinobi family that conceals its shadowy business under the company name Phoenix Conglomerate (sometimes referred to as Houou, depending on media, after the Japanese phoenix). The clan had, in recent years, been in something of a tricky situation, as its heir apparent Murasame was showing insufficient talent in the shinobi ways to be able to wield the heirloom sword Hien.
Ikaruga was actually originally a distant relative to the main branch of the clan and grew up in the slums, but she was adopted after she demonstrated some talent in the ninja arts. So great were her abilities — particularly when compared to her adoptive older brother — that she was given the honour of being the heir to Hien.
This, naturally, put her in something of an awkward personal situation, since Murasame resented Ikaruga for showing up and taking away what, he believed, should be rightfully his. Rather than being defiant about this, Ikaruga was wracked with guilt, and became extremely withdrawn and aloof, particularly once she enrolled in the Hanzou academy to train her shinobi skills.
Her guilt made her incredibly lonely and she frequently clashed with her classmates — particularly the very forward Katsuragi, who seemed to take delight in provoking her — but over time, she came to understand the value of developing bonds of trust with the people closest to her. She began to open up and express herself more, and eventually came to realise that she was not alone; she had people who cared about her, and did not judge her for a situation that was, after all, somewhat beyond her control.
In the original Senran Kagura Burst, the Hanzou girls are typically paired up with a girl from the rival Hebijo academy who contrasts with them somehow. In Ikaruga’s case, she typically finds herself squaring off against Yomi, which makes for an interesting contrast.
Ikaruga hails from an affluent background, but despite speaking and behaving in an understatedly polite manner, tends not to show off her “princess” aspect all that much; she more resembles the seemingly cool but easily flustered “student council president”-type, helped along by her delightful portrayal by veteran voice actress Asami Imai. Yomi, by contrast, comes from an extremely poor background, but deliberately plays up stereotypically “hime-sama” tropes such as ending her sentences with “desu wa” — somewhat ironic, considering her hurling accusations of being a “princess” at Ikaruga during the early stages of their relationship.
Opposites attract, as they say, and over time Ikaruga and Yomi develop a fairly close relationship with one another, since both of them are able to learn things from one another. Ikaruga learns to open up a bit and express herself — often participating in impromptu masked “superhero shows” for local kids alongside Yomi — while Yomi learns that bitterness about past events never solves anything; it’s better to try and make a positive difference to people in the present using the things you learned from more difficult times.
Ikaruga’s design blends elements of both Eastern and Western influences. Upon their first meeting, Yomi comments on Ikaruga’s distinctly Western-looking outfit, which resembles a military uniform, but Hien is obviously a traditional Japanese nodachi. The combination of the two gives Ikaruga a look of considerable grace and elegance during battle, but also puts across the irrefutable sense that she is not someone to be trifled with.
Given her background, it’s unsurprising that Ikaruga’s guardian spirit is a phoenix, but besides being the name of her clan, a phoenix is also a good symbol for Ikaruga’s life up until this point; she’s had several opportunities for “rebirth” as she’s grown up, beginning with her adoption out of a life of poverty into the wealthy arm of the clan, and continuing with her realisation that she stands alongside friends she can trust with her life.
Ikaruga’s musical themes have something of a flair for the dramatic. Her original transformation theme from Senran Kagura Burst outright quotes the opening to the theme song to The Phantom of the Opera, for one thing. And throughout the rest of the series, her compositions typically blend Japanese instrumentation with distinctly Western classical-style harmonies, melodic patterns and ornaments.
They depict her blend between power and grace; her acknowledgement of her past but her embracing of her present; the deadly elegance that is so core to her being. They’re some of the most “serious” compositions among the soundtrack, reflecting that she is usually the voice of reason when things start to get chaotic. But they also reflect her enthusiasm for theatrical play alongside Yomi; she gets very into their little shows!
Ikaruga has been a fixture in the series since the start with good reason: she’s a well-realised, interesting character with an immediately recognisable, distinctive design. There’s a strong sense that she’s been composed not just as a combination of audio-visual assets and text, but as a very complete-feeling person; in other words, she’s a fine example of the care and attention series creator Kenichiro Takaki, character designer Nan Yaegashi and the rest of the team behind this series have put into each and every character since the very first episode.
Long may Ikaruga continue to show us her dance cloaked in shadow!
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
—
Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
Who’s up for the ruination of a perfectly good walk? Well, you’re in luck, because here comes Elite with their ST conversion of Sega’s Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf.
Tournament Golf, as it was rebranded for its home computer release thanks to the ditching of the license for cost-cutting reasons, is an interesting example of a relatively early golf game trying to incorporate some more complex simulation-style elements into the mix.
Unfortunately, said mix also includes incredibly twitchy arcade-style controls that you need the reflexes of a particularly hyperactive kitten to master, making the whole thing rather more challenging than it needs to be! Still, I had fun…
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if, for once, everything went your way? I know I have.
Doubtless many of you reading this have, at some point in your lives, wondered “what’s the point?” and contemplated giving up altogether. “I work my ass off,” the train of thought inevitably goes, “and I never get any recognition for it. Why bother?”
Well, unfortunately I can’t help with your own personal circumstances — my hands are plenty full with my own, believe me — but I can both prescribe and recommend a healthy dose of the new kinetic novel from Nekopara developer Neko Work (under their new Neko Work H label), because Love Cube is one of the most potent pieces of wish fulfilment fiction I think I’ve ever enjoyed.
Some sexually explicit NSFW images and themes ahead.
Ichinari Tsuzurigi is a struggling hentai manga artist. Technically he’s gone pro, having been both serialised in a magazine and put out a book, but he’s really having trouble making ends meet as his sales figures are pretty pitiful. As we join the story, he’s reduced to eating tissues rather than actual food, since his bank account contains a grand total of just 18 yen.
It is fair to say, then, that Ichinari is on the verge of giving up altogether. He doesn’t know what to do; he knows that his sales aren’t bad because he’s bad at what he does, but this only makes things more demoralising. If you’re already doing your best and that isn’t good enough to bring you success, what then?
Thankfully, Ichinari isn’t entirely alone in all this. His editor, Akira Higashibojo, has been looking out for him since the very beginning, acting as something of an older sister figure whenever he needs it. In an early scene where Ichinari is looking like he is approaching rock bottom, Akira reminds him that “humans can flourish anywhere, so long as they’re meek and sincere”, and promises that she’ll “marry him and make him a kept man” if he still finds himself at a loss.
It’s clear from the affection with which she treats him that she’s not joking… but Ichinari is also too proud to just fall back on a safety net like this. He doesn’t say as much directly, but doubtless the simple presence of such a safety net keeps him going, however. Not everyone has that luxury in similar situations, but the story in Love Cube is not a tragedy.
Akira, forever looking out for Ichinari, manages to arrange him an appointment to interview for a position that may allow him to develop his skills. It seems that the legendary, prolific and mysterious professional hentai manga artist Ishitaka-sensei is looking for an assistant; could this be Ichinari’s big break?
Thus begins a heartwarming story of what life might be like if you have the courage to follow your dreams, regardless of the potential consequences. And, as noted, it’s quite literally a story of wish fulfilment, too; there’s a light spiritual angle to the narrative setup, with much of the ensuing story resulting from one particular popular superstition turning out to be rather more real than anyone anticipated. And from that point on, Ichinari’s fate is irrevocably crossed with those of three remarkable young women who have made similar wishes; sometimes everyone just needs a little “nudge” in the right direction for their fates to intertwine.
Before we delve further into the plot, one thing about this visual novel cannot be emphasised enough, and that is the fact that it’s immaculately presented. This will probably not be a surprise to anyone who ever played Nekopara, which remains a beautifully slick presentation throughout all its installments to date, but Love Cube sees Neko Work’s central figure Sayori collaborating with another artist to create something really rather wonderful.
The majority of the artwork in Love Cube is the work of Ishikei-sensei, a prolific and popular doujinshi artist renowned for their beautiful full-colour work, their expressive characters, their excellent sexually explicit parodies of series such as To Love-Ru, Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu Ka? (aka GochiUsa or Is the Order a Rabbit?) and Lucky Star… and their absolute mastery of the relatively vanilla sex scene, including (if you can find them in uncensored format) some of the most detailed dicks you’ll ever see.
When I started reading Love Cube, I tried to look into Ishikei’s history further, but I came up pretty blank on actual biographical details. Their works have been shared all over the place — and many of them can even be purchased legally from hentai localiser Fakku, who published Love Cube here in the West — but an answer to the simple question “who is Ishikei?” is incredibly elusive.
This was initially frustrating; I wanted to know more about this artist with such a distinctive style about their work, and the reasoning behind some of the things seen in that work. You can joke about those super-detailed dicks all you want, but presumably Ishikei made a specific effort to master drawing them for some reason — especially given the knowledge that they would typically end up censored when published in Japan!
I even found a few threads around the Internet claiming that Ishikei was a woman, which presented an interesting potential new perspective on things. But nowhere could I find any definitive information, and no-one else seemed to know either; this was clearly an artist that liked to keep themselves to themselves.
I wanted to know, and the more I ran into brick walls, the more desperate the “need” for this knowledge felt like it was becoming. That is, until I reached a particular scene in Love Cube, where Ishitaka-sensei — or, rather, Ichinari’s childhood friend, Iori, as Ishitaka-sensei turns out to be — is giving her first ever interview with a member of the press.
“She’s so cute,” says the reporter to Ichinari, who is attempting to comfort a deeply uncomfortable Iori, who is struggling with her social anxiety more than she has ever had to endure in the past. “I bet if she showed her face in the media her sales would go up two-fold…”
“Ishitaka-sensei doesn’t want to be seen that way,” explains Ichinari, having rekindled his relationship with Iori well enough to truly understand her by this point. “That’s why she doesn’t show her face. Ishitaka-sensei takes her manga very seriously. And she doesn’t want to be judged on anything but that work. Working as her assistant, I’ve learned a lot from her approach.”
“I’d rather people focus on my work, rather than on me,” pipes up Iori, finally finding her voice after Ichinari’s support. She doesn’t want to be “a cute girl who draws hentai manga”; she wants to be Ishitaka-sensei, the creator of consistent, popular work that she is proud of and that her audience loves. She wants her work to be the star, not her.
By this point in the narrative, I’d already harboured some suspicions that Iori might be something of a representation of Ishikei themselves — and my findings (or lack thereof) might initially seem to confirm that.
That would be fine and pretty straightforward, were it not for the existence of the third heroine Nodoka, who is another figure from Ichinari’s past — this time a high school sweetheart who was in the manga club with him. Nodoka, like Iori, has made something of her life in the intervening years; while Iori has reached the pinnacle of the professional manga world, Nodoka has reached doujinshi superstar status on the self-published amateur circuit.
One thing I found particularly fascinating about Love Cube’s narrative was how it highlighted this distinction between these two discrete parts of Japanese manga culture, with Iori and Nodoka acting as prime examples of what happens when it goes “right” from each respective angle.
Iori demonstrates that it’s possible for a professional manga artist on top of their game to be extremely well off — to such a degree that “money isn’t an issue”, as she frequently notes, not out of pride, but out of practicality — without having to make themselves particularly “known”. The professional life is perfect for her desire to allow her work to speak for itself; she’s under no obligation to show her face, promote her own work or do anything other than actually create. This fits her personality — and her issues — perfectly.
Nodoka, meanwhile, demonstrates that the doujinshi world is one of constant, hard graft — but one where the potential rewards are huge, and not just from a financial perspective. In Nodoka, we see a young woman who is able to express herself and explore her sexual fantasies freely through her own work, but who also enjoys speaking with her fans, hearing what they have to say about her work and even meeting with them at doujinshi events. And we also see a confident, self-assured young woman who doesn’t take any shit — someone who, like Iori, wants to be known as more than just “that cute female hentai artist”.
To bring this back to the mysterious case of Ishikei-sensei, it’s likely that the truth of the matter lies somewhere between these two extremes.
If one were to look at Ishikei-sensei’s Twitter feed, for example, one would see an artist who is more than happy to chat with their fans, answer questions from them (which, from casual observation and my limited knowledge of Japanese, always seem enormously respectful) and promote their work in person at events such as Comiket.
But at the same time, one also has to take into account the fact that none of these fans appear to have taken any photographs of Ishikei-sensei, biographical information on them is seemingly non-existent and everyone seems perfectly happy with that. Ishikei-sensei doesn’t want to be found online except on their own terms, it seems, and I can both understand and respect that, particularly having spent some time with Iori.
To put it another way, we can interpret Iori and Nodoka as the two distinct “lives” an artist such as Ishikei-sensei has; some artists doubtless choose to lean further in one direction or the other depending on the sort of person they are, but most tend to err on the side of privacy, from what I understand.
And to put it another way still, Love Cube taught me that it doesn’t matter who Ishikei-sensei “really” is, because their work does indeed speak for itself, just as Iori says.
And what work. If you’ve never seen Ishikei artwork before, be prepared for a treat. It’s packed with detail and typically features characters who aren’t “perfect” — or rather, they have details about them that might not be explored by certain other artists.
We learn that Akira is a former judo champion, for example, which explains why her overall build (massive breasts aside) is so muscular. This is mentioned in passing a few times in the narrative, but there are some event scenes that make it quite clear, particularly when she’s showing off her legs. And it’s especially apparent on the occasions when she gets naked; we can see clearly defined muscle tone, particularly around her back and abdomen.
Nodoka, conversely, is someone who grew up as a bit of a nerdy girl, but has subsequently made an effort to reinvent herself. There’s no denying that she’s blossomed into a beautiful young woman, but she also has a certain amount of adorable pudge about her still, particularly around the legs; those who enjoy “thigh squish” will be a big fan of her first event scene.
Another key characteristic of Ishikei’s art is that it typically incorporates girls with luscious, full, shiny lips rather than the simple line that is an “implied lower lip” you get in a lot of simpler anime-style artwork. Given how there are quite a few instances in the game where kissing is involved… well, you can imagine how well this works, surely.
What makes Ishikei’s artwork all the more remarkable in Love Cube is that much of it is animated. Just as Nekopara made use of a variant of Live2D that it dubbed E-Mote, so too does Love Cube feature fully animated characters. And it’s even better than it was in Nekopara; characters are now able to move their arms, turn their heads, dynamically and smoothly change expressions and, in general, look incredibly believable.
This is most apparent when it comes to large movements such as arm movements, but some of the most interesting work in this regard comes in the more subtle animations; one of the most wonderful things to see at several points of the narrative is a character gradually breaking out into a smile or welling up with tears while they’re speaking with Ichinari; with a few exceptions (primarily major changes in pose or orientation), the movements are smooth and seamless, creating a wonderful illusion that you’re spending time with a person feeling real emotions rather than a static piece of 2D artwork.
Credit for this side of things primarily goes to Sayori, the artist behind Nekopara, the driving force behind Neko Work and clearly an absolute maestro of Live2D choreography at this point. Sayori also contributed chibi character art for interstitial scenes between major episodes in the narrative and it is, as ever, absolutely charming.
Love Cube has been described by some as a nukige — in other words, a visual novel whose primary purpose is to get you from one sex scene to another with the minimum of fuss. Pornography, in other words, rather than a narrative with erotic elements. While the latter half of the game is certainly extremely sex-heavy, it should already be apparent that considering it simple pornography is doing it something of a disservice.
We’ve already talked about how the narrative as a whole explores the different ways members of Japan’s manga and doujinshi communities end up living their lives, but there’s a very down-to-earth aspect about the whole thing, too. While Ichinari is initially awed to discover that two of his biggest heroes in hentai manga are actually his childhood friends, it doesn’t take long for him to discover that they, like him, are only human.
Iori, for example, is depicted as someone who struggles with social anxiety to such a degree that she finds it difficult to go shopping or even to answer her own intercom. Like most people who suffer with this affliction — be it through a condition on the autistic spectrum or other factors at play — Iori has a small circle of people that she feels she can trust and be herself with; among those people, she is able to talk normally and be honest about her feelings.
Akira, meanwhile, works a thankless job for a company that clearly doesn’t appreciate how hard she works, and regularly suffers from stress-related anxiety that she does her best to cover up. Having spent this much time with her, however, Ichinari is able to tell when she’s having a bad day, and on more than one occasion — increasingly frequently as the story progresses — he finds himself being the one who comforts her, rather than the other way around.
Of all the cast, Nodoka seems to be the one who has it most together. She had a dream, she followed it, she achieved it. And she only continued to achieve further dreams from there, be it reuniting with Ichinari, becoming lovers with Ichinari, drawn a collaboration doujinshi with Ichinari. If she has a “flaw”, it’s that she’s single-minded and stubborn, but that side of her has brought her great success over the years, so it’s debatable if one can really consider it a “flaw” at all.
Ichinari, too, undergoes a considerable amount of growth over the course of the narrative, progressing from starving, tissue-eating poverty to a situation where he feels like he can develop his own skills without feeling like he’s being constantly knocked (or held) back. It’s absolutely heartwarming to bear witness to his growth in self-confidence as the story continues; at the outset, he’s about ready to give up, but by the end he’s being proactive and assertive about all manner of things he wouldn’t have even considered in the opening chapters.
Love Cube front-loads its narrative with a lot of character development, and we get to know Ichinari and the three main heroines very well before there’s the slightest hint of explicit sexual content. There are a few “teases” along the way — some more in-your-face than others, with Ichinari’s initial reunion with Iori being a particular highlight — but no full-on sex until the core “conflict” (if you can call it that) of the game’s first act is resolved.
That conflict is, quite simply, Ichinari attempting to decide who he loves the most out of Iori, Nodoka and Akira, and, by extension, deciding who he will give a positive answer to. It’s clearly a source of considerable inner turmoil for him, and is ultimately resolved not with a choice of “routes” as in a conventional ren’ai visual novel, but with him deciding that he loves all of them and that he is unable to choose. Love, cubed.
From here, the game handles the subject of a polyamorous relationship sensitively and with grace, and this is another aspect of the story I found to be particularly interesting.
Speaking personally, I’ve always struggled a bit to understand the thinking behind polyamorous relationships, as my sensibilities in that regard are fairly traditional. There are also plenty of works out there (anime, manga and visual novels) that depict a protagonist having a harem as something sleazy, or the domain of pure fantasy, so my judgement has, in the past, been coloured somewhat in that regard.
However, with first Alicesoft’s Evenicle and now Love Cube, I’ve had my eyes opened somewhat to the reasons why people might engage in such an arrangement; it’s still not something I’d want for myself (or my wife, she’ll be pleased to hear), but I feel like I kind of get it now.
It’s about family. A polyamorous relationship allows for the formation of a non-traditional family unit, with everyone playing a role to keep one another happy, comfortable and satisfied in various ways. The main difference is that rather than a single couple being at the top of the “tree” and the remaining members forming the “branches” beneath them, the arrangement is a little different. In the case of Love Cube, Ichinari is the central, focal point of this “family”, and each of the three heroines radiate out from him in a different direction, complementing him in some way; he, in turn, helps them to come to terms with and accept their own character traits; the things they perceive to be their own “weaknesses”.
In this way, we get the opportunity to explore all the characters equally. Ichinari is a decent sort of chap and really means it when he says he loves all of them equally; each of the heroines get the same number of chapters in the narrative, the same attention to detail… and the same number of erotic scenes. So let’s talk a bit about that latter aspect.
When we’re taking about sexually explicit works, it’s important to be able to talk about them frankly and openly, because, let’s face it, at least part of the appeal is in that sexual aspect. We’ve already talked about how the game’s pacing — how it takes the time to establish its characters and setting before providing any sort of sexual “payoff” for the reader — and so now it’s time to share some candid words about Love Cube’s H-scenes.
The first thing I’d like to state up-front is that the first H-scene in Love Cube is an absolute masterpiece. It’s one of the most erotic scenes I’ve ever seen in a visual novel, and it achieves this without getting particularly outlandish about anything. Aside from the whole “four people are involved” aspect, it’s pretty vanilla — especially as Ichinari takes the time to give each of the girls some attention individually rather than attempting some sort of contrived “do everyone at once” scenario — and as such, the fact I found it so impactful is all the more remarkable.
Before I get into specifics, I want to (perhaps over-)share what I mean by “impactful” in this situation.
Doubtless many of you reading this are already familiar with how narrative-centric games — and particularly visual novels — are able to grasp you by the heartstrings, tugging and tugging away using their potent combination of visuals, music, voice acting and text until, on certain occasions where the blend is just right, they have an actual physiological impact on you.
Your heart rate might increase during a dramatic scene; you might feel nervous tension during a climactic encounter; you might feel scared when entering the unknown or expecting something unpleasant; you might even find yourself starting to cry during an emotionally intense scene, whether the scene itself is happy or sad. For me, it always provides an odd sense of pleasure and satisfaction when this happens; it’s a means of exploring and expressing emotions that everyday life doesn’t always provide us with. And as the old adage goes, everyone feels better after a good cry.
Well, what I’m describing here is also true of good erotic scenes. I’m not simply talking about some hot porn making you pop a boner (or lady equivalent) — that’s a simple, instinctive reaction to pretty much any sort of sexually explicit material if you’re in the right mood to be receptive to it. No; instead, I’m talking about an erotic scene that absolutely wraps you up in its whole mood; an erotic scene that truly makes you feel part of the action; an erotic scene that immerses you in that private little world you find yourself in whenever you have the opportunity to share an intimate moment with someone.
Love Cube’s first H-scene starts hot, with the three heroines lying topless on the bed, waiting hungrily for Ichinari with visibly soaked panties. Once things truly get underway and each of them gets their own unique, animated scene, that was, for me, when things crossed a line from “huh, nice porn” to “I am living this moment”.
It’s actually quite hard to describe how it achieves this. We’re not talking Grisaia-style H-scenes here, where they’re an opportunity for character development as much as they are for fanservice. The dialogue between Ichinari and the heroines during the sex itself is fairly pedestrian; the exact sort of thing you’d expect from a sexually explicit romantic visual novel. I think the magic of the scenes comes from their context; they immediately follow an emotionally intense scene in which Ichinari, having been agonising over which one of the three beautiful girls before him is going to be “the one”, finally explodes in passionate anguish and makes his decision… or rather fails to make a decision.
As previously mentioned, prior to this point we’ve had a number of suggestive scenes, and a number of instances where it looked like Ichinari and at least one of the girls would cross that line between friendship and physical love, but up until this particular scene, the game — or more specifically Ichinari himself — blueballs the reader at every opportunity. Consequently, by the time something actually does happen between everyone, I defy anyone who has been engaging with the story and characterisation fully to not be in possession of a set of genitals that are bursting at the seams, desperate to be unleashed in a gushing torrent of righteous erotic fury.
There has been such a lengthy leadup to this initial erotic encounter, in other words, that it feels like it has real meaning. And that meaning makes it hella hot. That meaning made it so hot for me that it is not an exaggeration to say that halfway through Nodoka’s part of the scene — she’s up second, after Iori gets first dibs — I felt like just shifting in my seat in the wrong way would provoke the sort of thunderous, earth-shattering orgasm that only comes around once in a blue moon.
By the time Ichinari was finished with Akira, I’m not ashamed to say that I had an uncontrollable urge to step away from the keyboard for a short period to enjoy a little bit of personal time, during which I was keenly aware that several of the characters (particularly Iori) had had to do something similar at numerous points in the prior narrative. Life imitates art, or something. We’re all human. There’s no shame in it.
Anyway, I honestly can’t remember the last time a visual novel’s H-scene had such a profound impact on the way I was feeling; beyond simple, primal arousal into an honest-to-goodness feeling that this was a sexual encounter with true intimacy between everyone involved… including the reader. It was a delight.
And the best thing? Those scenes only get better from thereon, giving Ichinari and each of the girls the opportunity to experiment in various ways, taking in a few light fetishes along the way. We’ve got a bit of soft S&M, we’ve got public sex, we’ve got a passionate encounter after an exciting but stressful day. We’ve got sensual screwing in a love hotel after a romantic date, energetic shagging in a spa and urgent boning in the middle of the day.
Each and every one of these scenes is super-hot, and it’s clear that great care and attention has been taken to give all the heroines equal time in the spotlight, with every encounter allowing each of their respective relationships with Ichinari to develop and deepen in new and exciting ways — and again, allowing each of the heroines to complement rather than compete with one another.
And that’s how it continues to unfold from there. Love Cube isn’t a game about high drama and tugging on the heartstrings — though there are more than a few scenes that brought a tear to my eyes when the girls were encouraging Ichinari to press on with his dreams — but it is a game about making you feel good, in more ways than one.
I went into the experience not sure what to expect from it other than some lovely artwork and probably some hot scenes. I came out of it feeling genuinely uplifted and positive. While I’ve never quite been in as desperate a position as Ichinari is shown to be in at the outset of the story, I certainly understood a lot of his pain and frustration, and it felt good to be able to ride along with him as he weathered the storm and came out the other side into bright sunshine… particularly with all the erotic fun he got to have along the way. Vicarious wish fulfilment, if you will.
All in all, if this is the calibre of work we can expect from Neko Work H going forward — and, it’s worth noting, the extremely high standard of localisation by Meru of Love Lab Japan — then we’ve got an eroge label that is very much one to watch on our hands.
Better stock up on those tissues, hmm?
Thanks to FAKKU! for the review copy.
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
—
Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
Last time, the Warriors of Light decided to take a well-earned holiday in the town of Melmond, only to discover it was a right shithole.
It (apparently) wasn’t the fault of the people of Melmond, however; the nasty vampire who had taken up residence in the Cavern of Earth was supposedly to blame, because he was blocking the flow of earth energy from the crystal and making everything rot. And this made all the buildings fall down, supposedly.
Motivated entirely by altruism (well, maybe a bit of greed… treasures are shiny!), the Warriors of Light descend into the Cavern of Earth to try and deal with this undead terror once and for all…
Senran Kagura. Now there’s a series we’re no strangers to here on MoeGamer, but it’s been a long time since it graced the Cover Game feature. With the recent release of Peach Ball at the time of writing, I thought it was about time we fixed that.
This Cover Game feature is, as much as anything, me fulfilling a promise to myself; I absolutely love the Senran Kagura series, yet I’ve been falling very behind with it, so I’ve been promising myself for… probably a couple of years now that I’d get caught up!
Since Estival Versus was the first ever Cover Game feature here on MoeGamer back in April of 2016, we’ve had Peach Beach Splash, Burst Re;Newal, Reflexions and Peach Ball, plus a lovely Limited Run Games packaged release of Bon Appetit, a former digital-only title. And, with the exception of Reflexions and a bit of Bon Appetit, I haven’t played (or covered) any of these yet. This leaves me with a fair amount of work to do, but I’m looking forward to it; I hope you enjoy it too.
Let’s back up a moment. It’s entirely possible that you’re coming to this article with no idea what Senran Kagura is, where it came from, why it’s interesting and why it’s important to me personally. So with that in mind, I thought we’d spend today talking a bit about where the series has come from and how it has got to where it is today.
I won’t reiterate the historical perspective of how the series is an evolution of the classic beat ’em up formula, because I already did that back when we explored Estival Versus; I invite you to check that article out at your leisure, because it was a ton of fun to write.
But it does pay to take a look at the history of the series itself — and how it’s managed to find success, seemingly despite a fair amount of resistance. So let’s do just that.
Senran Kagura originated on the Nintendo 3DS in 2011 with Senran Kagura: Shoujo-tachi no Shin’ei (literally Senran Kagura: The Shadows of Girls, more commonly translated as Portrait of Girls or Skirting Shadows). The game introduces Hanzou National Academy, a prestigious high school with a secret: it also trains the best of the best to become shinobi. Specifically, it trains “good” shinobi; the ones who do things because it’s the right thing to do, rather than those who carry out the will of the highest bidder.
The game initially introduces us to a cast of five young female shinobi students as they continue their training and find themselves coming into conflict with the local “evil” shinobi training institution: Hebijo Clandestine Girls’ Academy. As these things tend to go, there are also five young female shinobi students there, and throughout Skirting Shadows (as we shall refer to it hereafter) each of Hanzou’s girls “pairs off” with a rival from Hebijo who complements their personality traits in some way.
It’s not a simple story of good versus evil, mind you; a key part of Senran Kagura right from the very beginning has been the fact that such terms are very much relative and that “evil” doesn’t necessarily equate to “bad”, as anyone who has ever played classic Dungeons & Dragons will be able to tell you; rather, “evil” is a matter of self-interest rather than altruism.
One of the most interesting concepts that Senran Kagura introduces right from the start in this regard is the idea that there is typically a barrier to entry in order to be considered “good”, yet “evil” will accept anyone and everyone. Both sides in the conflict between Hanzou and Hebijo gradually come to understand this, and end up building solid, deep friendships with those who are supposed to be their most bitter of enemies. Those complementary character traits become the basis for these characters to learn a great deal from one another; opposites attract and all that.
Skirting Shadows only allowed the player to enjoy the story as the Hanzou girls Asuka, Yagyuu, Hibari, Ikaruga and Katsuragi, with the Hebijo girls Homura, Mirai, Haruka, Yomi and Hikage acting as antagonists. A year later, however, the game was expanded with Senran Kagura Burst, something of a “director’s cut” release which incorporated both the original Skirting Shadows storyline as well as the opportunity to play through the whole thing as the Hebijo girls, presenting an interesting new perspective on things.
For quite a while, Senran Kagura remained a strictly Japanese phenomenon, but it did well on its home turf; on its week of release it took the top spot in the 3DS sales charts with its limited edition version, and third place with its standard edition. Moreover, in October of 2011, Destructoid reported that Skirting Shadows’ strong performance had, alongside Vanillaware’s PSP title Grand Knights History, contributed to publisher Marvelous AQL reversing their fortunes from a predicted net loss over six months of 185 million yen (about $2.4 million) to a net gain of 192 million yen ($2.5 million-ish back then).
Destructoid suggested that strong Japanese sales such as those seen here often led to localisation announcements, but it took a while before anything happened on this front. There was interest, though, both from fans and localisation companies; speaking with Destructoid in May of 2013, XSEED boss Ken Berry noted that he and his team knew “the demand [was] there as lots of fans [had] asked [them] about it” — but he also said that he found it a “scary proposition due to the subject matter and difference in attitudes between Japanese culture and the more conservative culture in the U.S.”
Berry was referring to the fact that Senran Kagura has one immediately identifying aspect that has, over the years, proven to be something of a problem for mainstream Western games journalists: a heavy degree of fanservice. Indeed, legend has it that the very concept of the game came about because producer Kenichiro Takaki — who had previously brought us the gloriously bizarre but perfectly family-friendly Half-Minute Hero series — decided that two things people would really like to see popping out of the then-new Nintendo 3DS’ glasses-free 3D screen were big, jiggly, bouncy breasts and squishy, peachy butts. And so these things became a central part of the game’s overall aesthetic, even before anything else had been decided.
It’s important to note that Senran Kagura’s appeal does not and has never stopped there, however. Having established this very simple baseline of something to create, Takaki fleshed out a design document, budgeted the project properly, established some initial designs for the characters and considered its gameplay carefully, at which point he met with character designer Nan Yaegashi, who was a veteran of the visual novel market by this point under his Mochi Chinochi pseudonym, and scenario writer Yukinori Kitajima. We last saw the latter here on MoeGamer as one of the writers of 428: Shibuya Scramble and, as well as being a fixture on the Senran Kagura team ever since its first installment, he also wrote Chaos Rings, Fire Emblem Fates and Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Quite the team, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Japanese pedigree counts for very little when it comes to certain quarters of the Western media, however; after XSEED finally bit the bullet and announced that it would be bringing Senran Kagura Burst to the West, the hit pieces began, with one of the most widely shared being an exceedingly ill-informed screed by the UK Official Nintendo Magazine’s blogger Chris Rooke, who boldly proclaimed that the game was “damaging the industry”, was “fundamentally degrading” and that people “shouldn’t buy it or support it in any way”. His arguments were all the usual non-specific fluff about sexualisation and driving women out of the industry and, as has become depressingly predictable at this point, did not actually engage with the game at all in order to determine if his arguments actually had any foundation. This is immediately apparent from the number of factual inaccuracies in his piece, which, frankly, I don’t have the time or energy to itemise right now.
Ironically, the notoriety that Rooke’s blog post brought the impending release of Senran Kagura Burst actually did more to promote the game than anything Marvelous or XSEED could have planned deliberately. Those who took umbrage with Rooke’s words having experienced countless other supposedly “problematic” Japanese titles previously bought the game to prove him wrong; those who had never heard of the series suddenly became aware of it and curious about it; those who were just sick of quasi-Puritanical finger-wagging from games journalists bought the game out of spite; and those who had been patiently awaiting the game became even more excited for it.
Back when I worked on USgamer, I had the opportunity to speak with Brittany “Hatsuu” Avery, who was XSEED’s production assistant at the time and a strong advocate for Senran Kagura. She had already torn Rooke’s article a new one on Twitter at this point — sadly those tweets seem to be lost to the mists of time — and was clearly champing at the bit to talk more on the subject, given the enthusiasm of her responses at the time.
“Despite the first impression it gives,” she told me, “Senran Kagura Burst is a complete story with fully developed characters. It’s about accepting those who appear to be different from you based on the surface. Some of the girls are relatable with their problems; I identified with certain personality quirks Katsuragi had, but other girls might identify with Mirai’s self-esteem issues, Asuka’s interest in self-improvement as an independent person over romance, or Yagyuu’s unrequited feelings. Each girl is quite different.”
When I asked her how she would respond to someone like Rooke if he came along and accused her, to her face, of peddling “insultingly misogynistic and degrading atrocities”, as he had done indirectly in his article, she had plenty to share.
“I don’t necessarily think anyone’s opinion is wrong,” she said, tactfully. “It’s a matter of whether they like or dislike the features. But I do think a lot of the people who disagree with how the girls are presented aren’t aware of the game in its entirety, so I feel it’s a personal mission to educate them about every part of the game. If you feel it’s important to discuss the 10 per cent of the time there’s girl talk involving boobs, I feel it’s important to also discuss alongside it the 70 per cent of the time when they’re struggling with the concept of what it means to be a shinobi and how they should really be perceiving their enemies, or the 20 per cent of the time when they’re just being normal girls doing normal things.”
Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed; Senran Kagura Burst successfully got released on the Nintendo eShop in North America on November 14, 2013 and crossed the pond to Europe in packaged, physical form in February of the following year — thereby showing Berry that his concerns over releasing such a title at retail were seemingly unfounded, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
And, somehow, doubtless much to Chris Rooke’s chagrin, the industry survived this terrible ordeal well enough for the series to go on to produce eight computer, console and handheld games; two highly successful mobile games; five runs of manga; an OVA prequel to one of the games; two anime series (with a third on the way); and plenty of merchandise. (Interestingly, the manga and anime were actually announced for localisation before we had confirmation that Burst was coming West, perhaps highlighting the fact that those forms of media are a little “ahead” of games in being able to deal with content like this.)
Not bad work for an “atrocity”, and I believe there are still a few surviving women working in games to this day.
Neither the Senran Kagura series nor the Western outrage over it stopped after that first installment, however, though interestingly, second chronological release Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus escaped mostly unscathed in the latter regard. This probably speaks more volumes about the Western press’ regrettably apathetic attitude to poor old PlayStation Vita than anything else, but it was a welcome reprieve; those who had a real problem with the series were back with a vengeance as soon as third game (Senran Kagura 2, naturally) was announced for Nintendo 3DS.
But let’s leave that side of things be for now; I think I’ve made my point in that regard, and for all the odious things about it, Rooke’s original post is probably the most historically significant piece speaking out against the series — in that it is what actually brought a lot of people to the series in the first place! — and is, as such, the main one worth looking at.
Here’s the thing to take away from this: Senran Kagura is not a series for everyone. That’s been apparent from the very beginning; it’s apparently something that makes Western games journalists very angry; and, in fact, it’s one of the things that makes it good.
The idea of laser-focusing a new game or series on a very specific audience is one of the things that many modern Japanese developers are very good at — and an ideal counter to the common (and now long-running) argument that modern triple-A games are all boring, designed-by-committee, paint-by-numbers affairs.
Games like Senran Kagura are designed to appeal to a specific type of person who wants a particular type of experience… and no, that type of experience is not pornography; anyone who has explored Japanese popular media in any detail will know that if you want pornography, there is plenty of actual pornography to hunt down and enjoy. Rather, the audience for Senran Kagura is made up of most of the same people who enjoy action-and-fanservice shows like High School DxD and Ikkitousen. Particularly that last one, which Senran Kagura has often been compared favourably to — and indeed several Ikkitousen characters even showed up as DLC for Estival Versus.
These games don’t water themselves down in order to try to appeal to as broad a market as possible like modern triple-A games do; they concentrate on their core appeal elements and their target market, then say a big “fuck you” to anyone who doesn’t want to engage with them on their own terms. As Takaki himself once noted, “the world is full of stuff people will think is fun to them; it just seems so pointless to waste your time on things you don’t like or can’t understand.” Or, to put it another, oft-cited way: don’t like it? Don’t play it!
Interestingly, what often happens once any controversy has petered out is that the original appeal ends up spreading beyond that initial core audience via word of mouth and various other means; sometimes immediately, sometimes long after the fact.
Over the years, Senran Kagura has found a particularly strong following among gay and trans women for both its attractive cast and its positive attitude towards many different types of female sexuality: straight, gay, bi, dom, sub, asexual and more; they’re all covered here.
In later installments the series even touches on matters of gender identity (albeit without going so far as incorporating a full-on trans character) through elements such as Miyabi’s story arcs, where she is torn between wanting to be seen as a feminine woman and embracing what she believes to be her more masculine traits such as physical strength and stoicism in the face of adversity.
Thoroughly admirable and interesting stuff all round; but more on that sort of thing when we look at specific games in detail.
It’s probably clear by now that Senran Kagura is a character-centric series, and the way it has evolved over time has very much reflected that side of things. While the two 3DS games are the most serious in tone, they are also regarded as unfolding in a separate timeline to most of the rest of the series, with the other games (and this supposed second timeline) typically focusing more on the characters’ interpersonal relationships and backstories than the originally established overarching narrative.
Said second timeline also expands the core cast considerably from the original ten, initially adding another two full schools of five in Shinovi Versus, plus various additional new individual characters and groups in subsequent installments. On top of that, Estival Versus onwards even adds crossover DLC such as the aforementioned Ikkitousen collaboration, plus guest appearances from Compile Heart’s Neptune from Hyperdimension Neptunia and Koei Tecmo’s Ayane and Marie Rose from Dead or Alive; Dead or Alive 5, in exchange, also got a bunch of Senran Kagura-themed costumes in one of its many, many DLC bundles.
This shift in focus has been a bit controversial for some longstanding fans of the series, as the original narrative of shinobi being the only ones with the strength to overcome the otherworldly threat of youma, deadly creatures straight out of Japanese mythology, was cool, exciting and thoroughly intriguing. It also made for an appealing sense of juxtaposition in tone; the brightly coloured, fanservicey elements were seemingly at odds with the rather dark narrative, but this really worked; because the game looked so cheerful but was more than willing to hit you with an emotional gutpunch when you least expected it, it really worked as a story.
That isn’t to say that the “second timeline” games don’t have the same impact, mind. In fact, in many ways their stronger focus on the individual members of the cast rather than the broader context of the narrative provides much better scope for emotional engagement and a wider variety of situations for the characters to become involved with. Some of these situations are dramatic, some are comedic, some are heartbreaking and some provide the opportunity for personal growth.
The more of the series you play, the more it becomes apparent that the overall story is not really the important thing with Senran Kagura as a whole; it’s the characters and their own individual arcs. And that’s why it’s developed and evolved in the way it has.
Across the numerous games that have been released to date, the gradually expanding ensemble cast has become one of the most interesting, well-realised groups of virtual “actors” in gaming, and the fact that several games have broken out of the original beat ’em up/hack and slash formula is testament to that; when a game’s cast transcends its original genre and context, that’s when you know there’s something really special going on.
And that’s what’s caused Senran Kagura to have such an enthusiastic, passionate fanbase — a fanbase that I described back in the 2017 MoeGamer Awards as one of the best communities in all of gaming — and how the series has managed to endure in both Japan and the West for, at the time of writing, a full eight years; an impressive achievement considering how quickly some other franchises come and go, and especially considering the resistance it weathered in its earlier years.
And so in this Cover Game feature we’re going to explore some of the later, more unusual installments in the series — as well as Burst Re;Newal, a “second timeline” reboot of the original Burst — and get to know these wonderful, inspiring, beautiful girls even better than we already do.
Pack your best lingerie and some sharp pointy objects; it’s going to get dangerous in here!
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
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Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
Pong and Breakout were winning formulae for Atari, so it makes perfect sense they would want to try and do everything possible with this style of game over the years.
Warlords was one of the more interesting experiments, adding a healthy dose of theme, four-player competitive (or team-based) action and a couple of interesting additional mechanics.
It’s even reasonably fun by yourself… but get three friends together and you can expect the trash talk to flow freely within moments of starting!
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
It’s been a great week for the site this week! If you’re a new reader, thank you for your support and a hearty welcome; if you’ve been around, hello again!
It’s late and I’ve been podcast editing all day, but I’ll do my best to be vaguely coherent before I pass out. Lots of things to go through and lots of things to look forward to in the coming weeks!
Let’s get right into the things you might have missed in the last week, then…
The Zelda Diaries: Part 6 – A Beast of a Time – I continue my ongoing look at Breath of the Wild with an exploration of the Divine Beasts, the four major “dungeons” of the game.
Custom Order Maid 3D 2: The Reluctant Idol and the Photoshoot – We visit the Empire Club once again to see what the maids are up to… and spend some time with Custom Order Maid 3D 2’s excellent photo mode.
Warriors Wednesday: Stoking the Fires of Rebellion – Cao Pi comes face to face with his former allies Xiahou Dun and Xiahou Yuan. Can he convince them to join his upcoming rebellion against Orochi?
Waifu Wednesday: Ikaruga – The next Cover Game feature relates to the Senran Kagura series, as you’ve probably noticed by now! We kick off with a Waifu Wednesday on one of my favourite girls from the series, the Asami Imai-voiced Ikaruga from Hanzou Academy.
LOVE³ -Love Cube-: Can’t Escape from Crossing Fates – This gorgeous visual novel from Neko Work H, featuring art by prolific doujinshi artist Ishikei and animation by Nekopara’s Sayori, is well worth your time if you need a little pick-me-up. It’s sweet, sexy, funny and incredible to look at.
Final Fantasy Marathon: Vampire Hunter F(F) – The Warriors of Light finally reach the Cavern of Earth and decide to try and save the already-ruined town of Melmond from further shenanigans.
Senran Kagura: Introduction – Senran Kagura Estival Versus was the first ever Cover Game feature here on MoeGamer, but since then I’ve got very behind on this all-time favourite series! So I’m going to correct that in an extensive feature taking in Bon Appetit, Peach Beach Splash, Burst Re;Newal and Peach Ball. But we begin with an overview of where the series came from — and how a vitriolic, offensive blog post brought it a ton of positive attention here in the West.
The 8-bit series finally reaches Z for the second time with an oft-overlooked classic from Activision, we hit the links on the Atari ST courtesy of Sega and Elite, and we get smashy smashy with the Warlords in the arcades.
First up, Patreon goodness! Right now, I’m supporting chaotic “old men (and Octav1us Kitten, who I also support) attempt to talk about games, usually fail” collective Digitiser 2000, the ever-grumpy (and always hilarious) Cheap Show Podcast, the wonderfully supportive Normal Happenings, independent games writing collective The Well-Red Mage and fountain of retro computer gaming knowledge Rob “Hellfire64” Caporetto, all of whom you can find out a bit more about by clicking through to their profiles.
Here’s a selection of recent YouTube and podcast goodness from several of this lot:
And from the bottomless well of delights that is my WordPress Reader this week…
Throwback Thursday… How Did I Start Watching Anime? (KAWAIIPAPERPANDAS) – Anyone who has experienced Katawa Shoujo will know what a wonderful experience it is. bodellyt explains how it played a key role in getting them into anime.
How Important is Relatability in Anime? (I drink and watch anime) – Irina kicks off another great chin-stroking discussion, this time over the concept of “relatability” and what it might actually mean.
Resident Evil 2: The Boardgame (Raistlin0903) – Raistlin may have left his video gaming days behind him, but that doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy some tabletop fun based on some old favourites! Here’s a look at a cool-looking cardboard-and-miniatures adaptation of Capcom’s classic.
Enter the Cringe (Enter the Anime Documentary Review) (A Nerdy Perspective) – A lot of people didn’t think much of this recent release by Netflix. Sam takes the time to put her thoughts after sitting through the whole thing into words.
The return to blogging (Later Levels) – Phil posts some thoughts on the value of blogging, how he’s come back to it after several years away, and what he’s discovered in the process.
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All right, that’s your lot for now! Please look forward to a new MoeGamer Podcast tomorrow (perhaps even tonight if the upload finishes soon) — keep an eye on YouTube and/or Soundcloud to check it out — and, as always, thank you very much for your continued support!
Good night!
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
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Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
Ohayou gozaimasu, listener-san, and welcome once again to The MoeGamer Podcast, featuring both my fruity, succulent baritone and my good friend Chris Caskie of MrGilderPixels.
The MoeGamer Podcast is available in several places. You can subscribe to my channel on YouTube to stay up to date with both the video versions of the podcast and my weekly videos (including the Atari A to Z retro gaming series); you can follow on Soundcloud for the audio-only version of the podcast; you can subscribe via RSS to get the audio-only version of the podcast in your favourite podcast app; or you can subscribe via iTunes. Please do at least one of these if you can; it really helps us out!
Or you can hit the jump to watch or listen to today’s episode right here on MoeGamer.
In today’s episode, we kick off with the usual discussion of the news, taking in a variety of topics ranging from newly fan-translated (then, apparently, un-fan-translated) PS1 games to Kenichiro Takaki’s upcoming “waifu Wave Race” project, Kandagawa Jet Girls.
We then continue with some talk of what we’ve been playing, taking in Sundered, Love³ -Love Cube-, Senran Kagura Bon Appetit and Happy Birthdays along the way — with, of course, plenty of video footage for you to enjoy in the YouTube version of the podcast.
Then finally we launch into today’s main topic, where Chris argues that the term “JRPG” is pretty much useless, and we should look at finding better, more descriptive labels for the games that we play. What do you think? How do you talk about your favourite games? Are you a fan of “JRPG” as a term, or do you prefer to talk about things in more granular, fine detail? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Enjoy the episode; we sure did!
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
—
Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
Do you remember the “god game” genre? Distinct from the few management sims we still have today, which tend to focus on financial and ministerial affairs, the god game, popular throughout the late ’90s and early ’00s, put you in the power of a supreme being with literally world-altering powers.
It’s a genre we don’t really see a lot of these days, with most strategy gamers tending to gravitate towards experiences with more board game-like mechanics such as Civilization and its numerous imitators, or the aformentioned fiscal frolics such as Cities Skylines, Two Point Hospital and the like.
Releasing a new god game is a brave step, then, but Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada has never been about taking the easy option. And so it was that his company Toybox came to bring us Happy Birthdays, an expanded, rebalanced and enhanced version of the earlier Birthdays: The Beginning, and a game in which you get to play God on your own little cube-shaped world.
In Happy Birthdays, you take on the role of… well, yourself, really. While out walking, you discover a mysterious cave, black out and find yourself floating in space in control of a cute little Ultraman-looking dude called The Avatar, accompanied by a sparkly sentient diamond-shaped object that refers to itself as Navi.
Navi explains that the cube before you is a world in its formative stages, and that in order for you to return to your own world, you must give birth to modern humans on the cube. No big deal, right? All in a day’s work.
No additional narrative context is given and even if you manage to “finish” this whole scenario by completing Navi’s request, the whole thing is left feeling rather unresolved with an inexplicable cliffhanger that doesn’t really get explained.
However, narrative is emphatically not what Happy Birthdays is about, so it doesn’t matter too much. The story-based scenario that will likely be your first stop on your worldbuilding journey is little more than a well-disguised tutorial, providing you the option of several ready-made starting worlds for you to experiment with, and perhaps challenge yourself to see how quickly you can develop humanity. Once you’ve exhausted its possibilities, there are a number of Challenge scenarios, which task you with accomplishing a particular goal against a time limit or under certain restrictions, or what is arguably the main attraction: a completely free mode where you can just play with the game as you see fit.
Happy Birthdays’ mechanics are surprisingly simple. There are two main ways of looking at your cube-shaped world: micro mode and macro mode. In micro mode, you affect the world directly; in macro mode, you sit back and watch what effect your influence has had.
In micro mode, time is frozen and you control The Avatar directly as it flies around the world. Depending on the circumstances in which you started the game, this may either begin as a completely featureless lump of rock or a partially constructed world ripe for fiddling around with. Either way, your main method of interaction in the early stages of the game is either raising or lowering the land, initially just a single tile at a time.
Raising the land above an altitude of 0 creates land, hills and mountains; lowering it creates seas. Every tile you affect costs some of your HP, and when you run out of HP you need to switch back to macro mode to let it replenish once you allow time to start again.
Moving the land around isn’t just for show: raising it tends to lower the temperature of the world, while lowering it tends to raise the temperature, with tall mountains and deep seas having particularly significant effects on the climate. The makeup of your world also has effects on things like moisture levels, and eventually all these factors will combine to create life.
There’s a tree-like chart of all the organisms (plant and animal) that it’s possible to create in Happy Birthdays, and each clearly spells out the conditions required for it to be born in the first place as well as the conditions it needs to thrive and grow. Using this information, you can tailor your world to encourage the birth and development of a particular life form, and follow the various paths through the tree in order to create more advanced life over time.
Once a new life form has been born, you need to “capture” it to add its information to the in-game library. This is done by locating it in micro mode, either in its standard view or via the very enjoyable first-person mode, and hitting a button, at which point you will acquire stars and experience points. Gain enough experience points and you will level up, giving you a greater stock of HP with which to affect the world, and at various level thresholds you also become able to affect more than just a single square at a time, too.
The stars are of critical importance, as they allow you to use skills. Each skill costs a particular number of stars to use, and there are a wide variety of different possible effects. Intangible skills allow you to do things like inflict global warming or cooling on the world as a whole without affecting the land, or to affect the moisture in an area. More tangible skills allow you to quickly create a large mountain or valley without spending HP. For an appropriate star outlay, you can also promote the growth of a particular species, force it to evolve, immediately make it extinct or cause it to become completely immune to the elements — though this latter option also causes it to become sterile, so it won’t breed any further.
Stars are initially quite hard to come by, particularly if you’re completely starting from scratch, but you get a decent amount from capturing a new species, a gradual trickle just by popping into micro mode and flying around a bit, and a huge bonus every million in-game years. As such, while the game tends to begin feeling like it takes a while to get anything significant done — and to develop any life more advanced than plankton — it gradually accelerates over time, with things really starting to pick up after those first million years. Which, in the context of this game, isn’t very long, whatever it might sound like!
While the story mode and the challenges give you specific tasks to try and complete, probably the best thing about Happy Birthdays is its free mode. Here, you start from a barren, rocky cube and develop it as you see fit. There’s no way to “win” or “lose” aside from any arbitrary objectives you decide to set for yourself, so the joy simply comes from experimenting with the environment in various ways and seeing what happens.
There’s also an achievement-like system in the game that rewards you with various “monuments” for accomplishing particular tasks, so if you really want a checklist of things to experiment with, that’s worth looking at. The monuments run the gamut from various coloured Avatar statues in different poses to national flags and bits of three-dimensional pixel art, and they allow another way for you to customise your creation besides the simple lay of the land.
The whole thing is presented really nicely. The way the world is constructed of cubes makes it feel very distinct, though notably different from other games that make use of a similar aesthetic such as the famous Minecraft. Looking at the various animals and plants up close, there’s almost a “hand-crafted” look to some of them; when the humans finally appear, for example, their hair in particular has the look of soft felt about it, and their stylised faces further add to this toy-like aesthetic.
The soundtrack, too, is designed to be relaxing and to reflect what is going on at any given point. Most things you do have an impact on the soundtrack; moving the land up or down causes randomised melodic notes to play, for example, while the biological density of a particular region of your world is reflected by the overall texture of the soundtrack when your camera is in that region. Pan into an area with human civilisation and you’ll hear the beating of tribal drums; head out into the jungle and you’ll hear gentler sounds; move out into a barren, rocky area and the music becomes appropriately “cold” and thin.
Happy Birthdays really is a joy to play if you go into it with the right mindset. It’s not a game you play to “beat”; instead, it’s a game to fire up when you tire of shooting things, racing cars or hitting your enemies with pointy objects. It’s a wonderfully relaxing, creative experience that enriches and invigorates the mind, and once you get past the slow start and start really figuring out how to nudge your cube’s ecosystem in the directions you want it to go, you’ll find that checking in on your little world — your creation — becomes monstrously addictive!
Games with a grand scope such as this can easily be daunting or feel overly complex, particularly to the more casual player or those unaccustomed to more cerebral, strategic affairs. But Happy Birthdays is simple enough for anyone to enjoy; it’s a “software toy” that classic-era Will Wright would be proud of, and a fine addition to the more thoughtful gamer’s collection.
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
—
Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
You can count on several things in a Warriors game: firstly, that pursuing Lu Bu is usually a bad idea; secondly, that the commander is struggling and that you should assist at once; and thirdly, that “it” is usually a trap.
It’s a trope at this point; if a particular encounter in a Warriors battle feels mysteriously easy, or there don’t seem to be very many enemies around on a suspiciously large map, you can guarantee that something bad is going to happen to your forces at some point. It’s just a matter of when…
And, of course, that’s exactly what happens today, as Cao Pi and friends attempt to seize a strategically advantageous garrison…
Sex is great and all, but have you tried talking about it?
This is something that the games industry in general appears to struggle greatly with, since adult gaming is still in a weird niche where it’s commonly understood to exist and is appreciated by its core audiences, but at the same time it’s still not particularly accepted by mainstream outlets, who will take every opportunity to deride and downplay it.
The latest of many examples at the time of writing was presented by Nathan Grayson of Kotaku, who derisively pointed out that “two of Steam’s top games last month were anime sex games” before going on to complain about creators catering to “straight men’s sexual fantasies”. But really this is a broader issue that has been worth talking about for some time. And now’s as good a time as any.
I’m gonna share some behind-the-scenes insights with you, dear reader: looking at the popularity of various articles on this site, the most popular by a significant margin are those that explore games with sexual content of some description — be they explicit, or simply using unashamed sex appeal as part of their core aesthetic.
Top of the heap by far are my articles on Illusion’s Honey Select Unlimited, an erotic game that is mostly known for its detailed character creation feature and excellent photo studio mode; this game brings in steady traffic to MoeGamer every single day, and has done ever since I published the first of these pieces back in March of 2018.
More recently, my detailed writeup on Neko Work H’s visual novel LOVE³ -Love Cube-, which features the distinctive artwork of well-established and beloved doujinshi artist Ishikei, has drawn in a noticeably larger than average influx of daily readers.
These are far from isolated examples, either; running down my list of most popular articles of all time, I continuously find titles like Custom Order Maid 3D 2, Deep Space Waifu, Dungeon Travelers 2, Senran Kagura, Rance, Grisaia and Negligee all occupying spots high up in the table.
The conclusion we can draw from this is pretty simple: people want to know about these games. And those people are emphatically not being served by mainstream video game sites such as Kotaku, which in turn brings them to places like MoeGamer. I’m not going to complain about the latter aspect of things, but what does concern me a bit is why those people are not being adequately served by commercial outlets.
Let’s ponder what I mean by that before we delve into the possible reasons — and why I think this is an important discussion to have.
For approaching a decade now, commercial games journalism’s approach to games that feature anything from mildly provocative content to explicit sexual scenes has been to deride it in one way or another — often taking the time to insult the audience along the way. The word “embarrassing” often crops up, as does “pandering”, and the games are often accused of being “pornographic” — or, in the very worst cases, “child pornography” or “paedophilia”.
Need some examples? Okay. Here’s just a handful from my own casual observations over the last few years; there are plenty more.
Here’s Chris Rooke from the now-defunct UK Official Nintendo Magazine claiming that Senran Kagura is “damaging the industry” and is an “insultingly degrading and misogynistic atrocity”.
Here’s Phil Kollar from Polygon declaring Dungeon Travelers 2 a “creepy, porn-lite dungeon crawler”.
Here’s Jed Whitaker from Destructoid outright calling players of Valkyrie Drive: Bhikkuni “paedophiles”.
Here’s Jim Sterling writing on his own site and completely failing to engage with Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson on any level beyond “tits”.
And here’s Mike Diver from VICE doing exactly the same thing, as well as suggesting those interested in Senran Kagura would be sexually assaulting strangers on public transport if they didn’t have this game to occupy themselves. (Senran Kagura, as a fairly high-profile Japanese series at this point, is a regrettably easy target.)
These articles all have one thing in common: no attempt to actually explore, engage with and analyse the works in question. They make assumptions, they don’t bother to check if those assumptions are correct, and they spend more time making grand, sweeping moral statements than actually trying to have a conversation, offer any helpful advice or get to the bottom of why these games have become popular.
Actually, they have two things in common, the second being that they’re all written by men. But let’s concentrate on the actual content itself for now, otherwise we’ll be here all day.
When I say these articles don’t bother to engage with the games they’re deriding, I really mean it; Diver’s article, for example, proudly boasts of spending a grand total of an hour with Senran Kagura 2 over the course of five or six sessions (so no more than ten minutes at a time, then) during which he had no idea what was going on in the story (unsurprising, since he also talks about deliberately not paying any attention to it); Kollar’s article on Dungeon Travelers 2 was written well before the game had been released and was based entirely on pre-release promotional materials; Rooke hadn’t played Senran Kagura Burst at all when he decided to let rip and inadvertently made a lot more people aware of this series he irrationally hated so much.
Many of these games have good reason for their content being the way it is, whether it’s subversive (as in the case of the early Senran Kagura games in particular, where the cheeky fanservice content was designed to be dramatically juxtaposed with the rather dark and tragic narrative aspect) or symbolic (as in the case of Dungeon Travelers 2, which makes use of a common Japanese trope where nudity represents vulnerability or exposing your “soul” to someone else) — but you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t actually play the games.
This applies to “sex games”, as Grayson refers to them, too; he describes LOVE³ -Love Cube- thus:
LOVE³ is a visual novel about a down-on-his-luck comics artist living with three women. Naturally, he sleeps with all of them. The game touts animations that “come to life and bounce up and down” and specifically notes that “all characters depicted are over the age of 18.”
This is a gross oversimplification of LOVE³ -Love Cube-, as I’ve explained in detail elsewhere. While LOVE³ does feature a lot of explicit sexual content in its latter half and it’s not inaccurate to say that protagonist Ichinari sleeps with the three heroines, what Grayson’s description misses out completely is the context of that. This isn’t some gonzo porn where you hit “Play” and the fucking starts within a matter of seconds; this is a visual novel where sex is depicted as a natural part of a relationship — and, to make things more interesting and different from societal “norms”, a mutually consensual polyamorous relationship, at that. But again, you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t play it.
At this point, I’d like to share a few tweets from Meru, the translator for LOVE³ -Love Cube-, because she provides an interesting perspective on things — both as someone who isn’t me, and as a woman.
Something the Kotaku article got me thinking about: while I acknowledge that most eroge are indeed aimed at men, what attracted me, as a woman, to them was the fact that you get to experience a relationship with the characters, making the sex scenes more intimate.
Sure, those scenes tend to be from a male perspective, and there are many things I dislike about the average eroge scene, but they offer something way more emotional than your average Western porn movie, and that’s the connection I was looking for.
Women are just as sexual as men, but (and this is a very broad generalisation) we often tend to enjoy porn with an emotional depth to it. It’s why bodice-ripper “romance” novels and fanfic are so popular.
Now I have no idea if this is something that’s innate or socialised (probably socialised, I mean most things are), but it is what it is. And there are female eroge fans out there who find a lot of joy in these games.
I’m not trying to destroy a narrative here or anything, as I’m not denying the audience for eroge is primarily male, but instead of ALWAYS looking for the negatives, it would be nice to see bigger outlets also look at some of the positives of these “anime sex games”.
Meru makes a great point here about emotional engagement. Even in nukige that emphasises sex over narrative, developers and writers make an effort to construct characters in such a way that make us care about them: they provide them with personality, backstory, character traits, tics and habits… all the things that come together to make that character feel more like “a person” and less like just some text, graphics and sounds.
And her preference for seeing sexual scenes in the context of a healthy relationship is by no means exclusive to women, either; speaking for myself, I certainly struggle to engage with straight-up context-free porn (unless I happen to have what can euphemistically be described as “the raging horn”; it happens to the best of us!), whereas if there’s a significant attempt to invest me in the characters involved before anything even remotely sexual happens, I feel extremely emotionally fulfilled when things do proceed to another level. By extension, those erotic scenes, when they happen, feel much more powerful and meaningful (both emotionally and outright physically) as a result.
This is a particular strength of LOVE³ -Love Cube-, which takes plenty of time to introduce its main heroines and develop their relationships with the protagonist before anything lewd happens, but it’s something that Japanese visual novel writers in general have become extraordinarily proficient at as the medium has developed; the Grisaia series’ use of sex scenes as an integral part of character development is particularly noteworthy in this regard, but there are countless other great examples.
Meru speaking up about Grayson’s article also raises another important point: these games are made by people. They don’t just appear from the aether, ready and waiting to fulfil every fantasy of heterosexual straight men without question. They’re the creation of substantial teams consisting of real people: real people who designed the characters; real people who wrote the prose and dialogue; real people who localised that dialogue to bring the work to a broader audience; real people who composed the music to complement the characters and the events that unfold; real people who drew 2D artwork and constructed 3D models; real people who animated characters and cutscenes; real people who provided their voices to play the roles of the various characters. And plenty more besides.
With this in mind, it feels fundamentally disrespectful to write off the work of so many real people as just an “anime sex game” — or to discard it based on its target audience. In the case of something like LOVE³ -Love Cube-, it’s not hard to imagine it being a particularly meaningful creation for its artist Ishikei, for example, since it’s a highly polished, quality product that features their artwork: something they can (and should) be proud to say they contributed to the creation of. On top of that, Neko Work artist Sayori’s contributions to the Live2D side of things also provides a rare opportunity for Ishikei’s work to be seen in motion; characters well and truly coming to life rather than being confined to the printed page. And not just during erotic scenes, either.
Everything we’ve talked about so far is true for non-explicit games, too; speak to any Senran Kagura fan and they’ll happily talk your ear off about their favourite girl, with how much they want to fuck them being pretty low down the list of priorities in most instances. Senran Kagura has endured and developed as it has done over the course of the last eight years because of this fact; most of the more recent Senran Kagura games go as far as de-emphasising the original plot in favour of in-depth character explorations and developing the relationships between the gradually expanding cast.
But even if the Senran Kagura series were ever to develop in an 18+ direction — unlikely, given that it is primarily developed as a console series, but let’s ponder hypotheticals for a moment — it would be absolutely fine, because these characters and their relationships are so well-established at this point that it would actually be rather heartwarming and emotional to see some of the more obvious “ships” get an opportunity to finally spend some on-screen intimate time together.
Emotional engagement is extremely important for a healthy relationship. And the most memorable relationships in games acknowledge both this and the fact that emotional intimacy often brings with it the desire to be physically intimate, too. And, I can’t emphasise this enough, that is very much OKAY!
I made a specific effort to talk about this side of things when I wrote about LOVE³ -Love Cube-. I wanted to be completely honest about it, so I went so far as to describe my reaction to both the emotional and the erotic scenes in detail. While I was nervous about being quite so honest about the latter side of things in particular as it’s something that it’s easy to dance around without really saying anything, my honesty in that regard ended up being very well-received. (I will happily say that I was heavily inspired here by my good friend Infernal Monkey, whose extremely NSFW onahole review blog is one of the most admirably honest — and entertaining — places on the Internet.)
It’s popular in progressive circles these days to criticise heterosexual men for being unable or unwilling to open up and talk about their feelings and emotions. However, were a man to admit that they found themselves emotionally attracted to a particular character to such a degree that they harboured a desire to be physically intimate with them, you can bet that the emotional aspect would be quickly discarded in favour of branding the man in question a pervert (or worse) — or perhaps just pathetic for finding a fictional character attractive.
This seems somewhat self-defeating; if you want men to start talking about how they’re feeling, you need to then accept those feelings, whatever they might be, and then you can move on from there. (Go play Blue Reflection if this concept is difficult to grasp; that game is literally about understanding and accepting feelings that might be alien to you, and as such is a title I strongly recommend to anyone interested in developing their empathy… or just playing a gorgeous, emotional game.)
It doesn’t stop there, however; all of the above goes out of the window if we’re talking about LGBTQ+ content. LGBTQ+ audiences are encouraged to be open about this sort of thing, and LGBTQ+ content is typically highlighted in publications that are often noticeably negative towards heterosexual content.
But that shouldn’t be it. Everyone should be encouraged to be open and honest about this sort of thing. No-one should be shamed for their preferences and the things they enjoy. No-one should be excluded or made to feel invalid based on such an important part of their overall identity. And at the moment, articles like Grayson’s in particular make a specific point to suggest that content intended for heterosexual males is somehow a problem because of a perceived lack of content for other audiences.
It’s important to remember that just because a piece of media was developed with a heterosexual male audience in mind, that doesn’t mean it will end up with an exclusively heterosexual male audience. This personal account, written by martial arts instructor “Atma Weapon”, describes how Senran Kagura’s Katsuragi helped her come to terms with her painful past and her identity as a lesbian, and remains an incredibly powerful piece of writing. It’s been one of my favourite examples of what we’re talking about here ever since I first read it a couple of years back, but I’m sure it’s not the only one out there like it.
And, on top of that, Grayson’s implication that LGBTQ+ content is lacking on storefronts such as Steam is simply inaccurate; just here on MoeGamer we’ve seen titles such as Ne no Kami and The Expression: Amrilato (both of which are available on Steam), which feature FxF relationships; popular localisers MangaGamer and JAST both have several explicit MxM eroge in their portfolios; and companies like Aksys specialise in otome games, which are specifically designed to primarily appeal to heterosexual women. These games exist, but as we’ve seen, the commercial press in particular is bad at talking about them. And especially bad at researching them before shooting their mouth off.
We need to get better at talking about sex. Sex is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a healthy, natural part of human existence, whether you are a heterosexual male who gets off on squishy, curvy mamas with big boobies or a genderfluid pansexual whose preferences change by the hour. Everyone should be able to enjoy themselves without judgement — so long as they’re not hurting anyone or breaking any laws, obviously. No-one should be excluded. And no-one should be shamed for enjoying one of the most pleasurable things life has to offer.
Two of Steam’s top games last month were anime sex games? I say great; let’s make it a regular occurrence!
More about LOVE³ -Love Cube-
More about Custom Order Maid 3D 2
More about Senran Kagura
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
—
Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
Roguelikes are big business today, but they’ve been around for a long time.
Much like many early games, they originated as mainframe affairs that didn’t get home ports until much later, when ambitious programmers decided to see exactly what they could get their micros to do.
A-Rogue is what happened when Robert Jung decided to take the original Rogue and rewrite it in Atari BASIC for 48K Atari home computers. He did a pretty good job considering the limitations he had to work within!
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
Horror games really took off with the advent of the “survival horror” subgenre that Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil introduced in the late ’90s.
That’s not to say that there were no horror games prior to that, however. And one of the most creepy, disturbing and unsettling of them all was Uninvited by Icom Simulations.
Uninvited was one of Icom’s “MacVentures” series of point-and-click games, but it was ported to numerous platforms after it proved popular on its original platform. One of those was Atari ST, so here we are…
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
The Gessen girls, introduced in Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus on PlayStation Vita and pretty much a fixture ever since, are certainly a distinctive lot.
Taking a rather different approach to being “good” shinobi than Asuka and friends at Hanzou National Academy, the students of Gessen Girls’ Academy learned everything they know about the world from their adoptive “grandfather” Kurokage.
And that includes their musical tastes, which is reflected in the games’ soundtracks; Gessen girls’ themes make extensive use of Western art music. So I thought that might be interesting to take a closer look at.
As the “leader” of the Gessen crew — and, if you listen to some people, the new “face” of the series having shunted Asuka aside — Yumi cuts a striking figure with her alabaster skin, her piercing icy blue eyes… and her obsession with cuteneth, puri.
While her narratives in Shinovi and Estival Versus helped her come to terms with her grief over the loss of Kurokage, she still clearly carries great sadness around in her heart. Which, naturally, is reflected in her music.
For Master Kurokage from Senran Kagura Estival Versus
Her theme from Shinovi Versus, “For Master Kurokage”, is based on the Dies Irae movement of Mozart’s famous Requiem — widely regarded as one of the most powerful, mournful compositions ever created. And even more so given the context: Mozart died at the age of just 35 before he was able to complete it, though the work was completed a year later by German composer Süssmayr.
Dies Irae from Requiem by W. A. Mozart
“Dies Irae” translates to “Day of Wrath” or “Day of Judgement”, and is thus eminently fitting for Yumi’s outlook on morality and that of the Gessen girls in general, at least at the outset of Shinovi Versus. While the Hanzou girls always make an effort to understand their opponents — which leads to them developing an initially uneasy but subsequently very close and genuine friendship with their rivals in Hebijo/Crimson Squad — Kurokage taught the Gessen girls the rather Biblical lesson that evil is evil and should be destroyed at all costs, regardless of consequences.
Grandfather's Wish from Senran Kagura Estival Versus
Yumi’s Estival Versus theme actually combines two pieces of music together: firstly, there’s another extract from Requiem, in this case the Lacrimosa, but this is also combined with the “Aquarium” movement from Camille Saint-Saëns The Carnival of the Animals.
Lacrimosa from Requiem by W. A. Mozart
Aquarium from The Carnival of the Animals by C. Saint-Saëns
The Lacrimosa, like Dies Irae, comes from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass and continues the theme of “judgement”. Rather than wrath, however, Lacrimosa (which translates to “weeping”) is a more mournful affair that tends to be associated with Mary, mother of Jesus. This is, once again, very suitable for Yumi, who, despite appearances, occasionally shows herself to have deep sorrow in her heart.
As for the addition of Aquarium from The Carnival of the Animals to the mix, there are a few main reasons for this. Firstly, all of Estival Versus’ character themes are associated with the concept of “festivals” in some way — the game itself is set during a twist on a traditional Japanese bon festival, after all — and this is particularly true for Gessen’s themes. “Carnival” is another word for “festival” — pretty simple stuff.
However, there’s another layer to it; Yumi’s mastery of ninjutsu is associated with the ice element and, as any good scientist will tell you, ice is made of water. Also pretty simple. But when put together we have a nice combination of musical factors that reflect Yumi’s history and personality rather nicely.
Shiki is an interesting character — and obviously presented a significant challenge for XSEED’s localisers when bringing Shinovi Versus and its follow-ups West! This is because rather than using standard, formal Japanese, she speaks in a vernacular typically associated with the fashion-conscious, heavily made-up gyaru subculture, which doesn’t have a direct analogue in English. What is pretty close, however, is the stereotypical “Valley Girl” accent and dialect as popularised by American popular media, so that’s what she’s stuck with in the English localisation.
On top of that, it seems that while Kurokage was still part of the Gessen girls’ life, he wanted Shiki to learn English in order to appear more “fancy” — and perhaps to tone down her gyaru-ness. In the English translation, this was switched to her learning French — a common swap when localising this sort of thing — though if you listen to the voices you can clearly hear her bellowing various phrases in broken English on occasion. She is, after all, pretty Japanese ninja.
For Serious from Senran Kagura Estival Versus
Shiki’s theme in Shinovi Versus is based on the first movement, Allegro non molto, from Winter, the fourth of Vivaldi’s cycle of violin concerti, The Four Seasons. While the connection here might not be readily apparent, since the gyaru subculture is, you might say, not particularly associated with the more “artistic” or “cultural” side of things.
Winter from The Four Seasons by A. Vivaldi
In order to understand why Shiki’s themes in general tend to have something to do with seasons, one need only look at the kanji that make up her name: 四季 (shi ki), which translate directly and literally to “four seasons”. Pretty straightforward. And the choice of Winter specifically in Shinovi Versus may be a reference to both her classmate Yumi’s ice association — or the fact that some of the levels in that game are covered in snow. Or perhaps it’s just a cool theme whose energy fits Shiki nicely.
Cookin' is a Piece of Cake! from Senran Kagura Bon Appetit
Shiki’s theme in Senran Kagura Bon Appetit follows the “four seasons” rule again, but this time rather than drawing from Vivaldi’s famous set of concerti, it instead makes use of one of Mendelssohn’s collection of solo piano pieces, Songs Without Words. This was an ongoing project throughout Mendelssohn’s life and career, and ultimately ended up consisting of eight volumes of six “songs” each.
Spring Song from Songs Without Words by F. Mendelssohn
Shiki’s “song” here is based on Spring Song, the sixth song from Mendelssohn’s 62nd opus, and a melody sometimes known as Camberwell Green after the area of London where it was composed. The cheerful major key of the melody fits Shiki’s personality to a tee, though Bon Appetit’s interpretation is rather more energetic than the fairly sedate original!
Je Suis La Ninja Japonaise from Senran Kagura Estival Versus
The original source for Shiki’s Estival Versus theme was tricky to track down, but we had some clues and patterns to go on. The combination of “four seasons” and “festival” leads to one piece of music in particular: Tchaikovsky’s February from his The Seasons cycle of piano pieces, which is also known as Carnival.
February - Carnival from The Seasons by P. I. Tchaikovsky
This is another piece that fits rather nicely with Shiki’s overall style and personality; its loose association with late winter is a callback to her Shinovi Versus track, while its energetic, chaotic nature reflects her somewhat unpredictable, joyous personality. It’s perhaps not as well known a piece as her other tracks, but it’s definitely very fitting.
Murakumo is a study in contrasts. When masked, her voice is deep, ominous and imposing; when unmasked, it is high-pitched and squeaky as her true, shy personality comes to the fore. Her musical themes reflect the harsh, aggressive front she puts up to the world in an attempt to keep herself safe — and also the fact that she is passionate about her hobby of drawing action-packed manga.
Masked Princess from Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus
In Shinovi Versus, Murakumo’s theme is based on Prokofiev’s Dance of the Pagan Monster from his Scythian Suite. The suite as a whole was originally intended as a score for a ballet, but when it was rejected, the composer reworked it into a self-contained orchestral suite, creating a spectacular and influential set of instrumental pieces in the process.
Dance of the Pagan Monster from Scythian Suite by S. Prokofiev
It’s a dramatic piece that most certainly calls to mind the monstrous ogre mask that Murakumo almost perpetually hides her face behind, and reflects the fact that she does her best to intimidate her enemies through her Sengoku-inspired attire in general. It gets to a point where everyone is wise to this, however, but most people respect Murakumo’s anxiety and desire to remain masked for the majority of the time; removing Murakumo’s mask against her will is one of the most shocking things you can do in a Senran Kagura game!
I Got It! -Fusion of Sci-Fi and Cooking- from Senran Kagura Bon Appetit
Murakumo’s theme in Bon Appetit reflects both the intimidating facade she tries to maintain with her mask, and her personal narrative of attempting to come up with a new twist on a science fiction story for her latest manga. What better way to blend these elements than with Holst’s Planets suite?
Mars from The Planets by G. Holst
One of the most recognisable parts of The Planets that can be clearly heard in Murakumo’s Bon Appetit theme is Mars, Bringer of War. This dramatic, stirring piece of music was extremely influential on a lot of modern soundtrack composers — fans of John Williams’ work in particular will recognise a lot of distinctly Star Wars-esque harmonies in this!
Jupiter from The Planets by G. Holst
Almost as recognisable is Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity — or more specifically, the latter section of that piece, which is perhaps better known as the hymn I Vow To Thee, My Country, which Holst also composed by excising this specific section and tweaking it slightly to fit the lyrics of a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice. One can easily interpret Murakumo’s adoption of tradition Sengoku-era dress in her Shinobi Transformation form as being patriotic — and I Vow To Thee, My Country is regarded as a highly patriotic song, particularly associated with Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom.
My Vow from Senran Kagura Estival Versus
Murakumo’s theme from Estival Versus was a little trickier to pinpoint the source(s) of than her previous tracks, since the melodic lines are a little harder to pick out. It seems to be commonly agreed to be based at least partially on Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, a dramatic and terrifying orchestral piece made particularly famous by Disney’s Fantasia, but the opening harmonies and dramatic chords are straight out of Sibelius’ patriotic celebration piece, Finlandia.
Night on Bald Mountain by M. Mussorgsky
Finlandia by J. Sibelius
Of these pieces, Finlandia is the most in keeping with the “festival” theme of Estival Versus, since it was literally composed for a “celebration” of sorts — or more accurately, an event called the Press Celebrations, which was actually a covert protest against the encroaching censorship of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Finland, it seems, had its fair share of problems with Russia, so in revenge they developed a language that consisted entirely of consonants and umlauts to deter further invasions.
Once again, we can make a tenuous link to patriotism here; Finlandia is a composition filled with national pride, and a section of it was later adapted into a patriotic hymn that remains one of the country’s most important national songs to this day. Murakumo, of course, knows little of Finland’s struggles, but it’s clear that somewhere beneath that mask, she’s deeply proud of her Japanese heritage.
Yozakura is the “mother” of the Gessen group; she tries her best to be the most responsible, and is often depicted taking care of them by doing housework, chores and cooking. Indeed, her primary motivation in Bon Appetit is simply to be able to feed her friends and keep everyone happy.
Floral Freedom from Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus
Her Shinovi Versus theme is probably one of the most recognisable: it’s very, very obviously based on Beethoven’s incredibly famous “Moonlight” sonata for piano — specifically, its iconic first movement.
Adagio Sostenuto from Sonata Quasi Fantasia by L. V. Beethoven
This is, in many ways, the perfect Gessen piece, since it reflects the sadness present in all the girls’ hearts at the loss of their adoptive grandfather and the fact that they have been left in a hostile world to find their own way and determine how best to approach the fight for “good”. For Yozakura specifically, it’s very appropriate because her name’s kanji (夜桜) translate to “cherry blossoms at night”.
My Ultimate Feast from Senran Kagura Bon Appetit
Yozakura’s Bon Appetit track might not immediately appear to have any particular influences from Western art music, instead sounding somewhat more like a Latin dance party. But let it proceed into its distinctive third segment and you’ll hear a very famous piece of music: Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk from Debussy’s Children’s Corner suite of piano pieces.
Golliwogg's Cake-Walk from Children's Corner by C. Debussy
The term “Golliwogg” tends not to be used these days due to its racist implications, but one could argue its inherent political incorrectness can be seen as a reflection of how Yozakura has a tendency to slip into foul-mouthed Kansai dialect whenever she gets mad or flustered. She doesn’t get outright racist, mind you, but she still comes out with a few things that might make you blush.
Instead, it’s perhaps better to focus on the larger work that Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk is part of: Children’s Corner, a set of six piano pieces that Debussy wrote in order to reflect various aspects of childhood. Looking at it in this way, we can interpret Yozakura’s adoption of this theme as an attempt to enjoy the childhood she never really got to have fun with — and the way that she, in many ways, sees the other Gessen girls as her “children” at times.
Ready to Say Goodbye from Senran Kagura Estival Versus
Yozakura’s Estival Versus theme, meanwhile, leans hard on the festival angle with an energetic piece one can imagine a tightly choreographed — perhaps even ritualistic — dance unfolding to. And, indeed, it is based on a piece quite simply called Ritual Fire Dance.
Ritual Fire Dance by M. de Falla
The piece was popularised by composer Manuel de Falla’s own piano arrangement, but it was originally an orchestral piece composed for a ballet called El amor brujo (or The Bewitched Love). The scene in which the piece appears sees a young girl haunted by the ghost of her dead husband, and her performance of a ritual dance in order to reveal and exorcise him.
This is, essentially, what the plot of Estival Versus as a whole is all about: each of the girls are carrying around the pain of someone important that they have lost, and the overall aim of the event that they find themselves participating in is to allow them to let go of this grief from the past.
Finally, we come to Minori, the most childlike member of the Gessen cast — and a character who plays host to some of the most recognisable, memorable themes in the series.
Let's Play! from Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus
Minori’s theme from Shinovi Versus is immediately recognisable, even if you might not be able to actually name it immediately. If it’s on the tip of your tongue, let me put you out of your misery: it’s the Russian Dance from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite.
Russian Dance from The Nutcracker Suite by P. I. Tchaikovsky
The Nutcracker suite is home to some of the most memorable themes in all of Western art music, and is very strongly associated with the Christmas period. Given Minori’s child-like behaviour and love of playing, this is eminently suitable for her personality, since it brings to mind mental associations of traditional toys and joyful, innocent play — certainly a far cry from the world of shinobi.
3 Minutes of Hustle and Bustle Cooking from Senran Kagura Bon Appetit
Minori’s Bon Appetit theme was driving me nuts because it’s one of those pieces I know the sound of really well, but wasn’t sure I’d ever actually really known the name of. It turns out I was correct in that regard; I was completely unfamiliar with both the composer and the original name, even though I could happily sing along with this joyful little tune. To once again put you out of your misery, it is known as Parade of the Tin Soldiers by Leon Jessel.
Parade of the Tin Soldiers by L. Jessel
Leon Jessel was a German composer who ended up tortured and killed by the Gestapo because he stood up to the Nazis in the late ’30s and early ’40s. So that’s a nice and cheery thought. However, this piece — by far the most well-known of his compositions — is very much associated with Christmas, so if you don’t think too much about the “tortured and killed” part, it’s a rather jolly little number that fits Minori very well.
Watch Me! from Senran Kagura Estival Versus
And appropriately enough, the last piece for today — Minori’s theme from Estival Versus — is based on the Finale movement from Camille Saint-Saëns The Carnival of the Animals, providing a nice bookend to what we’ve looked at today after Yumi’s theme also incorporated elements of this delightful cycle of tunes.
Finale from The Carnival of the Animals by C. Saint-Saëns
The Finale of Carnival of the Animals is a wonderfully joyful, energetic number that brings the whole thing to a dramatic close while incorporating elements of most of the preceding movements. Whether played by full orchestra or piano duet, it’s a masterpiece of organised chaos — and few would say it’s not a fitting way for us to wrap up today’s exploration of Gessen’s themes and their links to Western art music.
There. Hopefully that puts all that to rest. Although if anyone can figure out what — if anything — Yumi’s theme in Bon Appetit is based on, I’m all ears!
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
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Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
In today’s episode, the Warriors of Light score their first major victory over the Four Fiends and cleanse the Cavern of Earth once and for all.
The fact that this part of the game makes you seek out the advice of an inconveniently located sage then re-run a dungeon in a different context was something pretty distinctive at the time of original release; an audience of players more accustomed to linear “straight line to the finish” games may well have found themselves surprised and baffled when they discovered what was necessary in order for them to progress.
We now know that to be the nature of RPGs, of course; but someone had to define and codify the conventions we take for granted today, didn’t they?
New Zealand, as beautiful a country as it is, is not a place that gets a lot of attention. I mean, it’s tucked away down there right in the corner of the map where everyone forgets about it.
However, back in 1988, the country left a sufficiently lasting impression on one of Taito’s programmers that, upon his return from holiday, he wanted to make it a setting for a new arcade game.
The result was The New Zealand Story. And it’s one of Taito’s most interesting games.
In The New Zealand Story, you take on the role of Tiki, a kiwi (the bird, not the fruit) who is out to rescue his kidnapped friends. They’ve all been kidnapped by an evil leopard seal, you see, so it’s up to Kiwi to save them all before, if certain mechanics of the game are to be taken literally, he is dragged into hell, never to see the sunshine of New Zealand ever again.
Although superficially resembling some of Taito’s earlier games such as Bubble Bobble, The New Zealand Story eschews the single-screen “kill ’em all” approach in favour of larger, scrolling levels that Tiki must explore. Tiki is able to jump — but not fly, since Kiwis are flightless birds — and fire a limitless supply of arrows from the bow he is carrying around with him, but the aim is not to defeat all the enemies. Rather, it’s simply to make it to the exit of the level, where one of his kidnapped friends is waiting to be released.
Since it was more exploration-based than many of Taito’s previous platformers, The New Zealand Story incorporated an interesting feature that we take for granted in our games today: a minimap. This was very simplistic, consisting only of a rectangle that represented the level’s complete area rather than showing the details of platforms and obstacles, but it did update to show Tiki’s position in real time, as well as the location of the exit point.
Along the way, Tiki has to deal with all manner of hazards, including enemies, spikes and water. The game was particularly noteworthy for being an early example of a platform game that featured multiple ways of getting around — as well as running and jumping on the ground, Tiki could also swim through the water and hijack enemy flying machines to take to the skies, and it was often essential to do all of these things to reach the exit.
This sort of thing was still pretty new to the platform game genre at the time — Super Mario Bros. 3, which popularised many of these twists on the concept of “mobility” through its iconic power-ups, came out a month after The New Zealand Story hit arcades — and so Taito’s game was, quite rightly, seen as something new and exciting.
It was especially well-received upon its conversion to home computers in 1989. The various ports for 8- and 16-bit microcomputers were published in Europe by Ocean Software — a prominent British game company at the time — and was particularly well-regarded in its ZX Spectrum incarnation — though British publication Amiga Power also declared the 16-bit port the “19th best game of all time” in its pilot issue, bundled with Amiga Format in May 1991.
One reason for its noteworthy popularity in Europe — and especially among Amiga owners — was its inclusion in Commodore’s popular “Batman Pack” bundle for the Amiga 500 computer. This went on sale in September of 1989 and sold a mighty 2 million units, each of which contained, among other things, a copy of The New Zealand Story.
The New Zealand Story actually holds up very well today. Its platforming controls might initially feel a bit stiff to those more accustomed to modern games that have a bit more momentum about them, but they are responsive and tight, and you always feel like you’re in complete control of Tiki. The jumping controls are particularly good; the amount of time you press the button differentiates between a short hop and a larger leap, and the distinction feels clear and natural. It’s rare you’ll find yourself accidentally bashing Tiki’s head on a spiked ceiling or plummeting to your doom because you didn’t jump high enough.
The level designs are consistently interesting, too. Although much smaller than your typical, say, Super Mario level, they make up for this in the fact that they’re not simple left-to-right affairs. In fact, most levels send you on a rather meandering, winding path throughout their scenery, in some cases feeling like an elaborate puzzle as much as a test of dexterity. Throw in the swimming and flying mechanics and you have a extremely varied set of levels to work your way through.
An interesting twist on the usual conventions of the arcade platformer is that many enemies don’t immediately kill Tiki if you just run into them, unlike in, say, Bubble Bobble. Rather, unless the enemy is obviously “dangerous” (i.e. covered in spikes, usually), Tiki will only lose a life if he is hit with a projectile. This allows you to enjoy exploring the levels a lot more; it still pays to be cautious, but you’re not constantly living life on a knife-edge.
The boss encounters are imaginative and cool; rather than acting as simple bullet sponges, the bosses all have intriguing mechanics you have to deal with. The first, for example, is a whale encased in ice; his icy shield makes it impossible to damage him with your arrows, so in order to defeat him you have to actually allow him to eat you, at which point you can fill him with pointy things from the inside.
And there always feels like there’s something new to discover, too; aside from point-yielding items, enemies sometimes drop new weapons or power-ups, and many of these behave in radically different ways to Tiki’s default bow and arrow. The laser gun, for example, fires horizontally at extreme speed, while the bombs travel in a slight arc out from you before exploding and taking out anything in their blast radius. Learning when is a good time to grab a power-up and when to leave it behind is an essential skill to learn if you hope to ever one-credit clear The New Zealand Story.
Like many of Taito’s older properties, The New Zealand Story isn’t that readily available on modern systems. It is, however, part of the first Taito Legends pack for PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC — the two volumes of this are an essential part of any retro enthusiast’s collection — and got a substantial reimagining for Nintendo DS in 2007. The PC Engine version was also available via the Wii’s Virtual Console service in Japan, but unfortunately at the time of writing, that’s no longer an option due to Nintendo’s closure of the platform’s digital services.
Still, it’s worth finding a way to play The New Zealand Story as it’s a fun platformer with some interesting twists on the usual formula. And, of course, it gives our Kiwi cousins some much needed appreciation for something other than Lord of the bloody Rings.
More about The New Zealand Story
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
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Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
One of my favourite things about working on this series is how I come across interesting bits of trivia during my research.
Did you know, for example, that today’s game, 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, was the work of Carol Shaw, an immensely talented programmer perhaps best known for one of my favourite games of all time: River Raid?
It’s not really all that surprising that someone who is good at programming worked on more than one thing in their career, I guess, but, hey, I found it interesting. And 3D Tic-Tac-Toe is a lot harder than it looks!
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
Goodness me, the last couple of weeks have been some of MoeGamer’s best for a long time in terms of visitors. So a hearty “welcome” if you’re new around here!
I’m delighted that so many new people have come along to see what I’m up to; I’m perhaps less delighted about the circumstances which prompted such an influx of readers — as you’ll find out more about shortly — but at the very least, I hope those new readers have found a place where they can enjoy their favourite things without judgement or censure.
As you’ll know if you’ve been following for a while, I don’t have any great grand plans for MoeGamer to be a one-stop daily gaming resource — I don’t really do “news”, for example — but I do make a point of, at the very least, taking titles the mainstream press have treated like crap and giving them the respect they deserve. So stick around if you want to see more… and check out what you might have missed this week in this article!
The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 27 – Death to the JRPG! – My podcasting buddy Chris and I settle down for an in-depth discussion about why we should stop using the term “JRPG” for such a broad array of diverse, unique games. Plus the usual news and “what we’ve been playing” segments.
Happy Birthdays: Someone Still Makes ‘Em Like They Used To – Remember “god games”? Populous, Mega-Lo-Mania and the like? I thought they’d died a death in the early 2000s, but it seems the creator of Harvest Moon decided they were long overdue a resurgence.
Warriors Wednesday: It’s A Trap… Again – You can count on several things in every Warriors game, chief among which is the fact that “it” is usually a trap. And today is no exception.
We Need To Get Better At Talking About Sex – An astronomically popular piece this week, suggesting that there really is an issue we need to do something about here; I look at how negative, derisive coverage of eroge and games that make sex appeal a key part of their aesthetic is doing a disservice to everyone — not just heterosexual male players.
Senran Kagura: An Almost-Comprehensive Look at Gessen’s Use of Classical Music – This extensively researched multimedia extravaganza of an article continues the current Cover Game feature with a look at where the distinctive musical themes for the characters from Gessen Girls’ Academy in Senran Kagura came from.
Final Fantasy Marathon: Wrath of the Lich King – Our Final Fantasy playthrough reaches a significant milestone: the first of the confrontations with the Four Fiends. Bring it on, Lich!
Taito Essentials: The New Zealand Story – As a nice quiet way to finish off the week after the earlier chaos, I take some time to look back on a thoroughly charming Taito platformer that does things a bit different from many of its contemporaries.
This week, we look at an impressive type-in listing that Antic magazine believed was the first ever Atari 8-bit port of the classic Rogue; a scary “MacVenture” that creeped out an awful lot of people I know; and an early Atari 2600 game from Carol “River Raid” Shaw!
First up, Patreon goodness! Right now, I’m supporting chaotic “old men (and Octav1us Kitten, who I also support) attempt to talk about games, usually fail” collective Digitiser 2000, the ever-grumpy (and always hilarious) Cheap Show Podcast, the wonderfully supportive Normal Happenings, independent games writing collective The Well-Red Mage and fountain of retro computer gaming knowledge Rob “Hellfire64” Caporetto, all of whom you can find out a bit more about by clicking through to their profiles.
Here’s a selection of recent YouTube and podcast goodness from several of this lot:
And from around the WordPress Reader this week:
The Guide on Being a Mature, Distinguished Gamer: Part 2 – Failure, Success and the Gaming Mindset (Games With Coffee) – Ryan Cheddi continues his ongoing series looking at gaming as a grown-up — this time taking a look at how we deal with success and failure, and how that might differ from the attitudes we held in our younger days.
Choosing sides: playing characters of the opposite sex (Later Levels) – Phil is well and truly back on the blogging train, and this latest piece echoes a lot of my own sentiments. Which, in turn, go rather against the common media narrative of “Gamers Don’t Want To Play as Girls”!
How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? (Episode 8) – What if We Get Lost? (Ecchi Hunter) – This is your regular reminder that if you’re not following Ecchi Hunter and you enjoy cheeky fanservice, you should correct that situation as soon as possible! You should also probably watch How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? because it’s fabulous and inspirational.
Advice for Creatives: Buy a Good Notebook (GeekOut UK) – terraphi offers some helpful advice for aspiring creatives that I can certainly vouch for — if you respect the materials with which you work, you’ll respect your own work more!
Don’t @ Me: Just Another Ten of my General Anime Opinions (Shallow Dives in Anime) – The clue’s in the title: Dewbond shares some interesting thoughts on a variety of anime, some of which you might find yourself wanting to check out! Regardless… don’t @ him.
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All right then. That’s another week over and done with. Thank you once again for your support and another hearty “welcome” if you’re new around here.
Don’t forget that if you enjoy what I do and want to help ensure I’m able to do more of it, you can support the site directly by buying my book (more of these coming soon!), by donating on Ko-Fi (for one-off contributions) or subscribing via Patreon (for ongoing pledges). MoeGamer is proudly ad-free because clickbait and hatebait suck, so these sources are my only means of getting paid for my work. Every dollar gets ploughed right back into this site, be it for hosting and administrative costs or helping me to expand my collection with new software and hardware to write about.
Thanks again, and I hope you continue to enjoy my work!
The MoeGamer Compendium, Volume 1 is now available! Grab a copy today for a beautiful physical edition of the Cover Game features originally published in 2016.
—
Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
If you’d like to support the site and my work on it, please consider becoming a Patron — click here or on the button below to find out more about how to do so. From just $1 a month, you can get access to daily personal blog updates and exclusive members’ wallpapers featuring the MoeGamer mascots.
If you want to show one-off support, you can also buy me a coffee using Ko-Fi. Click here or on the button below to find out more.
When the Senran Kagura series first launched, I’m not sure anyone could have quite predicted the trajectory it would take.
While some fans lament the fact that the series has deviated somewhat from its original course of “cool female ninjas fight youma, also there are breasts and bums”, I can’t say I’m the slightest bit sorry for the existence of games like Senran Kagura Bon Appétit (also known as Dekamori: Senran Kagura in Japan).
It’s a game that bills itself as a “hyper busty cooking battle”, and gives us the opportunity to see that enormous cast of delightful characters in a rather different context to normal. What’s not to like?
There’s some disagreement over whether or not Bon Appétit is a canonical part of the overall Senran Kagura narrative — indeed, the introduction to the game itself urges you not to take it too seriously — but to be honest, at this point it doesn’t really matter.
What does matter is that Bon Appétit was the first, convincing sign that the cast of Senran Kagura had grown beyond the constraints of their original genre and context; they had become a troupe of “virtual actors” in their own right, and this was just the first example of them turning their attention to something other than kicking the snot out of each other.
For longstanding series fans, Bon Appétit features a number of callbacks to the events of its immediate predecessors Burst on 3DS and Shinovi Versus on Vita. At the time Bon Appétit was first released for Vita, Shinovi Versus was regarded as a direct follow-up to Burst in narrative terms, and indeed this is still a plausible reading of the series, if not unanimously agreed on at the time of writing.
From here, it gets confusing, however, and no-one seems to quite be able to agree on the specifics; moreover, there’s not really been an official word on it, either.
Some argue that the two narrative routes through Burst represent a split timeline — and indeed, there are some inconsistencies between the two, so this is plausible — while others argue that Burst and second 3DS game Deep Crimson occupy a completely separate timeline to the rest of the series, though this then doesn’t explain how characters in Shinovi Versus and Bon Appétit make reference to the events of Burst. Unless, of course, we take into account the more recent release of Burst re-imagining Burst Re;Newal, which supposedly retcons the events of Burst into this “second timeline”… and who knows where the hell Senran Kagura 7even (which is, of course, actually the ninth, tenth or twelfth game in the series depending on whether you count… you know what, never mind) will fit into things at this point?
Confused yet? Don’t worry; everyone is. And, like I say, it doesn’t really matter. Because this is, at its heart, nothing more than a game about 22 thoroughly charming ninja girls entering a cooking competition in the hope of winning a Super Secret Ninja Art Scroll that can supposedly grant any wish. If you’ve played previous Senran Kagura games, you’ll get some nice series fanservice and references. If you’ve never played one… well, you might wonder what on Earth is going on, but there’s certainly no “prerequisite” to enjoying this on its own terms.
The narrative setup for Bon Appétit sees legendary master ninja, Asuka’s grandfather and colossal pervert Hanzou (of Hanzou Academy fame) establishing the First Annual Super Dish Cook-Off as an excuse for ogling a variety of pretty young things; he knew that the tempting prize of the aformentioned Super Secret Ninja Art Scroll would tempt both good and evil shinobi to the contest alike, since the girls have, at this point, all demonstrated that they have their own strong motivations for fighting and trying to better themselves.
From hereon, you can choose any of the 22 cast members — including the five girls from each of the Hanzou, Hebijo, Gessen and Crimson Squad groups, plus former “secret” characters Daidouji and Rin — and enjoy a unique story for each. These stories unfold in traditional Senran Kagura style, featuring a combination of full-screen “NVL-style” text narration to explore the protagonist’s inner thoughts and motivations, and “ADV-style” dialogue sequences with animated characters to show more “immediate” exchanges between individuals.
Each run through the game’s story mode consists of five rounds. Before the first round, you’ll have an NVL-style introduction to the character’s reasoning for entering the competition, followed by an ADV-style exchange with their first opponent, who will be someone that is personally significant to them in some way. After this, you have the first round of the competition, after which there’ll be another exchange between the two initial characters.
Following this, you compete in two more rounds of cooking competition against randomly selected opponents — there’s no narrative context to these — until you reach the fourth round, at which point the final two rounds are both presented as part of the character’s story. Beat all five rounds and there’s a final NVL section with an event image as your reward. A whole runthrough takes about 30-40 minutes, assuming you don’t have to retry any of the “battle” sequences.
So how do those battles work? Well, with this being a game about cooking, they of course unfold as a rhythm action affair that is strongly reminiscent of the genre’s PS1-PS2-era glory days.
You’re presented with two “lanes” on which button prompts move from right to left, and you have to hit the buttons and/or directions indicated when they reach the “ninja star” marker on the left side. Continually do this and you’ll build up a combo; make a mistake and you’ll break that combo. The victor is determined by a sliding “tug of war”-style meter at the top of the screen: do better and it will slide to the right; cock up and it will slide to the left. If you reach the end of the song and it’s right of centre, you win; on the left, and you lose.
There are three difficulty levels available, with each difficulty level affecting both note pattern density and the number of buttons you have to worry about. At the hardest difficulty, you’ll be using all four directions and all four face buttons with intense note patterns… and it is hard. Normal difficulty, however, provides a solid challenge for those who have a decent amount of experience with rhythm games, while Easy is very accessible for those who just want to enjoy the story.
There are a few additional mechanics layered atop the basics we’ve already talked about. First of these is the “Ninja Arts” meter in the corner of the screen. Fill this up and you can hit a shoulder button to unleash your ninja arts, which causes the background to burst into flames and all your successful hits to be worth more points. Continue to fill the meter while it is “active” and you’ll gain ever-increasing amounts of points, but make a mistake during a long combo and it can cause a big hit to the “tug of war” meter if you’re not careful.
The second mechanic involves a heart-shaped meter on the screen that gradually fills as you score points. Each song is split into three discrete segments, with a brief “appraisal” of how you’re doing between each. The first two allow you the opportunity to fill the two halves of the heart meter; if they are both filled by the time you reach the third segment, that part of the song will feature a special heart-shaped note for you to hit.
Successfully hit this, and you’ll get an extremely distracting animation of your opponent gyrating provocatively in the background for a brief period, but — assuming you still win — you’ll also have scored yourself a “Perfect Victory”. This has two main effects: firstly, you’ll get an extremely entertaining animation of Hanzou enjoying your victorious dish once the match is over, and secondly, you’ll have the opportunity to enjoy a “Special”, which consists of your opponent being stripped naked, covered in whipped cream and chocolate and made to pose seductively on a giant dessert dish.
Yes, this is Senran Kagura, so the series’ iconic clothes-blasting action is well and truly in evidence. Success in each of the segments of the song causes the losing contestant to have a layer of clothes explode dramatically off them, and scoring the aforementioned “Perfect Victory” blows their lingerie off as the coup de grâce, leaving them utterly humiliated in defeat.
At this point, it’s worth reiterating something worth noting about this aspect of the series that I’ve talked about before: while this side of things is most obviously there for the fanservice, it’s actually not especially unusual for nudity to be used in this way in Japanese popular media. Specifically, it can be seen as symbolic of the victorious combatant’s complete mastery and understanding of their opponent: gradually “stripping” the layers of defence away with their skilful battling until the loser is (in this case quite literally) laid bare in defeat. There are plenty of other examples of this in video games; Dungeon Travelers 2 is a great example.
There’s also a “skinship” aspect to this in Senran Kagura, too. If you’ve never come across this concept before, it refers to the idea of being comfortable in nudity around those you care about and trust, and is often seen represented as (typically same-sex) characters taking baths together. It’s not a sexual thing (though sometimes one thing can lead to another) but rather a simple sign that you are willing to open yourself up and make yourself completely vulnerable; you’re showing everything to someone that you trust, and demonstrating your belief that they will not take advantage of this or hurt you physically or emotionally.
Play any of the Senran Kagura games and you’ll notice that despite some initial embarrassment at their clothes exploding off, none of the girls actually appear to be the slightest bit bothered at simply being nude. In fact, after whatever situation caused them to end up in the buff this time around, it’s not at all uncommon to see them simply standing around starkers, chatting away to their opponent of a few moments ago as if nothing happened. On one level, this is simply comedically absurd, of course, but it can also be read as evidence that these girls are already completely at ease with one another. Even when self-professed sexual harassers such as Katsuragi are around.
But back to the gameplay. The 22 different songs on offer are enormously varied and range in difficulty from very easy but enjoyable to listen to (Hibari’s saccharine-sweet I Just Want to Marry Sweets) to monstrously difficult but irresistibly toe-tapping (Rin’s ’90s anime-inspired Prepare Yourself, Teacher). They also encompass a wide range of different styles and tempi: Ryouna’s track Frantic Self-Satisfaction is a delightful bit of downtempo howling dad rock, for example, while Yomi’s relentlessly energetic I Devote Myself To Bean Sprouts -My Lovely Bean Sprouts- sounds like a song from a lost Sonic game.
At this point, Japanese rhythm games have absolutely nailed the fine art of making the player feel connected to the music by making the note charts you play have direct, clear links to what you’re hearing. And Bon Appétit is no exception in this regard.
Sometimes you’ll simply be tapping out the rhythm of the main melody; at others, you’ll be banging out counter-rhythms, complementary off-beats or syncopated patterns, or perhaps assisting the rhythm section in their backing. The easiest difficulty perhaps feels a bit simple to feel much of a direct connection with the music, but both Normal and Hard make it very much feel like you’re part of the performance. Your Vita (or your controller, if you’re playing the PC port) becomes a musical instrument in its own right; successfully nailing a complex pattern in the middle of a challenging song feels just as satisfying as if you’d actually performed it yourself.
The game doesn’t overdo it with attempts to distract you, either; grit your teeth and maintain your focus on the note charts and you won’t have a problem; the entertaining background animations, meanwhile, provide plenty of things for a potential audience to watch, and you can catch enough of a glimpse of them during play to bring a smile to your face every time.
In fact, probably the most distracting thing in the gameplay is attempting to squeeze in the shoulder button hit required to trigger Ninja Arts; in the faster, more complex songs it can be difficult to find a suitable opportunity to fit this in without throwing off the rhythms your thumbs are busy banging out at the time. And once you lose your concentration in this way, it can sometimes be a little tricky to regain it — though unlike many other rhythm games, it’s not possible to fail a song in the middle here, so it absolutely is possible to claw back a victory after a disastrous middle 8.
As for the narrative component of the game? Well, it’s just as diverse as the songs on offer. While this is clearly intended to be an entertaining side story (or, perhaps more accurately, a set of 22 entertaining short stories) rather than something to be taken too seriously, the various characters’ routes don’t shy away from some interesting topics.
Miyabi’s story, for example, continues to explore her struggles over her gender identity introduced in Shinovi Versus; she feels guilt over wanting to abandon her more “masculine” aspects when those are the things that make her popular with a lot of her admirers.
Mirai’s, meanwhile, sees her coming at her self-esteem issues from a different angle from usual: rather than focusing on her flat chest, she wants to develop a more mature attitude that shows people they can rely on her, rather than feeling the need to “mother” her at all times.
Yagyuu’s story, as always, sees her attempting to understand her feelings towards Hibari — and trying to work out the best way to communicate the love she feels.
And Yomi’s, in which she comes to the realisation that she might be getting tired of her beloved bean sprouts, is a heartbreaking allegory for a struggling relationship.
At the other end of the seriousness spectrum, we have Asuka’s story, which is a 40-minute dick joke; Katsuragi’s, which is the same but for tits; Homura’s obsession with meat (and crab impressions) to the exclusion of all else; Daidouji’s desire to find something other than a giraffe to punch in the face; and Haruka’s earnest desire to unite the world by drugging everyone up to the eyeballs and making them dance the samba. There is, as they say, something for everyone to enjoy here.
And, like the other Senran Kagura games, there’s plenty of longevity here even once you’ve seen all 22 stories — which will take you quite some time! An arcade mode tasks you with clearing six narrative-free stages and attempting to record a high score (with online leaderboards) while a free mode allows you to practice any of the songs to your heart’s content. There are tons of clothes, accessories, hairstyles and sets of lingerie to unlock, trophies and achievements to attain and a dressing room to play around with.
And even if you’ve “done” everything, this is still an immensely entertaining game to just pick up and play for a few minutes. Pretty girls, great music, satisfying gameplay… and some truly delicious-looking food. Sounds like a fine way to spend an evening to me!
More about Senran Kagura
More about Senran Kagura Bon Appétit
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Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.
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