The story so far: In the beginning, Polygon’s Phil Kollar posted an article called “Atlus can do better than this creepy, porn-lite dungeon crawler“. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
With apologies to the late, great Douglas Adams for the bastardisation of his quotation, it’s worth exploring this subject a little further, if only to counter the extreme negativity of Kollar’s article — negativity which, frankly, appears to come from a position of ignorance as to what games such as Dungeon Travelers 2, the game under scrutiny in the article, actually involve.
You see, it’s okay to like ecchi or even hentai content. It’s also okay to not like ecchi and hentai content. Where it stops being okay is when someone who doesn’t like these things starts calling for publishers to stop catering to people who do like these things.
Why? Because if these games continue to exist, people who don’t like them have the option of not buying and supporting them with no harm done. If they don’t exist, meanwhile, the people who do like them have no option — they simply have to go without. And that doesn’t strike me as terribly fair; it would be a case of certain individuals having the power to act as the “morality police” on behalf of people who may not share their ideological viewpoint.
Is that a problem? You’re damn straight it is; let’s explore it in a little more detail.
My personal objections to the attitude on display in Kollar’s article have nothing to do with the oft-quoted protestations that progressive types are “not trying to take your games away” — even though this particular article makes the rather stern assertion that publisher Atlus “not only can but should do better” and, by extension, implies that they should really stop bringing these disgraceful, perverted games over because they are somehow A Bad Thing.
Polygon’s piece speaks from the same position of cultural ignorance that led to a vitriolic piece regarding Senran Kagura from the now-defunct Official Nintendo Magazine.
No, my main objection to the piece comes from the fact that Kollar is prepared to take a heavy-handed moral stance on a game that hasn’t been localised yet, that he hasn’t played and, judging from his comments, doesn’t appear to know a great deal about. He is, in other words, speaking from the same position of cultural ignorance that led to this vitriolic piece regarding Senran Kagura Burst from the now-defunct Official Nintendo Magazine. As you’ll know if you read my own piece on the Senran Kagura series as a whole, those games are a lot more than just “life and hometown” — as, indeed, are many other modern Japanese games that tend to be written off on the grounds of “fanservice”.
Let’s take Dungeon Travelers 2 specifically for the moment. I haven’t played the game either due to the fact it’s not out yet — the new Vita version only just hit Japan — but knowing what I do about Japanese games that tend to get talked about in this way, I found Kollar’s claim that “the goal is not to get one of the game’s many women to fight alongside you or to forge a deep relationship with them; it’s to eventually see them naked and probably doing something demeaning” rather hard to swallow. So I decided to look into things a little deeper.
Well, just the trailer casts aside one of Kollar’s arguments immediately; just 30 seconds in, the trailer asks “do you have the dungeon-crawling skills to form a party of female adventurers and seal away powerful monsters?” That sure sounds like “getting the game’s many women to fight alongside you” to me.
Just 30 seconds in, the trailer asks “do you have the dungeon-crawling skills to form a party of female adventurers and seal away powerful monsters?” That sure sounds like “getting the game’s many women to fight alongside you” to me.
Then there’s the official site, which is currently in “teaser” mode at the time of writing, but still manages to point out that the game allows you to “unlock sub-events while exploring to get closer to the girls in your party”. That sure sounds like “forging a deep relationship with them” to me.
And then we come to the crux of the matter: if you watched the trailer, doubtless you’ll have noticed a number of scenes throughout that appear to be pretty sexual in nature. Their exact context isn’t particularly clear in the video, but given that the girls are in various states of undress throughout each of these brief teasers, it is a fair assumption to make that these scenes are somehow sexual.
While Dungeon Travelers 2 isn’t narratively connected to the first Dungeon Travelers or indeed ToHeart2, it shares themes and mechanics — and it would be rather out of character for Aquaplus to put out something that didn’t involve pretty girls and relationships.
It’s a doubly fair assumption to make when we consider the somewhat convoluted lineage of the Dungeon Travelers series as a whole: the first Dungeon Travelers game (which we haven’t seen in the West, and which is unrelated to Dungeon Travelers 2 in narrative terms) was a spinoff from Leaf and Aquaplus’ romance visual novel ToHeart2, a game which was originally released on PS2 and subsequently ported to PC with erotic scenes added.
Dungeon Travelers, in turn, was an expanded “all-ages” (i.e. free of explicit depictions of sexual acts, though still featuring suggestive scenes) port of a dungeon crawling RPG featuring ToHeart2 characters called Final Dragon Chronicle: Guilty Requiem, one of four games included in ToHeart2 spinoff package Manaka de Iku no!!, which contained ero content. While Dungeon Travelers 2 isn’t narratively connected to the first Dungeon Travelers game or indeed ToHeart2, it shares themes and mechanics — and it would be rather out of character for publisher Aquaplus to put out something that didn’t involve pretty girls and relationships, since even its one-on-one fighting game Aquapazza features an in-depth visual novel-style story mode not unlike that found in Persona 4 Arena.
Okay. So, to return to the point, there is almost definitely lewdness of some description going on in Dungeon Travelers 2. Here’s the big question, then:
So what?
I find myself asking this question any time a Japanese game with any degree of lewdness hits the market, whether the game is overtly sexual (like Criminal Girls or, in places, Ar Tonelico), if it uses fanservice in a satirical manner (like in Omega Quintet and Hyperdimension Neptunia, the former of which you better believe I’ll be writing a whole lot about very soon) or if it uses suggestive or even explicit scenes to make a point about relationships (as seen in Time and Eternity, where the fanservice scenes reflect the protagonist’s sexual frustration, and as seen in eroge in general, where sexual scenes are used to represent a relationship progressing to a new level of intimacy — not always with happy results). So what?
The double standards between the public and press’ collective attitudes towards violence and sex in video games have never been more apparent than they have been following the aggressive rise of “progressive” politics on social media.
This isn’t to handwave away this content or pretend it doesn’t exist, mind you. Quite the opposite, in fact. While ecchi or hentai content is never the primary reason I personally come to a Japanese game, when handled effectively — and it is handled effectively far more often than mainstream critics like Kollar give it credit for — I am genuinely pleased, since I greatly respect any game willing to treat the subject of sexuality with any sort of sensitivity. Hell, I greatly respect any game that is willing to acknowledge that sexuality is actually a thing at all, since the double standards between the public and press’ collective attitudes towards violence and sex in video games have never been more apparent than they have been in recent years following the aggressive rise of “progressive” politics on social media.
Let’s take an example from another dungeon-crawling RPG that featured ecchi scenes — though to a somewhat lesser degree than Dungeon Travelers 2 appears to.
Demon Gaze was a fantastic game for numerous reasons, not least of which was its solid, Wizardry-inspired dungeon-crawling gameplay. But this was just one of several reasons I found it particularly noteworthy. Arguably the reason I found myself more drawn to Demon Gaze than any other first-person “gridder” dungeon-crawler I’d ever tried in the past was due to the fact that it actually bothered to fill its world with well-realised characters with whom you gradually developed a relationship as the story progressed.
The scene carries genuine conflict; the sight of her in bed is unmistakably erotic, but you can’t help but be aware that she appears to be suffering, leading to a uniquely dry-mouthed moment where it’s difficult to look away even though you know that now is really not the time to pop a boner.
Chief among these was Fran, the owner of the inn that acts as your “home base” between your numerous expeditions into increasingly perilous dungeons. When the game starts out, Fran is all business, but over time, you gradually come to understand one another better. You strike up a friendship that eventually looks like it might cross the line into something more.
By the time you reach a scene in which you find a feverish Fran in bed, clad only in some rather impractical-looking lingerie, you’re well and truly invested in the relationship, and this moment carries meaning. It also carries genuine conflict; the sight of her in bed like this is unmistakably erotic, but at the same time you can’t help but be aware that she appears to be suffering, and this leads to a uniquely dry-mouthed moment where it’s very difficult to look away even though you know that now is really not the time to pop a boner (where applicable).
It was, in short, a scene that was powerful and effective at advancing the narrative and the characterisation of both Fran and the player-protagonist.
I’m not going to deny that there’s a huge and unreasonable disparity between the provision of fanservice aimed primarily at a heterosexual male audience and that aimed primarily at any other specific demographic — though it’s worth noting that this is a situation that is more of an issue in the West than Japan due to publishers and localisation companies seemingly being hesitant to spend time and resources bringing otome, yaoi and yuri games over. These games exist, they’re just not getting localised at the same rate.
If games such as Dungeon Travelers 2 and titles like it are truly “for all intents and purposes, a porn game” then why do they attract such dedicated, passionate followings whose conversations are inevitably far, far more than “which girl is hottest”?
It’s also worth noting that the industry as a whole is taking baby steps in the right direction in this regard, with organisations such as MangaGamer, Aksys Games and Idea Factory International all making a point of acknowledging these other demographics with games aimed specifically at them. Not only that, it’s also worth noting that just because something isn’t aimed specifically at you doesn’t make you incapable of enjoying it. I — a heterosexual dude, if that wasn’t abundantly clear already — played and adored Otomate’s Sweet Fuse, for example, an otome game brought to the west by Aksys, and I’m actually rather curious to play something along the lines of MangaGamer’s recent yaoi title No, Thank You!! Conversely, titles and franchises like Hyperdimension Neptunia and Senran Kagura have heterosexual female fans just as passionate and dedicated as their male counterparts.
But why, and how? If games such as Dungeon Travelers 2 and titles like it are truly, as Kollar says, “for all intents and purposes, a porn game, or the closest you can get to a porn game on the PlayStation Vita” then why do they attract such dedicated, passionate followings whose conversations are inevitably, in my experience, far, far more than “which girl is hottest”? Why do these people — including myself, I’m happy to admit — get so riled up when inflammatory pieces such as Kollar’s diatribe are published? And why would these people get so defensive about what is strongly implied to be their wanking material?
The answer is pretty simple, and if you’re reading this you probably already know it, but I’ll spell it out anyway. It’s because these games are not porn or wanking material, even when they include explicit sexual content. Oh, sure, nukige is a subset of Japanese games that very much does fit these descriptions — though even the most gleefully gratuitous nukige tend to at least make something of an effort with story and characterisation, in stark contrast to the Western “gonzo” porn style, which is arguably the nukige subgenre’s closest analogue — but we’re not talking about nukige.
Sex and art have been inextricably tied together for thousands of years. Not everyone wants sex in their art, and that’s fine. The problem comes when the people who don’t want sex in their art start to try and dictate what everyone should or should not be comfortable with.
We are, however, talking about games that happen to feature sexual content ranging from lightly titillating to full-on explicit, all in the service and context of atmosphere, emotional engagement, characterisation and the depiction of realistic, believable relationships. We’re talking about games in which you’re invited to become uniquely intimate with characters that you, in many cases, spend tens or even hundreds of hours with. We’re talking about games that acknowledge the fact that attraction — be it sexual, emotional or, more commonly, a combination of both — is a natural and beautiful thing, even when it involves a fictional character. We’re talking about the very essence of moe, in other words, not to mention the deeply mistaken assumption that the presence of sex doesn’t immediately invalidate anything else the work has to say.
Sex and art have been inextricably tied together for thousands of years. Not everyone wants sex in their art, though, and that’s fine; no-one is saying that every game needs sexual content. Where the problem comes, then, is when the people who don’t want sex in their art — or, more specifically, don’t want explorations of sex that they disagree with or find objectionable in their art, since even Kollar claims in his piece that he thinks “there should be more games featuring sex” — start to try and dictate what everyone should or should not be comfortable with.
In other words, it’s time that critics such as Kollar and the many others who parrot the same predictable talking points at every opportunity acknowledge the fact that if games are to be taken seriously as an art form — and they absolutely, positively should be — then we must all understand that sexuality is something creators should be willing and able to explore as they see fit. It’s time that Japan’s efforts to explore and push these boundaries — sometimes very successfully, sometimes less so — are recognised, celebrated and explored with nuance and, preferably, an understanding of their native cultural context, rather than dismissed with the most superficial of ill-informed criticism. And it’s time that those who already recognise the cultural value of these games — and who in most cases appreciate them for far more than the size of the heroines’ knockers — stop being demonised by critics in perceived positions of “authority”.
Or, to put it another way, as my good friend Mr Matt Sainsbury over at Digitally Downloaded said in his own excellent editorial earlier today, it’s time we stopped calling Japanese games with sexual content “creepy”.