Tag Archives: ecchi

Interspecies Reviewers, Vol. 3: Sweaty Horseplay

With its third volume, Amahara and Masha’s breakout hit Interspecies Reviewers really feels like it’s hitting its stride.

While the first two volumes (see Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) were highly entertaining, erotic and, at times, surprisingly thought-provoking, Volume 3 feels like a noticeable step up with regard to a sense of developing narrative and overall worldbuilding.

And, with the trouble the TV anime adaptation has had getting broadcast even in late-night time slots in its native Japan… the manga may well end up being the definitive way to experience this delightfully bawdy series. Let’s take a closer look at this third volume.

Some NSFW content ahead! Like, right ahead. Immediately after the jump. I warned you.

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Interspecies Reviewers, Vol. 1: Don’t Pretend You’ve Never Thought About It

Manga is an incredibly broad, rich and diverse medium with a lot of benefits for the modern busy weeb.

It’s affordable, it’s portable, it’s easily consumed in short, digestible chunks and, perhaps best of all, at this point there’s something out there that will appeal to pretty much everyone. And as such, I thought it high time we start taking an occasional look at some manga here on MoeGamer.

We begin with the first volume of Amahara and Masha’s Interspecies Reviewers, a series about fucking monster girl prostitutes. I figured it was probably best to establish the tone sooner rather than later.

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Let’s Respect Each Other’s Tastes (Or: “This Game Isn’t For You, and That’s Okay”)

Whenever any creative person sits down to compose something, they inevitably do so with a particular audience in mind.

Sometimes that audience is as simple as the creator themselves; they want to write something that simply expresses themselves, and if it happens to resonate with anyone else, that’s a happy bonus. Sometimes a creator makes an attempt to appeal to as broad an audience as possible — though it’s very difficult to please everyone. And sometimes that audience is a specific group of people.

Whatever a creator decides to create, we should respect their intentions. And, by extension, we should respect the audience it ends up attracting — even if we find ourselves outside that group.

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We Need To Get Better At Talking About Sex

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.

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Lucy Got Problems: What’s an ADHD Succubus to Do?

Know what I love? Demon girls. Know what I love even more? Demon girls who are really bad at being demons.

With that in mind, I knew I was going to have a good time with Lucy Got Problems almost immediately, since it opens with the eponymous succubus rather meekly prostrating herself in front of her superior (and unattainable object of desire) Tiamat, suggesting that she had done something very silly indeed.

One might even say she had encountered some difficulties, or problems if you will…

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The Case for “Adults Only” Ratings

It was announced earlier today that the upcoming dungeon crawler Omega Labyrinth Z would be refused classification by the Video Standards Council in the UK, despite the game already having successfully attained a PEGI 18 rating.

The VSC’s comments on the matter note that the game’s “style is such that it will attract an audience below the age of 18” and that “there is a serious danger that impressionable people, i.e. children and young people viewing the game, would conclude that the sexual activity [in the game] represented normal sexual behaviour.” It concluded by noting that the game “has the potential to be significantly harmful in terms of social and moral development of younger people in particular”.

Okay. Omega Labyrinth Z is a game with a significant lewd component. And, as with many Japanese games, visual novels and anime — including those with lewd components — it is set in a school-like environment, which is where the majority of the VSC’s complaints come from. But, as ever, what essentially amounts to “ban this sick filth” represents an oversimplification of the issue.

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Altering Content and Self-Censorship Pleases No-One

Yesterday, DRM-free digital distribution platform GOG.com posted a lengthy interview with localisation producer Tom Lipschultz and team leader Ken Berry from XSEED Games, whose most recent localisation project Zwei has recently been released on GOG’s storefront.

Lipschultz in particular has been known up until the time of writing as someone who claims to hold a “zero-tolerance” policy towards content edits made during localisation of Japanese titles for Western audiences, but a number of his comments throughout the interview gave a few people pause.

And it’s worth talking about those points in detail, because some of what Lipschultz says unfortunately appears to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of where his priorities should be as part of a successful and prolific localisation company that has brought a number of beloved franchises to the West.

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Puzzler Essentials: Hell Girls

We’re enjoying a bit of a puzzle game renaissance at the moment.

While we’re not quite at the same level as we were in the 8-, 16- and 32-bit eras, where puzzle games would happily share retail shelf space with 100+ hour RPG epics (Puyo Puyo Tetris aside), we are at least starting to see more and more puzzle games that aren’t free-to-play mobile titles primarily designed to repeatedly part you from your cash rather than providing a well-balanced, fun experience.

One interesting game that may well have passed you by owing to its low price and seemingly low production values is Hell Girls from Taiwanese circle SakuraGame. And you should most definitely give it a look!

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From the Archives: Embracing the “H”

Sex.

Yes, that was entirely a cheap trick to get your attention, but it’s also the subject of today’s column.

There are some interesting and varied thoughts about sex in games out there, but it’s a subject that still remains largely taboo for many developers, publishers and even critics. It’s also a subject in which Eastern and Western approaches and philosophies differ greatly, and it makes for some fascinating discussions.

So let’s talk about sex, specifically with regard to visual novels.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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Let’s Talk About Dungeon Travelers 2 and “Ecchi” Content

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.

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