Oh. Hi there. Christ, what a month, huh?
Yessiree. Quite a month.
As usual after a movie marathon like Hubrisween, I find myself glutted on film and unwilling to head back to the trough. (Due diligence: I still watched a few movies, but with the blissful intent of not writing a word about them) Last year at this time I went back to my first love, reading. This year, I returned to my second love, gaming.
You tell kids that these days, and they won’t believe you.
If you were to extrapolate my college days’ obsession with Dungeons and Dragons (when it was only three booklets bound in card stock covers) you’d find what brings me joy: dungeon crawls with turn-based combat. It’s what drew me to the Final Fantasy games, until the combat systems grew too action-oriented (and I could no longer afford new consoles, but that’s a complaint for another time).
So imagine my elation when I discovered that there was a Battle Chasers dungeon crawl with turn-based combat, Nightwar. I really liked the comic book – even when it could only manage to come out every six months or so – and the game has really good presentation on the rich characters. For the uninitiated, those would be Warrior With A Cursed Sword, Little Girl With Gauntlets of Ineffable Power, Protective Sentient War Golem, Alcoholic Wizard and Voluptuous Bounty Hunter. Best of all, with a little tweaking, it would run well on my ancient, wheezing computer. That it’s got a decent crafting system is gravy.
As is usually the case with such games, I hit a point where the challenge ramped up considerably and it was time to engage in what is known as Grinding: playing the game not to advance the storyline, but to get stronger, to buy better stuff, to beat tougher enemies. And it was at that point that Steam sent me a message that a game I had shown some interest in was on sale. At less than ten bucks, I took a gamble on Sakura Dungeon – and that is where things get complicated.
“Sakura” is Japanese for “cherry blossom”; it is also a continuing franchise of hentai games from the Winged Cloud studio. Most of these fall into the “visual novel” category, with Dungeon being the only RPG in its catalog. As it is, it’s a fairly stripped-down affair (pun not intended, though as a hentai game, unavoidable). Move in first person through a dungeon labyrinth, encounter monsters, get treasure, get to the Boss at the end, save the world. That really all I need, and all I wanted. However, I got more, and in that more is the source of my headscratching and chinwagging this month.
There are two main characters in Sakura Dungeon: Yomi, an ancient fox spirit and former dungeon lord, and Ceri, an adventurer and dungeon raider. Yomi has been asleep for several centuries, imprisoned in a crypt by whoever took over her dungeon, and is awakened and freed by Ceri, looking for treasure and glory. The vastly more powerful Yomi easily brushes aside Ceri’s attacks, and enchants her to become Yomi’s servant, her right hand in a crusade to regain her dungeon.
It’s an interesting storyline; the inhabitants of the village just outside the dungeon are glad to see Yomi return (they’re all monsters, too, though they look human – and more on that in a second). Ceri will be forced to reconsider her opinion of monsters as something to be despised and immediately killed, and under Yomi’s tutelage will become an extremely powerful warrior. The major twist to the combat is the possibility of capturing any defeated monsters and placing them under the same enchantment as Ceri; they can be added to your party and fight on your side. You’re allowed six party members at a time, though only three are playable. The other three step in if any of the primary three fall in combat. That’s an intriguing system, but it also means that a lot of the captured monsters will wind up in the dustbin without ever being played. That seems a lot of design work for nothing, but that’s also a common thread through all these party-based games.
Now, you’re thinking, didn’t you say this was a hentai game? Yes, we’re getting to that. All the monsters are cute anime girls, even the ones who are just supposed to be wild forest animals (Ceri has a thing for the Panda girls. “So cute!” “I’m not cute! I’m fierce!” “Aw, that’s adorable!”). As anime characters, all are pretty scantily clad. We are told that this is magic cloth, though, so it affords the same protection as a full suit of armor. That’s kind of dumb, but it’s still a better explanation than any fanboy has ever given me for Red Sonja’s bikini armor. So, naturally, a critical hit in combat shreds their clothing. And if you employ the readily-available-with-a-little-effort adult patch, a second critical hit renders them completely nude.
Without the adult patch the game provides a little cheesecake. With it, holy crap do things get explicit. A common chase item in these games are CGs, which I guess stands for Character Graphics – artwork of the characters you unlock and collect. With the adult patch these increase and become the smut that fanboys love and fill internet boards and tumblrs. Monsters are a lot more sexual than you’d think, and Yomi is quite the libertine – one of her goals is getting Ceri to loosen up. With an astounding variety of revealing costumes.
The closest thing to a man you’ll find in Sakura Dungeon.
What keeps this from becoming ugly is there are absolutely no male characters. None. Zilch. Dildos aplenty, but it’s all girl/girl action. It’s intriguing to me how much, in my eyes, this seems to elevate the relationships here. Though the game itself still leads to worrying about myself.
Like I said, what a month. We’re in the midst of a long-overdue housecleaning and discussion about the darker side of sexual politics in this country. I received my card for Team Burn It All Down some time ago, and now it’s starting to look like I should have gone for the Platinum level membership. I’m male and I’m horrified and flabbergasted and wondering about my own level of complicity.
So sitting in my office whiling away the hours looking at cartoon girls, in a game engineered to reward the Male Gaze. Am I part of the problem? Probably. Almost certainly. I can take some small comfort in knowing that I am horrified and flabbergasted and wondering about myself, and that I seem to lack whatever fucking chromosome that causes other men to think whipping out their penis automatically leads to immediate sex. I literally cannot comprehend that mindset, and I am thankful for that.
And then I encounter an early access game called Mirror.
Mirror is a gem-matching game like Bejeweled, with a tactical bent. The different color of jewels provide physical attacks, magical attacks, healing and (in this case) something called Rage, which ups your attacks and healing percentages. Link more than three jewels, you get bigger effects. If you’ve played Puzzle Quest, you’re familiar with this; my last encounter was something called Hell Girls where, with a choice of three of the title characters with different abilities, you played Destructo-Bejeweled to rid the map of monsters, find their bathing suits, and unlock their hentai CGs. Pretty straightforward, and entertaining enough in small doses.
Mirror has more of a involved story mode. At this stage of development it involves three girls: a dark elf, a demon hunter, and a hopping vampire/zombie festooned with prayer talismans. Each has a different method of attack via the jewels, like the zombie setting various jewels on fire, and each flaming jewel causing you damage until you eliminate them.
Beating them in three rounds advances their story and allows you to play the end scene, which is where things get truly ugly. The mechanics of each of these scenes is going to be familiar to you if you’ve ever played porn games. Let’s just say that options for your mouse cursor include hands, tongues, candles and in one instance, tentacles (of course). Each is meant to be as humiliating as possible to the girl; winning four matches unlocks “Free Discipline Mode”, which should tell you everything you need to know about this game. You shouldn’t turn your back on it, and this is coming from a man with his own kinky twists.
Oh, there’s even worse – if you unlock Free Discipline Mode, you also unlock an extra story mode which allows you to heap even more degradation upon your hapless opponents. The story modes posit the player as being exclusively male, which is probably the most canny/cynical design choice ever, and is the source of the strange angst running roughshod over my soul at the moment. Sakura Dungeon seems so carefree and positive in its female-centric antics, while Mirror, exclusively male in its outlook, is ugly, dark and brutal.
I wish I was clever enough to derive some sort of metaphor or lesson from this, other than the obvious and apparent Good God, but men suck; but the fact that I am confused even by my own actions would render anything I had to say suspect at best. It’s an odd confluence that occurred in my month off from movies, made more profoundly affecting by events in the real world, and the best I can can hope for is to simply report on it, continue to ponder the questions presented to me, and hope that enables me to be better for it.
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drfreex.com 
Your timing is great, mister. I also have Sakura Dungeon here and yep, it’s a charmer without the patch and as noted, quite racy with it. Haven’t tried Mirror yet, but I did experiment with a few Nutaku.net games for almost a year for an article I probably won’t write because those games tend to be on the more nasty and exploitative side of the scale and they’re tough to defend in terms of certain content. That said, some of them are quite fun in their cleaner variants over on Nutaku.com (in case I’ve accidentally made you curious).
I think “tough to defend” pretty much covers it.
Posted on the fifth anniversary of the City of Villains shutdown, too.
I was handling everything so much better when I could be Telstar Bronson whenever I felt like it.
My Black Dynamite clone agrees with you.