• 5 days

    At a certain point Anime Games only exist because of teenage hormone levels.

      • 5 days

        I’m curious how many people who upvoted this only got into the genre after age 20. Excluding pre-internet fans who wouldn’t have had access as teenagers.

        • 5 days

          I was into DBZ and stuff as a teenager, but back then you were “weird” for liking anime and anime styled games so I think a lot of people my age avoided it for a while. Now I’m 40 and idgaf, I play and watch what I like lol

        • So many of my friends who grew up watching stuff like Naruto or Bleach or DBZ or Onepiece or any other show like that swear on how good they are but when I tried any of them they were just snorefests where nothing happened for hours on end.

          Like a purgatory made of boring. And thats without even the frankly ugly ass art design like on One Piece.

        • yes we did. you got tapes in the mail. there were services for it. there were conventions. it was just a lot smaller than it is now.

  • Much as I’ll admit all such debacles are silly, sometimes I wonder if games have been harmed in other ways by that type of prude adjustment.

    Like, I was playing an Atelier game, got to a city, and there was a tall building that intrigued me. I wanted to pan my camera up to it, but the Y axis was tightly restricted. As the protagonist wears a skirt, you can guess why.

    It makes me wonder what’s the absolute worst reaction of someone less pervy who’d trigger such a view by accident - whether they’d actually feel a sense of violation or creepiness at their own camera movement, or more likely just giggle it off and pan back.

    • 4 days

      The problem is that it seems we always swing too much either way: it’s either puritanical “no sex allowed” or depraved “let’s sexualize everything!”.

    • The people who throw fits about stuff like that don’t play the games in the first place

      • And if they did, they’d be the first ones to be looking up those skirts. That’s why they think everyone else is doing it.

        • I mean looking up video game character skirts is harmless anyway. I imagine most people do it at some point or another. It’s the puritanical shame that’s the problem

          • I don’t have any problems with people looking up video game skirts. It’s the hypocrisy I’m pointing out. The people who complain the most and try to take the rights away from other people are the ones who are most likely to be doing the bad thing themselves.

      • I genuinely think there’s a little bit of a sliding scale. Like, it’s not often vocal, since they know they’re coming from the “No fun allowed” club, but I’ve heard it a few times.

        The two games that are used the most for examples are Nier Automata, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The first is a philosophical action RPG about death. The second is a party-based RPG about friendship and saving the world. But BOY HOWDY, will you have a bad time in those games if you don’t love boobies, panties, and a bit of misogyny.

        To put it short, I’ve heard from people that actually felt a bit grossed out by both games and how they actively treat women. Nier a bit less so, but a fully-torn-away miniskirt on a combat android wearing a thong doesn’t exactly pull people into the sci-fi premise.

        That’s just what little I know of from hearsay. But since it’s not something arisen in public conversation much (since no one wants to be a party pooper), I’m curious if it makes it into any game-testing focus groups that had already picked out people with hundreds of hours in other games.

        And I can certainly imagine some friend circles would avoid mentioning Goddess of Victory, out of shyness around how gargantuan the nikkes are stacked.

        • What misogyny is in those 2 games? Unless you think the sexualized character designs are inherently misogynistic I don’t see it, and you mentioned it separately after listing the character designs so it seems that’s not what you mean?

          • 2B is a combat android built to fight machine lifeforms. Moreover, she’s staunchly anti-emotion, a veil which only breaks slowly over the course of the game. She wears a miniskirt and a provocative thong. The resulting outfit just feels kind of brazen, as well as staunchly contrasting the scifi mood of the game. Satisfying, if you swing that way, but if you don’t, it just feels like a loud reminder: “This game was made by a basement manga author”. What’s worse, there ARE many character designs out there that would fit the theme of “Emotionless combat android who slowly admits to her emotions” but also have a sexy appearance. Horny kinda overrode fitting character designs. Oh yeah; and they build in a mechanic to strip her clothes.

            XC2 builds half of its premise around an intrinsic “bond” between Pyrah and Rex. It’s often very physical, and Pyrah is kind of forced into it. In addition, there’s a pretty large number of scenes that are very factory-printed gooner anime moments: Trying to get the girls to wear maid outfits. An inventor making his own cute-girl android. A Hot Springs scene with zero creativity to it. On top of that, the core gameplay involves a gacha to draw other “blades”, many of whom fit right in with something like Goddess of Victory.

            When I know what I’m getting, I’m totally okay with horny-driven designs. When someone is baited by other elements like a fun adventure, I can’t totally blame them for feeling they were trapped into scenes like those.

            And, just to calm some statements: I do think a game can be based around sexy women without being misogynistic. It’s tricky, Bayonetta is definitely a great example though.

  • It’s worth mentioning that the Shinku patch was released just 12 hours after Version 1.2 went live on July 2, which is a rather quick response by the devs at Perfect World to “un-nerf” their newest character.

    12 hours for the patch to be released, players playing it, complaining about it online, the devs reading it, deciding to act on the complains, change the model and release the new patch?

    That sounds a bit too quick to me and more like they already had the model ready. For whatever reason.

    And just for completeness sake, this whole thing is stupid beyond believe.

    • 5 days

      they already had the model ready.

      Almost certainly. International marketing showed renders of the character with pantsu, but the character was released in China with shorts.

    • 4 days

      Huge mobile games like this compete with each other fiercely. Part of that is being able to turn around updates, events, fixes and so on quickly. The business buzzword is Live Ops.

    • That sounds a bit too quick to me and more like they already had the model ready

      I would assume that they have multiple models of each character ready, potentially for future skin releases or maybe just as a “what if X looks like that”, as some sort of “proof of concept”.

    • Or perhaps they just put up the original model which they couldn’t use because the marketing team thought it was too risky,

  • Genuinely surprised they even dared to release a female character in shorts to a Chinese audience. You would think they know how much they indoctrinated their audience with trashy fan service by now. The stories about enraged lonely guys almost ending an entire franchise over not pandering enough to their fantasies are crazy. You don’t want to mess with those guys. It could put your employees in actual danger.

    • Gacha games (especially these days) are usually more censored on Chinese servers than on global ones to avoid government interest. That’s why you can have long running titles like Azur Lane being kinda crazy with their skins without getting into trouble while other ones (Snowbreak) crash and burn because their devs felt a little too comfortable skirting the rules.

      Not saying whether any of that is good or bad but CN servers do tend to err on the side of caution with their designs.

      • Don’t read too much into it. I was merely criticizing the whole ecosystem around it. Because for every “government slapped” story there’s at least one where fans threatened the devs because they didn’t feel pandered to enough. The whole situation is just toxic.

        • question remains the same. What makes you think audiences elsewhere wouldn’t also be angry at this unnecessary change in their regions specifically. Why do you think chinese audiences are the only ones “indoctrinated by fanservice”