I've been playing Piofiore: Fated Memories for the past month or so, and I just finished this past weekend. The plan was to start this Monday off with my usual overview followed by a weekly breakdown of each route until I hit the end. But due to how the finale is and is not related to the overall plot, as well as how it's a sort of sub-route of Gilbert's, I realized that I needed a little more time to figure out which posts are going to cover what material so I don't end up repeating myself.
Instead I'm going to post what was originally going to be a follow-up to my VN Talk series for Piofiore. It has mild spoilers and is a bit of a personal bugbear so I knew it wasn't something I could discuss in either the Overview or Yang posts because it would take up too much space I needed to talk about the actual story rather than venting my frustrations about how the Chinese characters are handled.
When I started the game I was predisposed to dislike Yang, partially because I knew ahead of time that his characterization mostly consisted of being a terrible person, but also because I (unfortunately) dislike a lot of Chinese characters in Japanese media, for being exoticized and a general sense of most writers not knowing what they're doing. Chinese characters are not the exclusive target of this. Anyone who's watched a decent amount of anime has likely seen some strange American and/or European characters that look like they stepped out of a clearing house for stereotypes.
When your primary representation comes in the form of women with hair buns and both genders running around in qipao and changshan (which are not actually traditional Chinese clothing as they come from the Manchu minority) it gets a little tiring after a while. Admittedly this might be less of an issue (like how the funny Americans in anime never bother me) if I had access to more Chinese media, but I haven't found enough in translation that really clicks with me. A native Chinese speaker might look at Piofiore and be completely unbothered.
Monday, July 31, 2023
Monday, July 24, 2023
Anime Talk: Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion
I had heard good things about Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion, but I think I just wasn't in the mood for yet another girl/woman from our world reborn in another one story, so when it came out last spring, I didn't watch it in favor of my must-see weekly viewing of My Home Hero, in which a middle-aged married couple try to cover up the murder of their daughter's abusive boyfriend.
While I still liked My Home Hero, I suppose the fact I'm now writing about Raeliana shows which of the two I ultimately liked better. But that said, it never crossed my mind to write about My Home Hero (probably because I don't write contemporary crime dramas). I probably would have not written about Raeliana either if it had been a run-of-the-mill isekai anime, even if it was good, but it was more than good.
It was great, and I can see why people were talking about the manhwa (Korean comic) well before the anime was announced. There are slight name changes because the anime is a Japanese production and so the protagonist Eunha became Rinko for the Japanese audience, but for the most part this doesn't matter since Eunha/Rinko is pushed off a building, presumably falling to her death, in the opening minutes of the first episode. When she awakens, she is Raeliana, a minor character in a book she read, whose murder at the start of the book sparks the heroine's return to her home country from abroad.
Those aren't great circumstances to be reborn in! After dying already in one life, she's not ready to die again in the coming weeks/months, so in a fashion similar to other isekai where the destination world has a predetermined plot, the new Raeliana is determined to stave off death by any means possible by using the knowledge she has of the days to come.
This part is a little rote, but buoyed by excellent execution. Raeliana knows her murderer is her fiancé, who will kill her post-marriage and take advantage of her grieving parents' wealth, so she does everything she can to be as incompetent a fiancée as possible (including accidentally on purpose almost shooting him in the head) so as to break their engagement. She feels a little bad about it because her fiancé is old nobility who will add legitimacy and provide important connections for her "new money" family, the kind that became rich enough to just buy their noble title, but she's not willing to die just to keep the plot intact. And when her fiancé, who is not that stupid, cottons on to the fact she wants to break the engagement, he is furious with her.
Raeliana realizes that the only way she can successfully break the engagement without endangering herself and her family is to come under the protection of an even more powerful noble, which is… why Raeliana ended up at the duke's mansion.
While I still liked My Home Hero, I suppose the fact I'm now writing about Raeliana shows which of the two I ultimately liked better. But that said, it never crossed my mind to write about My Home Hero (probably because I don't write contemporary crime dramas). I probably would have not written about Raeliana either if it had been a run-of-the-mill isekai anime, even if it was good, but it was more than good.
It was great, and I can see why people were talking about the manhwa (Korean comic) well before the anime was announced. There are slight name changes because the anime is a Japanese production and so the protagonist Eunha became Rinko for the Japanese audience, but for the most part this doesn't matter since Eunha/Rinko is pushed off a building, presumably falling to her death, in the opening minutes of the first episode. When she awakens, she is Raeliana, a minor character in a book she read, whose murder at the start of the book sparks the heroine's return to her home country from abroad.
Those aren't great circumstances to be reborn in! After dying already in one life, she's not ready to die again in the coming weeks/months, so in a fashion similar to other isekai where the destination world has a predetermined plot, the new Raeliana is determined to stave off death by any means possible by using the knowledge she has of the days to come.
This part is a little rote, but buoyed by excellent execution. Raeliana knows her murderer is her fiancé, who will kill her post-marriage and take advantage of her grieving parents' wealth, so she does everything she can to be as incompetent a fiancée as possible (including accidentally on purpose almost shooting him in the head) so as to break their engagement. She feels a little bad about it because her fiancé is old nobility who will add legitimacy and provide important connections for her "new money" family, the kind that became rich enough to just buy their noble title, but she's not willing to die just to keep the plot intact. And when her fiancé, who is not that stupid, cottons on to the fact she wants to break the engagement, he is furious with her.
Raeliana realizes that the only way she can successfully break the engagement without endangering herself and her family is to come under the protection of an even more powerful noble, which is… why Raeliana ended up at the duke's mansion.
Monday, July 17, 2023
Frostpunk - Yes, There's a Story Here
Release: 2018 (Windows), 2019 (PS4, XB1), 2021 (Mac)
I originally wasn't going to write anything about Frostpunk since it doesn't contain much of a central narrative and no one would really sell it to a player as a "story-based" game, but one thing I love is when a game emotionally moves me. Frostpunk does that, and also it is an amazing example of showing (or experiencing, since this is a video game) rather than telling, so I figured it was worth discussing.
The basic premise of Frostpunk is that the world is facing a catastrophic winter likely caused by volcanic eruptions around the equator, but there may have been other extenuating factors as suggested by some of the lore nuggets you can uncover over the course of gameplay. All that's really necessary to know is that the game is set in an alternate history steampunk Victorian England and you take on the role of a captain in charge of a small group of survivors try to build a new home around one of the generators built as a last ditch haven for humanity survive a winter with no end in sight.
The game comes with four basic scenarios, each following a different group of people with differing circumstances, so I will mainly talk about "A New Home" since that is considered the main scenario and the one everyone has to start by default before unlocking the others.
Monday, July 10, 2023
My Next Life as a Villainess Game was Always Going to be Otome
Anime Expo takes place over the weekend including or closest to American Independance Day, and being one of the largest conventions in the country as well as near the US branches of many a Japanese company, it was not surprising that Idea Factory International chose that time to announce the English langauge release of My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! -Pirates of the Disturbance-. (Yes, that's a long title, but that's what you get when you add a subtitle to an already long title with a subtitle.)
I've read a few of the books, watched both seasons of the anime, and wrote a little about the series, so when a game was announced I hoped it would eventually be localized given the series' popularity. But I was uncertain this would happen given that it was a licensed title, meaning more stakeholders would be involved, and this was an otome game, which is growing but still a rather niche genre in the US.
Because of that niche genre bit, it was probably inevitable that someone was going to raise a fuss over Catarina not being able to date women.
You see, in the series, Catarina is a high school girl reborn as a character in the otome game she was currently playing at the time of her unfortunate demise. She uses her knowledge of the game to avoid her character's inevitable death or exile (depending on the ending) and in the process makes the rest of the cast fall in love with her by being a nice person who encourages them and cares about their problems (though some of that was motivated by trying to avoid getting killed/exiled by them or their loved ones).
So even though the setting is that of an otome game and there is some lampooning of otome game tropes, Catarina's romantic interests includes both boys and girls. This is where the potential fan expectation mismatch comes in.
My Next Life as a Villainess introduced a lot of people to otome who had never given the genre a second thought, and as a result don't have a clear image of what is it or what the tropes are. For instance, the idea of having a villainess at all runs from extremely rare to non-existent, but because of the series, there are a number of fans who will ask around for otome games just like the one in the anime only to learn that no such game exists outside of possibly the indie scene.
Hearing that Catarina is having an all new adventure in an otome game, might lead such a player to assume that they will get to date any of Catarina's would-be love interests, leading to disappointment when they leave that only the male options are available.
Of course that's the case. Because this is an otome game.
The market for romance games is fairly segmented in Japan and each runs with their own tropes. There's BL and yuri for queer relationships, galge (or bishoujo) for male protagonists romancing women, and otome for female protagonists romancing men. You don't have everyone can romance everybody else games except possibly in the indie scene. (In the English speaking world, there is a small movement to create a new grouping called amare that covers that niche.)
On occasion there are otome that will include one same sex or non-binary romance option, but the majority will be male. That's the expectations of the audience. So when My Next Life as a Villainess was announced by Otomate, Idea Factory's otome label, everyone familiar with the market knew that it was going to be male options only. In the world of My Next Life as a Villainess Catarina's admirers are split between four boys and three girls, so there was no way to accomodate all seven of them and fit in genre convention, and trying to chase multiple audiences would likely result in a significant chunk of the players feeling they paid for content they don't care about.
Otome visual novels generally aren't like picking a romance option in Mass Effect or Fire Emblem where the romance consists of a few scenes wrapped around a larger central story. Depending on the game, as much as 90% or more of the path from start to finish can be unique to a particular love interest, which is why I often break out otome into multiple posts on my blog. There is such much that can be unique to each route and all the dialogue is voiced in a game that mostly consists of reading text.
While there is certainly a subset people who would play every route in the game no matter which gender the love interest is, the otome player who is more an otome fan than a Villainess fan might be disappointed when half the routes aren't something they would be interested in playing. Similarly, fans who want to set up Catarina with one of the girls might not be interested in having the boys as options at all. It's a big ask for someone to pay full price for a romance game when they know don't care about half the love interests before they even get started.
And the thing is, Otomate is its own label for a reason. Everything it makes is otome and there are annual events in Japan like Otomate Party which are dedicated to fans of its games. It's a brand. If a game comes out of Otomate, it had better have female protagonists romancing male love interests or it has no business being there. I know of one blogger who bought the Japanese version of the Pirates of the Disturbance game without having watched the Villainess anime or read the books because playing otome games is something she does. Otomate would not win points with its core audience's expectations by deviating from their brand.
So, one might ask, why didn't the IP holders go with someone else?
I'm sure they considered the possibility of giving Catarina a chance to have a happy ending with everyone, but there are two things I think that made it inevitable any romance game for My Next Life as a Villainess was going to be otome. First, there's the fact that it's a parody of otome, and a creative team that works within the genre will likely be able to lampoon it with love better than an outsider. And second, it's just not a good fit anywhere else. Galge tends to be the closest romance subgenre to mass market (the venerable Fate stay/night and all its spin-offs started as an adults-only galge), but Catarina is not male nor does she fit the self-insert nature of most galge protagonists. Yuri is even more niche than otome, leaving otome as the only pre-established option.
As for going it alone, I suspect that the cost of advertising a romance game to the general masses would be too much for the amount of people who would likely buy it (who again, likely have their own romantic preferences). Even if it meant cutting out half the would-be lovers to make sure that Otomate could also release it to its regular fans who are fans of the genre rather than Villainess itself, it would allow the game to remain closer in spirit to its source material (while being financially viable) than anything else.
The anime stakeholders, and quite likely author Satoru Yamaguchi himself, signed off on the deal so everyone knew going in what the concessions were going to be.
Would I have played all the options if they were put in? Sure! I like the characters and I find the in-fighting in Catarina's "harem" entertaining. But I have my romance game preferences too, and if half the love interests were women in a game I had no prior connection to, the hurdle to get me to play that game versus another otome would be much higher. It would have to be a game that's recommended to me by a friend, or the developer reached out to me as with Kiss the Demiurge. And it's likely the stakeholders were cognizant of that.
I've read a few of the books, watched both seasons of the anime, and wrote a little about the series, so when a game was announced I hoped it would eventually be localized given the series' popularity. But I was uncertain this would happen given that it was a licensed title, meaning more stakeholders would be involved, and this was an otome game, which is growing but still a rather niche genre in the US.
Because of that niche genre bit, it was probably inevitable that someone was going to raise a fuss over Catarina not being able to date women.
You see, in the series, Catarina is a high school girl reborn as a character in the otome game she was currently playing at the time of her unfortunate demise. She uses her knowledge of the game to avoid her character's inevitable death or exile (depending on the ending) and in the process makes the rest of the cast fall in love with her by being a nice person who encourages them and cares about their problems (though some of that was motivated by trying to avoid getting killed/exiled by them or their loved ones).
So even though the setting is that of an otome game and there is some lampooning of otome game tropes, Catarina's romantic interests includes both boys and girls. This is where the potential fan expectation mismatch comes in.
My Next Life as a Villainess introduced a lot of people to otome who had never given the genre a second thought, and as a result don't have a clear image of what is it or what the tropes are. For instance, the idea of having a villainess at all runs from extremely rare to non-existent, but because of the series, there are a number of fans who will ask around for otome games just like the one in the anime only to learn that no such game exists outside of possibly the indie scene.
Hearing that Catarina is having an all new adventure in an otome game, might lead such a player to assume that they will get to date any of Catarina's would-be love interests, leading to disappointment when they leave that only the male options are available.
Of course that's the case. Because this is an otome game.
The market for romance games is fairly segmented in Japan and each runs with their own tropes. There's BL and yuri for queer relationships, galge (or bishoujo) for male protagonists romancing women, and otome for female protagonists romancing men. You don't have everyone can romance everybody else games except possibly in the indie scene. (In the English speaking world, there is a small movement to create a new grouping called amare that covers that niche.)
On occasion there are otome that will include one same sex or non-binary romance option, but the majority will be male. That's the expectations of the audience. So when My Next Life as a Villainess was announced by Otomate, Idea Factory's otome label, everyone familiar with the market knew that it was going to be male options only. In the world of My Next Life as a Villainess Catarina's admirers are split between four boys and three girls, so there was no way to accomodate all seven of them and fit in genre convention, and trying to chase multiple audiences would likely result in a significant chunk of the players feeling they paid for content they don't care about.
Otome visual novels generally aren't like picking a romance option in Mass Effect or Fire Emblem where the romance consists of a few scenes wrapped around a larger central story. Depending on the game, as much as 90% or more of the path from start to finish can be unique to a particular love interest, which is why I often break out otome into multiple posts on my blog. There is such much that can be unique to each route and all the dialogue is voiced in a game that mostly consists of reading text.
While there is certainly a subset people who would play every route in the game no matter which gender the love interest is, the otome player who is more an otome fan than a Villainess fan might be disappointed when half the routes aren't something they would be interested in playing. Similarly, fans who want to set up Catarina with one of the girls might not be interested in having the boys as options at all. It's a big ask for someone to pay full price for a romance game when they know don't care about half the love interests before they even get started.
And the thing is, Otomate is its own label for a reason. Everything it makes is otome and there are annual events in Japan like Otomate Party which are dedicated to fans of its games. It's a brand. If a game comes out of Otomate, it had better have female protagonists romancing male love interests or it has no business being there. I know of one blogger who bought the Japanese version of the Pirates of the Disturbance game without having watched the Villainess anime or read the books because playing otome games is something she does. Otomate would not win points with its core audience's expectations by deviating from their brand.
So, one might ask, why didn't the IP holders go with someone else?
I'm sure they considered the possibility of giving Catarina a chance to have a happy ending with everyone, but there are two things I think that made it inevitable any romance game for My Next Life as a Villainess was going to be otome. First, there's the fact that it's a parody of otome, and a creative team that works within the genre will likely be able to lampoon it with love better than an outsider. And second, it's just not a good fit anywhere else. Galge tends to be the closest romance subgenre to mass market (the venerable Fate stay/night and all its spin-offs started as an adults-only galge), but Catarina is not male nor does she fit the self-insert nature of most galge protagonists. Yuri is even more niche than otome, leaving otome as the only pre-established option.
As for going it alone, I suspect that the cost of advertising a romance game to the general masses would be too much for the amount of people who would likely buy it (who again, likely have their own romantic preferences). Even if it meant cutting out half the would-be lovers to make sure that Otomate could also release it to its regular fans who are fans of the genre rather than Villainess itself, it would allow the game to remain closer in spirit to its source material (while being financially viable) than anything else.
The anime stakeholders, and quite likely author Satoru Yamaguchi himself, signed off on the deal so everyone knew going in what the concessions were going to be.
Would I have played all the options if they were put in? Sure! I like the characters and I find the in-fighting in Catarina's "harem" entertaining. But I have my romance game preferences too, and if half the love interests were women in a game I had no prior connection to, the hurdle to get me to play that game versus another otome would be much higher. It would have to be a game that's recommended to me by a friend, or the developer reached out to me as with Kiss the Demiurge. And it's likely the stakeholders were cognizant of that.
Monday, July 3, 2023
VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 6: Mizuki
Unfortunately, I still didn't know what to make of him by the time he was the only one of the initial five routes left. We know from the prologue that he's a former pop star who decided to change careers and become a bodyguard, which is a little weird, and for someone who must have spent a lot of time in front of crowds and cameras, he comes off as a rather muted personality. If there was a vote for bodyguard most likely to fade into the background, the winner would be Mizuki.
He has no prior connection to the MC, he's not in the command chain, and he's not outgoing enough to make an impression. For much of the game he occupied a nebulous space in my mind as "that fifth guy" which made me a little hesitant to buy his route, but since the series was on sale I figured it would be roughly equivalent to losing $3 if I didn't like it, so I picked it up.
And Mizuki is initially weird... really weird. He immediately comes off as serious about his job, and directly tells the MC not to fall in love with him, but then he's also talking to animals like a fairy tale princess, which is probably one of the last things I'd expect of a crack bodyguard. (He says he can't really talk to animals because that would be silly, but even if he can't literally talk to them, he can get them to do some very non-instinctive things for him.)
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