Frostpunk - Yes, There's a Story Here

Platform: Windows (also on Mac, PS4, XB1)
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.

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.

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 6: Mizuki

I left Mizuki for last, not out of a sense of saving the best (or second best) for last as I sometimes do, but because I didn't know what to make of him and sometimes seeing a character on someone else's route is what I need to pique my interest.

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.)

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 5: Sora

I was looking forward to Sora's route since he's a bright and optimistic personality on the other routes, even if he tends to get a little too huggy with the MC, but by the time I finished it, I wasn't sure I liked him as much anymore. It wasn't that he turned out to be a secret jerk, but there were two things about him that bothered me on his route.

The MC meets Sora first out of all the bodyguards during her rescue in the prologue, but she thinks she's being helped by another woman, who turns out to be Sora, who sometimes crossdresses as a disguise. He looks really good as a woman, and given his upbeat personality and that he's even enthusiastic about it on other routes, I assumed he was fine with it. And I actually think that he is fine with it, and proud of how well he passes, since he even has a photo album of him in his disguises which he admits are all of him dressed as a woman.

Given his protests on his own route, I suspect the problem is that Sora doesn't want to look feminine in front of a woman he's attracted to, but even if the MC is nothing but supportive he always feels resistant about it. It's not until the ending when the MC tells him his disguise is what allowed them to meet that he kind of dials it back, but it doesn't feel like there was a solid resolution on how he really feels about it and I didn't like the "I can't look girly in front of my woman" vibe I was getting.

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 4: Subaru

Subaru, though seemingly the poster boy of My Sweet Bodyguard, actually pissed me off in the prologue for being rude and arrogant, so I wasn't inclined to like him, but he becomes a lot more tolerable later in Katsuragi and Kaiji's routes, which softened my impression of him. I especially liked seeing him discombobulated by Kaiji's sisters, which showed that he wasn't as put-together as he pretended to be. (And his freak out expression is a nice contrast to his usual smug one.)

It admittedly helps that the MC's internal commentary after choosing him is full of snark. She's impressed by his resume (Harvard grad, studied in Paris, professional accolades, etc.), but not his personality, which makes it a little weird when she starts falling for him about a third of the way in. There is the "there's only one bed" trope which results in them awkwardly sharing it, and unlike the other love interests, he passes himself off as the MC's boyfriend to cover for his need to shadow her 24/7. This produces some expected emotional confusion, but he doesn't act terribly boyfriend-like other than physical proximity.

I guess it's nice that he cleans her place and cooks for her (because those are always boyfriend points), but the way he does it suggests more that he thinks her standards are below what he can tolerate if he's going to be living with her. It's like no good deed he does comes without a put down, but the MC is attracted to him anyway. In universe multiple people comment on how attractive he is so I suppose it's possible the MC just can't get over how gorgeous he is, but as the player I think his character design is just "okay" and not obviously more attractive than the other love interests.

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 3: Kaiji

As I mentioned in last week's My Sweet Bodyguard post, I was leaning towards choosing Kaiji as a love interest for being a similar age to the MC, and also being a childhood friend, which I thought could make for a more interesting dynamic than the other characters who are all strangers.

I thought it was off to a promising start. People who knew each other as children and then separated as they went to different schools, only to randomly meet each other again later in life is a thing that happens. So I wasn't bothered by the MC not remembering certain aspects of their childhood friendship, and though their romance does include a childhood marriage proposal, that's pretty much par for the course. I expect to be running into tropes in this game, so there's no harm in feeding the player the candy they're here for.

But even though I thought we were off to a promising start with the two getting reacquainted after an uncertain number of years (I think the MC moved away when she was about eleven, but the exact age is unclear), I found I didn't like their dynamic that much. Kaiji has a lot of fun teasing her due to their shared history, but otherwise spends a lot of time telling other characters how he's not interested in her. And meanwhile the MC spends a lot of time noting evidence that supports her theory that Kaiji hates women (he actually never says anything of the sort).

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 2: Katsuragi

Picking Daichi Katsuragi first was a "me choice" rather than seeing who the protagonist seemed to mesh with the best. Voltage protagonists are never named, though they often come with their own personality, so they aren't completely blank slates. But when I first started messing around with the Love 365 app I didn't think about it so much as looking for a story with a love interest that I would find interesting. So those early days were a lot of hopscotching through the various titles to use my free reading time as much as possible before I had to pay.

What I'm getting at, is I was lured to My Sweet Bodyguard due to its premise (a lot of Voltage games are exactly what the name says on the tin) and then chose Katsuragi to be my protagonist's bodyguard because I thought if I was going to read a romance with any of these guys, I wanted the boss, who's older and more experienced than the others. (Might also be my own age talking.) I played about halfway through his story before my free time ran out and then set the game aside as I played other things.

Coming back after all this time, and having bought a bunch of other My Sweet Bodyguard routes while they were on sale, I restarted from the prologue and found I almost wanted to set up the protagonist with either Kaiji or Subaru, just so their age would be closer. Katsuragi's age isn't given anywhere to my knowledge, but since he's the only love interest who goes by his family name instead of his given one, he's probably several years older so they would not be able to address each other as peers. My personal guess is he's in his thirties since there are other love interests in Love 365 who are canonically in their forties and they look older than Katsuragi.