Pros And Cons Of Dating Sims

Yet to broadly claim that American’s squeamishness towards sex precludes dating sims from penetrating the Western market would be misleading. After all, many popular dating sims do not feature any sexual activity whatsoever. For example, no game in the Tokimeki Memorial series has exceeded a B rating, with only one receiving the “Sexual Content” icon and several of the older titles receiving A ratings. All the Love Plus games received C ratings, and despite receiving the “Sexual Content” icon, there are no explicit depictions of sexual acts (NewsComAu). In fact, games with more sexual content may actually be more likely to make their way West, because explicitly sexual games, known as eroge for “erotic games,” are typically developed and published

Furthermore, eroge that don’t receive official localizations may find themselves in the hands of Western gamers anyway through fan translations. Because console manufacturers, such as Nintendo and Sony, generally prohibit developers from creating eroge for their game consoles, nearly all of these games are for PC. While console games can be hard or impossible to unofficially translate, and the user is often required to modify their console to run these unauthorized games, PC games face no such technical barriers. This means that the market for fan-translated eroge ends up being much larger than for non-sexual dating sims, which typically run on game consoles—a counterintuitive phenomenon that may actually explain part of the West’s rejection of dating sims in general: those willing to go to extreme lengths to obtain access to eroge do so at the expense of creating the impression that all dating sims are explicitly sexual or even

What specific elements in their gameplay allows for their relative palatability among Western audience compared to standard dating sims? Though there are many possible answers, one major factor appears to be humor. Neither Hatoful Boyfriend nor Leisure Suit Larry attempt to present themselves as serious games: both feature humorous premises and generally do not take themselves seriously. This leads to the human playing the game to assume a dramatically different in-game identity and establish an entirely distinct relationship with the game itself. Leisure Suit Larry is played from a third-person perspective: the player is explicitly not Larry, and the failures and successes within the game are made at Larry’s expense, not the player’s. The character of Larry himself is designed to distance the player from assuming a first-person identity—few people would want to identify as a 40-year old virgin, however sympathetic he might be. Similarly, though Hatoful Boyfriend is indeed played from the first-person perspective, the player is not seriously expected to truly assume the role of a girl attracted to pigeons. The absurdity and incongruity of the premise serves to similarly separate the player from the game, allowing the player’s real-world and in-game identities to easily remain detached. This stands in stark contrast to games like Love Plus, where people go so far as to