I was really having fun with this. It's set up like a TV show; broken into episodes complete with recaps and previews and credits for each chapter. It's a lot of fun, over the top nonsense, like a guy punching a guy so hard it breaks the entire planet in half. Even though it has a lot of QTE-laden cutscenes I was really enjoying the wild characters and art style.
Uuuuuuntil chapter 10. In this scene, apropos of nothing, our hero visits some sort of hot springs resort. There the player is treated to a first-person interactive scene in which he first spends time ogling the staff, then moves quickly on to exposing himself, before finally just straight up sexually assaulting a service worker. But don't worry, because it's all played for laughs! Technically it's only an attempted assault, because he's comically punched by his father figure as a "Denied!" achievement pops.
I just don't know. This is so normalized I couldn't even find mention of it in any reviews. The IGN review, written by a woman, specifically mentions the scene but carefully leaves out the attempted assault. Instead it's described as "the objective is to stop Asura from staring for too long at the generous assets of a hot-springs attendant" which as far as I can tell is completely false; you cannot progress in the game until you've gone through the whole menu of sex pest behaviors.
Like I didn't just fall off the fucking redneck truck I know women have always had it bad. But the misogyny in some of these Japanese games in particular feels almost compulsory. It's like there's some regulatory body that comes through and is like, "You allowed the player to go 5 hours without being horrible in some fucked up regressive way to a woman. Back to the drawing board!" From my many minutes of googling about it I know everything about how shitty it is to be a woman in Japan. Obviously nothing I do is going to change any of that, I just wish we as gamers were, like, slightly less inured to it.
Anyway, in Chapter 9, you're a badass demigod going through a wild narrative. In Chapter 11, you're a badass demigod going through a wild narrative, and for no particular reason, a hilarious wannabe rapist! Somehow the experience lost its luster once I realized I was playing as Donald Trump's self-image.
Uuuuuuntil chapter 10. In this scene, apropos of nothing, our hero visits some sort of hot springs resort. There the player is treated to a first-person interactive scene in which he first spends time ogling the staff, then moves quickly on to exposing himself, before finally just straight up sexually assaulting a service worker. But don't worry, because it's all played for laughs! Technically it's only an attempted assault, because he's comically punched by his father figure as a "Denied!" achievement pops.
I just don't know. This is so normalized I couldn't even find mention of it in any reviews. The IGN review, written by a woman, specifically mentions the scene but carefully leaves out the attempted assault. Instead it's described as "the objective is to stop Asura from staring for too long at the generous assets of a hot-springs attendant" which as far as I can tell is completely false; you cannot progress in the game until you've gone through the whole menu of sex pest behaviors.
Like I didn't just fall off the fucking redneck truck I know women have always had it bad. But the misogyny in some of these Japanese games in particular feels almost compulsory. It's like there's some regulatory body that comes through and is like, "You allowed the player to go 5 hours without being horrible in some fucked up regressive way to a woman. Back to the drawing board!" From my many minutes of googling about it I know everything about how shitty it is to be a woman in Japan. Obviously nothing I do is going to change any of that, I just wish we as gamers were, like, slightly less inured to it.
Anyway, in Chapter 9, you're a badass demigod going through a wild narrative. In Chapter 11, you're a badass demigod going through a wild narrative, and for no particular reason, a hilarious wannabe rapist! Somehow the experience lost its luster once I realized I was playing as Donald Trump's self-image.
2 Comments
@pixelsaturn wait, are you implying there's more to masculinity than smoking cigarettes, strangling chumps and sexually harassing your coworkers?
pixelsaturn
1 month ago