Dragon Knight

[lthammy]

My thanks to the writer of the article. I've always been interested in fighting out what the original Dragon Knight series was like. Knights of Xentar was such a fantastically goofy script; I wonder what lead to its creation. Were the writers like "these Japanese cartoon games are so dumb, let's just write whatever and no one will even care"? It seems like a parody of itself half the time.

On the subject of whether porn games are good, there are a lot of hentai games that aren't really designed to be hentai games. They're just trying to get that initial attention, then get some real success when they can get a clean version out. Other than that, it's like a little indie industry. You have a lot of retro-inspired games, you have a lot of hardcore(dohoho)-focused games, and you have a lot of derivative or cheap garbage.

[Bobinator]

Thank you for the explanation on this sort of thing, I really appreciated it! I guess it makes more sense that the porn is, in a lot of cases, just something people do for sales. I guess it's not too far from sticking a sexy female character on the game's cover and hoping it gets sales, so I can kind of understand it from that point of view. Kind of a shame the market over there is so screwed up that's what you have to do to get more sales, but it makes sense, I guess.

[Leona Phoenix]

It's like with the Fate series: regardless of how well-written one thinks the story is (to me it was sort of interesting at first, but nowadays, meh) nothing of value was lost by sanitizing it.

It's always a bit of a shame when competent gameplay (or something approaching competence, anyway) is paired up with rape crap, though. Then there's irredeemable garbage like ELF's own Isaku series, Raidy, or pretty much anything by Crimson.

[lthammy]

Alicesoft games are a good example of that. It's clear that they care about their gameplay and even their stories. Rance has a really cool setting, at least by Kichikuou. But they embed the hentai stuff into the plot so much that there's no simple way to remove it. It's a shame; it feels like the other parts of the game are being held back because they can't hit the mainstream market.

There's another perspective you can take on it, though. Visual novels are so cheap to make and they're niche even in Japan. So it should be expected that a ton of them slip under the radar and die. It's neat that there's a route that can give these games the initial attention they need to demonstrate that they're actually a quality product that should be taken seriously. There are a lot of manga artists that start off doing hentai, but in all the cases I've heard, they have to leave their hentai works behind in order to work on something proper. They can't just drop the hentai from an otherwise legitimate work.

And now I'm thinking that maybe I should do an article on Divi-Dead when submissions are open again. That's another hentai game that I wish hit the mainstream. Assuming no one's doing that already.

[Joseph Joestar]

Feb 1, 2015 16:03:26 GMT -5 lthammy said:

Alicesoft games are a good example of that. It's clear that they care about their gameplay and even their stories. Rance has a really cool setting, at least by Kichikuou. But they embed the hentai stuff into the plot so much that there's no simple way to remove it. It's a shame; it feels like the other parts of the game are being held back because they can't hit the mainstream market.

That's what happened with Toushin Toushi II, which had a 3DS remake recently.  And ironically, the changes they made to the game inadvertently made it more offensive or fucked-up.

Love that game, by the way, and I highly recommend it. 

[tbb]

Cool article. I had no idea that even in Japan they had to take out the sort of stuff they had to take out when porting these to consoles.

[jackcaeylin]

Dragon Knight 5 got a fifth game. www.dmm.com/netgame_s/dk5/

This is a game from DMM, which means, it will be very awful.

Yours sincerely

Jack Caeylin