Some of these titles have some rather dubious aspects around consent and others fetishize homoerotic relationships for a female audience but all, at their heart, celebrate love, romance and relationships. Over the last decade, otome gaming has now largely split into two distinct sectors those that follow a traditional romance visual novel/dating sim (considered mainstream) and those that are more adult in content and contain some more explicit sexual elements. Also released on the PS2, the game enjoyed moderate success with the game’s distributors releasing a whole range of similar titles in a range known as AnimePlay.
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Think rippling abs and bulging guns and you can understand the appeal.Īnd it wasn’t just in Japan and Asia that these games became popular.īy 2006, the first mainstream otome game to be officially translated into English and released for PC was Yo-Jin Bo. Heavily influenced by the shoujo genre of manga comics, the anime characters in early otoge titles are seen through the female gaze where men are objectified. The traditional power dynamics typically seen in the gaming world are also flipped on their head in otome games and the women become the pursuers, the heroes, the guardians, the warriors and the villains.
The normative gender roles have also become more subverted and sub-genres of otome now include far less frilly and girly characters, often celebrating non-binary genders and alternative sexualities. This involved the inclusion of more complex plots, combat and action as well as increasingly more explicit adult content ( along the lines of hentai and futanari)
However, as the genre began to build a following and the selection of titles increased, there became a greater focus on expanding the elements of gameplay to be more diverse. Protagonists were cute girls, and the artwork was fluffy, pink and girly. Narratives were quite simple and the conventions of the storylines quite tranquil, peaceful and ‘aggressively’ feminine. Yet, Angelique was to become the first in an increasingly popular range of otome games which mainly focuses on romance.Įarly titles were all based around the rather traditional stereotypes of girly heroines simply seeking sexless love. The game’s distributors, KOEI, were somewhat surprised by the crossover appeal to an older audience as no gaming studios had previously imagined a market for women and certainly not in this age range. The game became so successful in fact that it has spawned several later editions and spin-off titles with a huge demand from overseas game importers on the company to create an English-language version. The game had a strong focus on romance with easy to operate controls but rather unexpectedly became a big hit with older teenagers and women in their 20s. Brief History of Otome GamesĪ relatively new genre in the short history of video games, the first otome title was called Angelique, developed by a mostly female team ( Ruby Party) and released as game for pre-teen and young teenage girls in 1994. These can be good, bad or neutral with most games having just one ‘True Path’. Structurally, otome games are mostly multiple-choice visual novels with the most popular titles having sophisticated stories with many routes through the game to a variety of endings. With elements of a dating sim and life sim game, the genre is pretty popular with women in Japan and in other East Asian countries but has also seen a rise in the number of fans in the West. Not to be confused with homoerotic yaoi games (‘boy love’) which also appeal to many fangirls in Japan who enjoy watching their favorite male anime characters share their passion, otome are principally romance games however more recently these have been evolving into more erotic ones with some having pretty explicit content and themes. However, there are plenty of titles available with female and non-binary characters to pursue. Conventions of an otome game mean that the protagonist is typically a woman with the love interests mainly being male. Often story-based in the visual novel genre, the main plot of an otome game is for the central character to develop a romantic relationship with one or more other characters. However, the genre is one of the first (and few) types of games that are specifically marketed at and developed with women in mind. A type of Japanese game, otome game (often shortened to just otoge) quite literally translates as ‘maiden’ game.ĭespite being generally targeted to a female audience there are otome titles aimed at guys too.
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