Thursday, June 09, 2005

Now 100% More Disturbing

I doubt that many people think of me as a strictly blood and guts type of gamer - after all, my favorite genre is RPGs, so that goes out the window right there. Still, I'm a little bit frightened to be as far away from familiar territory as I am with the Hanihani -Operation Sanctuary- demo.

In the Linux Game Tome entry (the link is back there), the game is described as being "A typical japanese 'choose a phrase' adventure based on a famous anime." I've watched some anime in my time, I'm not averse to it. You can hardly be a fan of the RPG genre and not have had your share of anime at some point. So, I decided to give it a go, although I'll admit I had second thoughts when I realized the download (torrent only, by the way) was ~150MB.

To try to put this as nicely as possible: This is not so much a game per se, but more of an interactive visual novel. I think that's what they call them, anyway. You can actually throw the whole thing into auto mode and just kick back while the story advances. You'll sit through the demo for a long while before you actually get to the point where you can make a choice, and I do mean a long while.

As far as I can tell, the story is mostly about a young man who goes to school and has a very short teacher. There are also some bizarrely uncomfortable moments of apparent sexual tension between this guy and the school nurse, among others. What I saw would be allowed in a PG-13 movie, but was still quite embarrassing to watch. One note, on the download page is does say that you must be 18 or over to purchase the full game - apparently it's a bit racier than the demo. It's also in Japanese, only the demo is translated as far as I know.

If really slow moving anime/manga or those creepy (sorry, but they are) dating sims are your thing, check out the demo - I'm sure you could do worse. Anybody who's interested in a game for the sake of a game, stay far away.

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