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Except for that insane carnival of masochistic play, the other routes will remain quite empty in September for the horny player. And there is a reason for it: at that time, the game makes the incredible bet the player won’t be horny anymore. The writer took the huge (and cocky) risk to try to have the player hooked to the narration and the characters, thinking that he will continue to play just to read the end of the story.
Let’s go back to the first scene with the boss. Since by pure chance both characters happen to be naked at the time of the mutual outing, the situation degenerates quite quickly, until Hideki stops the action for the (actually quite good) reason that he is not clean. If you prefer (but I’m not sure you do, actually), he comes from a world where the ass is not only used to fuck, but also to sit upon and to evacuate fecal matter. Of course, this makes his boss, who seems to be some sort of parallel entity from the porn world, quite angry. He sees that Hideki hasn’t mastered the basic technique of replacing the unpleasant "shitting" by the much more useful and elegant "tearing of rose petals from his navel", and forces him to have an anal douche in front of him before the intercourse resumes. While some of the more prude of our readers might find this a little bit too extreme (oh, and he also makes Hideki describe what he’s doing while he’s doing it. It does look very entertaining), the point here is that the game blatantly refuses to respect the basic gay porn rule about the perpetual anal cleanliness I described earlier. It follows one rule, refuses the other; and as the relationship of Hideki with your mate of choice grows deeper (no pun intended), the interventions of the outside world in the bubble of porn will be more and more brutal. In other words, the game creators refused to completely cut the link with reality, and "reality" in its roughest meaning.
That "reality" element can appear in very tiny details. It shows, for example, in the case of Senzô, the gorilla-like character. This guy is huge, fat, muscular, hairy, but in his heart of hearts, he is actually a prudish young girl. Even though he doesn’t show, he likes girly things, romantic dramas and movies, and has a cute pink dildo. This kind of anticlimactic detail wouldn’t have been shown in a normal porn situation, where everyone would be here to be butch and fuck accordingly. But in real life (the life out of the porn world), this kind of man is far from rare, and this is basically the reason of the presence of this character. While mammoth-sized Masato and his facial hair from outer space is a "completely fictional character", interesting for his original psyche and his actions, Senzô is here to have a relationship as close to normality as possible. It doesn’t mean the scenario of Masato is not interesting, far from it; but Masato is a fictional character, with a unique past and unique problems when Senzô is a general type. Not a conventional character like the meganekko: he just comes from something more akin to the real world.
After having fucked with Senzô for a month or so, you will start to go out with him to see a French movie or eat in classy restaurants, and as your relationship with him will grow, the characters will continue to fuck every time they can, but you will be shown the sex scenes less and less often, for the good reason that THIS IS NOT THE IMPORTANT THING ANYMORE. What matters now is the love affair between the two, what they do together when they don’t fuck, what they say to each other, etc. The usual way gay men tend to create a relationship should explain this difference of rhythm from straight games, even the more realistic ones: sex before, love after (while the sex continues, but the emphasis is elsewhere). This also means that by the time you arrive in September, the romantic love story should theoretically interest you more than the sex the characters are having.
Another borderline cliché character also has an interesting development: Naoki, the "non gay" character. He is as "non gay" as you can be when you fuck your male roommate (Hideki) twice a day, but that’s a result of his setting, and let’s not start to discuss settings. Settings are sacred.
Naoki used to have sex with girls, without bothering to ask himself if he liked it or not (he’s not the brightest of the bag; actually, nobody in the game is); when he saw Hideki and his boss fuck the first day of the game, he became interested, tries to do the same with Hideki the next day. He thinks he likes it better than going with girls, so continues to fuck the hero. Yeeeeees, I admit this is not completely what I would call a realistic situation, but it manages to be at the same time entertaining and somehow plausible (within the boundaries of the knowledge this is, after all, a game created to entertain the guy who bought it).
Anyway, after nearly two months of non-stop sex, a surprise character appears, and the game instantly topples over in pure horror: Naoki’s ex-girlfriend appears. And by "girlfriend", I mean "girl". By "girl", I mean "a female living being".
Naoki! Watch out, it’s a monster!
It’s trying to fecundate your face like those spider things in the Alien movies!
Being the incarnation of pure evil in a gay game, the creature, named Tôko, is only slightly less ugly than a girl from Sakura Taisen 5. But my point is: although this kind of game is supposed to show you something exciting to masturbate to while you imagine you are so sexy that every character would only want to fuck you, this one suddenly confronts you with a rival character of the worst kind: the rival who has something you can’t compete with.
The Tokimemo series is one of the rare dating sims that dares to introduce the concept of rival characters, but even there, the rivals in Tokimemo 3 were just there to punish you when you made some big mistake with your girl. Tokimemo Girls Side had the "friends" of the heroin, who were much more aggressive to take your man; this is similar to Ietate on the important detail that girls are just devils escaped from hell, trying to steal the guy you are hoping to get in your bed.
But those are romantic dating sims, where the competition element is nearly justified; and with the exception of Girls Side, the rival characters are usually just easily defeatable foes who were never a real threat to the construction of your harem if you play correctly. Tôko, on the other hand, will really try to take Naoki back, and while she is by no stretch of imagination a realistic character (you can nearly see her horns and goat legs) the threat she represents is real, and the game has a bad ending in store for you if you don’t make the right choices. Needless to say, when the game reaches the last days of September, you won’t care at all for the porn element anymore; you just want to read the end of the story, and if possible, the happy ending. Migiri won his bet with the player.
I’m not sure a straight man can understand every dimension of unfair competition that a girl can mean in a gay environment, so you have to trust me on this: her presence is a real blasphemy in a porn game. With her appearance, the Naoki scenario suddenly retreats from the unbridled fantasy to enter something very similar to the real world. It’s still not really the real world, since it’s fairly easy to take your man back, but it’s incredible that the writer dared to go that far. And when I mean unfair competition, I don’t only mean tears and other normal weapons women have the right to use, it also mean ugly things from the everyday life, like the revelation she was pregnant when Naoki left her 10 years ago, and she had to get an abortion when he went away. This just doesn’t belong to a happy gay world.
And when I’m speaking of something you can’t compete with, I’m talking of the simple social acceptance that comes with dating a pretty girl, which never completely comes when you date another man. The game, even though it is clearly a fantasy world, takes place in a place where homophobia exists, real homophobia from everyday life, internalized by the gay characters as something normal you have to deal with. We are definitely out of the protected sphere of gay porn here.
The first time I noticed it, it was just a tiny sentence from Hideki: he and his boss were fucking for the nth time of the game, until another character (Masato) appears and sees the intercourse. At this point, he doesn’t know that Hideki and his boss were gay, and they don’t know he is; he presents his excuses and quickly closes the door, leaving Hideki and especially his boss shocked and flaccid. Finally, Hideki runs after Masato to apologize, but Masato doesn’t seem particularly surprised by what he has seen. Hideki insists: "But we are gay! Aren’t you disgusted by us?" Of course, Masato says he isn’t, because he’s also gay, and the problem is solved.
But of all the things Hideki could have said, this "Aren’t you disgusted by us" deeply moved me. I guess my near ignorance of what it really means to be gay in Japan is part of what surprised me, but as I played the game further, I realized Hideki, even though he was a fully assumed gay man with a normal sexual life before the game began, was still what I would call, as a western gay man, "in the closet". It is also the case of most characters (except maybe Masato, who is nearly as unrealistic as his facial hair so he doesn’t really count); the boss, for example, is totally terrorized by the idea his coworkers might find out he is gay, even though he is the one frightening them during each day of work. Of all the endings you can get, even the best one doesn’t have something close to a Hollywood ending, with the homosexuality of the character revealed to everyone, and all his coworkers and all his family say they love him and they all lived happily for ever and ever. Usually, I hate this kind of "perfect" conclusion, but in this precise case, in a game with 8 "happy" endings, the fact that none of them involved such a heavenly outing could only mean one thing. "This is reality". "Being gay and out of the closet is just not a valid solution in Japan".
Another character I can’t really figure out because it seems completely a Japanese situation for me: Yoshimi’s character doesn’t only revolve around his glasses and monstrous member. He is even deeper in the closet than some other characters, and is frequently harassed by his own mother who keeps introducing him to young single women to finally quit the bachelor life. That miai custom, that doesn’t really exist in the western world (even though we have things that come quite close), seems to be extremely well written. On the BBS for the game, many [Japanese and gay] readers said how they loved the Yoshimi scenario because it pictured their everyday life in the most realistic fashion (and they were not speaking of any penile abnormality). Even his happy end is not all stars and glitter, just something very simple and down to earth; both characters are happy, and that’s all that counts.
Yes, basically, what I am saying is that this game, a simple porn dôjin simulation game, taught me more about the everyday life of gay men in Japan than anything I ever read on the subject. To put it in a more "IC way": this is the best reporting on the subject I ever saw, even though it’s just a game with all the fantasy elements that this kind of game usually has. At the very least, it is a testimony of how the writer sees his own life as a homosexual man in today’s Japan, and if only for this, the game already has more objective value than most of the games, porn and non porn, released this year in Japan or elsewhere. It even helped me understand the story of western gay activism, something I’ve been quite ambivalent about until now: without events like Stonewall and its repercussions through the western world, my life as gay man could very well have been something like the one that appears from time to time in this game, and it’s definitely something I wouldn’t want to try even for one day.
The reaction of the Japanese players on UGCP’s BBS seemed to concur with what I saw. While everyone agrees that the porn aspect of the game was great, and that the situations and the drawings were as arousing as you could want them, many said that those weren’t the details that seemed the most important to them. The way the stories were told was the greatest element, the most fantastic ones as well as the most down to earth ones, in which they recognized a part of themselves.
Gay men always used porn as an active element to cement (ha, ha, pun) their community and their identities, and I think that Ie, Tatemasu! might actually become one of the pillars upon which the Japanese gay identity is going to grow in the next years.
In conclusion, my "Game of the Year 2004" is Xenosaga 2.
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