Any time I want to know how good an anime or manga or video game with an obvious Eastern aesthetic is, I have to search up Japanese reviews because that's the only way I can find reviews using words that can actually mean things.

guy whose mission is to defend corporations: nooooo you don't understand, it's not a fair comparison because the youtube guy is doing small-scale experiments motivated by an in-depth understanding of the hardware, while triple-A studios have a scope set by executives who don't know anything!

Getting stuck causes players to explore the world.

Dying causes players to think about what they're doing.

An "impossible" situation causes players to learn how the game works and eventually achieve the impossible.

We need to be able to design *some* games around these fundamental ideas.

I was about to say maybe even if you removed this generation of kids' obsession with morally justifying fictional likes from the equation, Qian Jin wouldn't be popular because of his lack of homoerotic fanwork potential but then realized you could do the Dojima/Adachi ship with Qian Jin and Xiao Li.

And y'know, emblematic of how many people in modern times seem to think depicting something without using real bodies is equivalent to actual exploitation/crimes.

Also want to say, while not a full on Otome Game.. Promise of Wizard is a prettyboy phone game that gets advertised in Josei muke manga, that allows you to play as either a boy or girl and the overall playerbase handled that just fine so..!

I do see why gay guys would like to self-insert in Otome games though as they tend to have higher fidelity presentation and more life & romance simulation aspects compared to most BL games being really just glorified picture books with dialogue options.

I'll admit though, for Otome Games with completely customizable protagonists (who tend to be silent blank states), I feel like for them the only major hurdle for allowing the player to pick their gender at that point is censorship or fear of homophobic backlash lol. You've solved the CG issue!

Games like this have also showed us that script changing in accordance to a protagonist's gender is very much possible. Persona 3 Portable also did a ton for that for the very male centric scenes when you play as a girl.

Of course it's best to have games like this designed like from conception.

On the other hand, I know it's not impossible. There are already games where you can both select the gender of your protagonist while also having the protagonist be an actual character instead of a blank state.

These kinds of games might be a favorite gender of mine. /reference

That's the *real* issue. You can't "just" throw in a second selectable protagonist for a story written for a specific protagonist where often times even their gender influences the social dynamics.

And that's not even getting into the fact it would require double the resources for CGs.

"i hate writing NPC dialogue i don't wanna do it i need bobot to do it for me buhhhhh" you are like a little baby

I can't take the credit for the discover though! I learned about this through this short and noticed this was not something the Western fandom documented. www.youtube.com/shorts/KnB32...