during the final act, Masashi is sent blackmail zech tapes as part of the villain’s plan to demoralize him. He struggles with a Madonna / Whore complex, despite being the hero that we’re supposed to root for – he laments the fact that his wife has been “made impure” and expresses jealousy at the “lewd” things she’s made to perform for others, wondering why she has never done them for him. And then he realizes something – of course she wouldn’t, because he would never ask of such things from his wife. She was the “pure” mother of his child, not a “whore” who would enjoy such things, after all.
At what seems to be the end of the story, after all the struggles to rescue Misaki – you’re actually given a choice – “Do I really want my wife back, now that she’s ‘impure’?”
If you reject her, the game practically slaps the player over the head for being a moron.
Thus, I reload the game, and pick the “correct” decision this time, wondering if this will be one of the very rare games in the genre with a happy ending.
And well, yeah, from a Jedi’s point of view, the true ending is indeed a happy ending.
It’s just a very esoteric one.
The couple never goes back to “how things were the way before” – the “innocence” of a naive, teenage romance is gone. In a bit of irony, Masashi was so traumatized by his experience that he developed a fetish for watching others boink his wife…
…By the dictionary sense of the term “fetish”, which isn’t “I prefer this particular act as I find it very stimulating”, rather, he can only get hornito specifically in that scenario and nowhere else.
The game actually goes into detail as to why this happened, showing it as a coping mechanism of his lack of control and powerlessness over what has happened to him. At one point, he intentionally puts Misaki in a similar scenario trying to recreate the circumstances that started it all. He’s trying to turn all of his guilt about not knowing and being able to stop things with a “yes, um, I wasn’t powerless at all, it was actually because I planned it all along!”
But it clearly doesn’t work, and no matter how much he tries to control things, he just kinda ends up triggering himself with trauma over again.
And that’s when Misaki does something that the Japanese fear above all else.
She has an open and honest discussion with him about their relationship.
She does a lot of things you don’t expect a Japanese written character to ever do regarding that subject – acknowledging her mistakes, reaffirming their bond that led them to fall in love and get married in the first place, wanting to work together to make sure both their kinks are satisfied, but also setting down her boundaries (she doesn’t want to ever sleep with other people again, for example)
Fast forward a few months, the last scene of the game is the couple happily planning to roleplay a scenario together in a safe and secure manner.
I love the ending – it feels very “adult” in the actual sense of the word. It’s a rejection of the pure/impure dichotomy when it comes to sexual matters – the woman didn’t “become an impure whore and is now RUINED FOREVER“, and neither is the man “abnormal.” It’s just two adults finally being open and unbound by the norms that hurt them before.
Nowadays, Visual Novel companies are going mainstream, even the ones that used to make adult games, in favor of “all-ages” works. I reject this development. Even if the majority of “adult” games are just created because someone just really wanted to write about boinking a big yogi’d succubus, I think trying to create a dichotomy between “pure” and “impure” games leaves cracks for actual adult stories to go untold.
At what seems to be the end of the story, after all the struggles to rescue Misaki – you’re actually given a choice – “Do I really want my wife back, now that she’s ‘impure’?”
If you reject her, the game practically slaps the player over the head for being a moron.
Thus, I reload the game, and pick the “correct” decision this time, wondering if this will be one of the very rare games in the genre with a happy ending.
And well, yeah, from a Jedi’s point of view, the true ending is indeed a happy ending.
It’s just a very esoteric one.
The couple never goes back to “how things were the way before” – the “innocence” of a naive, teenage romance is gone. In a bit of irony, Masashi was so traumatized by his experience that he developed a fetish for watching others boink his wife…
…By the dictionary sense of the term “fetish”, which isn’t “I prefer this particular act as I find it very stimulating”, rather, he can only get hornito specifically in that scenario and nowhere else.
The game actually goes into detail as to why this happened, showing it as a coping mechanism of his lack of control and powerlessness over what has happened to him. At one point, he intentionally puts Misaki in a similar scenario trying to recreate the circumstances that started it all. He’s trying to turn all of his guilt about not knowing and being able to stop things with a “yes, um, I wasn’t powerless at all, it was actually because I planned it all along!”
But it clearly doesn’t work, and no matter how much he tries to control things, he just kinda ends up triggering himself with trauma over again.
And that’s when Misaki does something that the Japanese fear above all else.
She has an open and honest discussion with him about their relationship.
She does a lot of things you don’t expect a Japanese written character to ever do regarding that subject – acknowledging her mistakes, reaffirming their bond that led them to fall in love and get married in the first place, wanting to work together to make sure both their kinks are satisfied, but also setting down her boundaries (she doesn’t want to ever sleep with other people again, for example)
Fast forward a few months, the last scene of the game is the couple happily planning to roleplay a scenario together in a safe and secure manner.
I love the ending – it feels very “adult” in the actual sense of the word. It’s a rejection of the pure/impure dichotomy when it comes to sexual matters – the woman didn’t “become an impure whore and is now RUINED FOREVER“, and neither is the man “abnormal.” It’s just two adults finally being open and unbound by the norms that hurt them before.
Nowadays, Visual Novel companies are going mainstream, even the ones that used to make adult games, in favor of “all-ages” works. I reject this development. Even if the majority of “adult” games are just created because someone just really wanted to write about boinking a big yogi’d succubus, I think trying to create a dichotomy between “pure” and “impure” games leaves cracks for actual adult stories to go untold.