![]() Eventually, as could have been reasonably predicted from even a cursory glance at Japanese art history, the sexy side started to consume all other formulas and genres around it: sex horror, sex comedy, sex puzzle, and soon enough the strategy games that defined the market were cornered by sex too. ![]() ![]() It was a money-making enterprise to make erotica for the PC-98, but as for its broader appeal, they were far and away mediocre titles that would fade into obscurity over the next decade, indistinguishable from each other and barely changing this core formula once it was developed. And as much as the puritans may contest, it’s easy to see which side was winning in the East - sex not only sold, but discovered a structural breakthrough early on via the idea of “routes”, as now your stories could start at Point A and end anywhere from Points B to F depending on whose pants you slipped into. While the old guard would stay relatively stagnant with their creativity over this period, settling into franchises about mysteries of murder and violence, a new breed of visual novel was growing in popularity as people with less resources started to sink their teeth into the other vice that pushes your product - pornography. ![]() All eyes were on the developers of this new generation, of which there were many - the power to create had been set free to the masses through the very devices they’d use to play their games on. The PC-88 series that preceded it had previously released the overwhelmingly popular Portopia Serial Murders, a mostly text based murder mystery that, for the first time, let you hunt down leads in a non-linear fashion, which, while not exactly leading to a wildly branching narrative, did mark one of the first meaningful differences between a traditional story and a story told by a video game. As a 16-bit computer that was great for detailed drawings and (unlike Western computers) had a comprehensive list of Japanese characters to use, but was shabby for animation, two main genres would dominate the system over its lifespan - initially it was strategy games like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, which established the computer as Japan’s foremost gaming computer, but in the modern age the PC-98 is pretty much synonymous with visual novels. While a lot of people who are big into games can probably give you a good estimate of what console a given game came out on purely on sight, there is NO hiding the origin of a PC-98 game. And that’s not to minimize the endless frustration that comes with its gameplay, which prompted a remake in the first place, or make it out like the aesthetic is its primary value, because even though YU-NO comes across as a by-the-numbers product of its era, its identity is both obsessed with the future and trapped in the past. Video essayists have a real problem with brevity, so I’ll just keep my justification short here: for the same reason Devil May Cry 3 fans knew they loved the game as soon as they saw its opening cutscene, the same reason Killer7 fans were glued to the screen from its level select, I knew I was going down with the YU-NO ship as soon as I witnessed something as admittedly trivial as the company logo. This is a slightly-edited transcript of a video essay, available above.
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