Tag: adult themes

Roguelike NSFW II: Erect Boogaloo

Tiberius1 Comment

There’s a market for everything these days

Earlier this year in February, I wrote about an Adults Only game called Scarlet Maiden, about a scantily clad heroine on a quest to defeat the Prime Evil one lewdening at a time. Once again, under the Critical Bliss publishing flag, I’ve found another AO-rated 16-bit game about slashing mooks and exposing boobs but with an emphasis on magic. The game in question: FlipWitch – Forbidden Sex Hex:

Should’ve known there’d be a bunch of fanart when looking for the title screen for this game, short of booting it up for the screenshot…

As the Flip Witch under the tutelage of a great witch named Beatrix, you’re main objective is to defeat the Chaos Witch, an Egypt-themed triclops witch messing with you and all the creatures of the land from her very own castle behind a door with six unique pyramid-shaped locks. To get them all, you have to traverse different realms and defeat the bosses to get the keys. Depending on your level, you’ll either eat dirt and be shown a game over screen where the monsters of a specific realm have their way with you, or you’ll blaze through relatively unscathed. This time, I’m torn over whether to conclude that this game uses permadeath as a feature since it doesn’t have a lives’ system, but on the other hand, there’s designated save points where you gain everything you used during your playthrough, crystal teleporters to fast travel between places you’ve been and a health restoration-like system in the form of a peach that gets upgraded with each quest you complete.

Speaking of quests, Beatrix’s secondary focus is to partake in such quests for health and magic upgrades. Some of these are found interspersed across the game enlarging your health and magic bars so that you can use more, to include the more taxing magic items, and others are gained by completing a certain number of quests. Reaching said number adds a little notification in the form of Beatrix’s sprite in the upper righthand corner to let you know that upgrades are available.

More quests mean more upgrades until you max everything out and steamroll the monsters like a one-man army. Or more like one man and one woman, both of which are you. The “flip” in FlipWitch refers to your ability to switch genders at will, an acquired skill that factors both into the quests and the game over screens, so male or female, something is gonna rise and ain’t gonna be a shield hero.

Didn’t even have to censor this one.

Combat this time around doesn’t give you the option to sex up a monster for upgrade points like Sin in Scarlet Maiden or even to add to the bestiary. For the most part, the monsters are more or less segregated to their own designated parts of the game map. For instance, only goblins roam the woodlands, demons stay in the demon realm of Jigoku, mermaids are in Umi Umi, etc., etc. and they all have their own unique game over screens for when you die and for what gender you were when you died.

The weapon variety is also limited to just your wand as opposed to any number of swords and other fantasy weapons like in Scarlet Maiden. Not to mention, the only enemy-types that do show genitalia are the female enemy types. The males do show d[spurt!]k, but often after the game over screen. So unlike Scarlet Maiden, the BDSM term “switch” has a different context. A more literal context. Where the game lacks weapon variety, it makes up for it in magic variety, by giving you more magical powers to use against enemies. The wand is capable of firing projectiles and select characters of different types that don’t give you quests give you different magic powers to use which require short tutorials to get the hang of.

As for the quests, the standard format they use is go to place, get quest, deliver thing to X, get sexy rewards. Like so:

The one twist these types of quests use is that specific costumes need to be bought with the coins you acquire through gameplay. Different costumes unlock different quests for different variations of a similar reward (sexy times), which ties into the whole Metroidvania aspect the game advertises. Nonlinear gameplay allowing for backtracking to important locations with new knowledge and more rewards and potential upgrades to finally defeat the Chao Witch…!

…which I’m very close to doing as of this writing. I’m so close!!

Recommendations? Give it a go. There’s keyboard controls like in Scarlet Maiden, but unless you’ve got the fingers for it, plug in a controller. Do what I did and program a PS3 controller to read like an Xbox controller; it’ll work the same. The fact that I’m very close to 100% completion and very close to defeating the Chaos Witch should all the recommendation needed for this game. The controls will feel slightly more sluggish at the beginning, but once you get used to it, especially after Scarlet Maiden’s fluidity and — for lack of a better term — bounciness, it’s pretty much a breeze. Currently on sale for the Summer Steam sales, but even not, $15 is a pretty good deal.

She Abandoned Nobility to Embrace Her Sexual Deviancy

Tiberius4 Comments

And regrets nothing

This post had a different title in my notes, but I figure the current title was a much better one than what I originally had. Last week, I wrote about a rape and revenge animanga series where the morally dark gray protagonist renamed his penis Divine Punishment and used it to add more and more women to his sadistic fantasy harem in an effort to take down a morally nonexistent kingdom. This time, I’ve got a manga that follows similar story beats, but the question isn’t about consent, but about kinks and the supposed absence of lines to draw.

Gigguk was right; animanga has been moving gradually towards the “I can’t believe it’s not hentai” genre as of late. A not insignificant portion of my reading and viewing experience either plays with pornographic content or just practically walks up to me and says, “Nice shoes, wanna f[clash!]k?”

The series in question is I May Be a Villainess, But Please Make Me Your Sex Slave, Japanese title Akuyaku Reijou desu ga, Watashi o Anata no Seidorei ni Shite Kudasai! and it wears its premise on its sleeve and in its chapters. Most online manga viewing sites like MangaDex, for instance, have 10 chapters translated so far, and I’m eagerly awaiting updates. This post may be shorter than the rest so I may bring it up again if we get more. It follows the isekai tropes we all know and love, but the protagonist, Kaito, isn’t Kazuma Sato or Keyaru/Keyaruga. He begins the series as the servant to a duchess named Christina “Chris” Febster, a.k.a. the silver-haired girl whose image graces the cover of the manga.

She begins the manga in a role similar to My Next Life as a Villainess’ Kata(baka)rina Claes or From Bureaucrat to Villainess’ Grace Auvergne/Kenzaburo Tondabayashi. Icy, vain, unforgiving, cruel; think of every negative thing said about Mandy from Billy and Mandy during the Keeper of the Reaper episode.

A single smirk puts her into the Powerpuff Girls’ universe, I s[buzzing]t you not.

So Duchess Chris Febster’s attitude is so distasteful and inappropriate that her fiance calls off the engagement. Protagonist Kaito feels like a failure understandably as her personal servant attempting to avoid the Otome game doom flags (these have been popping up a lot as of late, I guess I should add otome games into the pipeline if I can find any in English). Kaito expected he and Chris to face the worst of the worst of outcomes, but in a twist not only is she relieved to be free from her noble status, she U-turns into the world of sexual deviancy.

Kaito grew up next to Chris and while this reincarnated young man grew to accept his role as a loyal servant, Chris had grown attached and at one point in her past asked about how to sexually satisfy a man. Following up on that, she requests (read: demands) to become subservient to Kaito’s penis in a sort of role reversal… or role… correction…? Normally, role reversal is when traditional gender roles are flipped on their head (working wife, house husband structure), but this is flipping the roles back on their feet.

It’s the opposite of this, and far smuttier.

So, Kaito accepts and Chris is arguably too proud to be a nun in this Church of D[whistles]k. As for the base of the story, by day, Kaito and Chris are slaying monsters and conquering dungeons in a typical fantasy adventure and, by night, Kaito plays along to Chris’ strange addiction and reinforces her infatuation as a pervert.

I mentioned this isn’t a hentai, right? And yet it’s structured like it would have the corresponding tags. So far, there’s not an ugly bastard yet, but I just wanna show you all what its categorized under.

Erotica tracks, but romance… I’m exaggerating, there’s a bunch of freaky couples out there and considering the recent chapters have roleplay in them, these tags give the author free reign to put whatever is in so long as it gets readers.

So, this manga, I felt, was more honest than Revenge of the Rapist due to its title alone and ironically I find it tamer largely because the parties consented to the arrangement, but it’s still strange that Chris needs to tell everyone with ears that her purpose in life is to take Kaito’s d[squirt!]k. Is this why I like it more? Honestly… yes. I did give some amount of praise for Angry Penis, but this time around I give more praise to the 10 chapters of Punish Me With Your Penis, Master largely for the consent aspect, and also because the protagonists weren’t victims of the most corrupt, vile, wicked people to ever exist nor were they so evil they didn’t realize a demon was in the mirror. Actually, there’s little showing of Christina’s villainy and more of Kaito being a servant/butler type. Even he didn’t expect to suddenly be a Penis Master, but here he is, f[gunshot]king Chris’ brains out because she’s down horrendous.

Now, this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I’m still uneasy about Redo of Healer after eight episodes and at times, I feel that All Hail My Master’s Howitzer gets into ridiculous territory, but away from all of that, the chapters are usually somewhere around 30 pages on average. A majority of the panels, in some way, feature the two main leads f[wood planks]king like they’re the last two people on earth, and one of the tags that should be considered is comedy because they f[hoot]k so loud that it can wake up the dead.

Source: Chapter 5, Page 23.

This is one of the tamer pages I could find. Before you is the face of a woman who secretly always wanted to live the life of a whore. Spoiler alert: she gets that and more.

I’m not even kink-shaming or kink-asking like I did last time. I wanna see more of this and I hate that we currently only have 10 chapters. If you so choose to read this yourself, MangaDex is my recommended go to for the lack of ads on the sides. The site did suffer from a DMCA and several series were scrubbed in some capacity, some wholesale. You’re more than welcome to find a different underground manga hosting site for your viewing pleasure. Actually, disregard my summary of this series, the meme below is a better summary:

Tell me where the lie is.

16-Bit NSFW Roguelike Metroidvania

Tiberius3 Comments

Guess it was only a matter of time

By now, dear reader, you are well aware of my tastes. I played coy in the early days of this blog, but with time comes growth, exploration, and experience. Many forms of media have been covered on this blog, but even two years after starting, I’ve a few blind spots here and there.

My marriage proposal masquerading as a blog about three lewd and pivotal anime series many moons ago was arguably the loudest I’ve been of my tastes and while I admit it was a gateway to the horny, it’s mostly stopped there…

…until in late December when I added an Adults Only game to my Steam library. For the longest time, I was under the impression that these types of games couldn’t be bought or accessed normally. And in the context of brick and mortar game stores, I was kinda right. They wouldn’t be on the shelves next to Pokémon or Kirby or even Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto, but there were (and are) developers who continually release envelope-pushing games for maturer audiences beyond the M-17+ rating. Games that, if put in a RockStar game, would easily get it the legendary AO rating.

The game I’m playing that has this rating is known as Scarlet Maiden by Otterside Games, a developer whose stated purpose is to make pornographic hentai games alongside publisher Critical Bliss. Scarlet Maiden is one of several fielded by this dev and by its nature leaves nothing to the imagination. It starts out with the titular character Scarlet, the last of a group of Maidens of the Flame on a quest to defeat an enemy known as the Prime Evil, previously sealed away by the First Maiden. On the way, you meet a smorgasbord of the typical RPG characters during your runs who can equip you with all the weapons necessary to navigate the dungeon. Melee weapons, magics, enhancing trinkets et al; you discover more with each run you take along with different enemy types that also come from just about any other RPG from orcs to fairies to slimes, etc.

As for the lewd content… actually, lewd suggests that there’s teasing and nothing is teasing in this game. Every character and enemy type either has but one inch of fabric over their genitalia or nothing over their genitalia, they’re just hiding a massive dong in between their legs. Or stickers are covering their nipples. Or… they’re either designed to be comfortable enough to leave their bits out in the open for all to see (something something exhibitionism kink), or they have a d[ding]k so big that they need to wheel it around…

I told you I wasn’t making it up.

Scarlet herself is covered by an abnormally thick piece of tooth floss that’s easily removed over the course of the game. In combat, sometimes when an enemy is downed she can remove the necessary parts of her outfit to f[anh]k the enemy (which is how you add them to the game’s Castlevania-like bestiary) or whenever you come across a chest or weapon/item swap/upgrade, the guardian/being resting in the room can simply be sexually pleasured to get to the shinies through the in-game currency called Sin. More sin = more upgrades. Sounds like pornstars when I put it that way…

Credit: ⎛⎝𝖘𝖍𝖆𝖗𝖕⎠⎞ (on Steam)

There’s a subsect of anime fans (read: tourists) who’ve sworn off all lewd and pornographic or porn-lite content, a legacy of the old GamerGate controversy that espouses the consequences of a generations of objectifying women in video gaming, and truth be told the number of games that still do this would only be found in Mature and up rated games and other media. For my take, if it’s plot essential, I welcome it, hence my shrine to Lady Rias…

IF I HAD ONE!!!!

Fanservice, however, is a broader brush to stroke. I can make the argument that a series like Black Lagoon has it in spades in the English dub in the form of anything coming out of Revy’s mouth.

For those who’re apprehensive of even fanservice or scantily clad women in media, rest assured that this game takes what I call the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure approach to character design. When I say, every character has only about an inch of fabric covering their bodies, I don’t just mean the women. At the Maiden of the Flame house, there’s a thinly covered nun, a blacksmith with bulging muscles, a wizard who’s wearing nothing beneath the robe (except probably a c[rooster call]k ring), and others.

As you explore the dungeon, one of the maidens will ask you to recover ten of something which unlocks a sexy minigame, and as you may have picked up earlier in this post, there’s a wide appeal to many a kink/fetish most commonly found in hentai, though thankfully not so many that would put off a newcomer. Futanari, huge tits, giant d[bells]k, masquerade, naughty nun; from what I’ve seen, BDSM is an umbrella term that more than accurately describes the sexual content in Scarlet Maiden. And to build on that observation, using BDSM terms, I can safely deduce that Scarlet is a switch. She f[kcuf]ks and gets f[gasp!]ked by roughly all manner of creature and character that the game will allow.

As for the gameplay, there’s one attack button, there’s a double jump, you can use a magic spell, and you can dash to avoid the traps inside on your way to pleasure the traps and get some new stuff to help you conquer the dungeon. See what I did there?

The last thing to mention is the permadeath feature. The game doesn’t have lives or save points, but it does save your Sin points for upgrades and displays your progress each time you die or if you complete a successful run–the latter of which I haven’t done yet as of this writing.

Do I recommend this game? Abso-f[horse neighs]king-lutely.

This “Lewdtroidvania” (that’ll never stick) is but one of several in the Otterside/Critical Bliss library in particular and one of several I’ve seen on that side of Steam as a whole. Full disclosure, it’s more than just one of those sex games hiding behind the skin of a visual novel or even a puzzle game (the latter of which has more gameplay interaction than a bog-standard VN), the types you might see in any one of those s[horse dung]tty ads on the porn sites. On a whim, I tried one of those and I can’t deny there’s an audience for that type of porn game, but all things considered, you might as well just read hentai, or better yet, play Scarlet Maiden. You’ll get your money’s worth and you’ll get the same level of entertainment you would from booting up the old 2D Castlevania or Metroid games.

Also, don’t let the abundance of milkers distract from the fact that everything in this game is f[plastic wrap]kable. I may or may not play more of these types of games in the future.

Animation Deserves more Respect

TiberiusLeave a comment

It hurts to see it.

Normally, I have one topic ready to go every Friday and planned on several weeks in advance. This week and into the weekend, I want to try something different, something special. A lot has occurred both in real life and the entertainment sector that may become old and stale if I add them to the empty spaces on my planner document (which goes into March 2024 as of writing this), so for today, I’ll cover my thoughts on animation today, tomorrow October 14, I will cover an anime adaptation that I’d been looking forward to personally, and on Sunday, October 15, I’ll cover the misfortunes of a company that, honestly, feels like it’s been on life support for a while now, each with sneak peeks at the end. Unlike this one, no YouTube recommended channels will be featured for those posts–just this one. Now to begin proper.

Since I was a kid, I remember part of my day was complete or going expressly well when I could turn on the TV after speeding through my homework and catching up on my favorite cartoons. Funny enough, a lot of what I liked at the time is now remembered as genuinely creepy and weird. Observe:

And it wasn’t just this one. Courage the Cowardly Dog, Invader Zim, The Secret Show, Kappa Mikey, Martin Mystery, and several other shows that I was always convinced I was the only one watching. The draw for me, aside from a series of moving drawings, was that a lot of them were so unique. They had their own art styles, plots, some of them were spearheaded by comic book artists, such as in the case of Invader Zim’s creator Jhonen Vasquez and Kaput and Zosky creator Lewis Trondheim.

They also had an air of black comedy embedded in the structure of the series, often based on works published prior. When these shows were picked up by Nickelodeon or its sister network Nicktoons, they were often marketed towards children, though often needed to keep the darker elements under wraps to avoid censorship. Still, a lot of stuff got through the cracks. Like this scene: [content warning].

And this wouldn’t be the only time, shockingly, that someone’s organs were outside them.

For all the flack cartoons have gotten for being “childish” and “immature,” it’s easy to forget that the pioneers of old like Disney, Warner Bros. and MGM had darker themes in a lot of their old cartoons. Never mind the modern day creepypastas featuring Mickey Mouse and co.; think about how many old cartoons had gun violence in them. Where else do you think we get this meme template?

I bring this all up, not so much to rant about cartoons getting soft, but more so to contextualize why I think animation and cartoons have become something of a laughingstock in the West. Ridiculous violence and anthropomorphic animals aside, it’s not like this was all western animation studios were throwing out since the 1960s onwards.

Think about comic book adaptations, like all those of Batman or Spider-Man or the X-Men. All of those comics and many successors trusted their audience, no matter how young they could’ve been, to understand the complicated themes and plot points within. For one such example, the YouTube channel, Shady Doorags, frequently covers animation and animated shows and their many mature themes. Even shows that had a high child and preteen audience like Teen Titans was covered several times, and this episode he covered earlier this year seems to have been one of the more mature ones in the series.

Credit: Warner Bros., Cartoon Network. Channel: Shady Doorags (March 26, 2023)

When referring to mature animated shows retroactively, there’s now a distinction between a show that’s mature and a show that’s adult. King of the Hill, The Boondocks, Black Dynamite, and Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy and American Dad are all mature and handle maturity in different ways, through satire, social commentary, the politics within certain hot-button issues (especially if those issues are still front and center today), or some combination of all these.

By stark contrast, some recent animated shows go straight for the fences without the maturity or class of some of the older shows. I need more fingers to count the themes in a South Park or King of the Hill episode, but I’d struggle for something like that show Fairview or Legends of Chamberlain Heights among others. The same goes for maligned reboots of well-beloved properties. You probably know about the 2016 reboot of Powerpuff Girls or Teen Titans Go! or worse Velma, or if not, you know them all by their sour reputations among fans of the original properties.

Whenever I look into the main sources of criticism, similar talking points come about. Lazy art-styles, crude and purposeless humor, mean-spirited humor, a grave misunderstanding of the subject matter, and often the worst of the criticism relates to pandering. Pandering to a demographic that had a hissy fit on social media; pandering to an underrepresented demographic, likely because that specific demographic is literally extremely few in number; pandering to demographics that suffer from an advanced case of white savior complex. The types that won’t really watch the property, but will lie on the internet to look more virtuous than the person they’re arguing with over the keyboard, even if they’re talking to someone who has volunteered before in the past.

Altogether, it brings back problems animation and fans of animation were certain they’d dealt with years prior and this new generation of animators seem to be fighting an old battle. I’m looking in from the outside, but some of the recent shows coming out don’t do burgeoning animators any favors, especially if you’re familiar with what Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are responsible for. Sometimes I only know about it because channels like Clownfish TV have experience and expertise on their design philosophy.

When I started conceptualizing this topic, at first I was going to write from the standpoint of award shows, but then I remembered some of the shows I mentioned in this post in passing have gotten recognition from awards boards in the past and even now so if there’s a group of people I’m asking or nearly begging to respect animation, it may be the studios that greenlight them and some of the animators that work on them. From my old high school art class, I remember learning of the philosophy of knowing the rules before breaking them, as in, learn how to draw before you put your own spin on things, and this rings true for all of animation. There’s a stark difference between Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry and the Pink Panther/The Inspector art-wise, and even animator-wise. Walt Disney and Friz Freleng were not the same people, but they both learned to draw somehow.

And this is true of today’s animators. You know the old saying: Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes a lot of skill, craft, and imagination to make a disciplined practice look so undisciplined. Think about how radically different medieval music is compared to Black Sabbath. And for animation, there was a lot of respect for the creators of this:

And the studios that brought us animations like this:

The simple and obvious solution for modern day animators is multifaceted, though to take an example from the military would be to look at who’s at the top of the chain of command. I would never doubt the capabilities of a studio today since most of the time they’re only doing what they’re told; rather my efforts would be better focused on the people they answer to. Clownfish TV mentions names like Disney’s pair of Bobs, Chapek and Iger, as well as investors ignorantly chasing lightning bolts with an open mason jar, confident that it’ll hit the bottle and not them.

Then again, if we’re looking at the investor angle, as risky as it is to put your eggs on an untapped market, it’s equally risky to go for the diminished returns for obvious reasons. Call it the centrist approach, but why not blend the two together? Put a few eggs in the new and unforeseen while keeping the rest in safety boxes, only moving when things go consistently south. If the new thing fails, you still have some pennies, and when the old things lose favor, you can pull out before you lose everything. Oversimplified solution? Well, again I’m no expert. It’s just something I could see myself doing if given the resources to do so.

For this week’s recommendation, I bring you to the channel sydsnap.

https://www.youtube.com/@sydsnap/about

The channel, run by Sydney Maneetapho (née Poniewaz), covers anime and manga, but a more adult-oriented type variety of each, namely hentai. Sydney often recommends some of her own favorite series often for the sake of some guilty pleasure, but also because between all the exposure and nudity, some of the authors and artists behind these hentai have credits writing manga for general audiences, such as in the case with the author of Don’t Toy with Me, Nagatoro-san. She’s even interviewed several names in the adult entertainment industry, like retired porn actress, Kaho Shibuya, or active porn actress, June Lovejoy. If you’re looking for some recommendations or would like to learn more about topics of this nature, most of sydsnap’s videos cover this in detail or alternatively, a donation can be made to her associated Patreon page to get past the censors.

I will return tomorrow with an impression of a long-awaited adaptation.