This is fourth of fourteen essays contained within the third issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Eithi

Sex is a very difficult thing to balance in games. There’s an art to portraying sexual scenes in porn games in a way that doesn’t disrupt the pacing and also feels like it “fits” within the context of the narrative. While it’s easy to add a sex scene during an intimate moment between two characters and make that flow from the previous scene to the next one, one must be able to approach these moments with a particular level of finesse in order for the work to feel cohesive. In HRPGs (or hentai RPGs, “hentai” being the Japanese word for “pervert”), sex scenes have a unique relationship with the overall structure of the game, especially as it pertains to them as content.

Let’s take Magical Valkyrie Lyristia as an example of how this structure typically functions. In this game, you play as the eponymous Magical Valkyrie “Lyristia”, a typical magical girl who uses her power to defeat the evil organization Fakker and their army of energy-stealing monsters. Lyristia explores the city at night and fights a myriad of enemies to find her senior classmate Frostia (who was kidnapped trying to save Lyristia). The game’s combat system revolves around the player building up MP by using skills dispatch small-fry; but crucially, Lyristia has a passive buff that starts in every battle that gives her a 10-hit shield. Once that shield is broken, or the player deactivates it manually, she will take a lot more damage and, if she loses, it’ll trigger a sex scene with the monster that beat her. (If the player goes for an undefeated playthrough they’ll be able to see the sex scene on Lyristia’s computer at her house.) Other games will dole out their sexual content in differing ways, from linear scenes, to more-involved minigames, to specific stat-raising simulations.

We can begin to see how HRPGs handle the relationship between sex, pacing, and ‘content’: a dynamic in which sex scenes – bespoke assets created specifically for player enjoyment – are confined behind a specific set of deliberate player interactions. While this isn’t to say that every HRPG handles sex in this specific way, as there are games where there are specific branches for when the player loses battles, choose-your-own-adventure types, etc, there’s a similar throughline between each one; one where the sex is not just portrayed, but taken as part of the accessible content of the whole, and the player must learn to navigate the distinct conditions that get to trigger these scenes within the game itself.

There are two primary elements that are unique about this system of content delivery. First, it creates a sort of self-selective process by which the player is capable of choosing what to partake in if there’s a specific fetish that they might find crass, uncomfortable, or just plain don’t find hot. Second, it allows the game to offer a sort of risk-reward element where the player has to strategize and structure their playthrough around watching these sex scenes. However, this creates an issue where the way these scenes are presented and accessed can ruin the pacing, creating holes in a playthrough where sex doesn’t happen, in defiance of player expectations.

So therein lies our question: How do we square this circle of creating accessible content that doesn’t impede on the pace of the game, yet still manage to make it present within the game itself? Doujin creator Akai Mato arrived at an interesting answer with his two masterpiece RPGs: King Exit and Demons Roots.

These games are traditional HRPGs in the sense I have defined previously. Both of them try to find their own way of showing the appeal of the HRPG as a vehicle for porn while also trying to tell a compelling story that has ambitions greater than “just” being a vehicle for porn.

King Exit

Although not my primary focus, I think it’s important to discuss how King Exit delivers its porn scenes: they’re all skippable. Before the start of a sex scene, the player is given the choice to read the scene in full or read a summarized version of the scene that skews less towards pornographic and more towards a general description of what happened. These scenes are also categorized by their level of extreme content, with most scenes being given a “Normal” rating and the scenes that would have happened had the player lost being given a “Hard” rating. This allows the player to experience the game as a regular RPG with content no more explicit than something like The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 (although it’s worth noting that both games do have graphic sex scenes), and thus they’re able to enjoy the game in a context semi-divorced from the HRPG it takes its roots from.

There are a couple of issues that can arise from doing this. A lot of the scenes are scattered throughout the main path of the story rather than sequestered somewhere else, so the pacing ends up feeling off. Skip prompts can sometimes come out of nowhere, such as when Geolouise (the protagonist) returns to her cell. A lot of plot-critical moments also happen within sex scenes (especially near the end of the game), meaning that moments meant to convey both eroticism and genuine emotional catharsis are reduced to a short, dry summary. This isn’t to say that the game completely fails at making these moments work, but it creates moments of whiplash that I feel could have been better presented.

Demons Roots

The next game, King Exit’s prequel Demons Roots, has a different, incredibly ambitious way of answering the question “How does one present sex scenes as content?”. One that, while impressive, I feel a lot more conflicted about.

Demons Roots features three main types of sex scene interaction. The first is linear, progressive set of scenes contextualized through the narrative and shown to the player in order. Unlike in King Exit, the player is not allowed to skip these scenes before entering them, as most are plot-relevant and contain crucial information about the world, character motivations, etc. While they’re still titillating, the scenes are taken seriously in the context of the narrative and form a foundation within the main plot.

Second are the bad ending scenes. After losing a fight, the player is given the option to go to the “bad-end dungeon”, an area of the game only accessible by being defeated in the combat, or by going to a specific house early in the game and letting yourself be captured by the antagonists. This area houses all the extreme content, including but not limited to torture, watersports, abuse, etc. Contextually it’s meant to feel miserable to go through, yet for players with an affinity towards this type of porn, it’s a perfect way to get it all in one place.

The third one is, and I am not kidding when I say this, Sex Disneyland. Early on the party is given access to an area in the world map called DoReMi FucKingdom, an entirely optional area of the map themed like an amusement park where a good half of the game’s sex scenes take place. In it, the player spends in-game money to pull on a gacha-like machine to get three different types of sex scenes for each of the female party members, each one with up to three variations with different attire and wholly new dialog for each. It’s a smorgasbord of any fetishes a player might have, all located in one spot, accessible wherever and whenever the player might feel like pleasuring themselves.

In theory, you could say that this is a perfect, even genius, bit of design. The segmentation of the differing types of sex scenes, all categorized by differing levels of extremity and accessibility within the player’s control, allows them to choose where and when they might want to enjoy said scenes. Excluding the scenes in the main story, the player can engage with the sexual content of Demons Roots at their leisure. This segregation of content, therefore, allows players who do not care about sexual content, or only care about one specific subset of content, to mostly skip through it if they’re not interested. If they want to play a regular RPG with fantastic characters and an ambitious story, Demons Roots caters to them too.

But then… what about the scenes in the main story? Unlike King Exit, those are unskippable unless you hold the control key; and even then, they all contain really good moments of character writing and important plot necessary to enjoying the full experience. Isn’t it weird to approach a game that’s sold to you as a sex RPG, but also feel the need to segregate the sex from it?

As I played through Demons Roots and had discussions with friends about it, this question came back to me again and again. In a genre space created because of the freedom afforded the creators to depict whatever they want, I couldn’t stop asking myself “Why is this game segregating the core of the space to its own optional, unobtrusive sections?” Seeing all this effort, all this writing and art, not used once outside of DoReMi FucKingdom and the bad-end dungeon felt dissonant. It was as though the game couldn’t choose what to focus on, feeling obliged to straddle both sides of the Sex/No Sex aisle.

What also conflicted me was that I didn’t dislike this segregation in and of itself. Despite my griping, Demons Roots was still enjoyable to me. I liked taking time off to see the new and crazy sex scenes I’d unlocked as I got more party members and more parts of the theme park opened up. And while the stuff in the bad-end dungeon isn’t to my tastes, I still came back to watch the scenes that contributed to worldbuilding not shown anywhere else. Still, seeing all this effort put into a part of the game the player may never even look at felt wasteful to me. I don’t know if it would have been better to distribute these scenes along the critical path either because they would have disrupted the pacing of the main story, and removing them outright would be antithetical to the game’s identity.

Demons Roots is interesting to me because it has a weird relationship with its sexual content. It’s very much a game made by someone whose express purpose was to titillate players, yet there’s a disconnect between what the game wants to do as an HRPG and what it wants to portray as a grand, ambitious RPG. While this disconnect didn’t affect my enjoyment of the game on the whole (I still feel it’s one of the all-time greats), it did leave me wondering about how we treat sex scenes within spaces that should, in theory, not need to cater to audiences that aren’t there specifically because of the sexual content. It’s interesting, in a way, how much we’re able to learn about the things we like by seeing how much they’re willing to take away.

Eithan Rosemberg is a freelance writer based in Mexico City and majoring in history. You can contact him at eithanrosemberg@gmail.com and check out his work via Muck Rack. You can also visit his blog at https://eithiwrites.neocities.org.

Subscribe to the RSS feed