Baud Attitude

There’s a fairly straightforward correlation between your interest in another culture and the degree to which your native culture starts thinking of you as a little weird.

Taking Japan as the example here, it’s not too weird to go out for the occasional sushi dinner.  Add a couple of Hokusai woodblock prints, and you’re even in the “classy” tier of cultural interest.  Maybe even watch a couple of Studio Ghibli movies, you’re still good.

Then, maybe you have conversations about seeing Dragonball or Sailor Moon on TV, and you’re starting to slip a little further away from acceptability.  Add a Crunchyroll subscription or a Hatsune Miku Nendo on your desk, and people will start filing you into the category of humans that maybe shouldn’t be invited to dinner parties.  Devote yourself to your 2D waifu, maybe make a little shrine, maybe buy a hug pillow, maybe marry your hug pillow, and people start to ask whether maybe there’s some way to get the police to look into what sorts of things you get up to in your spare time.

And then, when you descend even further into the depths of obsession… there, hovering just at the event horizon of madness, there you find the railfans.

For the record, I don’t know as I’m quite there, nor do I think I’ll ever be quite there.  I don’t quite have the personality that leads to hanging out by the train tracks trying to snap a photo of a rare locomotive.

But, well, maybe call me train-curious.  Not ready to dive into the subculture head-first, but interested enough to try a game like Densha De Go! Pocket, a game in which you drive passenger trains and in which you’re graded on (a) meeting your schedule, (b) stopping precisely at the stations on your route, and (c) obeying posted speed limits.

I swear, from here I HEARD you close the browser tab.

For the record, when I picked up DDG, I thought I was buying the version based on the Yamanote line.  That’s the loop line that goes around Tokyo, and I have spent an awful lot of time riding it myself.  So, yes, I intended to buy a game about driving a train in a circle and obeying speed limits while doing so.

It turns out, the wrong disc was in the case and I instead wound up with the version of Densha De Go! Pocket that covers the Chuo line, which intersects with the Yamanote at Shinjuku station but which generally goes out of Tokyo and to more rural parts of the metropolitan area.  I’m not as familiar with the Chuo line, so when I realized that I had the wrong disc I was more than a little vexed.

I shouldn’t have been – while, sure, it’s not exactly the experience I had in mind, it’s still a very comforting and meditative experience to listen to track sounds and announcements and station jingles and pilot virtual commuters to their destinations.  The track graphics aren’t amazing by modern standards, but they’re not bad by PSP standards, and the Chuo line version even lets you unlock the Narita Express, which is one of my favorite trains to ride as it usually means that I am going from the airport into Tokyo.

I’ve only put a couple of hours in.  I’ve gotten better, I think – my first attempt at coming into a station left me coming to a stop 19 meters beyond the place I was SUPPOSED to stop at, and my latest had me land only 28cm off the mark – but there are a lot of tracks to unlock still and a ton of depth left to plumb.

And maybe I can find a copy of the Yamanote version someday.  That would be cool, too.

I thought I was playing a goofy, pervy dungeon crawler.  I wasn’t expecting a treatise on morality and societal expectations.

…

Let’s start over.

Criminal Girls is a game that probably would have slipped completely under the radar in Western markets, if it weren’t for a Kotaku article titled “In This Game, You Spank Girls”  (Which, if I’m honest, is a pretty good headline.)

It’s an old-school top-down JRPG, in which your character has taken a part-time job without looking in to the fine details and discovers that it’s quite a bit different than they believed.  Turns out, your new job takes place in Hell, and the goal of the job is to rehabilitate seven girls who were condemned to hell for Earthly sins but who are being given a second chance at life, if they can just make it through a series of dungeons and find redemption.

And, yes, there’s a fair bit of spanking, because that’s how you motivate your charges to learn new skills.

Oh, Japan.

The actual spanking mini-game is about as visually tame as you can imagine.  Little markers fly across the screen at an SD representation of the character and you must press the circle button at the right moment.  This isn’t an adult game, it’s just modestly pervy.

In between spankings, you traverse dungeon levels, fighting random encounters to level and finding chests full of money or consumable items.  Some of the harder-to-find chests unlock new moves for your team.  There’s no armor or weapon upgrades, so there’s not a lot of inventory management.  This is somewhat refreshing, actually, though people looking for a loot game ala Diablo will not be well served.

While wandering the halls of Hell, you are treated to a near-constant commentary from your charges, mostly complaining about how they can’t believe they’re STILL walking and isn’t it time for a break yet and when are we going to take a break and Oh My God MORE dungeon why are you making us doooooo this.

This does tend to relieve some of the guilt you may have otherwise felt when it’s spanking time again.

Combat is… also interesting.  It’s turn-based, and the start of every turn has the characters in your team telling you what they’re willing to do, from which you get to select one option.  The options – and thus, the fighting efficacy of your team – are affected by how motivated your team is, so you will have only very basic attacks at the start and then work up to screen-filling lightning storms as you progress through the game.  You can also swap characters in and out of the active team during fights, so you don’t get stuck in a situation of needing a particular skill from a particular character but having them warming the bench.

So, by now you may be wondering about the way I started this post, so let’s talk about that.

After going through several fairly traditional dungeon levels – you get your swamp dungeon, your fire dungeon, your ice dungeon – you find yourself in the modern world, where all of your team members need to confront the Dire Sins that led to their damnation.

This is where things may just get a little personal for the player, because these hardened criminals really haven’t done anything wrong.  At worst, they’re guilty of the sort of slack that gets most of us through the day.  One of them is in Hell because she decided that she didn’t like to go to piano lessons any more, another is there because she got hooked on MMORPGs, failed in high school, and now she’s 20 years old and doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life.

This is, I think, the point where the developers decided to metaphorically stab the player with a metaphorical dagger, and every time you unlock a new story, the metaphorical dagger gets metaphorically twisted just a little more.  It’s a near certainty that one or more of these Horrible Moral Failings is going to apply to the person holding the PSP, and suddenly the whole dragging the characters through dungeons while happily spanking them so they’ll learn their new heal spell takes on a whole new turn.  Hope you never stayed up too late playing WoW!

Oh, and the final boss?  Well, without spoiling too much, you’re not going to feel good about fighting them, either.

Criminal Girls is a weird game, even for Japan.  It sells itself on being ridiculously naughty, isn’t actually all THAT naughty when you actually play it, and hits you with a massive dose of The Feels when you’re about three-quarters of the way in.  It got remade for the Vita, and rather surprisingly got a US release, albeit one rather heavily edited for content.  I haven’t played that version, so I can’t specifically recommend it, but barring a few years of language study it’s probably your best option.