From Fantasy and Magic to Boobies, Giant Axes and Milk Bukkakes: The Story of Queen's Blade

Today, I came across a series of games known as Queen's Blade. We'll get to why it caught my attention in just a bit. I'd never heard of Queen's Blade before, but apparently, it's part of the "visual combat book" genre. Even being a fan of visual novels, I'll admit I'd never heard of this particular genre that Japan has apparently been enjoying for a few years now. A quick look at this site, however, gave me some info on Queen's Blade:

Queen's Blade is called "Visual Book for Duel." It is based on the Lost Worlds Combat Picture Books, the classic game book for duel.


In this game, each player uses one beautiful fighter (for one book) to duel with another player. The combination of each player's choice of offenses and defenses then leads to the character being in a state of, for example, falling down, being wounded, having armor broken, etc (each state has an artistic page in the character book), and the repetition of these decides a winner, by accumulated wounds.

Books? Status effects? Rules? This was all very vague. It sounded a little like Dungeons & Dragons...some sort of table-top RPG. Surely, it couldn't be Japanese by origin?


Unsatisfied, I decided to do some further research. What I came across was Lost Worlds, a series of "game books" created by a person named Alfred Leonardi.


Here's what I found out: a gamebook is somewhat like an RPG rule book which features a "character" meant for combat. Play using these gamebooks requires at least two players and a gamebook for each, ie; a character for each.


Play requires two players and at least two "visual combat books", with each player choosing a character (i.e., a book) from those available. Both players pull their "character sheet" out of their gamebook and hand their respective book to their opponent. Each book lists the moves and abilities for that character in tabular form, so what you're seeing during play is your opponent's character, not yourself.



Quoting Wikipedia, "During each turn or combat phase, players secretly select an action from those shown on their card, possibly influenced by the results of previous turns. Players then simultaneously reveal their intended action, by number, to each other. Using the character sheet to cross-reference their action with that of their opponent, players then turn to a specific entry in the book they are holding in order to determine the results. These effects may include hit point loss (i.e., a wound), as well as any restrictions on the opponent's next move (which is read aloud to them). The first character to reduce their opponent to zero hit points wins."


Funny story: I thought up the exact same game back in Grade 6. My friends and I would play it every free class we had until we finally tired of it in Grade 8.


Coming back to the origins of Queen's Blade, though, the "game book" concept was capitalized on in 2005 by Hobby Japan, the same publisher that translated the third and fourth editions of Dungeons & Dragons for Japan. HJ may as well have stuck with the abbreviated title thing from D&D and named their new series based on the gamebook concept "T&A" for reasons that will become obvious soon enough.



T&A...er, I mean, Queen's Blade...was for the most part a re-skinning of pre-existing character matrices from Lost Worlds. And what a re-skinning it was! Gone were the days of mages and skeletons and trolls and gnomes. Who needed that when you could have the usual harem of scantily clad beauties with torn clothes? Hobby Japan also went and added a variety of pre-existing characters from Japanese media, including Mai Shiranui from King of Fighters and eventually, even added entirely new characters to the mix.

The series grew into a successful franchise, spawning anime spin-offs, dozens of gamebooks and action figures. The only thing it seemed to be missing was a series of videogames.

Of course, that particular issue didn't last very long.


Enter Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos published by Namco Bandai for the PSP...a crossover of sorts featuring Queen's Blade characters. It is described as a "simulation RPG about the battle of beautiful warriors." With the RPG equivalent of moneyshots in the form of tearing clothes and ecchi pictures...very ecchi pictures...Spiral Chaos features super-deformed female fighters controlled as units in realtime like a strategy RPG. By maneouvering these characters, you can get into one-on-one battles with opponents.

Each character's damage stats are linked to five parts: head, chest, waist, arms and legs. By focusing on a particular part, you can damage it faster and cause the armour or weapon associated with that part to break. Doing this will result in the aforementioned ecchi pictures/cutscenes. For example:













And now you know why Queen's Blade caught my attention. Here are some nice shots of the gameplay to make it look like I wasn't just interested in the pantsu:









Images courtesy of Namco Bandai. Thanks to Laura Hou for translation help. Also, this post is filed under "Hentai" because I didn't know where else to put it.

[ADVANCE]

The REAL Reason Behind Sonic's Bad Rep

Go to Google Image Search. Turn off your safe search filter. Type in "Sonic".

I wonder if SEGA knows...

Do note that this post is filed under "Hentai".

[ADVANCE]

Fantasy pin-up girls

Not reeeeeally related to gaming in any way, but breaking the mold every now and then isn't a bad thing at all, especially when it involves scantily-clad elf women.

Seeing as how these people AREN'T REAL (You hear me, Google AdSense?!), I didn't bother censoring that pic up there. Besides, it's just boobies. You see boobies everywhere nowadays. Ths post comes from Art of Love, which has a collection of scanned pin-ups of a bunch of leopard/elf/devilish women by 3D artist Scott Koznar. There are some very obvious WarCraft and Lord of the Rings influences in there, which is the main reason I did this post. The collection has been bundled together in a calender, available here.

Filing this one under "hentai", simply because I have no idea where else to put it.

[ADVANCE]

Play-Asia offering translated h-games

Well, this is certainly a surprise. A welcome one at that. As we all know, American licensing companies have close to no knowledge of the hentai games that they choose to license and translate, which results in crap like Virgin Roster ending up localized when we'd be far better off without it. What's more, even in the rare even that a good game sees a localized release, it's damned near impossible to find.

Luckily, it seems Play-Asia has teamed up with a mysterious American distributor to offer a nice, long list of h-games in their stores. The goal of this endeavour seems to be trying to facilitate availability. Although their marketing may not be the best, their hearts seem to be in the right place.

Thanks to an eager American based distributor, Play-Asia is now happy to carry a variety of some of the most popular Japanese dating simulations -- fully translated into English language. Our selection is starting with almost 60 different titles, all including full English in game text and mostly without the censorship of the original Japanese release.

You want to dive into the filthy world of Japanese Hentai Erotic? Browse through our new category. Good luck for your date!

Oh yeah, that'll make people buy them. Nice wording there. Does wonders for peoples' self-image. Most games on that list are already rather well-known, but it's nice to see that they're more accessible now than before.

[Via Kotaku]

[ADVANCE]

Impressions: Tsukihime (Game)

Tsukihime. Is. Awesome. Period.

No smart-alecky comments. No witty, fun-poking repertoire. No doubt. It is awesome. Go buy it. Then go download the English patch here. And while your order is being processed and your patch is downloading, sit your ass down and listen to me rant about how awesomely awesome this game is.

And yes, I know this is filed under “Hentai”. Trust me, it does not matter. More after the jump.


Before we move on to the game itself, allow me a moment to carry out the necessary introductions. If you’re into anime, chances are you’ve heard of Fate/stay Night. The Fate/stay anime/manga are based on a game of the same name by TYPE-MOON (yes, all in uppercase!), a Japanese doujin-soft company founded by writer Kinoko Nasu and artist Takashi Takeuchi. Fate/stay is the company’s third or fourth project. TYPE-MOON’s very first work was a novel by the name of Kara no Kyoukai. Originally published online in 1998 on Nasu and Takeuchi's website, it was commercially released in 2004 by Kodansha. The series was extremely well received and sold over 500,000 copies. However, at the time of its ’98 release, TYPE-MOON hadn’t yet been officially formed.

Then, in 2000, TYPE-MOON’s first official project saw its release. That game’s name was Tsukihime. The game is an interactive, erotic visual novel, which places a very, very heavy emphasis on plot. Not only that, Tsukihime features outstanding writing; quite possibly some of the best I’ve seen in a game to date.


The game is about Tohno Shiki, a boy who is victim to a life-threatening accident at a very young age. Shiki wakes up in the hospital, only to find out that, although doctors say his recovery is miraculously complete, not all seems to be right. Shiki can see strange lines around him everywhere. Lines in people ... lines in objects ... on the floor, on the walls ... everywhere. Furthermore, he realizes that he can destroy any of these objects, simply by tracing along the lines with a simple knife. After an “incident” at the hospital, the doctors conclude that Shiki’s brain was damaged in the accident and that he is hallucinating.

But all is not as it seems. The lines aren’t a mere hallucination. They threaten to drive Shiki crazy as he comes to the realization that there isn’t a single spot around him – no matter where he goes – without the lines. Shortly thereafter, he meets a lady who gives him a pair of glasses that hide the lines as long as he wears them. After healing Shiki emotionally over the next week, the lady disappears from his life forever.

Cut to eight years later. Shiki is ready to leave the home of his adopted family and return to the Tohno family mansion, the residence of his real family. With both his parents dead, Shiki’s only real remaining family is his sister, Akiha. However, once he starts living at Tohno residence, strange incidents begin to take place.


On the way back home from school, Shiki notices a beautiful girl. He doesn’t know her name or where she’s from. All he notices about her is her undeniable beauty. Her golden hair … her crimson eyes. Falling into a trance, Shiki follows her to her home and takes off his glasses. He then proceeds to cut her up along the lines on her body into several pieces, making the entire apartment look like a blood bath. He doesn’t know why he did it. He doesn’t know how he did it.

But more importantly, he doesn’t know who she was...

BAM. That’s the sound of Tsukihime’s very first plot twist hitting you square in the face. The first of many, I might add. As I said earlier, Tsukihime features some of the best writing I’ve seen in an interactive novel in ages. The game is extremely heavy on dialogue and the game’s interface practically forces you to pay attention to what is being said. Mirror-Moon, the group that translated the entire game, has done an outstanding job of remaining faithful to the source material while making the game accessible to people outside of Japan. Dialogue is deep, insightful and sometimes, it really makes you think a lot about the game in relation to the real world. Playing Tsukihime is like reading a book, only on the PC and with hauntingly beautiful music playing in the background, accompanied by still pictures.


Personally, I found the visual style of Tsukihime to be very appealing. The character designs are all beautiful and crisp. They’re not very different from any standard anime character designs, though. No, Tsukihime’s visual appeal stems from the fact that it mixes these sharp, well-defined anime characters with blurry, beautifully coloured – sometimes to the point of looking painted by hand – backgrounds. The style works wonderfully for the story the game tells, and keeps you from getting bored, despite the fact that you see these backgrounds several times during the course of the game.

Couple that with the fact that Tsukihime features a beautiful soundtrack, and you have a very kickass interactive novel on your hands. The track list comprises only of 10 tracks, most of them being variations of one another. However, since nearly every single piece is so beautifully appropriate to the scenes unfolding onscreen, you tend not to notice their repetitiveness.

Tsukihime features 5 different girls, which means you have five different paths you could end up on. Furthermore, some of these girls’ paths split up into two different endings towards the end of the game, so you’re looking at a reasonably long playtime. And this is without the use of a walkthrough, mind you. I’d best warn you in advance ... Tsukihime is tough. I found myself dying a fair number of times throughout the game, having to re-load a previous save file and start over from there.

Luckily, the game provides you with around 20 save slots, so you have plenty of room to save at various choices. Ending up with the girl of your choice can also be a fairly trying task.

Tsukihime can be a very touching game at times. I found myself especially attached to Arcueid and proceeded to play through her ending first (the recommended order is: Arcueid, Ciel, Akiha, Hisui and Kohaku). By the time I made it to the end of the game, I was pretty much in love with her. However, just because it’s touching, doesn’t mean Tsukihime can’t be downright spooky at times, too. This game isn’t necessarily about love or friendship or any of that. It’s about suspense. It’s about incidents that date all the way back to Shiki’s childhood ... incidents that scarred him for life.


It’s about the Tohno mansion and his sister and her two maids. But at the same time, it’s also about the girl he killed and his senior at school, Ciel. It's about a secret society, living in the shadows. While some of Tsukihime’s scenes and stories intersect, each girl’s path offers a ton in the way of new information. In order to gain a total and complete understanding of just what is going on, you would have to play through each ending. However, you can also just play through one ending and leave it at that. Each ending provides a good sense of closure, a significant amount of information and a very touching experience along the way.

Bringing it all to a close, I highly recommend you give this a look if you’re into interactive novels and/or hentai games. You can download the English patch for the game here.

[ADVANCE]

Impressions: Bible Black: La Noche de Walpurgis (Game)

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be killed.
He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed."

-Exodus 22:18-20

Every good hentai fan has heard of Bible Black. Hell, even most anime fans have heard of Bible Black. If you go into an IRC chatroom and say to no one in particular, "Hey, anyone seen Bible Black?" chances are you'll find a ton of people who have. What I'm referring to, though, is the Bible Black OVA series. The popularity of the series is in part due to its gorgeous animation, sounds and colours, detailed art and the fact that it has some semblance of a plot underneath all that kinky sex.

What most people don't know is that Bible Black is based on a hentai game of the same name. A game that was produced in 2000 by a company called Active-Soft. Unfortunately, the game was never licensed outside of Japan and despite the fact that Kitty Media licensed the anime quite long ago, no h-game publishers picked up the game to prepare it for a worldwide release. No one knew why this was the case. Over the years Bible Black became somewhat of a forgotten myth. A game that was supposed to be exceptionally good but was unplayable by anyone without a mastery over Japanese.

Luckily, this has all changed as Kitty Media is now expanding their business to include hentai game solicitations and Bible Black: La Noche de Walpurgis is their first gift to the world. Seeing as how Kitty licensed the OVAs, it's only right that they should be the ones to translate the game.

So, how does the legendary Bible Black -- a game that was produced more than seven years ago and set the standard for quite a few games that followed -- hold up in this day and age?


Let's start with the basics. Very often the look of a game is what draws us to it -- even more so for hentai games.


For a game that was released in 2000, Bible Black certainly looks a bit dated. The game's art is fairly simple and while the art does a good job of making the characters look attractive, it is nowhere near as detailed as some H-games that have been released in the past four or five years. I'm thinking of titles like The Sagara Family or Crescendo.

The colours in Bible Black aren't exactly what you'd call vivid but whether this is a shortcoming on the art teams' part or if it was a conscious decision made by the team to match the art with the feel of the game is debatable. In short: if you've watched the Bible Black anime and are expecting quality on par with that; don't. This game was one of the first of its kind and it shows.

Moving on, we come to sound: an area where Bible Black excels. One thing you'll notice frequently right from the time you start the game to the very end is that the music is top-notch and does an excellent job of conveying the eerie and occultish feel of the entire game. Tracks like "Bible Black" (plays during the intro and at the main menu) and "Jesus Christ" really stand out. The composer(s?) has done an outstanding job of crafting the music to perfectly match the events unfolding onscreen. Once you turn on Direct Sound from the game's options, listening to the game's soundtrack either while playing or from the "Extras" menu is a real pleasure.


But a game isn't just about music. Actual sounds themself play an important role. This is another area where Bible Black tends to impress. Every single character in the game has speech. That's right ... every single one. And that includes Minase, the protagonist -- the guy you play as. I'd like to reflect upon this for a second. This is a very uncommon feature in hentai games. Usually, the protagonist isn't given a voice. He/she has dialogue, but he/she is almost never given a voice in order to help players form their own image of what the character might sound like. Several role-playing games follow this trend, too (the biggest one being the Zelda games where Link never speaks). I'm not sure if giving Minase a voice was a good idea or not. While I appreciate that I know exactly what the character sounds like, I feel it takes away from the game's ability to immerse. Perhaps this is why most hentai games produced after Bible Black have avoided this feature.

And finally, we come to plot. The one area where Bible Black not only shines, it beats every other hentai game out there hands down (maybe with the exception of Divi-Dead, a game very clearly influenced by Bible Black). Upon playing Bible Black, it dawned upon me that the anime was never meant to be a replacement for the game. Rather, the anime was produced in order to help visualize what certain scenes from the game might look like fully animated with vibrant colours and lots of attention paid to detail. The anime was produced well after the game in Japan but everywhere else, the anime was what built up the hype for the game.


Anyone who's watched the anime will also notice right off the bat that the series was deprived of 80% of the game's plot in favour of depicting as many sex scenes as possible. Again, it is now obvious that the anime was never meant to replace the game. Rather, it was just eye-candy for fans of the title.

Bible Black is about a highschooler by the name of Taki Minase. A rather down-to-earth and logical chap, Minase has absolutely no interest in the supernatural or anything that can't be proven by Science. This puts him at odds with Kaori Saeki, the president of his school's unofficial "witchcraft club". Rumour has it that twelve years ago, a magic users club existed at their school and that they used the school basement to perform their occult rituals of devil-worship. However, all members of this coven are said to have died mysterious deaths. Saeki and her friends are intent on getting to the bottom of the mystery. In addition to having somewhat of an affinity for Black Magic (God, did I just put that in uppercase? I need to stop playing this game before it posesses me), Saeki also posesses a sharp intellect and cool, calm demeanor that often frustrates Minase.


Refusing to believe in this Black Magic mumbo-jumbo, Minase ridicules members of the witchcraft club every chance he gets until one day he finds himself down in the mysterious basement at the bottom of the school. Cold, dark and off-limits to everyone at the school (students as well as faculty), the basement is where the turn of events that kicks Bible Black's story into high gear occurs. In the basement, Minase finds a strange book ... strange and old. With extensive chapters on sorcery and magic, the book -- written in Hebrew, Latin, French and Greek -- seems to confirm the rumours of the old coven at the school.

Letting his curiousity get the better of him, Minase starts to practise spells in the book. Dangerous spells of posession and the ability to induce lust. At first, Minase's spells don't do much harm (relatively) but as he reads the book further and masters new aspects of magic, it seems he ends up hurting someone or the other no matter how much he might be trying to do good. As the days count down to the mysterious "Night of Walpurgis" -- the night when all members of the old magic club are said to have died twelve years ago -- Minase finds his mind and actions slowly slipping out of control...


And what of the coven and the mysterious basement under the school? How do they tie into it all? Will Minase be able to break free of temptation or will the book eventually posess him?

It's rare to see a hentai game with a plot as ambitious as that of Bible Black's and luckily, Kitty Media's translation does it justice. Sure, there's the occassional grammatical error here and there and while this is simply inexcusable, the translators have done a good job of making the writing detailed, accurate and -- most importantly -- crisp.

The game features an "Extras" section as well, where one can view art/scenes from the game as well as listen to the various musical tracks. Both features are a welcome addition.

All in all, I'd say Bible Black holds up pretty damn well after all this while. The game isn't the best-looking hentai game out there but it's the only one of its kind. Nothing comes close to matching Bible Black: La Noche de Walpurgis in terms of plot, depth, sound and writing. And as for the aforementioned dated visuals ... they won't bother you in the least if you play the game long enough. Indeed, I was a bit put off by them myself when I first started playing but they grew on me fairly quickly.

Bible Black is a must for any fan of interactive dating sims. Just don't expect to see happy, magical rape in here. Bible Black is cold, brutal and sometimes downright eerie.

[ADVANCE]

Hentai Neko bought!

My personal favourite and all-around awesome hentai site, Hentai Neko has now been bought. A month or two ago, the webmistress announced it was going up for sale as she didn't have the time to juggle her life, career and multiple websites all at once. The new owner hasn't revealed much about him(?)self and for now, we'll have to make do with this small update:

2.7.2007:
Hey guys. This is the new owner of Hentaineko.Right now Im redoing a few things to the site and I will be adding Hentai doujins and Hentai galleries soon. So stay posted guys.
H-Master Samurai

Let's hope that HN continues to maintain its excellent coverage of hentai anime, games and manga and that its community remains as strong as ever. Who knows, I might apply as a writer to the site myself in a few weeks. I have contributed to it in the past. Until then I'm going to be keeping an eye on any developments that take place. Honestly, the world needs more unfiltered-yet-classy coverage of hentai-related topics.

Hopefully, I'll be able to make something of the hentai section at Flame War ADVANCE, too sometime down the line, but for the moment hentai news is really slow.

[ADVANCE]

And so it begins...

The game is Hizashi no Naka. It's flash-based. I don't think I need to say any more. We all knew it would happen. It's only a matter of time before the Wii's turn arrives.

[Hizashi no Naka DS]

[ADVANCE]