Bishoujo Games
Seeing a lot of annoying arguments on the net (ten years after I thought the argument was settled) about what constitutes a ‘bishoujo game’ and/or some other word typically used to describe bishoujo games. Here’s the break-down for everyone who’s late to the party.
Visual Novel: Any ‘game’ that’s basically an interactive story- photos, text, and sometimes audio and even animations. Interactions are usually just a handful of pop-up options that are given to you when you reach certain ‘forks’ in the story (the options available might be something like “walk home”, “pick up groceries”, “visit the planetarium”, etc…). Depending on the choices you make, the events that occur through the storyline can be completely different. Think of it as a visual representation of “choose your own adventure” children’s novels if you’ve ever read one.
Ren’ai Game: Romance/Love Game, also called ‘Dating Sims’ in the states- this is a subcategory of visual novels in which the goal is to achieve ‘dating’ status with one of the characters. These games can be either romantic or sexual in nature, or both.
Bishoujo Game: Also called ‘Galge’ or ‘Gal Games’. ‘Bishoujo’ means ‘beautiful girl’ and so a bishoujo game is a subcategory of dating sim in which the goal as a male protagonist is to date one of several beautiful girls/women available in the game. There’s a secondary category to this called a GL Game (Girl’s Love or Yuri Game) in which both the protagonist and available partners for her are female.
Bishounen Game: These types of games come in two varieties- Otome (Maiden) Games, also called GxB for GirlXBoy, and Boy’s Love (BL) Games. The former refers to the reversal of a bishoujo games, the player is in the role of a female protagonist that is trying to achieve a romance status with one of several male characters in the game. The latter, Boy’s Love (or Yaoi Game), refers to a game in which both the protagonist and his romantic interests are male.
Eroge: A catch-all terms that refers to any anime-style game that has heavy sexual content- short for Erotic Game. H-Game, Ecchi Game, and Hentai Game are all different ways of saying it, but although this includes adult-oriented visual novels, it’s by no means limited to them, and can be used to refer to games in many other genres as well, such as fighting games, shooters, etc…
So, to simplify things for everyone who is now thoroughly confused, it’s quite possible for a title to fit into more than one of these categories, especially seeing as how many are sub-categories of something else. The game Crescendo, as an example, is an eroge, visual novel, dating sim, AND a bishoujo game. If you were to translate each of those, in a sense, you see that the game is an adult only (eroge) visual novel that features dating (dating sim) young beautiful girls (bishoujo game).
Hope this clears some things up.
~Misk
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#bishoujo game #ren'ai game #dating sim #eroge #video games #visual novel
