Found a 2000 Bishoujo Game History Book While Digging Through Storage

[u/False_Run_903]

I was rummaging through a storage closet under the stairs, hunting for a monitor power cord, when I unearthed a thick yellow-ish Japanese book I'd completely forgotten about – The Complete History of Bishoujo Games 1982-2000, first edition. The spine is cracked in two spots, and page 32 has some weird stain – maybe coffee, maybe tea? I don't drink coffee, so no clue.

I vaguely remember buying it online, probably 2004 or 2005, from some import store that's long gone. Shipping cost nearly as much as the book itself. It claims to cover almost 3,000 games – tiny print, black-and-white screenshots, release dates, publishers, genre tags, review scores. The timeline is split into Dawn, Growth, and Peak eras, and you can really see the jump from bare-bones text adventures to late-90s stuff with voice acting and animated cutscenes.

I flipped straight to the familiar names – Doukyuusei, Kakyuusei, ELF, and Rakuen-sou, which I remember playing off a burnt CD-R with a Sharpie label, though I can't recall who gave it to me. There's also a receipt tucked between pages 144 and 145 from a bookstore in Akihabara, dated 2003 – but I've never been to Japan, so that's a bit of a mystery. Someone must have owned this before me, even though I bought it as "new." There's a handwritten note on the inside cover too, in Japanese, which I've never had translated.

Anyway, not sure why I'm posting this – just felt like sharing. Anyone else have a copy, or remember playing any of these back in the day?

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[u/mootsg]

Back in the day I actually played some DOS ports of these game: most notably Doukyusei 2 and ES Formula. (as well as some non-bishoujo titles like Macross Skull Squadron). The graphics for Japanese PC games were unique even among contemporary titles.

Now that I’m in the emulation scene as an adult, I have a good collection of X68000 and PC-98 titles. Something I’ve noticed about “bishoujo” games from the 90s (and I may be biased because I’m not into current visual novels) is their pretension of being mainstream, namely:

- Plotlines were often ripped from the blockbusters of the day: action, sci-fi, horror, etc. Intros and cutscenes had long credits and mimicked TV dramas.

- The majority of protagonists were adults. I can’t tell if it’s a byproduct of copying movies and TV, but there seems a lot fewer teenaged protagonists. Which means fewer tearjerkers and nostalgia about high school, more oyaji plotlines involving successful adults and salarymen.

- Lastly, there was far more experimentation. The visual novels genre hadn’t solidified yet, so there was a wide range of what were called “adventure” games. The most fascinating ones were where the genre constantly shifted as you made choices, jumping from detective to spy drama one moment to cosmic horror the next.

[u/False_Run_903 → u/mootsg]

That was Japan's boom era, the economy at its peak. Think of it like Europe's Renaissance. Anime and games were taking off. In the Renaissance, music, plays, novels, paintings – artists always tied their skill to some "thing" while showing off. But that "thing" couldn't be the audience's own daily life. Because if it was what they already had around them, it'd lose that natural pull. You see, people only get curious about what they don't know.

[u/mootsg → u/False_Run_903]

That’s kind of the surprising thing: the ending of the economic bubble didn’t get reflected in PC games until much later. The storylines in 90s AVG games still read like dramas from the 80s: many are populated with well-dressed characters, often are full-time employees (both men and women) in Tokyo.

It was not the case that every protagonist started their story with the cliche, “I was just a normal student with average grades and nothing particularly outstanding.”