And while it would be ideal to be able to depict people’s lives without the need for a Very Special Conversation, the game proves it’s possible to discuss such concepts even among characters who aren’t aware of labels or terminology for their feelings ( a concern expressed by David Gaider when asked about including ace relationships in Dragon Age - four years after Magical Diary’s release). It’s a somewhat on-the-nose conversation, but believable for the character and handled with care to avoid invalidating ace identity. A crucial choice to completing the route is Virginia asking the player if they would still be interested in dating her, even if she never developed any interest in intimacy beyond hand-holding and kissing. While clearly written from the perspective of a teen who’s still exploring her identity, the writing takes care not to portray Virginia as someone who is simply nervous about having her first partner. Virginia’s route also deals with her desire to become a professional athlete, but the final event revolves around Virginia’s discomfort with and disinterest in physical intimacy. The other route, Virginia Danson, is to date the only example I’ve ever encountered of a romanceable asexual character. One route, Ellen Middleton, involves conversations around the character’s struggles with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder (in a pleasantly understated fashion for example, the player encounters Ellen compulsively cleaning their room after a stressful visit home), and the culmination of her route does not involve a magical (literal or figurative) cure for her mental illness. Two of the game’s romance paths tell stories that are still rare to virtually nonexistent even in modern games. The game also included several prominent Black characters (as well as the option to make the protagonist a POC), two of whom are romanceable. overwhelmingly cis, heterosexual, and white). While 2011 is still in very recent memory, it was nonetheless ahead of the curve in terms of breaking free of the boxes of narrowly defined “acceptable” romances (i.e. These routes aren’t treated as jokes or flings, nor are they any shorter than the male romantic routes. In keeping with the company’s previous games, Magical Diary also has a female protagonist and two female romance options alongside four male ones. Hence, we’ll be focusing on the relationship writing. While the game also makes an attempt to be more responsible in its worldbuilding - the game’s magical populace is heavily entwined with Native American tribes, for example, though there are no Native characters - but I am quite unqualified to assess how successfully it executes those elements. Among western visual novel developers, Hanako Games was one of the first developers (alongside Winter Wolves) to include same-gender romance options - predominantly between women, as their games tended to star female protagonists. The most popular dating sims and visual novels translated among fans and by professionals were predominately heterosexual and aimed toward (cis) men. The team continued to develop and experiment within their chosen genre, and 2011 saw the release of Magical Diary, one of the company’s most narratively thoughtful if visually unremarkable games.Įven in the world of indie games, it’s been a long and uphill slog toward games that tell diverse, inclusive stories. They developed their first dating sim in 2008 with Summer Session and ventured into the otome game model with 2010’s Date Warp. Hanako Games (founded in 2003) was one of the oldest indie developers to take elements of this style, usually incorporating them with “raising game” (focusing on the development of the player character’s stats), RPG, or adventure game elements. Barring a few translations by small companies like JAST USA (which started in 1996 and primarily focused on pornographic titles), the bulk of the VN genre was shared peer-to-peer or sold at convention booths. Given the explosive success of Dream Daddy and the romance elements of latter day Bioware games, it might be hard for younger gamers to imagine how niche the market was less than ten years ago. The late 2000s saw a boom in western dating sims - now adults, developers who’d been influenced by Japanese visual novels, eroge, and dating sims began making their own forays into the genre.
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