#oneaday Day 245: Ge

Fellow enthusiasts of Japanese games will doubtless be familiar with the suffix "-ge". Short for geimu (game), it's a shorthand method of describing various types of interactive entertainment, usually according to things like subject matter and quality.

Some of these are quite helpful; eroge is probably the most well-known, and is a useful term to describe games that feature (but are not exclusively about) erotic content — that said, as that qualifier there probably suggests, it is a term that is often misunderstood to be a catch-all term for any sort of pornographic game, when in fact it's a bit more nuanced than that.

Likewise, utsuge and nakige are two interesting distinctions to make, with the former describing games that are deliberately depressing or tragic, and the latter literally meaning "crying game", distinguishing itself from utsuge by the fact they tend to have a somewhat happier or more positive ending.

There are two I'm really not a fan of, though. One is kusoge, which literally means "shit game". For me, this is an unhelpful term in that it presupposes a game's quality before you go into it, because inevitably it's used in a context of someone who is about to "try out a kusoge" for the sake of making people laugh at it. As those who have been following me for a while will know already, I don't like doing this; over the years I've discovered that many of my absolute favourite experiences are those which have not had particularly positive critical receptions, and so I find going in to something with the assumption that it is a kusoge is not a good mindset for how I like to approach things.

The other is nukige; this is typically used to describe video games (or most commonly, visual novels) in which the emphasis is on the sexual content rather than a story. This is something of a simplification of matters, of course, but I tend to find that it's a term that is applied much too broadly for my liking, with a number of interesting games with compelling stories written off as nukige and, as a result, sometimes putting people off exploring them at all. If eroge is misunderstood by the general gaming public, nukige is misunderstood by people with a bit more specialist knowledge.

This particularly springs to mind as I explore Neko Works' latest visual novel Love Cube, which I'm enjoying a great deal. This is typically described as a nukige, and for sure it looks like there's going to be a lot of sex in it. This is fine, but that doesn't preclude it from telling an interesting story, and indeed in the first few hours of Love Cube, it's mostly about the narrative setup, character introductions and emotional engagement. I won't lie; some of this early material has had me choked up on more than one occasion, which is the last thing I expected from what I had been led to believe was a nukige. You see how making these assumptions isn't always helpful?

Anyway, I still have plenty more of Love Cube to play, but suffice to say for now that it is definitely up to Neko Works' previous standard in terms of storytelling and characterisation — and as I noted the other day, Ishikei's art is absolutely to die for. I'll have a full write-up on MoeGamer as soon as I've seen it through, so watch out for that then; in the meantime, if you're in the mood for a fun, romantic and genuinely amusing harem story, Love Cube is definitely worth your time.