#oneaday Day 811: Oh, Amy

I've been really enjoying revisiting the classic '90s era visual novels for the History of Lewd column over on Rice Digital. It's something I've been meaning to do for ages, and now I have a good reason/excuse to. And I'm discovering lots of interesting things.

Amy's Fantasies, which I covered today, turned out to be particularly interesting — a lot more so than I initially assumed it would be, too. And, looking around the Internet while I was doing a bit of research, I seem to be one of the few people who have actually written something about this game and attempted to do anything vaguely meaningful with it.

In fact, one of the only other pieces I found written about it I shall now quote in its entirety, verbatim. No, they did not use any paragraphs.

Amy's Fantasies is another one of the Japanese hentai games like Dangerous Toys which contains a lot of explicit sexual content but not a whole heap of actual gameplay. It's best suited to bottom crawlers who rarely venture outside into the real world so unless you consider yourself a creepy old man, then you easily skip this one and have a conversation with an actual woman. The story here is your typical Japanese nonsense, and follows Emi, a high school student who falls in love with her step brother. When she's about to tell him of her feelings, debt collectors show up and the step brother disappears. Now, Emi has to find him so she can tell him about her true feelings for him. However, along the way, Emi finds she has another person inside her, the rather more adventurous Amy who has all sorts of complex desires and who wants to explore them all. What follows is a sort of interactive graphic novel which is mostly concerned with telling a story as it lacks puzzles and with the player not really required to do much at all. If you are looking for a bit of cartoon smut to bring your own fantasies to life, then this will probably get your pulse racing. There are plenty of dodgy schoolboy fantasy scenes to encounter, along with enough cheap romance and cheesy characters to keep a soap opera going for years. The visuals are strange, with some amusingly bad designs for the characters but really there is little of interest here to anyone looking for anything other than cheap titillation, so walk on by this one and find yourself a real game.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that everything written in this piece can be found out from the game's marketing material, and nothing that is not written in that blurb is discussed. In fact, given that the game's marketing material is arguably inaccurate in reflecting what the game is actually about, it only makes pieces like this all the more transparent — they just wanted to get a cheap jab in at the expense of people interested in eroge.

I'm not going to stick my neck out and say Amy's Fantasies was any great masterpiece or anything like that, but it was certainly interesting, and definitely worthy of discussion — discussion better than whatever that is above. This era of eroge in particular is massively under-discussed online — so I'm doing my best to rectify that a little bit!

If you have any particular suggestions for things I should check out (preferably stuff on Asenheim, or which is easy to get running on modern machines!) then do let me know!