Is Catherine's Sexiness Fanservice or Disservice?
By:
William Thompson
|
September 12, 2011, 7:15 pm

It’s been a month or so since Atlus’s oddball hit Catherine came out, and I’m sure you’ve read how amazing it is, both on this site and others. Nearly everyone and their mother have written about the engaging and believable characters, challenging puzzles, and how the amount of narrative choices available is a huge step forward, especially for a Japanese developer.

I want to make sure you understand: I agree with everyone, and especially their mother -- that lady is awesome. Catherine is a great game, and even if I find the marriage of complex narrative and wacky surrealist puzzles a little strange, I wish there were more games like it. The protagonist isn’t a hero or a chosen one, and his problems and reactions to them are something we can all relate to. In fact, my first thought when I heard about Catherine was that whoever had come up with this story is a genius. What emotion are gamers more familiar with than the fear of commitment?  How many times have you created a new save file so you could go back in case you didn’t like the way things turned out? How long have you spent hovering over a level up screen, pondering intently which category to put your points in? Games have been making us feel a uniquely visceral fear of commitment for years without even trying, and I was thrilled that someone had picked up on that.
 

 
Well, that’s not exactly the first thing I thought when I heard about Catherine. The first thing I thought was, “Oh, no, look at that box art. Another moe-riffic dating sim that’ll sit on the shelves and make it harder for great games from Japan to get localized.” Of course, I know better now, and that just makes me even sadder about the marketing direction the Catherine team took. I love telling people about great games and how the medium is making big leaps forward in depth and complexity. 

That’s why Catherine’s advertising scheme, and yes, even the infamously censored North American box art, make me sad. Not because I have a problem with sex or intimacy in art, but because it cheapens an otherwise great game right off the bat for people who don’t know anything about it. They won’t know that it’s a story about someone’s fear of commitment, or that the man being crushed in that woman’s cleavage on the box is symbolic of the crushing pressure around him to change his life. It just gives the trolls who went crazy over Mass Effect’s tasteful 1950s-esque “fade to black” scenes more fodder to use against video games.

And if there’s one unbreakable rule of gamers, it’s this: don’t feed the trolls.

I’m pretty conflicted over this topic myself, so please let me know what you think in the comments!
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