A bit early, but I won’t really have free time for the rest of the year(like maybe two hours a day?) and this is the day the ecchi page when up so I figured I’d just use this for the end year summary.

I’m not going to get into why 2020 really sucked as a year in general. For porn VN’s though, it was pretty decent. All the main publishers pumped out a decent selection, though there were some dry spells. Porn patreon’s went on and mostly didn’t seem that affected by the whole mess the world was in. So as far as my hobby is concerned, Vn’s and porn games were fine. Definitely had worse years.

Ecchi took a big beating this year though, with multiple tepid titles that should have been easy A+’s for ecchi. The Danmachi game, Kandagawa, Fairy Tail, and more. Each set up with a good IP for ecchi and failed at basically every turn. A few decent indies came up though and I’ll cover them sometime next year when my schedule clears up.

As for the whole doing ecchi, I’ve gotten more reaction posts actually talking about the game itself instead of just asking for links or reuploads then I did in years of talking about porn games, so I’m going to stick with it. Few interesting h games are coming out anyway, so I don’t feel like I’m missing much. My best looked at posts are from years 1 and 2 anyway, and I’m never going to topple those with anything I look at now.

As for what I enjoyed this year, the best game was Agarest Mariage, and that bothers me. A spinoff handheld RPG is the best game I played this year. A few things came close but just fell apart at the end for different reasons. It doesn’t help that a lot of the early ecchi stuff was me replaying stuff on PC instead of console, and a lot of those games took a while.

Kyonyuu Fantasy Gaiden 2 was the best VN I played this year, with little else really sticking out to me. There was some decent reads, but I barely remember what I even did read this year. Maybe it was a lot more sparse then I remember? I know MG released something each month as usual and Nekonyan got out like 3+ things… Aokana extra was fun. IxShe Tell was actually kinda boring. Had a fun setup then it just mellowed out to much. A few fun nukiges came out… and the 15th has like three VN’s coming out. Which is a really good close out to the year I won’t be able to touch for a month. Kinda sucks, but eh. Adulting sucks, what else is new?

Following is my current list of ecchi games to play. I’ll add this to the update post at some point.

And no, I don’t mean from this site, I mean they just aren’t really be made anymore. In fact, they aren’t good investments to be made anymore. All thanks to Sony and Steam.

Sony should be obvious to most, as their actions toward censorship were pretty loud at the start, but now companies go around and don’t talk about it as much, probably because contracts and threats. You’ll get press release saying they won’t censor, only for something like Fairy Tail to come out. At the very least, Kandagawa Jet Girls being such a tepid game is Sony’s fault, along with the current death of Senren Kagura. Now thanks to Nintendo and Microsoft, you would think that wouldn’t be an issue on consoles at least as both have agreed to only censor what they legally have to if at all(unless you are Treehouse). But a lot of the companies who made ecchi stuff were dependent on Sony, so getting a new audience on a different console for what were already struggling, small studios just wasn’t going to happen + a lot of the studios still had contracts to make games for Sony. I’m sure if I went though the list of ecchi Vita game developers most have either switched to completely different game types or died.

Steam, sadly, isn’t the savior it could have been do to its big change to allow porn on the site. Why is that a problem, you might ask? Because as far as Steam’s engine is concerned, an ecchi title and a porn title might as well be the same, and are hidden from normal viewers unless you turn on the allow mature content setting on Steam. Without that, most ecchi isn’t even see able on Steam. The other issue that stems from that is if you have the choice of a 2 dollar puzzle thing that will take 5 minutes to get porn, and a 40$ RPG with some pornish elements here and there, which do you think most will buy? This isn’t helped by how most ecchi games are of a substandard quality in art or gameplay, so most people don’t really give them the buzz they desperately need. User tags don’t help either as it’s impossible to tell what is porn and what is ecchi based on just game tags on Steam. Twitch doesn’t help anything either, as there’s this strange(but valid) fear of getting banned for playing sexy games so popular streamers avoid them.

A good example of the issues is Dizzy Hearts Chapter 1. Now that game has a history I won’t get into here, I’m just going to focus on the issue of its sales when it finally came out to a very different Steam then it was designed for. Dizzy Hearts was suppose to be a sex positive game that hinted at or admitted sex was happening, but never showed it. It had ecchi, but it was part of the plot and was needed for the story the game wanted to tell. When it came out to a Steam that expected porn as those were the kind of games it was surrounded with, it sold poorly. Poorly enough that the devs were going to double back and add porn in an update, though I have no idea what happened to that. Now, was this game ever going to get great sales? Probably not. But the environment Steam has created for ecchi is not doing ecchi any favors.

Then of course you have the social media pressure and the goal of getting more child friendly to get more customers that seems to plague games nowadays. As of this writing, Shadowverse just recently censored a bunch of its card. A game that was once known as Waifuverse for how girl card focused it was censored products people had already spent a lot of money on to attract a fanbase that probably isn’t going to stick with the game at all. Based on prior censorship do to region issues, I doubt the old art is impossible to get back into the game, but I know I’ll never play it. I honestly don’t see the move actually getting them longterm sales. The switch port and anime though, might draw enough attention to hide the people who did drop the game in the short term. Making it look like a good business move long enough to be worth it for them.

Which leaves not much else coming out. Ryza’s success should have meant Gust and Koei would ride the fanservice train for a while, but then they released Fairy Tail(less violence then it should have, no panties, no low camera angles at all.) and that went down the drain. The Ryza sequel looks like it should be fine baring the Sony censored trailer for no reason. Disgaea 6 looks alright, but Disgaea isn’t really ecchi so much as just exaggerated. Dead or Alive pretends to drop its sexy elements every generation. Soul Caliber seems to be going full speed though, though I want to wait until the next one to see if they stick with that. SNK is going to be owned by an Arabian Prince in a few months, so Mai is up in the air. Gal Gun Returns is literally a last attempt for a company to see if ecchi is even worth investing in. And every other company seems to be distancing themselves as much as possible from attractive women in their games(though Square seems to be flip flopping all the time). And as stated with the Dizzy Hearts example, ecchi just isn’t worth the investment for an indie company so I expect a very small number of those to even attempt. And then make a nudity patch to make the whiners stop whining.

Of course that’s not even mentioning China. By there rules, fanservice is really ify. And since every game company wants to sell there right now for the money, they are making things that don’t have to be censored for China. Which might be the actual reason for a lot of the decisions we are seeing in game design. No blood, no skeletons, no boobs, no visual maturity. Some games, like Azur Lane, just deal with having several versions, most companies won’t bother with this. So gore and ecchi have to take a back seat to profit. With Japan’s lessening buying power do to a lessening population, its easy to see why pandering to China or the US is way more important then making what Japan has been the best at. Which I get, it just sucks that the games I do enjoy have to be butchered so much.

So while disappearing might not be the right word, the amount coming out is definitely dwindling. The porn market seems to be doing well thanks to crowd funding, though who knows how long that’s going to last since it depends on those third party crowdfunding sites to work. Ecchi though is limping badly right now, which just sucks.

This is mostly because this is one of the rare examples of a game where it’s save is useful that is going to be useful in the near future. It really doesn’t fit here, but hell. I have things I’d like to say about Cold Steel in general, mostly about Rean and the whole harem/dating sim thing, so I might as well give it a full post. After a quick thing about completion and some short things on the game’s content, this will mostly be about me ranting about how Cold Steel 3 kinda shot itself in the foot and how glad I am that after the newest game in the series, they are dropping the whole fake dating sim thing.