Shuusaku

　The bishoujo game industry, once steeped in an underground image, has been largely “cleaned up.”

　Or rather—to be blunt—it feels less like purification and more like a loss of vitality, a rounding-off of the edges. There’s no longer the budget to plan niche projects filled with extreme ero-guro elements or highly specific sexual fetishes that clearly weren’t for everyone.

　What continues to be talked about now are the so-called nakige (“crying games”) and subculture-flavored denpa games. Of course, I talk about plenty of works that fall into those categories myself. It’s only natural that games offering easy-to-grasp emotional catharsis or fear are the ones that survive.

　But if that’s all there is, you start mistaking yourself for something “pure.”

　The image of the gross otaku panting alone in his room disappears, replaced by the illusion of a refined critic, intoxicated by stories and madness. Before long, you’re quoting philosophy and literature left and right, uploading long, supposedly meaningful reviews to your blog. Getting that absorbed is a good thing—though probably about 80% of people will cringe at it a few years later.

　That’s why the so-called Ito Family Trilogy—Isaku, Shuusaku, and Kisaku—is so incredible.

The three brothers, who proudly brand themselves as kichiku (degenerates), are represented by icons of a cockroach, a fly, and a maggot. What they do is assault and crime. Society doesn’t treat them as human beings. Middle-aged criminals reeking of filth and lust are nothing more than vermin.

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　There was once a kichiku boom. One of its most prominent figures was the so-called denpa writer Murasaki Hyakuro, who even published a book titled On the Recommendation of Kichiku: Slam the World into the Filthy Abyss!! Let’s All Enjoy Dumpster Diving. It’s an outrageous book.

　There’s not a shred of tidy morality in it. He drags discarded trash bags home at night, exposing the private lives of the women who threw them away. Finding underwear, he checks the size; finding diaries, he traces the men in their lives. He becomes aroused by the female figures that emerge—and masturbates. A soul-baring book written by a complete degenerate. Murasaki Hyakuro was later stabbed to death by a reader with schizophrenia—a tragic end befitting a man who lived and died by denpa and kichiku.

　Setting aside the criminality, people like this really did exist. I think Shuusaku and Kisaku were influenced by that. Leaving aside Isaku as an outright antagonist, both Shuusaku and Kisaku repeatedly speak of a “kichiku aesthetic.” Evil has its own code of beauty, and the three brothers act in accordance with it.

　In Shuusaku, you become the manager of a girls’ dormitory, secretly photographing the students. Once you’ve gathered enough material, you use it as blackmail—and assault them. That’s all you do. But the meticulously refined game system is astonishing. You can specify exactly where to place cameras at which times, giving the game extremely high replay value. Because of that, the sense of accomplishment when you finally reach an H-scene after all that effort is immense. Surely Murasaki Hyakuro himself must have endured countless nights with nothing to show for it.

　As the player repeats these acts of degeneracy, Shuusaku asks you a question: “You’re enjoying this too, aren’t you?”

　There’s a meta element here—the character recognizes the player—and it adds a remarkable depth. Shuusaku may be the one committing the acts, but it’s the player glued to the screen who desires them. Shuusaku and the player are inseparable, shaking the “pretend-good” player’s hidden degeneracy to its core.

　The final scene that makes use of this structure is overwhelming. I want you to feel the chill of a conclusion that could never exist in a game where you merely read through the scenario—a finale born specifically from the relationship between a kichiku game and its player.

　After all, no matter how far we go, we’re still filthy otaku who fell in love with bishoujo games—an underground medium through and through.