Boys’ Love (yaoi) games feature men in relationships with other men -- created by and marketed to women.
But the game genre has languished over the past decade.
One night, her dolls suddenly come to life as a group of fully-sized hot men.
Tools like multiple save slots, quick-save features, and the ability to skip text and rewind help players efficiently pursue every potential partner character and reveal every story path.
It’s like backwards-engineering a narrative database -- and you may be surprised to find how much the story changes when you focus on a different partner each time. Hakuoki is a period piece, taking place in the Bakumatsu period of Japan at the time of civil unrest between the Emperor and the Shogun.
You play as Chizuru, who disguises herself as a man to travel to the capital of Kyoto in search of her missing father.
She accidentally gets tangled up with the local police, the Shinsengumi, and the story evolves from there. It's a samurai history lesson with a Twilight twist.
“The hardest thing was probably the fact that you have to get both of the guys’ faces on screen at the same time,” she says.
“Generally, eroge for men are drawn in POV style, and you do what you can to keep the man’s face out of the shot, but BL is the complete opposite.” “Most of my research was focused on figuring out how far I could push a more explicit approach to sex and still appeal to other women,” she adds.
Lots of players get turned onto these aspects from story and character-driven Bio Ware games like Dragon Age, and if you’re a fan of those, I have a few recommendations to help welcome you into the otome genre.
While all you need to be “good at” is reading and making choices -- don’t worry if you don’t normally play games -- there are some important things to know about how these games work.
But I can’t recommend the i OS/Android port of the game, because of its atrocious, machine-like translation.