Will we ever see an A.O game with mature storytelling ?

[Eve Charm]

In the age where you don't need a publisher, distributer or any of that to put out a game, you don't really have to worry about rating. Any game/movie can tell a good story and throw and graphic sex/death scene in and get it jumped up to M or even AO but honestly that's not the point that should be gotten at.

Thinking of it is kinda a tricky subject... Fact and point anything can be made into a game, a so called good game that people will play ie cookie clicker/cow clicker. But to create an AO game that center story is it's AO writing and have a good deep story is kinda like writing a game about someone that rapes and tortures everyone instead of just killing everyone, hard to make them into good story elements.

 

[Jamash]

I just finished playing this visual novel Kana little sister.. well yeah its a hentai 18+ novel but it surprisingly uses its AO rating to actually tell us a good mature story.

So when will we actually see microsoft&sony allowing AO games to be made for their consoles ? i mean what's the big deal about AO games ?

Why is A.O rating so taboo ?

The game you mentioned was actually allowed by Sony to have a PSP release but with the adult content removed.

So with that in mind, how does it use it's "AO rating", i.e. how does it specifically use it's scenes of sex and sex between a brother and his high school sister to tell a mature story?

There have been plenty of mature rated games that have managed to tell mature stories without graphic sex, incest and paedophilia, so what makes this game and it's genre so special that they need to explicitly depict this graphic and taboo content in order to tell a good mature story?

Call me old fashioned, but if a game can't tell its good mature story without explicitly showing the protagonist fucking his child sister, then perhaps the writing isn't as strong and mature as you think it is.

 

[Fox12]

Kana Little Sister doesn't have an ESRB rating, so it thus doesn't have an AO rating.

It's not one of the thirty-two games that have an AO rating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AO-rated_products

Besides, it's just an eroge visual novel. No offense, but I just don't think hentai has any place on consoles. Nor will Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo ever let them be on their console.

Hey, it's cool if you like sex and hentai and eroge stuff, I do, too. It's even cool when some of them know how to really hit the feels where they can be hurt, but those companies just don't want to associate with them and with good reason. Retailers don't carry AO rated games because they know there'd be huge backlash.

You actually missed my entire point..and i think visual novels are considered as video games right ?

I don't care about hentai or eroge they're dime a dozen.. i just want more mature storytelling in video games with issues and themes that are considered taboo in society and that's only possible with an A.O rating.

I can find movies which clearly addresses them like A clockwork orange.. Now i'd fu*king love to play a game like that but will a video game be ever made which has balls to tackle themes and serious issues like that ??


Will we ?

Why couldn't an M rated game cover the mature themes your talking about? Silent Hill 2 covered themes like child abuse and rape. Do we actually need to see these things in order to tell a story about them? Not really, it's unnecessarily gratuitous. The mark of a good story teller is subtlety, which is why good story tellers can usually express their ideas and explore dark material without relying on nudity and blood to make a point. It's lazy. That's my issue with GRRM, the only way he knows how to make a point is to kill someone off, even if it doesn't really make much sense to kill the person off. That's why Lord of the Flies is WAY darker than Game of Thrones, despite the fact that only three people die in Lord of the Flies. The AO rating simply acts as a free market filter to keep out the nastier stuff, and frankly, the crappier stuff as well. Do we really need Postal 2 in Walmart? There are tons of great games that are really dark already, so there aren't any themes that can't be explored by an M rating that I can think of.

As for why there aren't more well written AO games? It's economic suicide for one, but I think it's deeper than that. As I said before, those games tend to be over the top instead of subtle, which is never good. They tend to rely on shock value, like the video nasties you see in the horror genre. Cannibal Holocaust was not a good movie, it's remembered for its shock value.

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

Uh... isn't Witcher 2 AO? I mean it has full frontal nudity and some pretty explicit sex scenes. As well as torture and murder and rape(not that Americans care those things where ratings are concerned.) And it's sold on XBOX 360.

So maybe the issue is with weird hentai CP... and not adult games.

 

[DementedSheep]

*checks game collection* Oh fallout 3 is R18...well it says MA 15+ on the side but R18 on the front. Why dose FO3 have higher age rating that TW2 here? It's not like TW is less violent though I suppose it doesn't have exploding heads.

Uh... isn't Witcher 2 AO? I mean it has full frontal nudity and some pretty explicit sex scenes. As well as torture and murder and rape(not that Americans care those things where ratings are concerned.) And it's sold on XBOX 360.

So maybe the issue is with weird hentai CP... and not adult games.

It's only an M.
As for the nudity in the witcher, you have naked ladies but it doesn't show vagina (as in between a woman legs) or penis. The most you get is a bit of pubic hair.

Although Amnesia has full nudity and torture while still being M. Alice: the madness return has pedophilia themes but is also only M so I don't really see what we need AO for story-wise.

 

[Savo]

Ground0:
I just finished playing this visual novel Kana little sister.. well yeah its a hentai 18+ novel but it surprisingly uses its AO rating to actually tell us a good mature story.

So when will we actually see microsoft&sony allowing AO games to be made for their consoles ? i mean what's the big deal about AO games ?

Why is A.O rating so taboo ?

HAHAHA, Mature Storytelling? Kana Little Sister? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAH

Oh god, I can't stop laughing, it is starting to hurt XD

OT:

No. No no nonononononononononono. Hentai will NEVER be considered "mature storytelling". Unless "Mature" to you means naked little girls.

It's often considered the first hentai visual novel that focused the story over the hentai. It caused a lot of visual novels to start doing the same. Having hentai doesn't just turn it into a immature story. Just look at Katawa Shoujo. Extremely mature visual novel, with a bunch of realistic characters. Has hentai in it. Not lolicon like I assume Kana Little Sister probably has (which is half the reason I intend to download it) but still. Also, the hentai in visual novels often can be used as a kind of trap. People come expecting porn, and instead get a great story that eventually has a small amount of porn in it. Nowhere near enough to justify the time it takes to get to it alone, but its there.

Don't get me wrong tho, the OP of this is an idiot, and doesn't understand what mature storytelling is.

I would agree with you that hentai doesn't necessarily turn something into an immature story; thinking otherwise is to be rather ignorant of the wide variety of visual novels available. Although a lot of hentai games are indeed immature and poorly written, not all of them are that way. I'm a little rusty on my visual novel knowledge, but a large amount of them are written to focus upon the story and characters, with the porn being more akin to an afterthought. Hell, a lot of them actually just snip out the porn parts for console releases, and the rest of the game is more than enough to stand on its own.

Kana Little Sister, for example, does have some hilariously unnecessary sex scenes in it, but the actual story is simply fantastic outside of some awkward translations (and this is coming from someone who generally dislikes visual novels). It could be seen as being forced in a few parts, but it's got a real spark for compelling melodrama. If you're willing to look past one or two sex scenes and a few squeamish bits about incest, I would highly recommend it.

 

[Abomination]

Perhaps GOG could bring it on? The Europeans are known for being a bit more liberal with their classifications... unless you're German, I guess.

Germans just don't like violence in their games. Sex is free game.

I like to say just keep it as it is. The Yankees can keep their guns and gore, as long as we Europeans get the tits and sexytimes.

And I feel no shame in saying it - sex and pretty bodies are just so much more enjoyable than bullets and exploding heads.

But why can't we have both?

Sexy violence!
Violent se- no wait.

 

[DementedSheep]

*checks game collection* Oh fallout 3 is R18...well it says MA 15+ on the side but R18 on the front. Why dose FO3 have higher age rating that TW2 here? It's not like TW is less violent though I suppose it doesn't have exploding heads.

Fallout 3 has a LOT of dark themes. It has a large amount of racism and sex slavery. It has a lot of gore. That usually is enough to get an R rating. While Witcher 2 is a lot more serious then Fallout 3 (although Fallout 3 isn't exactly a comedic game, its just got nearly too much black humor that it nearly becomes upbeat), and is a lot more realistic, realism doesn't increase a games rating.

Uh... isn't Witcher 2 AO? I mean it has full frontal nudity and some pretty explicit sex scenes. As well as torture and murder and rape(not that Americans care those things where ratings are concerned.) And it's sold on XBOX 360.

So maybe the issue is with weird hentai CP... and not adult games.

AO literally means it has porn in it. Frontal nudity is not enough to be considered porn if it isn't too often. In terms of restriction, AO and R mean the exact same thing, even if AO is wildly less restricted in content. It's why I prefer the names given by Australian rating system. R-18+ and X-18+. Less likely to be confused when people assume Adult's Only means R.

True.
I sometimes forget how dark FO3 is and I suppose in FO3 you, the player can do a lot of nasty stuff yourself which probably bumps it up.

It always made more sense to me that violence would get you a high rating than nudity and sex scenes.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

AO literally means it has porn in it. Frontal nudity is not enough to be considered porn if it isn't too often. In terms of restriction, AO and R mean the exact same thing, even if AO is wildly less restricted in content. It's why I prefer the names given by Australian rating system. R-18+ and X-18+. Less likely to be confused when people assume Adult's Only means R.

Not always. The 2005 Punisher game almost got an AO rating purely for it's violence, before they censored it. The PC version of Manhunt 2 did, as well, but the console versions censored some of the more gruesome content in order to maintain an M rating (and not get banned in the UK).

 

[Eve Charm]

Honestly there is always the skyrim test. Backup your pc skyrim saves and go Adult mod downloading crazy, and no not just off nexus, if this game is gonna be AO you want the really really messed up stuff to. Download all the gore, all the dismemberment, all the sex, nudes, and slavery stuff you can find and play the game ((back up your saves first))

Now see if :
A: you can still actually get immersed in the skyrim world or if the game just turned into a cheap spectacle.
B: if you can rp a deep character doing all this adult stuff and immerse your character.
C: if all the stuff you downloaded and now can do is worth alienating at least 90% of game buyers.


I mean there is the desire to see something once but not subject yourself to it several times over a play session.

I mean try and think about leveling up your sex level the same way you would go out of your way to level up magic levels in skyrim >.<

 

[Phrozenflame500]

I'd imagine that ratings in general will become less important as the gaming demographic expands and the digital market takes off.

Basically once it becomes profitable to do so it will be done.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

It's not that developers don't have the courage to make games that have very mature themes, it's that there wouldn't be a single large retailer in the US (or maybe even the EU) that will sell the title in their stores. Sure, I'm sure there will be some specialty retailers that will sell an AO title, but when you have freakin' HUGE retailers like Wal-Mart or Amazon that simply refuse to sell the game, yeah, that is pretty much financial suicide.

You're right about the retailers but I think you're mistaken about the developers. Well....not necessarily about "courage" per sé, but for the same reason we no longer see hardcore RPGs and why so many games get homogenised into third-person action-adventures. Budgets and "mass market".

No one will develop niche titles because of corporate greed dictating every game has to appeal to the widest audience. The days of niche titles for a target audience are long gone. Personally tho, I don't give a damn about this hentai/porn type games and wouldn't buy it or play it were it given away free.

 

[EyeReaper]

and i think visual novels are considered as video games right ?

You'll find many around here that will disagree, for some arbitrary reason or another

anyways, OT: To be honest, I don't see it happening, unfortunately. Mostly because of the stigma that "It's porn it can't be good for anything but jerking off" which is not true, Katawa Shoujo and Monster Girl Quest can attest to that. However, like others have said, Couldn't you just take the sex that's giving an AO rating, push it off screen a little bit, and then call it a good M game? I mean, even with the beforementioned Katawa Shoujo, you can turn off the hentai, and I've seen many people say they would fully play MGQ without the sex.

 

[Something Amyss]

well yeah its a hentai 18+ novel but it surprisingly uses its AO rating to actually tell us a good mature story.

It's not an AO game, and I doubt it's particularly mature. To answer the title question, we don't even have many mature stories period in games, so no.

So when will we actually see microsoft&sony allowing AO games to be made for their consoles ?

Likely never.

i mean what's the big deal about AO games ?

It's political poison.

Why is A.O rating so taboo ?

The same reason X is taboo. It's associated particularly with pornography.

Fair or not, it is what it is.

Besides, if we can't tell mature stories without bewbs, why is there any reason to believe things would change by adding them?

You actually missed my entire point..

Next time make your point then. He addressed what you said.

i just want more mature storytelling in video games with issues and themes that are considered taboo in society and that's only possible with an A.O rating.

Bullshit. You even dispel this yourself.

I can find movies which clearly addresses them like A clockwork orange.. Now i'd fu*king love to play a game like that but will a video game be ever made which has balls to tackle themes and serious issues like that ??

A Clockwork Orange was rated X at the time of release....Over thirty years ago and when the X rating was treated differently. Even the original cut is rated R (and has been for decades). Not only that, but if that's your idea of "serious issues," I don't think you're really looking for maturity.

 

[Bluestorm83]

There will never be an A.O. rated game that is actually Mature because Mature people don't want to cram porn into their intellectual pursuits. No offense to you, but that's really what it is. Boobs doesn't make maturity; respect for boobs does.