What is the Appeal of Otome Games?

I have to admit, this is something which I did not understand for the longest time. Otome games are basically a mixture between dating sims and visual novels, and I always found visual novels to be a strange medium. If I want to experience a story, why wouldn't I just read a manga or novel, or watch an anime or drama? The appeal escaped me.

This started to change when I got into the anime Harukanaru Toki no Naka de Hachiyoushou. It is a 26 episode anime based on the first game from the Harukanaru series, and attracted me because it is set in the Heian period and features Japanese folklore- a Japanese Xianxia, if you will. I fell completely in love with the anime, and then fell down a rabbit hole of wanting to learn more about the series, and then all of the games by Ruby Party, who actually pioneered the otome genre.

Ruby Party's games are, if you can read Japanese, a great gateway into the otome genre. Not only because this studio is responsible for the genre, but because Ruby Party envisioned their games as a combination of a dating sim, visual novel and other traditional video game genre. Angelique is a strategy game, Harukanaru is an RPG, Kiniro no Corda is a simulation game, etc. It's a lot easier to understand the appeal of a traditional video game which also has an extensive storyline and multiple romance routes to choose from than one which is exclusively a visual novel, if you aren't familiar with visual novels. I enjoy having story-based cutscenes to enjoy before being set loose to play the game, but didn't get the appeal of the whole game being cutscenes.

Primarily, though, my experience of otome games has been through their adaptations. I avidly seek out anime, manga and stage play adaptations of otome games which are in genres appealing to me: Angelique, Harukanaru Toki no Naka de, Ikemen Sengoku, Hakuouki, Hiiro no Kakera, Meiji Tokyo Renka... Fantasy, Japanese folklore and history, romance! All the things I love in shoujo manga and anime.

Being such a big fan of the Hachiyoushou anime and its romance, I became interested in Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 6, which features a male lead inspired by the male lead/villain of Hachiyoushou. The tantalising prospect of getting more of a similar romance, perhaps this time with a conclusive ending, captivated me. And then, while watching a promo video for 6 which featured the first 6 minutes of gameplay, it clicked for me.

This cutscene has limited animation frames, largely being still frames with panel shifts, but the characters have full lip movements and blink naturally while speaking, with full voice acting, so it's rather like watching a very low-frame scene from a shoujo anime. Very little motion, but intricate art. In a way, it reminded me of the 'animated webtoons', which add minimal animation to webcomics, but much, much higher quality, since the art was designed for this in the first place.

I was watching an anime!

I have complained frequently, and for years, of how neglected the shoujo genre is when it comes to anime. Many famous shoujo titles have never received anime adaptations, and even ones which do are unlikely to ever be fully adapted; many sit with only a short section of the manga's story animated, forever, leaving fans eternally unsatisfied. And now even fewer shoujo titles are receiving anime adaptations at all; many anime seasons only have one or two shoujo titles in a sea of shounen and isekai. Could this, I thought suddenly, be a part of the widespread appeal of otome games?

Obviously, I can't speak for anyone but myself, not really. And people all enjoy genres for different reasons; I've often scoffed at attempts to come up with simplistic explanations for why women enjoy yaoi/danmei, for example. But I suddenly wondered if, at least for some players, this was part of the puzzle: in a time when the anime industry in Japan seems to have all but forgotten that women exist and are an audience worth catering to, are some women filling the itch for anime with otome games? Certainly that's part of why I've become more interested in them!

And the line between 'anime' and 'game' has been permeable from the very start of the otome genre. Right away, Ruby Party wanted to include voice acting in their games, and a reprint of the SNES version of Angelique included a whole separate disc with voice work on it, since consoles of that era couldn't accommodate fully voice acted games. Angelique Duet (PS1) features an animated opening cutscene and final scenes with each chosen bachelor that are animated, which you can see on Youtube here:

You can watch all of the romance routes on Youtube here, and see how the regular sprite-work gives way to a fully animated cutscene for a short period at the end each time, too.

The remaster of the first Harukanaru game also features animated scenes in the opening minutes of the game:

I'm experiencing these many years down the line, but imagine popping a PS1/2 disc into your system and seeing actual anime cutscenes playing! It must have been incredible.

I have observed that otome games don't all have the same degree of 'cinematic' presentation that Ruby Party brings to the table. Visual novels are narrated in prose by the protagonist/player character, and the rest of the cast is voice acted while the lead is silent. This is presumably to allow the player to imagine themselves in the role of the lead (not something I've ever cared to do; I'm a voyeur with fiction and want to observe people who are not-me living their lives), but it also hampers the cinematic nature of cutscenes, when everyone else speaks out loud but the protagonist is silent.

It also leads to certain actions being narrated in the prose while also being clear due to the character dialogue, animation and sound effects. In Ruby Party's games, the main character has internal thoughts like you'd see in a manga- just short reactions to or thoughts about what's going on and what she should do next. I personally think that if these sections were voiced as well, Ruby Party's cutscenes would almost perfectly fill the role of a 'low-frame anime'. Or, if you'd prefer to think of it this way, a radio drama with illustrations accompanying the audio.

Either way, this lack of voice acting for the protagonist is, in my opinion, the one weakness which holds back otome games in their presentation. Since I typically watch the anime or stage adaptations first, I tend to then imagine the female lead's anime/stage voice in her lines, which helps, but...

Even so, if you can get past that one snag, these games are very engaging. I did find that while watching a playthrough of one of the Hakuouki routes, I got used to the medium and format very quickly and become extremely engrossed in what was going on. Given that these types of sweeping fantasy and historical shoujo stories have most often been limited to the pages of manga and light novels, getting to experience this type of story in such a cinematic and voice acted way can't be underestimated; even if it's not a traditional anime, clearly these games have a great deal to offer shoujo fans.