Oh man, I missed some good stuff!
As the resident uguu~ expert, I gotta chime in MoeGamer. The stuff I know about, anyway.
Modern Japanese games as a whole are widely misjudged to be pandering otaku bait.
That's probably because so many games
are pandering otaku bait.
The same thing goes with anime. That shit sells over there-- it's not hard to understand why so much gets made since the industry just shifted towards the people willing to drop tons of cash on overpriced games, media, and character goods.
Let's take Senran Kagura as an example. This has been widely shat on by a variety of commercial mainstream publications by writers who, in most cases, admit that they haven't spent more than an hour or two with the game. Take any time to engage with it, however, and you'll discover that the series as a whole features a large and diverse cast of female characters, each of whom have their own unique backgrounds, personalities and ways that they engage with other people. Some (many!) of them are gay. Some have relatable issues such as concerns over their body image, or worries that they might get kinkshamed for their tastes, or simply feelings of inferiority when compared to their peers. Over the course of the Senran Kagura games to date, each and every one of these characters has been explored in great, great depth, but this aspect of the series never, ever gets discussed because mainstream sites spend an hour with one game and go "lol, it's about boobs".
I'm Senran fan #1. I love this shit. It's perverted as hell and the games are generally pretty fun to play. He's right that there's a lot of story and content that you might not expect from the art style. The problem here is that all that stuff is just plain text on the screen and once you get all this dialogue/"deep" character thoughts/emotions, it's like the game goes "OK, BACK TO TITTIES AND BUTTON MASHING!!!" And while it has all that story content...
come the fuck on. The game's producer is upfront about exactly what his games are- his motto is
"tits are life, ass is hometown," for fuck's sake.
This is one of those games were males pretty much don't exist. There's only two main male characters and both are old dudes. However, you can play as one character's brother in Senran Kagura 2 on the 3DS, and just like the girls, he can get stripped down to his tighty whities.
Diversity! Or how about the Neptunia series? Another all-female cast of highly capable women (arguably except for Nep herself, who is a joyfully adorable idiot, though she steps up to the plate when it counts and her charisma could be argued to be her most "capable" aspect), some of whom enjoy same-sex relationships with one another, and none of whom need men to support them or approve of what they do? So strong is the Neptunia cast in terms of characterisation and personality that they've transcended their original genre and medium; since the original PS3 game, they've appeared in traditional RPGs, beat 'em ups, management sims, strategy games, action RPGs and I have no doubt there will be plenty more enormously varied titles in their future.
These are parody games with dumb humor and cutesy little characters. There's nothing any deeper about them.
I can't comment on the other games he mentioned because they all looked like visual novel type shit or those dungeon-crawler RPGs that look incredibly boring, with enemy sprites that have no animation and
who cares.
But I will defend Neptunia from this post-
I'll address this one, since I tried to play it once. Emphasis on "tried". Because this is the problem, see? You can as many of these diverse, well-developed, three-dimensional characters as you want, but when they all look like this:
you're alienating an awful lot of people. I couldn't play the game for more than an hour or so because it creeped me the fuck out.
Now, if they could deliver a game filled with well-developed female characters without sticking them all in thongs...
If you played the game for more than an hour...you didn't see the characters looking like that. Those are special transformation "goddess" outfits that you see in battles. This is what you're mainly seeing:
The graphics are so simplistic that even the fan-servicy stuff doesn't look like that in game.
But I'm sure somebody is still fapping to it.TL;DR version- dude has a site called Moe Gamer and is trying to discuss hentai games as art? Just admit that you like anime titties and be done with it.