Games of the Abstract: Pachinko Sexy Reaction 1 & 2 (1998-1999)

 

Developer: Sammy Company

Publisher: Sammy Company

One Player

Arcade

 

In terms of “ephemeral” games, those which are made in mind they will be replaced with newer versions down the line, not focused on as a long lasting franchise, gambling machines are today's example to examine through a curious pair of entries in pachinko's history. Pachinko is a phenomenon in Japan, and one factor to consider in this is how most forms of gambling in Japan are banned by Japanese law with a few exceptions¹. One example which is exempt is horse racing betting, which is apt for a video game review to bring up as, when Nintendo even as far back in the late eighties tried to bring in online connection for the Famicon (the Japanese NES), with the Family Computer Network System in 1988, there was also the JRA-PAT (Japanese Racing Association-Personal Access Terminal), horse-race betting software for the add-on.

Pachinko is not a gambling game but has managed to get around these laws too, including how prizes won at pachinko can be exchanged at nearby stores for cash², and the lucrative nature of pachinko means that countless licensed machines have existed over the years and earn a lot. For the anime franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), held in high regards in the West and in Japan, its variety of pachinko and pachislot machines have had 2,380,000 cumulative unit sales by 2020 alone³. In mind to this, it is not surprising if tragic how, when Konami went weird in the 2010s in their licenses, the joke they would make pachinko tie-ins to the likes of Silent Hill and Castlevania came from a logic. Something like CR Pachinko Akumajō Dracula (2015) becoming notorious when it a) even existed for Castlevania fans, and b) was promoted for having 'Erotic Violence' content⁴, but unfortunately, at a time Konami were investing more in areas like pachinko machines than video games⁵, it made sense nonetheless for them. To invest in this industry considering how prolific it was in Japan was clearly them, as with investing into mobile gaming, a sign of how these vast industries like pachinko were lucrative even if not what we wanted from a video game developer to focus on.

The irony is knowing these pachinko machines came to Japan originally through a children’s game called the Corinth Game (or Corinthian Bagatelle), an early 1920s game produced in Chicago and based on the 1819 French game Bagatelle⁶, in which there was a shooting plunger designed (unlike with marbles originally) to fire silver balls, both helping to innovate pinball in its existence too⁶. Corinthin Bagatelle, or the Korinto Gemu as it became, was first imported into Japan in 1924, where kids could win sweets playing them. The term "Pachi-Pachi", which means the clicking of small objects or the crackling sounds made by a fire, came from this target audience and in itself was a term around the machines that would eventually christen the future ones influenced by these initial pieces of entertainment⁶. Adults would eventually play these games for small prizes, and also bear in mind too that a British wall game called The Circle of Pleasure, invented and distributed in 1910, brought scoring pockets, a vertical configuration where the balls stayed on field and other innovations which would find their way to influence the first pachinko machines, starting to be created by 1929⁶. This is a long prologue but all video game genres are inherently of interest for their backgrounds, and ephemeral genres, those rarely preserved and re-released, merely with new titles for them, are usually tapping into cultural concepts of great interest.  The obsession with fishing in human culture (and Japan’s) from official games let alone the fishing mini-games in others in one such example, to mahjong in all its normal and strip based varieties which get released into the West, based on a variety of different forms of mahjong, originating from China, and in certain cultures is also a game played with money on the line. Pachinko’s arcade and home console interpretations, not the actual machines, stand out for this reason too, most if all never getting released in the West, yet appearing on home consoles over the decades let alone in the arcades. Today's games being covered, as digital arcade pachinko games not played for prizes of a physical kind, could be dismissed especially when you get into their salacious content, but with their historical origins, they already have a lot of cultural background to prod with fascination.

It is also important in mind to the creator of these two games, the Sammy Company. Sammy Company got into the mechanical and electro-mechanical games industry through pachi-slot games in 1982, and continued to into the modern day, but not without taking a passing period into video game publication and development too, not just pachinko games like the Pachinko Sexy Reaction games being covered. Their bread and butter in pachinko and pachi-slots would continue over the decades, but we have to thank Sammy Company, who merged with Sega to form Sega Sammy in 2004⁷, for distributing a large portion of Arc System Work’s Guilty Gear franchise over decades, both arcade to home console releases of the cult fighting game franchise, and the non-pachinko games just from picking them out from the softography are tantalizing if obscure to learn about. For examples, Dolphin Blue (2003), a side-scrolling run-and-gun for the arcades that sadly never got an official port to consoles; Deep Freeze (1999), a Japanese only action adventure game for the original Playstation; or Higanbana (2002), a sound novel for the Playstation 2, another concept more frequent in Japan sadly neglected as a concept in the West. Sammy also, for the most part, produced a lot of pachinko games for the arcades and consoles, and whilst it may make no sense with no ability to win prizes to have these games exist, bear in mind mahjong is prolific in the arcades and consoles, and casino games for the West without the ability to gamble real money have existed in multiple forms. Even onto the Nintendo DS, Sammy gave you the likes of licensed titles like the legendary manga franchise Fist of the North Star in pachinko form with sequels.

There is another aspect to Pachinko Sexy Reaction to bear in mind, which might cause one to blush and avoid covering it, but is an incentive to play the game if there is not physical prize you can win. It is an adult game franchise, but in context that the closest thing to adult material, where even Japanese hardcore pornography is censored for their laws, is topless animated nudity and nothing more explicit. Alongside the fact that pachinko, like other games, do touch on a compulsive aspect of human beings, to be hooked on stimulus, these two games are also based on being able to see female characters you encounter slowly take off more clothing as you win. It is still a game of chance here, which presents an obvious aspect about the game being a pure coin guzzler, as ball bearings in real life let along digital, bouncing off pegs, are unpredictable to coordinate, to reach the areas you need to send them in to succeed. This was meant to be a game to eat coins unless you can figure out a perfect technique to fire the balls, chance in physics only challenged by the option to change the side the silver balls are fired to. This is also a rare “sexy” pachinko game, when most versions for game consoles are straight forward pachinko replications. This was also a fascination with this double pack of games, being covered together, simply as much as a rare choice. Next to mahjong or clones of Qix (1981), for Sammy Corporation to have chosen pachinko in terms of a game about selling sexy female characters you can see nude, it is an eclectic choice and clearly one, based on the belief clearly there was another audience with their main games of choice, a chance to wider their audience to their regular pachinko and pachi-slot games in a variety of forms.

The only real issue in terms of the game’s erotic content is that, to be blunt, some of the characters in the first game are uncomfortably young in their design, both in visual appearance and in the choices for the female voice actors with the pitch of their voices, a cast of which we will get into later as they include prolific figures. Beyond this, this is cheesecake, where over three rounds for the first game, you get animated cut scenes of the women, for the main character, getting undressed into more fetishistic and skimpier clothes, won by reaching the number of silver balls won on their tables. The game is like a teenage heterosexual male, obsessed with female breasts, exaggerated in the character designs which, beyond this, follow the tropes of what was popular in female character designs in this era of anime and manga. This is in terms the style of eye size and the other little touches which could be ignored, such as having eyes on female characters drawn in oblong circle shapes to depicting noses beyond a dot, using the likes of the hiragana kanji "ku" for the shape and being more obviously prominent as a result⁸.

With the first game having a stand-in, a slightly dimwitted attractive blond guy playing pachinko to get women to dress in clothes less likely to hide anything as the rounds go on, there is a concern as to whether this type of erotic game in presentation is acceptable. This is more an issue for the first game in the uncomfortable use of cuteness, by way of youth, in some of the characters, and that some of the characters, whilst not threatened, are still not pleased at all with the challenge they have accepted, not happy with you even putting another coin in to get more silver balls to play with. Beyond that, the notion of the male gaze has been complicated as more female gamers, and more pro sex female fans of pop culture, make their voices known, as with the wider voices for LGBTQIA+ video gamers which means a “gaze”  needs to reconsidered for a wider spectrum. This now has to consider individual gamers in terms of their sexuality, what they are attracted to and/or what would be sexist and/or purely crass to them. This means the standards of what is acceptable for good reason are more complicated even for a game like this, which was targeting a heterosexual male audience in Japan.  

The issue is that too, due to tendency for video games to once focus on male players, and electronic machine games too over the decades beforehand, we ended up with games which eroticize women rather than also eroticize men with equal interest. Unless Fist of the North Star has buff macho men who attract you, which I write that hoping someone out there does find their pleasure in, sadly there is no Pachinko Sexy Reaction game yet with sexy shirtless men getting changed into skimpier clothes unless it is obscurer then even these games. Decades where the concept of the erotic or even sexy video game being for a male audience, and being of female characters only, has made it strange to look at a game like this. Nowadays, gamers of all gender and sexualities exist and a vast level of eroticism has never been touched at all in genres like this before hand when the industry came to be properly, let alone dealing with the fact that a variety of body types, let alone a LGBTQIA+ and female perspective, were ignored. The obsession here with large breasts barely contained in clothes by itself, from female characters who are still depicted as thin figured, does feel like a self contained and small fraction of what is considered potentially attractive to any player, as much likely influenced by Western figures like Pamela Anderson and Western interpretations of beauty from outside Asia from the time. It in itself does brings up the very limited idealizations of beauty in terms of appearance and body shapes for women, let alone cis- and trans-women and men as an audience and subject for desire, something you need to point and accuse the Western gaming industry of doing so too. It is deliberately an exaggeration of the female character designs too, which also has to be factored in, as between the ability to summon an actual angel on the final pachinko table who helps you out, or the bright sensatory aesthetic of the stages, sumptuous in their own way, the entire game as with the sequel is an openly cartoonish game mixing sex comedy and pachinko that, whether it has aged or not, looks like it could have been a tie-in to a straight to video sex comedy show which had a broad sense of humour and had the slapstick as this does in its animated cut scenes.

The other prominent thing about the first of these games is that, for this production, it is quite a lavish game in context, with the animated scenes short but fully animated, hand drawn if interpreted on an arcade machine, and with full voice acting even if un-translated into English, as a work never released over in the West. Whilst clarifying the accuracy of this can be to debate⁹, this is where a real surprise comes in the established voice actresses who worked on this project, all part of how, as talented figures, voice actors for Japanese animation and video games still work, and their CVs can swing in so many tonal shifts. Kumiko Nishihara will be known for many for Perona, a prominent One Piece franchise character over the series and film tie-ins, alongside many cute mascot characters for the Pretty Cure/Precure series, a magical girl franchise of series which is explicitly targeting a young audience, a veteran since the eighties in the voice acting industry. Konami Yoshida is prolific especially in supporting roles but also with main ones, the one of note being one of the leads for Magic Knight Rayearth, a CLAMP magical fantasy mecha story with a notable Sega Saturn tie-in game, Magic Knight Rayearth (1995), an RPG which ended up being one of the last Saturn releases for the North American market despite being a 1995 game. Masako Katsuki, prominently the support character of Tsunade from the Narato franchise of anime, alongside Sailor Neptune for the Sailor Moon franchise, is another veteran starting from the eighties. Yumi Takada, who became a casting director for the Metal Gear Solid franchise, was prominent as a character Ayeka in the Tenchi Muyo! franchise among other roles. And finally, breaking up the alphabetical order, is Ikue Ōtani, as she is the one who really shows how voice acting in Japan is a job where one works in titles for all audiences, adult and for kids. She is someone most will know as, without being seen, as she is the voice of Pikachu, the beloved yellow electric mouse, over the Pokemon animated franchise, alongside other main and supporting roles, starting her career in a tiny role for My Neighbour Totoro (1988) by Hayao Miyazaki. This is neither to shame any of these actresses, if this is all confirmed in terms of casting credits, just a funny realization, completely unaware of this until researching for this review, of how voice acting in Japan, which goes from anime to redubbing Western films and television, is a job which you live on and means working on any project to live. Even if it means voicing the sexy female character in the office suit here, who bust size would have had Russ Meyer, the film director famous for his obsession with them in real women he cast, raise his thumb in approval of, it is still work for pay. It is still work, even including having to talk seductively to the player at a Japanese arcade as they try to earn as many silver pachinko balls to get more from them physically. I tip my hat off to the actresses who did the work, and just wonder what the recording process for them was like even if it was banal and quickly finished with.

The game is simple – pachinko, with three stages for each female character. The first game is straight forward, whilst you get to the 1999 sequel and have more video game logic to how you progress, such as how the bonus stage, meant to unlock more images in the first game, is actually required to be accessed and finished to complete the stages. The bonus stage in both games is slot machines reels in the centre of the stages where, when you land a silver ball into the slot which starts them off, you need to get the same symbols on them to access the bonus stage, the games sometimes emphasizing the turning reels for drama. The bonus round for the first game, unlike the second, are an optional challenge, providing additional images of the female characters as prizes, multiple ones, the further levels you can reach. Additional points, alongside the vast waterfall of silver pachinko balls you can win and fill digital buckets full of, can also be won.

Even if there was not the promise of nudity, between these games is a sensory overload of colour and noise over both, even a racket in terms of noise as you spam the firing of the pachinko balls. To bring in a really esoteric reference, in 1998, German artist and musician Eckart Rahn, founder of the Kuckuck Schallplatten record label, released the ambient field recording album Pachinko in Your Head: Non-Linear Music, which is literally an hour of experiencing being sat in a pachinko parlor, something that I have come to now with a fresh perspective envisioning a hundred of these machines, minus the voiced dialogue from the on-screen characters, in a row on both side blaring in unison or off-tune to each other as the Rahn album allows you to experience. These games can be accused as still being sleazy, but the bigger accusations, alongside those uncomfortable younger female cast members, can be made in terms of this as a sugar rush of stimulus, inherently designed to sink a person’s money over a long period of time, unless you are innately (suspiciously and supernaturally) knowledgeable of how to beat a digital pachinko game.

There is a great game you could have built from this, removed from its monetary point, and this pachinko hybrid, if you were willing to commit blasphemy, would be fascinating to remake if you had more control over the silver balls you fired, like a sexy version of Peggle (2007). Even in terms of the original game, for all its accusations of sleaze, the lead for the first game is a doofus who, by the end, after even a couple of the cut scenes having him beaten up by some of the women, also becomes the boy toy for a group of women now, out of his depth The cut scenes do suggest the tone was closer to a fun sexy comedy if with tropes, also found in anime and manga, which have not aged well. A fun sexy comedy in pachinko game form with some changes, with this game franchise’s vibrant tone, would find an appreciative audience, and the second game was becoming more ambitious a mere year later, with visual novel cues, and the ability to choose different paths, between two options of a female character to play against in divergent paths. Set around a variety of locations you wander around, needing to complete the bonus games to continue on the three stages per female character, you meet anyone from a woman in an animal mascot costume, to hitting gophers for a buxom tiger woman or patrons in a cinema for an obsessive female cineaste.

Barring your plucky female friend that tags along with your faceless protagonist, who is the last figure you play against, no one else has the uncomfortable look of being young as she does, feeling less sleazy and becoming a palette cleanser as a result. Sadly however, with the turnaround time very short between the games, there is far less actual animation and a sense less production value was being spent on this sequel, despite there still being elaborate pachinko table stages as with the first game, full of noise and colour. Than this franchise became barely more than two games, as Sammy Corporation even when they continued with this genre for home console released into the 2000s stuck to tie-in franchises, moving away from original intellectual properties and the nothing of sexy pachinko as a concept elsewhere.

The two games are curiosities – technically erotic but very tame, still with questionable choices, but bright and vibrant like a sexy comedy anime from this era. Their “sexy” content is not dissimilar to what you could get in some anime and manga even into the modern day, some of which can be much worse and more possible to accuse as sexist or even misogynistic than this ever will be. Worse games too exist even on Steam, with actually pornographic content nowadays as long as it is just animated characters, which makes this, if anything, merely juvenile and silly in its breast fixation. These are weird footnotes instead, preserved from the likes of M.A.M.E. yet having (least for the first game) a lavish production design placed onto them to sell to punters, knowing their developer would forget about this premise and franchise in favour of big franchise tie-ins.

Sammy Company would move away from video games, and into the 2010s, their output was pachi-slot and pachinko games from home consoles or mobile phones. Their ideals on their official website are the likes of being “Able to provide machines equipped with innovative gameplay through outstanding development capabilities and imagination.”¹⁰, all in mind that pachinko/pachi-slot machines as an industry is one alien to video games, an industry that likely earns more than even AAA titles for video games and yet is one prominently more focused for Japanese audiences and markets open to the machines only. This is an audience of its own rather than a worldwide audience for electronic entertainment as the video game industry is, separate in its own world and why Konami got mocked for its tie-in games then actual follow ups to their beloved franchises. These two games are forgotten, items that could be dismissed because their modus operandi is sexy nudity, even if the equivalent of a topless photo spread and nothing more explicit, but their history in context is worth talking of. They are fascinating to consider even in terms of if anyone ran with their style and game play in the modern day, considering the glut of low budget erotic games you can find just on Steam itself. Their tie-in to a business in pachinko, one which, by 2021, earned 2.39 trillion Japanese yen¹¹, is also significant in itself. This industry is a titan even larger than arguably video games will ever be in Japanese culture, and yet still felt it had to wiggle itself into video games with the likes of these two games, which is a strange concept to even consider in terms of a tale now finished for today.  

 

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1) A general introduction to gambling law in Japan, written by Anderson Mōri & Tomotsune for Lexology, published on May 11th 2022.

2) The Secret Life of Pachinko: How Japan's gaming parlors really work, written by David Kushner, and published for IEEE Spectrum on October 1st 2020.

3) Fact Book 1 (PDF) by the Fields Corporation, published February 17th 2020. p. 29. Retrieved March 17th 2020.

4) 'Castlevania' Pachinko Featuring 'Erotic Violence' Proves Konami Hates You, written by Zack Kotzer for Vice, published July 30th 2015.

5) 'Silent Hills' Is the Latest Sign that Japan Is Losing Interest in AAA Games, by Zack Kotzer for Vice, published April 28th 2015.

6) History of Pachinko, written and published for Pachinko Planet (© 2010-2023 Pachinko Planet LLC.)

7) Sega Retro's page for Sammy with its softography.

8) '90s Versus '00s Moe Character Design Examined, written by Scott Green and published by Crunchyroll on October 5th 2013.

9) This is going off the staff credits, including voices actresses, from Moby Games for accuracy.

10) The Business Outline for Sammy's corporate website (in English).

11) Gross profit generated by pachinko halls in Japan from 2013 to 2021, taken from Statista.com.