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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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