Title: "Virgin Roster"
Publisher: G-Collections/Zyx
Cost: $49.95
Graphics: Excellent, with animated scenes and beautifully detailed backgrounds
Music/Voice: Music is adequate/ordinary; Voices are adequate and unremarkable
Sound: Very good - sound effect details in unexpected places
NPCs: Mostly lookalikes with altered hair & clothing; Victims all
Writing: Twisted - malevolence without reprieve
Plot: One-dimensional sadism - pick a victim, rape her, repeat, pick new victim, etc…
Player interface: Poor - one decision point every half-hour or so, usually consisting of choosing a new victim to stalk. You’re more spectator than player - thankfully, in this case…
Sex: Every sex scene is a rape, varying only in location and scenario
Kinkiness: Rape; gang rape; heavy bondage; use of knockout drugs to subdue victims; forced drug injections; physical and mental torture; extreme psychological degradation; coerced threesomes; vaginal, oral and anal sex; bukkake; voyeurism; mass-transit groping
Overview: A malevolent rape-fest with no letup, which ultimately becomes mind-numbingly boring.
This is a somewhat difficult title to review because over-the-top, macho expressions of domination of women have been an enduring theme in Japanese anime, hentai, manga and bishoujo products, and must be considered as part of the territory. There are doubtlessly people who are into that trip, and to each his own. For me personally, no - I have a low tolerance for dramatizations of overt cruelty toward any living being - especially women. Maybe I’ve just been involved with one too many real-life girlfriends who have been brutalized in the past by rotten men, and maybe it’s my inherent love of women in general. Even with that bias aside however, I think it’s safe to say that this game is repulsive even by hentai standards.
In “Virgin Roster” you, the player, essentially assume the role of an unapologetic serial rapist whose every waking moment is saturated either with vicious, misogynistic fantasies of humiliating and brutalizing women, or with carrying out actions based on those fantasies. Again, the very fact that you’re playing a bishoujo game at all indicates that you’re mature enough to have no unwarranted prudishness regarding over-the-top, graphic erotica. Similarly, you’re presumably mature enough to be able to separate fantasy from reality. But even within the context of fantasy there is a distinct difference between good erotica and gutter porn - a difference determined in large part by the tone and content of the story underlying the sex. “Virgin Roster” plants itself firmly, almost militantly, in the latter camp. True, the subject of rape is also common in bishoujo games - but in most cases it’s an incidental occurrence, and in most cases the player is at least presented with an opportunity to make an ethical decision. An example of the best of these is “Tokimeki Check In!” in which there are two rape-related decisions the player must face: one in which your character must choose between rescuing a girl from two rapists or passively watching, another in which he directly chooses either to rape a vulnerable girl or not. In each of these, your decision has a dramatic effect on the outcome of the game - if you make the ethical choice, the game moves toward a favorable outcome. If not, your character comes up a loser.
Not so in “Virgin Roster.” There is no ethical possibility in this game - the entire story line (if you can call it that,) revolves around the player character, Kengo Inui, raping one woman after another, period. There is literally nothing else that happens in the game. In at least one instance you do get to make a choice to intervene and rescue a girl from being gang-raped, but only so that your character can proceed to rape her himself immediately thereafter.
One of the very few positive elements of this game is the fact that, given that the only actions the player character can take have to do with coercive, devastating assaults on women, there are comparatively few decisions you have to make at all. The first decision point comes roughly 45 minutes into the game, thereafter they appear every 20 minutes or so, depending on how much dialog you skip. (That’s not much of a positive, but in the case of this game you have to take what you can get.) This is largely a spectator game - you sit and watch while your character plans, then follows through with plans, to humiliate/rape/torture various women in the school at which he’s been hired as a substitute chemistry teacher. The gameplay itself is almost as egregious a flaw as the repulsive storyline itself. What few decision points exist in the game have no challenge to them or relation to any goal-oriented action. Most of your choices boil down to which particular woman you decide to assault next - beyond that, you’re primarily clicking through dialog. Getting to the next rape is just a matter of time regardless of what choice you make.
The tone of the entire game, both in Kengo’s silent thoughts and in his dialog with other characters, is relentlessly malevolent and obsessed with degrading women in the most vicious ways possible - in breaking their spirit to turn them into his “sex slaves” as he calls it (or “sax slaves,” in one of the more amusing typo errors.) Indeed, another of the game’s few positive elements is unintentional: the sado-misogynistic dialog of the Kengo character is so blatant that when he’s engaged in these periodic, or more accurately constant, conquest-and-domination fantasies, it’s frequently humorous in its aggressive rawness, though clearly not humorous by the intent of the writers. “Virgin Roster” is like a “Penthouse Forum” story written by somebody with some serious psychological issues. The contempt for women is overboard to the point that it breaks a cardinal rule of game creation: It repeatedly jolts the player out of the game milieu entirely and makes him wonder consciously about the mental state of those who wrote the game, and about his own decision to buy it. The only comic relief to the relentlessly malevolent content shows up as unintentional humor.
The Kengo Inui character is so contemptibly drawn that you find yourself wondering as the game goes on whether there will be a final, climactic comeuppance in store for him at the game’s conclusion (ideally in a prison,) and consciously wishing for that moment to arrive. Here is a creep who desperately needs to see things from the perspective of his victims. It requires a supreme effort of will to set aside your disgust, hold your nose, overlook the game’s tedious viciousness toward women, and play along to see where it goes. But there’s the rub: Gameplay is supposed to be fun or at least entertaining, but the entire starting premise - along with the near-absence of possible interaction by you the player - makes enjoyment difficult if not impossible. What player with a shred of ethics about him can feel comfortable with, much less enjoy, embracing the identity of a predatory psychotic and tagging along with him while he turns beautiful female characters into sobbing, physically and mentally devastated victims, usually left in fetal position on the floor in a mess of various body fluids? It’s been said that there is nothing more boring than depravity - and at a certain point this endless, spiteful and causeless misogyny becomes incredibly boring. Through the mostly spectatorial tedium you begin to question, “Is this necessary?” - and feel a sense of profound annoyance that this game’s technical excellence was not applied to a more ethical, benevolent and engaging scenario.
On a level of purely visual quality the game is excellent. The graphics and sex scene animations are extremely well done; the backgrounds are many, incredibly detailed, and beautifully rendered. Along with the occasional animated sequences, the still images themselves switch during dialog progressions to show altered facial expressions, postures, etc. - so even the still images are given an element of cel animation and therefore seem more “alive.” The only downside is that all of the women’s faces (and bodies) are virtually identical, with only hair, clothing, and personality altered to distinguish one from another.
The animations and image progressions prompt some tangential questions (if I can digress for a second): Why aren’t bishoujo games animated from start to finish? Why is the basic “still image” format the norm, when the sky’s the limit as to storage in context of standard PC gaming? A Lara Croft-wannabe game called “The Longest Journey” comes on five (5!) CD-ROM discs, contains some of the most stunning graphics and in-play animation available in PC gaming, and costs roughly $10 less than this title. Why not the same for bishoujo games? Is it laziness? Production cost? Hmmmm…
The voice acting in “Virgin Roster” is acceptable though a little wooden in some characters; the music is ordinary and just adequate. “Tokimeki Check In,” as an outstanding game for comparison, sets a high standard for excellent music and voice acting - not to mention benevolence, romance and fun in gameplay (which is like fresh air after VR’s oppressive hatred - TCI’s main character is a good-natured scammer who is generally benevolent toward women.) VR has a repeat function to review immediately preceding text, but unlike TCI the voice doesn’t repeat, only the text - which is annoying to those who want to hear the Japanese dialog repeated. VR also lacks TCI’s “skip to next” function, which fast-forwards through lines of dialog to the next decision point. The wonderfully exaggerated facial expressions among bishoujo characters as in “Tottemo Pheromone,” are also present in TCI, but not in VR. But then, the only possible expressions of the women in VR range from casual day-to-day conversation to shock, horror and grief, so the range doesn’t get the chance to broaden much in any case.
What stands out in this game aside from the graphics are the great sound effects throughout: I was surprised to hear quiet “hold” music (Pachelbel’s “Canon,” I think,) during the course of a phone call, which plays over the top of the BGM; “Big Ben”-type clock chimes; some limited “chopsocky” slapstick sounds during off-screen fights with (other) Bad Guys; the sound of coffee pouring, doors closing, footsteps, glass breaking, vibrators humming, etc. The menu screen is beautifully rendered and has some great sound effects of its own for the mouse click functions. The separate slide volume controls for voice, effects and music are also an essential feature, as are the extensive save game slots - though both of these appear in bland Windows-type dialog boxes, not the rich graphics of the title menu.
Another minor positive in the game brings up a peeve I have with bishoujo games in general: In VR there are at least two characters who are older than the standard “jailbait” teenager - which latter is becoming almost a clich√© for bishoujo. There is an obvious appeal in younger characters, but the presence of an occasional adult female is a refreshing change - “variety & spice” and all…
As for technical downsides - as distinguished from the conceptual ones - the text box and font size are much larger than they need to be, and there are too many “empty room” backgrounds where text and sound effects indicate there should be people present. It’s as if the artists were too lazy to draw multiple characters into a scene, even as static elements. It’s very odd to enter a classroom of empty desks, while the text describes a full class and verbal interaction with several students. This is all the more annoying given the periodic descriptions of beautiful females. Why aren’t the people drawn into the scenes?
In sum, this game could easily have been several orders of magnitude better - instantly - if the whole premise of misogyny and sicko-sadist rape had been replaced with a light-hearted, comedic and more complex and involving storyline characterized by heart, benevolence and warmth - or perhaps a more serious drama or mystery which nevertheless manages to treat women as human beings and avoid forcing the player to assume the role of a subhuman psychotic. “Virgin Roster” is a product of laziness - and the result is tedious, if well-rendered, gutter porn whose periodic shock value is the only break in the boredom it creates.
If you are someone who does not find the role of sadistic rapist a persona you want to embrace, be forewarned and skip this title. The game’s graphics and animation, though well done, are not worth the extended sessions of nausea you have to endure in order to see them. You’re far better off just getting one of the “Creamy Angel” or “Dream World” gallery discs. As for VR’s creators at Zyx/G-Collections, let’s hope they do a thorough ethical head-shed before they begin work on their next title.
[This message has been edited by ZaphodB.Goode (edited 01-23-2004).]
