The Loli Love Sequel Formula

Is teenage panty the deus-ex-machina for a flagging game series?

In a gamer’s world, what’s better than a solid, genre-defining, widely popular cinematic title? A solid, genre-defining, widely popular cinematic epic. That’s right- sequels. We loved the first one- why not play the second? And even if the second sucks, we’ll still give the third a shot. Developers know this too, and so when they release a hit with satisfying sales features, they reliably head back to the shop to churn out a follow-up. The gaming industry’s penchant for producing sequels rivals that of the film and industry world; in fact, many games these days are released as part of a planned series, release dates predefined for maximum cash-in.

They know we’ll buy, and they’re counting on our money. But it’s a mutual arrangement— they get the ka-ching, we get more of what we love, and everyone’s happy, right?

Well, like any entertainment medium, game series can suffer from tiredness. Whether the formula loses its luster, the audience tires of the characters, or the fickle market simply starts to prefer another direction, sometimes protracted installments of beloved games can start to feel like the umpteenth season of an eighties TV show- you can just feel ‘em reaching, ever dithering precariously nearer to the edge of spent creativity.

The gaming audience is highly vocal, and thus by and large its pulse is generally not too difficult to take. Just as they knew we would buy Blockbuster Hack-and-Slash 2, developers can feel when we’re starting to snooze at Blockbuster Hack-and-Slash 6: Morbid Tarantella. So what do they do-- kill off the protagonist? Ascend to a new story environment? Resurrect a vanquished villain? Often, all of the above. But we’ve now seen that there is one, and only one surefire tack taken to inject life into a tired epic. It’s a powerful technique, used as a last resort when all other creative options have failed.

The secret? Apparently, just add a prepubescent, anime-eyed, short-skirted little girl of indeterminate age. If you want to, make sure to obviously insert into dialogue, or in the game manual, that she’s nineteen or twenty, even though she surely doesn’t look it.

A little plaid skirt and gratuitous boobs (and flash of pink panty, if the gamer was strategic with the PS2’s camera control) bailed out Resident Evil 4, which although a good game, came dangerously close to jumping the shark when it featured a cloyingly obnoxious juvenile villain who produces a gigantic mecha of himself. But they get younger. Xenosaga, a convoluted disaster in the plot department, kept audiences fixated with piles and piles of painfully adorable, vacant-eyed female clone children. Final Fantasy- up to its twelfth installment this year- has reliably produced at least one flat-chested, cutesy character per game for years now. We expect the jailbait with as much certainty as we expect a chocobo.

In Japan, they call it lolicon, an abbreviation of “Lolita complex.” The penchant for sexualizing school-aged girls has bled into the gaming world through the influence of Japanese design, where a twelve-year-old with her panties showing is simply super-cute. Many Japanese cartoons, such as Sailor Moon and Tokyo Mew-Mew, which are shown to the Saturday morning kids’ cartoon set here in America, had to be heavily edited to remove suggestive elements from animation enjoyed by an audience of the same general age group in Japan. Video games enjoy far fewer restrictions, due largely to the letter-based rating system which defines certain material as appropriate only for older audiences.

Still, richly rendered cinematics of female teens and adolescents bouncing and flashing about in video games raise occasional eyebrows in the West, when rarely the general audience pays any attention to game culture. Sony declined to port a US release of 2006’s horror title Rule of Rose, due to what was generally perceived as erotic undertones involving female minors—in the game, female orphans in varying states of youth perpetuate wicked and often brutal little horror-crimes on one another. Atlus stepped in to publish the US release to tepid reception. The game fared little better in Europe—the EU’s justice minister called it “obscene,” and the UK release was canceled.

A close eye, however, on the themes of popular games and surrounding culture on the Internet tells a different story. Games spawn fan-made porn art just as readily as other forms of popular fiction, and few among the audience seem particularly concerned that they might be committing any moral—or legal—impropriety. The jury’s still out on the actual legality of lolicon imagery, since while it may offend some people, no statistics have emerged to correlate them with actual child sex crimes.

Perhaps, with the influence of Japanese culture virtually inextricable from the gaming world, we’ve been acclimated to some of their social norms. Moreover, these types of characters, as they’re rendered in games, bear little actual resemblance to children at all- they’re more like youthful, surreal humanoids with overlarge eyes and disproportionate bodies, neither woman nor child. Many of them aren’t even human, as with Xenosaga’s android-like Kirschwassers (yes, they share the same name, with unsettling aptness, as cherry-juice brandy) or the scantily-clad demon girl Lilith Aensland of Darkstalkers fame.

And they’re all pretty cute, maybe even cute enough to render the moral debate ultimately useless. One thing’s for sure- like it or not, we’re used to seeing them in video games. And we understand the appeal. Their vulnerability makes them ideal for rescue stories. Their diminutive stature makes for some adorable contrast with outlandish costumes, and their juvenile demeanor can add lightness to overly weighty cinematics and game mechanics. The next generation of epics are already being launched on the cutting-edge consoles; if you take issue with the “token loli,” then just keep buying up those sequels and perhaps she won’t appear.

All images have been shamelessly raped from wherever I found them.