You know what really turns me on? Microtransactions.
I know I’m not alone. There must be dozens out there for whom the mere thought of blowing $US9 ($12) on a virtual hat gets us dripping below the waist. Oh yeah, we say. Charge it right to my card, you saucy minx. Give me those abstracted gem-based currencies with which I may buy ways to make this game slightly easier.
NSFW Warning: This post contains NSFW imagery.
If any of that resonates with you, perhaps you’d like to check out Pocket Waifu, available for free on Nutaku. T
he game takes the dating sim concept of putting Kindness Coins into a woman until ice-cold cans of Sex come out the bottom, and shamelessly reduces it into a Tamagotchi-style girl-babysitting experience in which your — sigh — “waifu” requires sleep, snacks, showers, and video games to fall in love with you. You can also spend real world money on gifts, toys, furniture and outfits for your collection of waifus.
On top of all that, you’ve been cursed by a nude demon woman (with a painful-looking clitoral hood piercing) who takes your soul in exchange for the power to… make women come over to your house? Unwillingly? It’s not entirely clear.
Pocket Waifu is a massive ball of contradictions and nonsense. It’s clearly shameless enough to not care that it’s portraying women as helpless babes who are unable to shower themselves without your help, or to get food out of the fridge without posing like a porn star.
And yet, from time to time, the aforementioned nude demon berates you for thinking that women are mere vending machines for sex.
Shortly after saying this, I managed to poke a woman into showing me her labia. And I literally mean “poke,” here: the word “poke” comes up every time you click her, and her ample bosom (because it’s never not ample) bounces like a 7.5 on the Richter scale.
I don’t want to seem prudish — I’m completely down with sex games being contrived and silly. Just as it’s completely fine to have lashings of poetic licence in things like Twilight — “I love you because I’m a vampire and your blood smells delicious” — I don’t particularly care if sex games need to tell me that women are only swarming around me because I’m cursed.
Sure, I can get down with that.
But to tell me that this game isn’t about kindness coins? I can literally buy an item called “Lust Dust,” or spend Gacha tickets on gifts that I can give to various women to make me like them more.
There’s even a meter at the top that tells me how much they like me. Just be honest in your grubbiness. It’s not like I can judge, anyway — anyone who clicks on “Pocket Waifu” is probably not in any position to judge.
Perhaps I’m blaming Pocket Waifu for the failings of sex games in general, but I’m finding it difficult to discover many sex games that don’t have a base level of disrespect for both their players, and the games themselves.
It’s honestly fine if you enjoy grubby sex games. Everyone has their personal preferences, and as long as no one’s getting hurt, feel free to get your rocks off however you like.
But when almost all sex games feature the exact same level of grubbiness, the exact same skinny-but-big-boobed women, and the exact same treatment of women as hopeless, shy creatures that nevertheless whap their baps out at the slightest provocation, I have to ask: is this really what the majority of people are into? Or is it just that it’s the only thing available, and therefore ends up shaping the fetishes of those who play games like this?
I can see the argument that sex games don’t need to be a higher form of art, or to have greater respect for themselves. As long as they have the required effect of getting people off, who cares?
But why shouldn’t we hold these games to a higher standard? Sex is something that a majority of the population does, or at least thinks about, and there should be more options, in the same way that you can buy furniture from IKEA, or you can buy a one-of-a-kind hand-crafted dining table made from rainforest hardwood.
IKEA is great, but sometimes, don’t you want something a little … special? Or even something in a comfortable middle zone, between completely basic and totally unique?
Pocket Waifu, I apologise for making you the target of this rant. You’ve not really done anything wrong, apart from being pretty tacky. But having played so many sex games that seem like repackaged versions of the same damn thing — virginal women with sizeable racks and a penchant for blushing all the damn time — I want more.
I want to see artisan sex games. I want an industry that respects its consumers enough to give them something more substantial. I want the developers to realise that there is next to no market for anyone who’s into men, or even just smaller-boobed women, but that’s an argument for another day.
If we can accept women as more complex beings than Pocket Waifu offers, which I hope we can, then perhaps we can accept men as more complex beings than Pocket Waifu caters to.
Comments
24 responses to “Pocket Waifu Is Tamagotchi, Only With Women (NSFW)”
WTF. Could you imagine someone playing this on a train?
I reckon some people are just weird enough to do it. Mate of mine is a sparky and sent me of Snapchat of some bloke on site watching hardcore porn in the tea room at like 10am. The guy was just eating a sandwich or something, headphones in and couldn’t give a rats what other people thought. 2 days late he was kicked off site because he kept doing it. My friend told me that this guy was just weird and never spoke to anyone on site
HAHAHAHA that was me.
It’s normal to read hentai on the train in Japan so I can imagine it quite easily. Never saw it when I was there but did see people reading it in 7/11 or in Lawsons.
The problem of course being that kind of incels who play this aren’t actually more complex at all.
Burnside; I get your hate for certain incels and the culture, but I am sure there are plenty of incels out there that have just not found the correct partner for them (whether it be physical, mental or social inadequacies). They likely aren’t what you would expect to find in the cesspool that is r/incel.
The whole point is that ‘incels’ are self-identified members of a culture. They aren’t just people who haven’t found a partner. They are horrid, twisted misogynistic lumps of flesh whose psychological issues are rampantly aggressive.
If you believe you are ‘entitled’ to sex, then you’re a pretty monstrous specimen and deserve all the contempt and derision in the world.
And there’s more than one or two floating around here, so don’t try and defend them too hard, they thrive on it.
Totally agree with Kate. So annoying that these game characters always having booming bust sizes. Why oh why won’t they let me choose the size!
Because 90% of the sizes would fall into three categories, two of which dominated by Japanese players (plank or unwieldy floatation devices) and one for everyone else.
FLAT IS JUSTICE! =P
I have a female friend that jokingly says this at the gym. I cry a little for her on the inside.
Yeah. Japanese culture seems to have some obession with women having breasts abnormally large.
Have you tried the many various and wonderful text based sex games? They tend to be more varied
Like trials in tainted space, sure most of the aliens are buxom women but sometimes they are genderless androgynous things you get to seduce. Or flat chested squid girls who climb trees, or ant girls and boys with nectar addictions
Or the bee boys, bee boys are the best aliens for honey related reasons
Go play TiTS, or its sorta preddecessor CoC corruption of champions if you want a fantasy feel with lots of demons
I prefer the scifi setting and better combat mechanics of TiTS myself
And there are boss battles!
Is ANYONE wanking off to this? It seems devoid of all sensuality.
Are you daring the Kotaku readership? Coz that is how you get the ick.
I’ve proofread fanfic, so I don’t really get that bothered by ick. These static full-frontals and gaudy GUIs are just like, confusing, if they’re meant to be regarded as erotic material.
I dont know how anyone could get off to this. Like the internet is full of porn not locked behind a payall or microtransactions.
I mean to ge fair the screenshots are meant to be parts of the gameplay/gui.
One hopes the actual ecchi scenes are done a bit better… but then again its one of the new western made anime inspired stuff on nutaku… the art for those can usually be a bit of a hit and miss
Hey i happen to enjoy my cheap quickie lewds on nutaku thanks! =P
But honestly you are looking at the wrong place for proper lewds with depth if youre going to pick on stuff from nutaku there are some decent mobage style games in there with decent gameplay like sacred sword princess, dragon providence, osawari island and then you get those clickers like crush crush and attsck on moe… but at the end of the day its all going to be lewds cheesecake. You are on a site thats focused on that market after all…
Its the equivalent of going and complaining how basic Facebook games are back in the day and asking for more “depth” from farmville and casual games. Completely different market and focus there
And Osawari Island is the perfect antidote to the always buxom that tends to plague some of the mass of western games. There was a period of time they were redrawing the flatter gals, but they stopped it after a while.
And some western titles, such as Huniepop, have gals of all shapes, sizes, ethnicity and religion, so you can go there for Diversity.
Even Nutaku has a lot of better eroge as downloadable titles for sale.
Check out Crush Crush.
Sounds like a tough challenge for designers. On one hand, try and make a game with actual build-up and and gameplay that goes with character development; while on the other hand, tray and make a game that also gets to the action fast enough to please their audience.
I wouldnt say its tough… there have been a fair few decent attempts at lewds with plot specially on the genre that birthed it all – visual novels. Its just that this article is looking at the wrong place. Nutaku’s online browser games are just that.. browser games its meant to be quick cheap lewds.
Complaining about a dating Sim with big breasted women where basically you have to turn into sex dolls, is just scratching the surface.
These days a large segment of lewd games feature incest and other disturbing female domination themes.
Hell, one of the most popular games on paetron is called “Daughter for dessert”. Even though the publisher starts with a statement saying that characters are above 18, you can clearly see what disturbing part of the population this is catered to.
I’m not sure how long before authorities will clamp down on this.