SHALL WE LOVE? NINJA LOVE
Shall we Date
Ninja Love Game for GREE belongs to a series of games created by NTT (Nippon Telegraph and
Telephone West Corporation) Solmare, which is according to their home page “the
No.1 Mobile Comic site in Japan”, and also a major global distributor of mobile
comics. The Shall We Date Series
consists of multiple spinoffs:
Shall We Date: Ninja Love Mobile Game, is an
app that you can download on your iphone
through itunes. It is also accessible on Android and the PC version from the
NTTSolmare website. Ninja Love is a
visual novel mobile game, and belongs to the genre of Himekoi that generally falls under the umbrella category of Otome Games. Himekoi games, which
translates to Princess love, in my definition refers to games where the player
experiences the feeling of being like a princess. The protagonists of these
games are young women and as the player you face a very fortunate dilemma of
having to choose one of four bishonen to date.
Ninja Love alludes to famous historical figures of the
Sengoku Period (Japan's feudal era) and through a parodic rendering of historical facts (as well as
fiction), the player is invited to relive and rewrite, to some extent, a
Japanese history. In other words, the Sengoku Period is not only used as a
backdrop, but allows the player to relish in Japan’s nostalgic past. In doing
so, one of the cultural implications of the game—despite its emphasis on
romance—is that it has a didactic purpose, but it also engages in discourses of
patriotism and in defining a national identity. In response to the question
posed earlier in the semester “What makes a Japanese
Game?”, I argue, that it contains an element of Japanese history, in its
broadest sense. But of course, this element is one of the many characteristics
of Japanese games.
Meet
the Characters
4 MAIN CHARACTERS
UNLOCK THE OTHER 4 CHARCATERS!
GAME PLAY
So
What are Some of the Features of Mobile
Dating Games?
-Less active participation required of
the player
-No voice over. Still images with
occasional facial expressions and gestures
-You are reading dialogues (and lots of
it)
-Music (each ninja has his own distinct
background melody, which is reflective of his personality)
MAIN FEATURES OF NINJA LOVE
RECEPTION
Ninja Love seems to be a very
popular game as the NTTSolmare Facebookpage indicates that they now have up to “300K users”. I predict that the
number of spinoffs available suggests the immense popularity of himekoi games
across the globe. The application is
available in 32 other countries not including Japan (See
NTTSolmare).
- I actually quite enjoyed this game! The characters were hilarious, the dialogues range from cute to crazy (despite the countless grammatical errors lol), and the CGs were surprisingly satisfying in the cute and [the] hot department (｡´艸`｡). Don’t expect too much from it, but the game exceeded my expectations (kiokunoaria)
- Overall, I give a 8/10 stars–mainly because I’m biased with all of the shirtless/half-naked men running around half the time in the game. (Jacqueline Cottrell)
- This is the only game that Solmare NTT [sic] with background music playing with a very aesthetically pleasing game to look at~
(Corlee 1289)
In
relation to the emphasis on the aesthetic pleasure that the player experiences
as she ventures on a journey with her selected suitor as indicated in these
three comments, it is evident that himekoi games render young men as objects of
female gaze, inverting the conventional role of woman and woman’s bodies as
carnal objects and spectacle for the male gaze. [1]
This
inversion of conventional gender roles I think on the one hand seems to
celebrate the liberty of female sexuality by providing woman with an outlet to
explore her sexual or romantic desires—although within a virtual Japanese world—while
on the other hand, it also reinforces fixed and patriarchal notions of femininity
and masculinity in ultimately validating discourses of heterosexual romance. Many
otome games, I think, employ a fairy-tale narrative and doing so sets up a
happily-ever-after ending, which becomes the ultimate goal of the game. The
player is, in most cases, rendered as the damsel-in-distress, emphasising her
powerlessness and helplessness without the protection of her male suitor. The
idea of knight-in-shining-armor, though, reinforces a power dynamic that
polarizes gender difference. In other words, woman is weak/man is strong; woman
is passive/man is active. While to some extent Ninja Love conforms to these
generic conventions of otome games, it also complicates these dichotomies by
allowing the player to contribute and participate in the assassination of Oda
Nobunaga and to restore peace. So in Kotaro’s route, for example, he thanks you
for your help in overcoming a foe, which I think demonstrates a mutuality or
partnership between the (female) player and the male character, encouraging, to
some degree, ideas of equality.
Moreover, Ninja Love caters to an
audience that wants to feel like a “princess” and to be pampered. So while
hegemonic discourses of gender propriety are articulated in the game, the
player is most likely consciously aware of their role as the female subject and
is not necessarily internalising the gender ideology exhibited in the game.
However, critics such as Fusami Ogi who
writes extensively on shojo manga writes “we cannot say that the texts [so in
this case himekoi games] do not reinscribe the man/woman power relationship
because they are written for female readers alone and thus do not affect male
readers in any way” (78). Moreover Ogi argues that one of the limitations of
the shojo manga genre is that it presents marriage as a natural goal for women.
This is also the case for Ninja Love. “In this game, there are three
alternative endings consisting of the Happy Ending, Normal Ending, or the
Unhappy Ending[. . .] only the Happy Ending rewards you with the last
event picture possible for the character of your choice whereas the other
ending does not merit anything” (Corlee). This reinforces that the
player’s successful completion of the game relies on her ability to make the
right choices throughout the game in order to either get married or end in
copulation with you ninja: there is no option to live an independent life.
To
what extent do games like Ninja Love provide women with a sensation of
experiencing or exercising agency within a virtual reality and space? Do women
play otome games as a means to escape their mundane and ordinary lives only to
ultimately conform to them in games?
[1] BUT does it really?! The idea of
a virtual gazing had been suggested in class. That is, since the male character
is staring at the player in her eyes throughout most of the game, there may not
be an inversion of the male-gaze after all. This idea is particularly
interesting in comparison to the ways in which female characters are portrayed
as avoiding eye contact with the male player in Ero games, where her coyness
invites the male gaze.
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