Yosuga no Sora set off my OMG detector just from the preseason description. As a more-or-less faithful adaptation of the original eroge, it has the hero scoring with every girl in sight.

In ep 11 he adds his twin sister to the tally. I somewhat rhetorically asked, "I wonder if we’re going to get a 'nice boat' ending?" JPMeyer responds:

I can’t imagine anything else at this point. The real question, I think, is who does the boating.

And how seriously boated he is afterwards. Surely one of those girls is going to turn yandere.

In general, I stay as far away from eroge adaptations as I can. The only one I think I've ever watched all the way through was Popotan, and that wasn't really an adaptation. They discarded the player avatar and tossed the entire original story. The only thing they kept was the character designs for the girls as well as the house that three of them lived in. The game's alien space ship became an image of magic taking place. Everything else was completely new. I think I heard someone describing it as "jacking up the license plate and replacing the car." (I have a vague memory that it was J who said that.)

Princess Lover was also originally an eroge, but they left out all the sex when they adapted it to anime. Anyway, I only watched about four episodes before giving up on it. (Later I went through the whole thing to take frame grabs for the top rotation, but I did that with the sound turned off and the subtitles disabled.)

This season also included "The World only God Knows", which was another I wanted to stay far, far away from. The basic concept is that there's a geek who happens to be a wizard at playing and winning dating games, and he gets recruited by an angel to use his profound seduction skills to win the hearts of real girls, because there are pieces of something-or-other in their hearts which need to be recovered. Or they are possessed by demons. Or some other contrivance.

The real hook is this idea that expertise in playing dating games somehow prepares you for real life romantic endeavors, and I found that idea utterly ludicrous.

Jessi found it really offensive, but she's a grrl and is offended by the idea that girls should be thought of as being so predictable. I found it offensive, too, because it insulted my intelligence. (No one understands girls.)

There's a kind of meta-level going on here. The reason this dork's skills work on "real girls" is that they're no more real than the ones in the games. They're just as much artificial creations of writers as are the ones in the games. He's moved from one level of unreality to another one.

But bad as that is, at least he isn't having sex with his twin sister. All together now: EEEEW! YUCK!

UPDATE: Pete responds.

IIRC, ef and To Heart were not eroge.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Never Watch at 02:51 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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