I just added two entries to the glossary:

Eroge -- is the Japanese abbreviation of erochikku geemu or "erotic game", essentially a seduction sim. Also known as "hentai games" or "H games". The genre is very popular in Japan and the goal is to meet girls and get them into bed and please them there. Many eroge's have been turned into anime series, sometimes staying quite true to the original and sometimes rewriting the story completely. Popotan is based on an eroge but the only thing they kept from the game was the graphics designs of the girls. Everything else in the TV series is entirely new, including the plot line. (They even left out the player avatar.) This is distinct from a "dating sim", where the goal is to get one of the girls to confess her love to you. Dating sims do not include explicit sex as a reward for winning. There are also otome games where the avatar is female and the targets are male.

Nice Boat - Comes from the series School Days. Nominally a high school romance story about one guy and two girls (based on an eroge), it had a rather shocking ending. Both girls got pregnant. One of them killed the boy with a knife. The second one took the knife from the first and killed her. Then she cut the guy's head off and took it away. The final scene shows her laying in bed, cuddling his head.That was apparently too much for some of the TV stations in Japan, especially considering that a couple of weeks before a teenage girl in Japan had killed her father with an axe. Instead of showing the final episode of School Days, they showed a half hour documentary about a cruise liner. So a "Nice Boat" ending is the ultimate "bad end".

I couldn't really remember for sure: Was the School Days ending the worst of the possible outcomes in the eroge, or was it a new ending that was even worse than the worst game ending?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:14 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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1 Heh.  I saw a "nice boat" reference recently and had no idea what it meant.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at January 12, 2008 07:22 PM (PiXy!)

2 It certainly is obscure, and fairly recent, and I've been seeing it a lot especially in comments elsewhere, so I felt it was worth a glossary entry even though I myself haven't used it. (Yet.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 12, 2008 07:23 PM (+rSRq)

3 You got the basic gore down, but your spoiler isn't really anywhere near accurate. If you don't mind spoiling this one (I doubt you'd ever want to watch it anyway) I reviewed it here:

http://anime.theastronomicon.com/?page_id=27

Clicking the spoiler tags will let you know how it went down, including the 'Nice boat' meme.

Posted by: astro at January 12, 2008 09:07 PM (RXNsB)

4 Also, to answer your question,

Any ending where Mokoto dies was a good ending. The game was famous for it's brutal endings, but it had some happy ones as well. However, the anime made him so hated that only his death could satisfy the fans. Early on, the director had promised one of the 'good endings'. As bloody as it was, he actually delivered on his promise. Damn, Kotonoha got screwed over, though...

Posted by: astro at January 12, 2008 09:20 PM (RXNsB)

5 Steven, I've not seen all the various endings from the game, but the ending in the show is just one of many 'bad ends', and it's not even the worst of the bunch, depending on your point-of-view.  Certainly it's not even close to being the bloodiest...

Posted by: Wonderduck at January 12, 2008 09:33 PM (fEnUg)

6 Alright alright. I changed it on the glossary page. Sheesh.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 12, 2008 10:36 PM (+rSRq)

7 I wasn't scolding you, if that caused the 'Sheesh'. You are still misunderstanding it, though.

Kotonoha wasn't pregnant, nor was Sekai, as we found out through a gruesome autopsy. Sekai was just nuts.

The 'Nice boat' episode that played in place of the finale was just a series of nature scenes, one of which included a boat sailing through a bay. A 4-channer made the comment 'Nice boat', and it got picked up by Futaba and then spawned countless macros.

The ironic thing was that it actually ended on a 'Nice boat'. The final image in 'School Days' is Kotonoha sailing away into the sunset on a yacht, cradling Makoto's head.

Legend has it that this episode was reworked because of the meme, while the TV stations were deciding whether or not to air the final episode. She'd actually mentioned this boat before, though, and even her sister envied her sailing trip with Makoto. So it was likely just a happy coincidence.

Still, for almost a month this series was known as 'Nice boat' before the finale aired. The fact that it ended on the boat just cemented it in otaku lore.


Hope that helps.

Posted by: astro at January 12, 2008 11:21 PM (RXNsB)

8 Hm... I'm not sure I would draw the line between Dating Sims and Eroge where you would. At least in the west, there are plenty of games marketed as Dating Sims that have explicitly adult content. See http://www.peachprincess.com/ for a bunch of (massively NSFW) examples.

Posted by: renpytom at January 13, 2008 11:46 AM (vkkAp)

9

I'm defining those terms the way I use them. That glossary is for this site, not for the universe.

Do I have to start posting the "no pedantic nitpicking" graphic again? Please tell me I won't have to.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 13, 2008 12:15 PM (+rSRq)

10 I was under the impression the anime ending for School Days combined a couple of the Bad Ends of the game ( but not all of them, for reasons unknown to me ).

Posted by: metaphysician at January 13, 2008 08:31 PM (KVPNK)

11 Well, <em>somebody</em> had to survive...

Posted by: mparker762 at January 13, 2008 08:39 PM (4qjka)

12 Why? 

Posted by: metaphysician at January 15, 2008 09:52 AM (KVPNK)

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