Christmas-themed eroge and dating sims (very mild NSFW warning)

Japan only recently began to celebrate Christmas through what I'm assuming was a combination of international capitalism and the American occupation following World War II, and that means it doesn't have quite the significance or connotations it has in the west. Oh, the Japanese surely give each other presents for Christmas and use Santa as a symbol of giving, but they've also developed a number of other Christmas traditions, such as dining on a bucket of KFC (to the point you have to order ahead of time if you want your chicken on Christmas Day). Most importantly for our purposes today, Christmas is also seen as a romantic holiday for young couples. As a result, there are quite a few dating simulators where the protagonist's stated goal is to find a girlfriend before Christmas, not to mention full-on eroge (erotic games) inspired by the season. As I've mentioned before, I'm not one to look down my nose at getting sexual gratification from a video game if that's what you like, and I thought we'd take a look at a few dating sims and eroge with Christmas themes. Be warned that some of these images are ever-so-slightly spicy, although nothing you'll see is particularly objectionable and the NSFW warning is more of a precaution.

Image Room: Banana Club (PC-98, 1994)

 

We start off with a bang (no pun intended) with probably the most suggestive cover on this list with Image Room: Banana Club, a series of words that might as well have been chosen at random. Fortunately any confusion caused by the title is cleared up immediately by the cover art, as the image of scantily-clad women riding a giant banana tells you exactly what you're getting into. Actually, based on the screenshots, videos, and descriptions I managed to find of it I'm not sure if it's an eroge or just a dating sim, so this cover might be making promises it can't keep. The story, at least as much of it as I was able to find, is that the impoverished protagonist is wandering around the city on Christmas when the wind smacks him in the face with a flyer for the titular Banana Club, which he immediately heads to and meets the trio of girls shown above. Santa makes an appearance in the intro, but I suspect it's not all that high on true Christmas-related content. Next!

AV Hanafuda Hana no Christmas Eve (Arcade, 1990)

 

In a Japanese context, "AV" stands for "adult video"—in other words, pornography—so I assume that the women on the flyer for this arcade game are contemporary AV stars that served as the models for the in-game girls. Most of them are giving a winning smile, but the lady second from the bottom seems shocked and disgusted, as if she's appalled anyone would besmirch the good name of Christmas with a porn game. But she shouldn't worry, as the game makes sure to remind us all of the reason for the season by including a cross as part of its logo, so everyone will think of Jesus while they try to get ladies to take their clothes off. The main lady in the upper right, meanwhile, is giving a sideways glance to something or other, making her look like she's unsure about everything that's going on around her but is going to put on her AV game face and smile it out.

This game actually has an interesting pedigree for a Japanese porn game, as developer Nichibutsu was the creator of the first strip mahjong video game, 1983's Jangou Night (in the process giving birth to a subgenre that continues to this day) and over the course of their existence they created hundreds of eroge, including a number of additional strip mahjong games. Of course, judging by the title this one isn't a mahjong game but rather a hanafuda game. Hanafuda (meaning "flower cards") is probably best known in video gaming circles as the first thing the company that would eventually become gaming giant Nintendo manufactured when it was founded way back in 1889, so you could argue that these ladies share some distant gaming ancestry with Mario and Luigi.

Maria's Christmas Box (Various, 1988)

 

Did you think we'd only be looking at Japanese games today? Nope, it turns out the west also has no compunction about using the holiest day of its calendar as fodder for a game about making women take their clothes off. Of course, this isn't strip mahjong, but the more west-appropriate strip poker, and it stars Maria Whittaker, who was apparently a British model and Page 3 girl in the '80s. (For those of you who don't know, British tabloid newspapers used to put pictures of topless women on their third page to boost readership. Since most British tabloids are right-wing rags dedicated to making people afraid of immigrants, Page 3 was probably the best journalism they did.) The back of the box claims Maria is "a dream girl of millions across the five continents", and considering most English-speaking countries recognize seven continents that seems oddly understated. It's fair enough to claim she doesn't have a significant following in Antarctica (she doesn't seem like she would have much to offer penguins, who have their own opinions on what constitutes sex appeal), but which of the other continents is also immune to Maria's charms?

This particular cover is for the Commodore 64 version, and from the screenshots I looked at I could just barely imagine someone getting titillated by its blocky depiction of Maria. You know, if it was the '80s and they were desperate. But if you're a big Maria Whittaker fan, I recommend playing the higher-res Amiga version, which shows some actual if fairly grainy photographs of her. Under no circumstances should you play the ZX Spectrum version, as it reduces poor Maria to something resembling what you'd get if you rotoscoped a picture of the ashen corpse of Alice Cooper, and it's genuinely upsetting to look at. Fortunately I don't think there's any actual nudity or sex in this game, so nobody was ever exposed to a doomed attempt by the Spectrum to depict genitalia.

Cocktail Harmony (Playstation, 1998)

 

Cocktail Harmony is dating sim structured around making cocktails, and I admit it's a bit of a stretch to include it in an article about Christmas games, but according to the poorly-translated summaries of the plot I managed to find it takes place around Christmas and features an appearance by Santa Claus, so I'm going to count it. More specifically, the protagonist proposes to his girlfriend one Christmas but gets rejected, prompting him to wander around town despondently until he runs into Santa Claus, who gives him a cell phone. Wandering around despondently in the cold was also part of the opening of Banana Club, and in both cases it's a rather depressing image to summon in the context of Christmas, as if Japanese game developers thought The Little Match Girl was the Christmas story that best captured the spirit of the season.

Fortunately things are looking up for the protagonist: fast forward to December of the following year and he has a bunch of girls on the speed dial of his mysterious Christmas phone, and the game is about calling them and inviting them to accompany you to various cocktail bars. In addition to being a dating sim it's apparently also a cocktail-making simulator with over 400 recipes, making it something of a spiritual predecessor to VA-11 Hall-A. I was initially puzzled by the cover's mention of the DualShock—how does selecting cocktail ingredients benefit from an analog stick?—but I bet you do things like stir the drinks yourself by rotating the stick around, possibly accompanied by rumble to represent the ferocity with which you are waggling your bar spoon.

NOëL: Not Digital (Playstation, 1996)
 

As previously mentioned, there are a ton of dating sims about a guy wanting to get a girlfriend before Christmas, and most of them aren't particularly Christmas-y otherwise, and besides that if I went through every one of them I'd be here until next December. Another problem was that most of them have covers that are just pictures of the girls standing around, which is fair enough (the girls are one of the major selling points of a dating sim, after all) but doesn't give me much to work with when it comes to comedy unless one of them is wearing Groucho glasses or something. Still, I wanted to show one off, and I figured the one with an actually Christmas-related title was as good a choice as any. Since NOëL's cover is just a picture of the face of one of the dateable girls, here's an advertisement flyer for it instead, which is slightly more interesting. I assume it's supposed to depict the girls lying on the ground and looking up at the clouds, but since the clouds in question are actually shown in the background it might really be a below view of them lying face down in the grass, and judging by their smiles having a grand old time of it, too.

The protagonist met these girls on summer vacation, possibly stumbling upon them in the middle of their pagan grass-huffing ritual, and the game is about staying in contact with them over the next four months until Christmas with your computer and phone, hopefully making a girlfriend out of one of them in the process. That explains the "Noël" part of the title, but "Not Digital" is a bit more puzzling, since it's all about digital communication with the girls. Plus, you know, it's a video game. They're all digital. My best guess is that it's supposed to tell you that the girls are so real-seeming you'll think they aren't digital, a claim I have my doubts about, or maybe that the end goal is to move past computer-based interaction into a non-digital relationship.

This is actually the first of three games in a series, followed by NOëL: La Neige (which instead of ending with Christmas starts with the protagonist getting injured skiing on Christmas Day, which attracts the interest of the game's girls, because there's nothing women love more than a klutz) and NOëL 3: Mission on the Line, which goes right off the rails with a plot about terrorism and computer viruses, although it still makes a token effort to justify the series name by being set around Christmas and showing the characters in Santa suits on the disc art.

That's all for today! Next time I'll be back with Part 2 of the list of Christmas versions of non-Christmas games. Until then, enjoy the season!

(As always, images are taken from the Launchbox games database, except for Banana Club, which was taken from the Visual Novel Database.)