J-List is Having a Hentai Game Sale
Although J-List has been around for an epoch in Internet years — we were founded in October 1996, a year after Netscape’s IPO and two years before a certain company called Google would be incorporated — our hentai game business is even older, reaching all the way back to 1995. J-List was started as a temporary thing to tide us over until our sister company JAST USA took off, though of course it turned out to be our main business in the end. 1995 was when I joined forces with the owner of the original JAST (creator of famous titles like Three Sister’s Story and Season of the Sakura) to make what would become JAST USA, licensor and publisher of fine Japanese hentai games and visual novels in English.
It was a very giddy time to be in technology. Windows 95 had just come out and everyone was rushing to buy new-fangled “CD-ROM drives” so they could install software without having to insert eight floppy disks. I remember bringing our early games to conventions and spending many hours explaining to potential buyers that, no, these were not anime DVDs, but interactive “dating-sim games,” which seemed to be the best term to describe them back then. I got a lot of blank stares for a while until the games began showing up as story contents in mainstream anime, and now everyone knows what they are.
Since the end of our fiscal year is coming up soon, we thought we’d have a sale on package visual novels, because rather than count them for inventory purposes later this month, we rather sell them to you. So, for a limited time, you can get 33% off three or more of the games on this page. To help you pick out some games during our sale, I’ll give you seven recommendations.
Flowers -Le volume sur printemps-
In the middle of a forest isolated from the rest of the world lies Saint Angraecum Academy, an all-girls school. This is where Suoh Shirahane, a painfully shy girl with a mysterious past, will begin her first year of high school. What beautiful relationships await her?
Flowers is a beautiful yuri game from Innocent Grey, creators of amazing stories of high quality, with visuals to match. We still have stock of the limited edition (Limited editions will not be reprinted), which comes with the game, Steam code, plus plastic figurines of the main characters in the game, with postcard backdrops. You should make sure to grab a copy during our sale!
Kana Okaeri x Sensei 2 Combo
Kana Okaeri is a remake of one of the most epic visual novels ever made, Kana Imouto, written by Romeo Tanaka (who made Yume Miru Kusuri and Family Project, which we also publish), who is kind of a God individual novel circles. You are very close to your younger sister Kana, who has lived with a serious disease all her life. Her condition worsens, and both of you realize you will lose each other. In your frustration and sadness, you reach for each other, and what is one of the most beautiful stories we know of. It’s kind of responsible for the modern imouto genre in anime today.
The remake is great, with new high-resolution art, full voice, and animated scenes, and all original game content and endings present of course. It’s one of our “2-for-1” hentai game releases, because fans always hated when we take games out of print or physical copies, so we started giving you one free game with each main game, so everything could remain in print. You get another game free, called Sensei 2, on the disc. See our other 2-for-1 games here.
Seinarukana – The Spirit of Eternity Sword 2
The broad category of 18+ anime-style games from Japan goes beyond visual novels, of course. There are also many great RPGs, with dungeon crawling, combat, staffs and leveling up, and awesome worlds and stories to clear. One of our most important recent releases has been Seinarukana, a direct sequel to Aselia and a “spiritual sequel” to Yumina the Ethereal, which was done by the same staff, but at a different company. All three games have great map-based gameplay, beautiful visuals, and RPG style battles. But of the three, Seinarukana has the most subtle and beautiful story, and probably the best gameplay. So, for fans who want to support something beyond visual novels, here’s your chance.
You might not have noticed, but a company called Steam has kind of taken over the industry. While it’s common practice for adult games that want to publish on steam to remove their adult content with the expectation that fans will patch the games to get the content back, Seinarukana does a much better job: in place of the sex scenes which are in our package version, you get proper replacement scenes for the Steam version, adding new elements to the story, all full voiced. You get the Steam code free, inside the limited package version, along with other cool stuff. (Limited editions will not be reprinted so get yours now!)
Girlish Grimoire Littlewitch Romanesque: Editio Perfcecta
Another game to offer great gameplay that’s quite different from the standard visual novel style is Littlewitch Romanesque, an innovative “raising” game in which you have two years to teach magic to two young which is-in-training. The system is complex and quite fun: every day the girls throw dice, which creates different amounts of magic, and they learn spells, which allows more magic to be created from each dice throw. The characters then go on quests, visiting different lands and unlocking different parts of the story, though you need a lot of strategy to get the magic spells you need in time for each quest. Many of the quests are the sex scenes in the game. Our version of the game combines all the limited fan disc material that was released separately in Japan.
With gorgeous art by Oyari Ashito (an artist we will be working with in the future) and an amazing world, complete with politics, history and many colorful characters, this is frankly one of the best games we ever have the honor of publishing. You should grab it during our sale!
Yin-Yang! x X-Change 3 Combo
Another of our “2-in-1” value pack games, we give you Yin-Yang! and X-Change 3 on one disc. One of the most popular genres we worked with has been the nyotaika (spontaneous male to female sex change) genre embodied in the four X-Change games we’ve published. (X-Change 1 and 2 are here, also in a handy 2-for-1 set package.) In Yin-Yang!, you are a male student whose body suddenly becomes female, due to a special kind of DNA he was born with. Now female, naturally you have all manner of sexual adventures. This is probably our best game that features futanari, too.
Tsuki Possession + Virgin Roster Bundle Pack
Yet another 2-in-1mo set of games, this purchase gets you two of our most famous “dark” titles, Tsuki Possession and Virgin Roster. If you like innovative sexual situations and bondage, you might like these two titles.
In Tsuki, you are a Japanese man whose parents have died, and all around you, there are women who are sad about your situation, and ready to offer any help they can for you…so naturally you use their sympathy against them to get sexual pleasure. In Virgin Roster, your job is to go around the school and find all the secret virgins, whether they are students, teachers, etc., and relieve them of their virginity. Both games have animated sex scenes.
School Days and Shiny Days
Basically, there are three types of 18+ game from Japan: visual novels (a story you control with various choices), RPGs (by definition, any game that has stats that rise and fall as you play the game), plus two titles that are in a class by themselves, the fully animated School Days and Shiny Days. Since any serious fan of this genre is probably going to play these games eventually, you should get them during our sale!
School Days is the story of a love triangle between Makoto and two girls named Sekai and Kotonoha. In the anime version, there was a very dark ending in which one of the girls kills Makoto then kills the other girl, which kind of freaked out a lot of fans…though happily that ending was only in the anime series, not in the game, which is not nearly as violent. There are 21 endings in School Days, only five or six of which feature somebody getting killed. As you’ll see if you read the interview in the artbook we published with Shiny Days, the writer of this game is a fan of the movie Fargo, and was trying to re-create the random, wacky violence in that film.
Shiny Days is a sequel to School Days…though actually it’s a prequel, telling what would have happened if the characters had met the previous summer. All your favorite characters are back, plus lots of other characters. This game lacks the violence of the School Days game, and in place you get…lots of MILFs. Every single character’s mother is a romanceable character in this game, and Makoto samples them all. So, it’s basically a game that’s all about the sexual relationships only, rather than who loves whom enough to kill him or her. You should play both games!
Thanks for reading, here’s your parting gif. I hope you’ve enjoyed my overview of some of my favorite games and I also hope you’ll visit our package hentai game sale and find some nice titles to pick up!
