J-List Recommends New Game!, for fans of Lesbian Anime Game Developers
Hello from Tokyo. Since most of Japan is still closed due to the Obon holidays, I decided to take a few days to hang out in Japan’s capital to catch up with some friends and get some sightseeing in, since there are plenty of areas I’ve not discovered yet. It’s a nice time to visit Tokyo, as most Japanese go home to be with relatives, so the city can be quite empty.
I continue to enjoy New Game, a slice of life anime that caters to my very specific fetish for lesbian girls who are software developers. The show is about Aoba, a girl who’s landed her dream job at a game company, working alongside Kou, the pantsu-challenged developer who created her favorite game. One of the cutest side stories is Aoba’s friend Necchi and a programmer named Umiko, who (fans hope) will become a couple before long. In the current season, Necchi is teaching herself to program games and gets help from Umiko, which is a nice side story, but almost more fantastic than the show’s implication that game developers are hotbeds of latent yuri tension. In reality, the technical level of nearly all Japan is extremely low, and skills you or I probably take for granted, like being able to use Excel or Word properly, will get a reaction of sugoi! by Japanese observers. There are exceptions, like the 82 year old Japanese woman who was miffed there were no iOS games for elderly people, so she learned to code and write her own, but by and large advanced computer skills are rare here.
(And to answer a question I received on Twitter, yes, all computer programming is done in English, with the commands used not differing at all. Code comments are of course in Japanese.)
As I’ve written before, one of the least fun things about living in Japan is our proximity to North Korea, a schizophrenic country that does unpleasant things like kidnapping Japanese citizens and using them as language teachers to train spies, mass-producing counterfeit Japanese yen notes to do economic damage to Japan and shooting missiles peaceful space settellites over Japan’s main island. They also regularly threaten to attack Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons, and last week made specific threats against Guam. While the American news media scrambled to educate readers about what Guam was — it’s basically Hawaii Lite®, a pleasant island paradise that’s been a U.S. possession since the 1898 Spanish American war, with a large military base and lots of tourism by Asian countries — I was smiling to myself. Japan has been threatened so many times by North Korea that people here largely take the threats in stride. It’s just part of living next to the world most unpleasant country.
J-List stocks hundreds of wonderful anime figures, including many sexy “cast-off” figures, with clothing that can be removed. It’s like playing with our sister’s Barbie dolls, raised to the 100th degree. Browse our stock now!
