Why the Nostalgia?
Entry posted by Clephas
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If some of you failed to notice, I've been going back over my list of ancient favorites amongst the moege/charage/slice-of-life genres. Why am I doing this? I actually have some good reasons, other than whims.
First, I keep recommending these things to people, but when you start talking about a VN you last played five years ago, people tend to let it in one ear and out the other. I mean, my long-term memory for games and books is pretty good, but my brain is fairly compartmentalized, so I don't remember them actively unless I go through the effort to refresh that memory. Can I continue to say that I honestly recommend something without playing it in the recent enough past that I can compare it to other, more recent VN experiences, through more jaded eyes?
Second, I want to know just how much nostalgia is coloring my viewpoint. To be blunt, the longer you are away from your favorite games or VNs, the more the memory gets beautified by distance in time. When I recently did a speed replay of G-senjou, I reaffirmed why I disliked the story structure while at the same time realizing that I didn't always do it justice due to my biases (no, I didn't blog on it, but I was mostly doing it for my own edification, anyway).
Third, I like to think that I try to be as objective as possible, so I wanted to reexplore my VN roots when it came to my attitude toward charage/moege. One thing I've noticed as I replayed certain charage from the past is that the best of the older generation wasted the least time on 'everyday' slice-of-life, ironically. The gradual shift to put an excessive emphasis on the everyday life aspects of charage and moege is a relatively recent phenomenon, from what I've re-experienced. A part of this is that, as the audience in Japan has aged, so has their nostalgia for an 'ideal youth' become much stronger. The fact is, a lot of the 'devoted' moe-gamers in Japan aren't young people (at least not the ones who are also erogamers). They are older people who want to experience an idealized version of youth through a non-person protagonist's viewpoint. Ironically, this seems to be the reason why the market is shrinking, since younger generations don't find that kind of stuff as accessible as the older generation does, so you can tell to some extent what generation a company is appealing to by how weak the protagonist is and/or archetypical the characters are, lol.
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