Wow, they're making a new
Valis game! Remember
Valis, the 16-bit action series about a schoolgirl named Yuko turning into an anime version of She-Ra and saving an alternate dimension several times over? Yeah, the games are mostly average, but they were fun back in the days of the Genesis and TurboGrafx, when we could be entranced by a plucky female warrior, decent
Castlevania-style play mechanics, and cinema sequences that used "amazing CD technology" to mimic those then-novel Japanese cartoons.
The series quietly died around 1993, but now we have
Valis X (or
Valis Cross, as it's pronounced) for the Japanese PC. Here's the
official website.
I don't remember the original games showing Yuko with quite such large breasts or an expression that mixed drugged stupefaction with a dawning sense of terror. Still, this is an official
Valis title—there's the Telenet copyright in the corner—so we should be interested. Let's look at the screenshots and see just what sort of game this is.
Yes, it's a lesbian porn game. A lesbian porn
Valis game. I'd make some joke about
Philip K. Dick spinning in his grave, but he never had anything to do with the
Valis games in the first place. Besides, he might have even endorsed lesbian anime sex in his unhinged later years.
This sort of thing turns up all the time in unlicensed gaming subcultures, where you can find just about any porn based on just about any game. It's truly rare, though, for a company to put out fully authorized smut about their most recognizable character, and that's precisely what's happening here. Telenet was a major Japanese game developer during the early ‘90s, but the days of
Valis,
Cosmic Fantasy,
El Viento, and all those shooters are long gone. Like a film director with no career left, Telenet's doing porn. And so is Yuko, whether she likes it or not.
That's the disturbing thing about this: Yuko doesn't seem to be enjoying it at all. If she was going about things with a huge orgiastic grin on her face, there'd be far less cause for offense. But no. We can't have harmless, consensual lesbian stuff, because the audience won't buy it unless a woman is cringing, blushing, sobbing, or dying.
Telenet's actually endorsed a series of
Valis X games, with four more titles that focus on other characters like Cham, Valna, and Yuko's stupid classmate Reiko getting sapphic with each other. Telenet also has the temerity to charge about $25 for every game, and they're download-only. Granted, I dont think anyone should pay any amount of money for something like
Valis X, because that'll just encourage more of it.
