Posted

Feb 8th 2006

Mood

Lazy

"Jast USA" has just released an american version of the japanese BoysLove videogame "Enzai - eine falsche Beschuldigung" (originally dated year 2002 on its japanese release).
BL videogames are girls-oriented videogames often featuring a long plot, a lack of interactivity (compared to what we western people think when we hear the word "videogame"), and of course more or less explicit boyXboy scenes.



WHAT'S ENZAI? (If you already know, skip to the second part.)
As I said, Enzai (literally: "false charge") is a BL videogame. So the fact that all of the main characters in the game are males often engaged in ambiguous scenes surely will cut off some of the people here from reading the rest of my review. Nevertheless, let's go on.
The story. It's set around the middle of 1800. The protagonist is Guys, a young boy around 14 years old, being a bit of a street rascal like nearly all the young boys from poor families. One day, Guys gets caught for a mere candy theft. While he waits for the official to scold him and send him home, things suddenly get a totally unexpected twist. Guys finds himself accused not of stealing candies, but of murder -the murder of a man he didn't even know at all. In a very Kafkian scene, everyone seems convinced that he actually commit that murder, and no one actually bothers to finding further proofs or even to make the boy understand what the heck it's going on. So, as if in an absurd nightmare, our hero is all of a sudden locked up in the worse prison you could imagine; his normal everyday life destroyed without logical explanation.
From that point on, 95% of Enzai's place setting is just there -inside that dark, claustrophobic, dirty prison. In there, Guys experiences humiliation and tortures of the most various kinds; sometimes actually reaching peaks of bad taste quite unusual to be seen in a japanese game for girls. The inmates of the prison are a bunch of quite unreassuring people, most of the characters Guys will meet there are mentally twisted in one way or another, and those who aren't psychos aren't fully trustable in any case. However, the people living around the prison who aren't jailed aren't any better... from sadistic, cruelly insane jailers to drunken and apathic lawyers, it seems that just all of Enzai's characters are either unreliable or plain dangerous, making it quite difficult for Guys to decide whom he might trust or find help from (if ever).
The player, leading Guys'actions, must find a way to discover what the hell has really happened, and must also try to keep the hero's body and mind as less damaged as possible (I won't spoil anything if I mention that some of the game's endings actually include Guys committing suicide or Guys getting insane).

Enzai has become overly popular also outside Japan, mostly due to its unusually dark and twisted atmosphere and to such surprisingly bad-taste scenes as I've already mentioned. No BL game had ever dared that before, so Enzai was the first girls-oriented videogame that showed not cute love scenes or charmingly perfect characters. Enzai showed blood, rape, insanity, abuse -and not in the romantic "shoujo way" but as rude as such scenes actually are.
Personally, what I found so charming in that game are the psychological details of the characters and of the situations. In the first half of the game, you -do- get that feeling of despair and hopelessness; the feeling of not knowing what is going on even if everyone else seems to, but knowing only that you can't stop this from happening no matter how bad it will be. That's why I often dare to compare Enzai to Franz Kafka's novels (no matter the huge difference, of course). The authors manage to convey such feeling by the constant repetition of similar scenes and phrases, nearly to the point of getting redundant, giving the feeling of a neverending spiral that can't be stopped (how many times does Lusca repeat "You'd better give up" to the protagonist vainly seeking help in him?).
Another thing that I've liked is the accuracy in portaying the mind diseases that the various characters suffer from. Either for coincidence or because the authors really did spend time looking up on a psychiatry book, the various disorders afflicting Enzai's cast are efficiently represented in their real symptoms.
Last thing to be noted, the constant references to Nazism. Despite the game not being set in the WWII era, Enzai is so full of nazi reminders that I even came to wonder if the game had originally been intended to be set in a lager, and then the authors changed the place setting as the plot developed. The title itself is written in German ("eine falsche Beschuldigung"), and so are all the titles of the (excellent) background musics, even if theorically they should have been in french.

Now enough with the review, time for the




CONSIDERATION ON ENZAI'S ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Well. I don't have Enzai's english version. So I can't really review it. But some things I can still note:

1) due to the American laws, the characters ages have all been changed. Guys and Io are now said to be 18 years old, and thus I shall obviously assume that one of the plot's main elements - that is, Guildias'pedophilia - has been changed too. It's definitely a big shame.
2) due to the American laws, the censorship on the genitals has been removed, at last. But rejoy not of this, because it means you'll also get to see BOLLANET's genitals. (AAAAYYEEEEEE!!!!!!! x.x )
3) it happears that the translation tastes very american. In fact, I'd say it's not english-translated, but, alas, it's american-translated. The use of american terminology on that game surely is gonna look awkward.....



That's all, folks!
Oh, yes, I forgot:

ENZAI'S OFFICIAL WEBSITE ---> http://www.langmaor.com/l01/index.htm

JAST USA'S ENZAI PAGE ---> http://www.jastusa.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?ScreenROD&Store_Code=JU&Product_Code=LANG001&Category_Code=yaoi