Knights of Xentar: Vanilla Casanova

The game's basic attitude.

       
One of my favorite holiday tunes is the old Frank Loesser standard "Baby, It's Cold Outside." I have about 15 covers including the sublime Dean Martin version. Because I like it so much, I get a little irked at the customary annual reminder that it's basically about an attempted date rape (or perhaps even a completed one; the song ends before a definitive decision). This article is particularly noxious. Talk about overanalyzing! I mean, yeah, the woman clearly wants to leave and there's an implication that the guy slipped her a roofie, but come on! It's just a light holiday song with clever lyrics! Bing Crosby sang it! Lady Gaga and Joseph Gordon-Levitt did it with a clever role-reversal! Do you politically-correct m#%@##$ers have to take everything?

I think the comparison to Knights of Xentar is apt. The game affects a tone similar to the song. Yes, women are depicted in the throes of sexual assault, but it's not serious sexual assault. They're saying, "no, no, stop," but they're doing it with a wink and a smile. I mean, if they were really traumatized, they probably wouldn't be so eager to offer sex to Desmond as a reward for "rescuing" them, right?

This is all to say that I get the negative backlash. If you like the Japanese eroge genre, and you've managed to play games like this for years without displaying any sociopathic tendencies yourself, you don't appreciate some guy coming along who nobody forced to play this game--a game that is 100% clear about its content and purpose on the box--and find him criticizing it for doing exactly what it says its going to do. I recognize that I'm the interloper here. Knights of Xentar was intended for a certain audience, and that audience probably appreciated what it got. It satisfies the same market as cheap 1980s sex comedies like Zapped! or Hardbodies: lots of nudity, and enough jokes and plot in between the nudity that you can plausibly claim that you're watching it for the comedy and the plot.

I also want to make it clear that I'm not coming down on the side of people who say that video games directly influence behavior. Plenty of studies have shown that playing violent video games doesn't make someone more violent, so why would I believe that playing video games that are at least a little insensitive about rape would affect the plight of any real women? I wonder sometimes if there are more subtle effects that the standard studies don't measure, but I don't have a strong opinion either way. It seems likely that video games, like all art and entertainment, affects attitudes, but it seems equally likely that video games, like all art and entertainment, could serve as an outlet for desires that might otherwise claim a real victim. I don't know.

In any event, this blog is about the mechanic and content of role-playing games, so that's what I write about. If a game is about dragons, I write about how it handles dragons. If it's combat heavy, I write about the combat mechanics. If it's primarily about sexual content, I write about my reactions to the sexual content. It would be absurd to cover a game like Knights of Xentar and not focus to some degree on the way it handles sex and nudity. I'm not interested in any more comments that suggest I'm "overanalyzing" or that I'm somehow worthy of ridicule for even discussing the primary content of the game.

If you don't agree with my analysis, fine. You might not agree with how I analyze dragons, either. All I can do is report on what I experienced and what I thought of it. I don't mind disagreement. What I mind is the amount of negativity, the amount of anger, the amount of ridicule, in that disagreement whenever I write about nudity or sex. If I say that a full-frontal shot at the end of the game is unnecessary and a poor substitute for real plot, and you disagree, you ought to feel about as angry as if I said I prefer red dragons to blue dragons. If not, consider that perhaps it's you, rather than me, who is over-invested in the issue. Maybe delay commenting until you can figure out why it bothers you so much in the first place.
    
In that spirit, here's what I can say about the sexual content in Knights of Xentar: Regardless of the intended humor or tone, I find many of the images creepy. The girls, to the extent that they look like people at all with their enormous eyes and bouffants, look child-like. They are often depicted in the throes of molestation by groups of men. The protagonist kills the molesters, which makes the game's ethics mildly superior to Rance's, but he then usually enjoys sex as a reward. I have never rescued a woman from sexual assault in real life, but I suspect that few of them are eager to immediately turn to sex to display their gratitude to their rescuers. Humor or not, as a player, I don't like the role-playing implications of that scenario.

              

I don't care how old the game says she is, this does not look like a sexually mature female.

    

As for the humor, I find that the jokes, never thigh-slappers in the first place, get old relatively fast. Desmond is universally presented as sexually insufficient, unspectacularly endowed, far more "vanilla" in his preferences than the women he encounters. But they still want to sleep with him, about one in every town, village, or hut. The occasional "small penis" joke can be funny. Eight "small penis" jokes in an hour--and I say this realizing that I'm a little "vanilla" myself here--just might be crossing the line into too many "small penis" jokes.

      

Ah, every man's fantasy.

     

Xentar is never content to simply let the joke be the joke. The dialogue has to go on forever and make its point with all the subtlety of a jackhammer. I'm going to make up this example because I didn't write it all down, but at one point Desmond rescues a woman who has been tied up by her attacker. A clever game would have Desmond defeat the enemy and then say, "Let me untie you!" to which the woman might reply, "Now, why would you do that?" Wink wink, fade to black, and we'd all get the idea. But Xentar handles it like this:

      

Desmond: "Let me untie you!"

Girl: "Now, why would you do that?"

Desmond: "Because you're tied up! Don't you want to be untied?"

Girl: "That depends what you're going to do with me."

Desmond: "I don't understand."

Girl: "Are you always this dense?"

Desmond: "Are you saying you want me to leave you in knots?"

Girl: "Only if you know how to tighten them."

Desmond: "What do you mean?"

       

On and on for a dozen more lines. The jokes never really end on a punchline; instead, they just kind of play out. I might chalk it up to cultural differences, but I had the impression that the western release was completely re-written by English-speakers.

That isn't to say that I haven't been laughing at all. Desmond's clueless comments are occasionally amusing. "Do you want it hard or soft?" he says during one sexual encounter, perhaps qualifying for the most inept dirty talk in history. Here's a guy responding to a request for directions:

    

     

But the good jokes are few and far between.
       

At the end of the last session, Desmond had been defeated by a wolf attacking a girl in a cabin. I leveled him up a few more times, tried again, and defeated the wolf. The girl naturally slept with Desmond as a reward, and offered her cabin should he find himself in the need of lodging again.

Continuing counter-clockwise around the game map, I next ran into the city of Dreadsden, where I got some minor item upgrades but not much else. Nearby, in yet another cabin, I found a woman being assaulted by seven dwarves (perversion of fairy tale classics is something of a theme with this game). The graphic that accompanied this, in which all seven of the dwarves managed to occupy themselves in one way or another, left me wanting to take a shower. 

    

Sorry about this, little guys.

      

I killed them. The woman introduced herself as Priscilla. She said that she lived in the cabin with the dwarves and normally they were friends, but an evil mage named Visel had cast a spell on them, making them lecherous. That made me feel bad about killing them, although Priscilla didn't seem to care. After sex (of course), she asked me to kill Visel, noting that I would have to get a magic marble from a hermit in Dreadsden to bypass the entrance to Visel's cave.

      

See, I feel like this crosses a line somehow.

     

I did as instructed, killed Visel in a long battle that took most of my healing potions, and got a "magic nut" from him. When I returned to Priscilla, she gave me a magic mirror.

       

The epic battle with Visel.

      

As I headed down to the next town, called Coventry, the random wilderness combats started to get a bit harder, both in quantity and quality. It gave me a chance to experiment a bit with the different settings. The game is somewhat unique in that it offers a "knowledge" setting for each enemy. Every time you face an enemy of that type, the percentage increases a bit. "Knowledge of the enemy's strengths and weaknesses" is one of the combat modes, and I've found that once your knowledge of an enemy passes 50%, the mode is extremely effective.

Otherwise, I've had the most luck with offense-heavy settings. It seems to burn my healing potions at the same rate as more defensive settings, but combats are over much more quickly. A lot of enemies have the ability to restore their own health a few times in the middle of combat, and a strong offense often prevents this.

In Coventry, I heard of a nearby demon named Tymm, who guards a passage east, and a knight named Arstein told me I could kill him with Priscilla's magic mirror. In the far southwest, by some cliffs, a well-meaning NPC assumed I was there to kill myself and suggested I visit some place called "Nero's Retreat" instead.

     

Buying weapon upgrades in town.

     

Moving east, I ran into Tymm but killed him immediately with the magic mirror. He'd been holding a woman named Marie captive; she seemed to know Desmond from a previous game. She rewarded him with sex.

    

The authors named him "Tymm" after presumably rejecting "Stievve" and "Fraynk."

     

Through Tymm's pass, I came to the city of Phoenix, where Dragon Knight II had been set. Desmond is apparently something of a celebrity there, with many of the buildings and other things named in his honor.

     

I get the idea.

     

I ran into a woman named Kate, who also appeared to know Desmond from the prior game. She immediately slept with him despite being married to someone named Pietro. Understand that all these encounters are scripted and do not give the player any options. You move near an NPC and you're committing adultery, role-playing be damned.

    

Pietro, I've got some bad news, buddy.

     

Most important, I ran into a brawny, horned man named Rolf who had apparently been a companion in a previous game. After some persuasion, he joined the party. I outfitted him with some extra items that I had. He frankly doesn't seem to make combat any easier; on the contrary, he's using far more healing potions than Desmond.

      

The game seems oddly fixated on pig gristle.

      

The second character's attack options are tracked separately from Desmond's, but I think the "knowledge" variable applies to both of us. There seems to be room for one more NPC. So far, neither Desmond nor Rolf have any items or options that would fit with the grayed-out magic menus at the bottom of the combat screen. I have managed to get Desmond to Level 26, where he was before he lost his levels in the scripted event early in the game.

      

The two friends take on some "evil sprites."

     

I don't find any of the RPG elements in Xentar particularly outstanding, but neither are they bad. The rapid leveling provides a constant sense of character improvement. I wish there was more to do in combat, but at least it has the virtue of brevity.

After I had written most of this material, a reader sent a manual, which I'd been unable to find, so I look forward to seeing if it explains some of these NPCs. I wouldn't mind if I could wrap this up in one more entry, but I'll give it at least two.

Time so far: 8 hours