"After the combined success of Japanese developer Alcohol Soft's smash hit bishoujo game The Last Waltz and American licensor Megatech Software's track record of localizing eroge by the turn of millennium, many Japanese eroge developers moved to the West Coast. Soon, development of bishoujo and eroge, colloquially known as "anime games" in America, adopted aesthetic and design elements from American comics and cartoons, which, in turn, lead a new trend of anime games in Japan." - An Unabridged History of Anime Games (2020) by Simon Paul Hewlett and Cynthia Wu.
During the end of the tumultuous 80s, the well-known "Arcade Crisis" took place, in which governments from different Asian regions blamed video games, and more specifically arcades, for being a bad influence on young people, promoting laziness, truancy, destroying family relationships... Thus, governments such as those of Japan, South Korea and Macau established strong restrictions against them and against the video game industry, while others such as Taiwan, China, Hong Kong or Thailand were banned.
As a result of this ban, many studios closed, moving abroad (Australia, New Zealand mainly) or adapted to these limitations, which prohibited death scenes, torture, the sexuality of the characters... or being forced to find ways to circumvent this censorship. One of the most famous, and in itself, most controversial, was the developer Alcohol Soft, which adopted this nickname as a protest against censorship, who would develop romantic video games set mainly in the 19th century, with a very ornate style, and with young female protagonists, that revealed subtexts of sensuality, multiple relationships...
These subtexts would cause The Last Waltz, (a video game set in Budapest in 1885, with a plot of a haunted palace, an ancient curse and vampirism) to be licensed in 1999 by Megatech Software, being an immediate bestseller.
With the arrival of the year 2000, Megatech would acquire the license to the other video games developed by Alcohol Soft (without much sales success), and would encourage the latter to move and develop its activity in the United States.
Where Nadja would be released in 2003 (the story of a young woman raised in Paris in 1898, in love with a bohemian artist, an American soldier, a Russian ballet dancer and a French aristocrat) in which, for the first time, there would be scenes of sexual character.
The launch of this game would encourage many developers and artists (mainly Japanese) to settle and develop their activity on the American West Coast, mainly in California, fusing and mixing different artistic styles.
Regardless of their gender and age, they were rebels, rebels to the Republic, and therefore, their actions could not go unpunished.
I didn't like ordering it, I wasn't happy about the death of all those people, but it was something that had to be done, and I would give that order again. And time proved me right.
