So, I Actually Played SEX 2…

Author: beef2929
First published 2023/07/31

You won’t believe what happens next.

1. SEX: A Very Good Place to Start

In September of 1994, an Osaka-based group of eroge creators named AyPio were flying high off the success of their pornographic gardening simulator SATYR. In their newfound confidence, they made the fateful choice to name an erotic video game SEX. They barely survived its development.

AyPio would go on to pump out classic after classic as 13cm/130cm, but they had just a few games under their belt in 1994. Still, SEX was a modest little game even by PC98 standards whose development should have been a cinch. But in November, two of the presumably four people working on the project quit overnight with no notice. Thinking on his feet, AyPio founder UYE! went to reassign staff members from another project the company was developing on the side. Every single one of them declined—who would want to work on a game called SEX?

The release was delayed, and all work on the project was halted for a full month while UYE! scrambled to find anyone willing to contribute. At this point, development on the aforementioned side project slowed to a crawl too. Everything was falling apart. When development on SEX finally did resume, UYE! caught influenza during a snowboarding trip. The following month, an earthquake hit the prefecture and destroyed at least one staff member’s home. By some divine miracle, the game was finished and made it to shelves in February of 1995; contained within is an ad listing for new staff. The positions they were looking to fill? Pretty much everything.

No, I have no idea why the screenshot came out looking like this. SEX is actually a cursed video game.

The game is less exciting than the story of its creation. It’s a collection of three brief interactive sex scenes which the player can access at will from an interface manned by the slightly animated, very cool Mr. Funk. I say brief, but these encounters can of course play out a number of different ways based on the player’s input, and actually ‘completing’ the game by tracking down every event CG is quite the chore. The subjects of these scenes are two standard JK heroines and a boastful, slutty 23-year-old CEO. I don’t think I need to specify my favourite.

It is a fun little game though, thanks in large part to its writing, supplied by a mysteriously uncredited author. What little dialogue the game has is snappy and silly—nothing mould-breaking, but short and sweet and doused in that playful tone you want from a 90s eroge.

Okay, I know, I know what you clicked this article for. Without further ado, let’s talk about

2. The Sequel to SEX

You’ve probably already heard of SEX 2—its incredible title has become something of a meme in English-speaking eroge communities, inspiring hit tweets and high-quality rips alike. When I first stumbled upon its VNDB page in 2017, the screenshots were full of bizarre, unintelligible text which just added to the mystique for me. This is obviously the work of a bugged out emulator, but at the time my friends and I thought it was some kind of handwritten Japanese font that only native speakers could ever hope to parse…

My interest in the game was renewed when I realised who was responsible for it. SEX was written by a young Tadokoro Hironari, who is probably best-known to English audiences for his worst-selling game, Fushigi Densha. Tadokoro’s disastrously abrupt departure from AyPio was presumably in order to found his very own eroge studio STONE HEADS, whose debut title SEEK was released to massive commercial success just a month after SEX dropped. So when AyPio came to STONE HEADS to commission a sequel to SEX, writing duties fell not to Tadokoro, who would have been busy with the company’s own games, but to the fresh-faced Marutani Hideto. We will be talking much more about Marutani throughout this post, so for now let’s just introduce him as the eroge prodigy responsible for the most radically political tentacle porn game of the 21st century, and 1996’s SEX 2.

SEX 2 is an ultra-rare “double sequel”—not only to SEX but also to the less interesting SATYR. The main heroine of both SATYR and SEX 2 is Ayaka-san, a young gardener and flower shop owner, and the protagonist’s older childhood friend, next door neighbor and girlfriend. SEX 2 simulates 40 days in the shoes of this carefree, precocious couple. Around a quarter of these days contain scripted events while the rest follow a simple looping template: a scene, randomly selected from several candidates, where our guy notices Ayaka outside his window and races down to see her, followed by the same interactive eroscene. As the game progresses, the player unlocks more options within this scene as well as more items to bring into it, often delivered by the protagonist’s doting uncle climbing through his bedroom window (the parents don’t let him through the front door anymore).

If Tadokoro’s script for SEX was amusing, Marutani’s SEX 2 script is hilarious. The tone is set immediately by a textbox-flooding monologue about fucking in Africa, on the moon, in the alps, by the Hachikō statue, at the White House, in the tundra, from the front, from the back, diagonally… you get the idea. This ridiculous high energy, sustained for the game’s duration, stands out even among other PC98 titles. The game should be as basic as they come, but the バカップル taking center stage are so effortlessly endearing and the gags are so intense and nonstop that it’s a blast to read.

While I’m glad the game doesn’t overstay its welcome—after all, skipping through this many choices over and over again gets tedious fast—I can’t deny I left it hungry for more. More of this relationship, this tone, these bits. I guess what I want to know is… if SEX 2 was so good, why did they never make a SEX 3?

生足くらぶ 5×5 (JAM, 1998)

On that note…

Sorry, this post is actually about

MAID iN HEAVEN: SEX DONE RIGHT

I hope you’ll forgive me for clickbaiting you, dear reader, but I’d like to think its for a worthwhile cause. That cause is to make as many people as possible aware of the most deranged, bewildering, magnificent thing I’ve read in years. MAID iN HEAVEN is a cult classic 1998 simulation nukige that has all but fallen into obscurity these days. Created by PIL, the main imprint of STONE HEADS, and written by Marutani Hideto, it is in all but name a bona fide successor to SEX 2 (which Marutani himself describes as a miniature MAID iN HEAVEN). It is also, perhaps, the perfect eroge.

To really explain what MAID iN HEAVEN is though, we’ll need to take one last detour back to 1992, when ALICESOFT released the (no pun intended) seminal Ayumi-chan Monogatari. In Ayumi-chan, you play as an average high school boy who lands the gf of his dreams and has passionate sex with her every day forever. And I do mean forever—the game has no ending, and simply loops endlessly until you get bored and stop playing, which, if you were born after the year 1980, is probably gonna be like three in-game weeks. Sex in Ayumi-chan is not just interactive, but gamified: both Ayumi and the protagonist have arousal/stamina stats you need to consider lest they pass out, there’s even a old shopkeeper you can visit to exchange your measly pocket money for sex toys.

Ayumi-chan is groundbreaking for being the first nukige, the first “porn game” to actually be all porn. I think people have this presumption that eroge started off as pure pornography, coming to possess an experimental edge and artistic merit only as the medium grew up. In truth, eroge were born from ancient video games where sex was more a reward for playing than the gameplay itself; think Leisure Suit Larry or uh… that Fast & the Furious game we all played on Newgrounds in elementary school. The thought of releasing an eroge consisting of nothing but porn seemed like commercial suicide until the unprecedented success of Ayumi-chan paved the way for many, many to come. Like Doukyuusei 3, a planned sequel to the game titled Sayaka-chan Monogatari ended up an artifact of high-profile eroge vaporware with this adorable interactive demo hosted on the artist’s personal site surviving as debris. Six years later, PIL delivered what ALICESOFT were never able to, the perfect iteration on Ayumi-chan.

You’ve probably already noticed that SEX 2, like so many of its contemporaries, takes rather obvious influence from Ayumi-chan. But MAID iN HEAVEN is practically a remake. Legend has it (I don’t have a source for this one, sorry) that Kiriyama Taichi wrote in the game’s own 企画書 that “it’s Ayumi-chan Monogatari with a maid”. Sure enough, it’s an endlessly looping girlfriend maid sim based around an elaborate interactive daily sex scene with arousal/stamina stats, special weekend events and even a sex shop to spend your hard-earned ¥500 a day at—although the owner of this one calls himself Joe Splotzkith and is convinced he’s a freedom-loving American-born Vietnam vet and you are his long-lost Communist-vanquishing brother-in-arms from the Green Berets named Steve SORRY SORRY SORRY I’m getting ahead of myself. Some go as far as to call MAID iN HEAVEN a parody game, but personally I think it’s such a dramatic improvement on the concept in every conceivable way with so much soul of its own that the moniker doesn’t do it justice.

MAID iN HEAVEN is the story of a man with exactly one passion in life. As he once confided to a childhood friend, his dream is to one day own a beautiful maid with mommy milkers. The game begins as he returns home from his office job to discover this dream has come true: having dedicated her life to studying at the prestigious maid-training Paradise Academy, that very same childhood friend now sits at his doorstep awaiting his return. This is Nagisa, and she loves our guy more than anything in the world. Happy at last, the two embrace, make passionate love and begin their lives anew together. A few minutes later, they watch as the faculty of Paradise Academy are arrested on live television for operating an illegal prostitution ring.

It took me maybe 30 seconds to understand what was so special about this game. It has the single most absurd, manic, unpredictable, hysterical, unhinged script I’ve ever seen in my entire fucking life. I was laughing my ass off reading the opening scene, waiting, in the back of my mind, for the game to relax, to calm down, to settle into a comfortable groove. It never did. The entire game is like this, every scene, every line. Marutani just absolutely could not help himself. He wasn’t even trying to help himself. What I said about the ultra high-energy text of SEX 2 applies tenfold here, but it’s drawn out to consume a whole full-length modern commercial eroge. This is the world’s first maximalist eroge. Marutani was no longer a no-name, he proved himself a professional in 1997’s Jorou Gumo, an astonishing achievement with denser prose and thicker atmosphere than I ever would have expected to find on the PC98. MAID iN HEAVEN… is also dense, thick and astonishing, but maybe not in quite the same way.

Marutani says this is his ‘default’ writing mode, that when he sits down to write, this is just what naturally comes out. This is just… how his brain works. The game possesses a charm I can only really compare to Otaku☆Masshigura, where you’re watching a clearly intelligent, well-read and talented writer inexplicably produce the stupidest nonsense you’ve ever been privy to. And much like in Otagura, you can feel that talent seeping out of this game at every turn. Even if it’s au naturale, there is genuine skill and refinement in how Marutani presents the eternal manic episode our guy calls an existence, a rhythm to this insanity. We’re treated to geographical and historical gags that are just a little too niche to be random. Sudden, brief spurts (or individual lines) of lovely poetic text. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there is explicit political commentary in MAID iN HEAVEN. All of Marutani’s best qualities are present here, just percolating beneath the surface.

The other thing impressive thing about this script is its density. MAID iN HEAVEN is a huge game despite its deceptively simple structure; it’s bursting at the seams with Content. There are entirely unique variations and progressions of every eroscene for repeating commands in a single day, for Nagisa becoming accustomed to them over time, for using them at different levels of arousal, for using them with your items at different levels. There are hundreds of different scenes depicting our guy’s adventures at the office that randomly trigger every morning, dozens of impassioned discussions about communism with Joe, running jokes getting set up and paid off in random 5-line pillow talk scenes capping off each day. There are weekend outings, events locked to specific seasons or days of the year, special variations of these events for triggering them again in the second year. There’s a fucking ending! A completely optional ending, just, hidden away somewhere beneath all the flags.

There is, believe it or not, an actual story in MAID iN HEAVEN. It is about their next-door neighbour working at a department store and occurs entirely off-screen, passively observed by our protagonists on the morning news during random breakfast scenes every couple of weeks for hundreds of days. This premise spirals out of control and leads to elaborate drama, intrigue and mysteries, all of which you are being drip-fed in 30 second chunks before you get back to fucking your maid. At one point you discover Nagisa has joined the unionised suburban housewives in protesting local labour laws outside the department store. Are you seeing what I alluded to when I mentioned politics earlier? This is a game where your only friend(?) is a man who exclusively screams about the red menace taking over Japan while your maid advocates for worker rights clad head to toe in riot gear. Incredible.

Mitsuya Arata noted that Marutani’s games tended to eschew traditional narrative structures in favour of simulating immersive 箱庭的世界 where every possibility is accounted for, and that this design philosophy can be traced from Jorou Gumo through MAID iN HEAVEN all the way to his magnum opus France Shoujo. This is an astute observation about MAID iN HEAVEN. The simplicity and repetitiveness of this core gameplay loop actually doesn’t detract from the authenticity of its simulation, because it so hilariously befits its protagonist. I actually can believe this is his day-to-day, that this is his entire life.

Ultimately, though, its the quality of the text, not the quantity, that is MAID iN HEAVEN‘s most significant improvement over its inspiration and the reason it never stops being fun. It’s only because the text is so entertaining that you’re actually motivated to go looking for it all, to keep playing for hundreds of days—and I did exactly that. I spent around 200 in-game days fully engaging with the system (as in, exploring the labyrinthine daily sex scene and finding new scenes and unread text), and played through a further 300 while mainly spamming the ‘go to bed’ option, essentially grinding for weekend outings, seasonal events, and other random scenes. But, and this truly pains me to admit… I was not able to 100% the CG gallery in MAID iN HEAVEN. Even after 500 days. Nagisa’s 被虐 stat was stuck at 74, when it needed to reach 82+ for the four (4!!!!!) CGs I had left to collect. I have no idea how to raise that stat and nothing I tried worked. Apparently I couldn’t bring myself to be abusive enough to my maid when it mattered most. I’m sorry, guys. I fucked up. I literally respect women too much to CG-comp MAID iN HEAVEN.

The batshit insane writing and characterisation also give the game a pretty unique tone. PIL are known for being a hardcore BDSM-focused 鬼畜系 brand, and MAID iN HEAVEN… kinda fits the bill, on paper? It is basically a 調教 simulator, complete with quite sadistic sexual commands and a bondage system. But the game’s unrelenting, infectious, gleeful stupidity precludes you from ever taking it too seriously. It’s cruel and saccharine all at once. No matter how brutish or thoughtless his actions, Nagisa’s love for the protagonist is unshakeable, unquestionable, sincere and just… adorable. The best comparison I can give you is Rance and Sill’s relationship, if Sill was a little smarter and Rance a little stupider. It’s impossible not to love them.

At this point I ought to clarify that there are three very different versions of the game:

The version I played, and the one I URGE you to as well, is SuperS. It is a gigantic improvement on the original. I cannot even begin to express how much of a difference the skip read text function makes in a game like this, those new scenes are among the game’s very best, and GOD, the voice acting… needs its own damn paragraph.

All of the performances are excellent, but Ichijou Kazuya delivers a strong contender for the greatest performance of eroge history as our protagonist. I have never laughed this hard at voice acting before, not even at Gakuen Handsome. He just… he just went fucking crazy on this shit! Please, please watch these. I’m not cherry picking these. This really is the whole game. He’s putting 210% into every single line—and he’s voiced the WHOLE time too, sex scenes and all. Every variation of every eroscene. Every obscure template scene buried away under mountains of code and flags. And he’s screaming, he’s whispering, he’s singing, he’s doing accents, he’s putting on all these little voices. Remember, the game wasn’t meant to be voiced, so it’s not like there were directions in the script; surely half the time he’s just completely going rogue. Pure love of the game. At one point the script just says “HAHAHAHAHAHAHA” and he does the fucking Woody Woodpecker laugh. This motherfucker is doing his own bits. He’s completely out of control.

But yes, the original release was totally unvoiced, and scenes were punctuated only by sound effects. I need you to understand this when I tell you the sound effects in this game are as deranged as the goddamn text is. This game will make you feel like you’re listening to a podcast where one of the hosts has a soundboard. An orgasm will be announced by the sound of a huge wave crashing, or maybe a pitch-shifted wolf howl, or perhaps the dropping of a bomb. The clanking of heavy machinery and the chiming of a wresting bell accompany the sight of anal sex. Our guy just whipped his cock out? Obviously that’s gonna be the baseball stadium organ jingle, you know the one, maybe throw some applause in there too. The most iconic of all is… well, it’s not even a fucking sound, it’s just some guy shouting “nuku nuku nuku nuku!” The sound effects, along with scripting and debugging were handled by Mitsuya Arata, who even claims to have recorded some of the sounds himself at home. Much like Ichijou, it’s hard to shake the impression that Mitsuya was throwing in his own bits, and the game is better for it. Incidentally, he also wrote the official walkthrough, which means he might just be the only person on the planet to actually understand how this game works.

God, what else… Kiriyama’s artwork is exquisite. Much like Ayumi-chan, the game uses hundreds of event CGs rather than reusable character tachie. ALICESOFT were able to achieve this effect only through cutting costs by using scanned illustrations, like those you might find in a doujinshi. MAID iN HEAVEN on the other hand is comprised of beautiful, glossy modern eroge CGs that are juicy as hell dude. The fetishes covered in the game are surprisingly lavish, everything from piss to whipping to exhibitionism to diapers to egg laying. I went really hard on communicating just how fucking funny this game is, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea and think that’s “all it’s good for”. MAID iN HEAVEN effortlessly accomplishes its job as a nukige amidst the chaos. It’s a sexy game.

Here’s where I might normally try to list some sort of criticisms, but like, what’s not to love? This is a masterpiece, and I adored every second it. I’m not even mad that I couldn’t find those last four CGs (okay, I’m a bit mad). But the story doesn’t end here.

4. メイドさん LEGACY

Let’s address the elephant in the room that I’m sure you’ve all been yelling at your screens (assuming you’re all middle-aged Japanese otaku, anyway): the popularity of MAID iN HEAVEN, while considerable in its own right, was dwarfed by the infamy of its original opening song Maid-san Rock’n’Roll. The song was written and performed by the game’s executive producer, Tadokoro Hironari—yes, the writer of SEX—under his alias Minami PILo (南泌流夫) with raunchy lyrics sung by a mysterious Minami PILko (南ピル子)—in reality, a voice actress named Dynamite Ami who was brought back to play Nagisa in SuperS. Here they are performing the song live in a televised recording. Opening songs were still something of a novelty in 1998, and I get the impression that Tadokoro (who wrote the first eroge opening back in 1992) was pushing the envelope here and seeing what he could get away with. The version of the song that actually plays in-game is so heavily censored by loud cheering noises that you can barely make out the lyrics, but even that couldn’t stop the song from becoming an instant classic and, well… inventing denpa music.

You read that right. Maid-san Rock’n’Roll is considered the first ever denpa song, the sensation that kickstarted the whole trend. When I realised this, I was overtaken by a feeling of deep serenity. Like of course MAID iN HEAVEN, of all games, invented denpa music, right? Sometimes the universe just makes sense. Over the years, PILo and PILko remained an underground sensation and continued to perform live together and collaborate on maid-themed songs and albums including, in true denpa fashion, some incredible Eurobeat and another eroge OP.

Around a year after MAID iN HEAVEN dropped, Marutani Hideto began work on what would become his magnum opus France Shoujo, but a torturous development cycle delayed the game’s release until 2009. He kept busy in the meantime, reaching a new audience with his work for PULLTOP and a brand new STONE HEADS imprint named CODEPINK. CODEPINK was established specifically to publish future work from the planner, director and artist of MAID iN HEAVEN, Kiriyama Taichi. Marutani wrote their first game, SEXFRIEND, but was relegated to assistant writer for Sweet Home and Sumeragi Ryouko. Even so, I think Kiriyama managed to keep some of the /sovl/ of MAID iN HEAVEN alive through these games; Sumeragi Ryouko for instance may have no stats or progression but it does have an endless loop of juicy ero, templated chaos and bizarre obscure sequences I’m half-convinced I imagined when I played the game, what, six years ago? Marutani remains active to this day, with his shocking, beautiful, radical, gut-wrenching latest work Dead End Aegis dragging him back into the limelight. It’s actually the game that took me down this rabbit hole in the first place and I recommend it emphatically.

Our soundboard savant Mitsuya Arata meanwhile worked his way up the chain of command, writing a couple games of his own (the former of which came full circle by inspiring an elaborate running joke in SuperS), directing a few familiar titles (Sweet Home, Sumeragi Ryouko, and yes, France fucking Shoujo) and finally following in his close friend and mentor Tadokoro’s footsteps by forming his own eroge brand eRONDO in 2013. eRONDO was an amazing company on a completely different vector to PIL—they zeroed in on and perfected the vanilla, 王道 nukige with rich audiovisual design and attention to detail. Their games demonstrate a genuine mastery of the form. Mitsuya was an incredibly passionate appreciator and creator of eroge who was never afraid to speak his mind and call out toxic business practices when he saw them; his Twitter account is an enduringly useful trove of information that I relied on a lot for this post.

こいのす☆イチャコライズ (eRONDO, 2017)

Tadokoro Hironari was in the process of organising a reunion event, sponsored by eRONDO, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Maid-san Rock’n’Roll when his health took a dramatic turn for the worse. He tragically passed away in December of 2018. The event, transformed into a memorial for Tadokoro, went ahead the following month with performances from Sapporo Momoko, PILko, and Mitsuya. A message mourning Tadokoro from his surviving family reads: “Today, the great rock’n’roll swindle Tadokoro Hironari has departed for heaven, where his maid awaits”.

Kiriyama Taichi and Mitsuya Arata both passed away of unrelated circumstances the following year.

5. MESSAGE FOR PETER PAYNE’S EYES ONLY

So there you have it, the story of SEX 2.

Seriously though, MAID iN HEAVEN is a true hidden gem. It’s not at all hard to see why this game defined eroge for a certain generation of otaku, and I can’t deny that I sort of feel the same way today. The game’s humour is timeless, as entertaining as the day it was released, and that’s probably because nobody has really outdone it, taken things this far, since. It’s a one-of-a-kind cultural touchstone that left a permanent mark on otaku culture, and its a real shame to see it fallen into oblivion. While researching, I was moved to see just how much of an lifelong impression it left on its creators. I never touched on Marutani’s attachment, but in his SuperS staff comment he confesses he was nervous about writing new scenes for the game after seven years, only to find once he actually started that he slipped right back into the characters, as if no time had passed at all. I think you can feel these characters in his other work too, particularly in Lisette from Dead End Aegis. He even gave her a damn maid in the fandisc.

A simple desire fueled me to research and write this post: I want to see this game translated. It’s not as unlikely as you might think! Remember those CODEPINK games I brought up earlier? In 2017, JAST USA translated Sumeragi Ryouko (2008). In 2018, they translated Sweet Home (2007). Surely MAID iN HEAVEN SuperS (2005) is the logical next step. As if that wasn’t enough, they translated Dead End Aegis in 2021! Imagine the cross-promotion opportunities! Please, everyone, put MAID iN HEAVEN on those localisation request surveys you all fill out! And, Peter-san, if you’re reading this, please assign the most insane person you employ to this title and make them translate the entire thing on ambien. Thank you sir.

Thanks to my gf for watching me play this game on her TV with the volume turned up, thanks to Tern for editing the MAID IN HEAVEN FUNNY MOMENTS compilation video and thanks to Zodi for designing this sick-ass site, which you’ll hopefully be seeing a lot more of in the future! Less than two years in the future even! And thank you for reading!!