The Wild and Horny World in the Shadow of RPG Maker

This piece originally appeared in the August 2019 issue of the now-defunct Play Underground! Magazine.

This piece contains direct discussion about pornographic material and diverse sexual interests.

When we talk about people making games inside of other games, we’ve got to tip our hat to RPG Maker. Enterbrain’s weird little toolset for creating your own Dragon Quest-esque experiences debuted on Japanese home computers way back in 1992 and has maintained a steady release of updates and revisions well into the 21st century. What began as a simple tileset and tables for editing encounter and drop rates has evolved into a full-fledged development platform where commercial games have been built and published. Without RPG Maker, we wouldn’t have fascinating experiments in genre like Heartbeat, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, or LISA: The Painful.

There are a ton of games made on the platform, especially in the amateur scene. One site, rpgmaker.net, is an English repository for games and systems made in the various incarnations of the toolset. They currently host over 4700 entries, most of which are actual games, and there are new ones uploaded everyday. There are also creators working somewhere in the middle: their works aren’t published on storefronts nor are they freely available. There is a growing community of creators and players operating in the Patreon space, where games made in RPG Maker can be independently funded by the people most interested in playing them. What’s surprising about digging into the games distributed this way is that a good deal of them are pornographic.

To illustrate, one forum used exclusively for the pirating and discussion of adult games in this vein has an entire section devoted to RPG Maker creations. In that section are just shy of 800 unique threads, each about a different game at some stage of development. This community is largely insular. A lot of the same users pop up in multiple RPG Maker game threads, discussing their opinions on the latest updates to their favorite jerk material. What’s more, the RPG Maker scene seems to cater to a more niche crowd than the other sections of the site. While 3D based games appear to be more vanilla, top tags for RPG Maker projects include “monster girl,” “face-sitting,” and “femdom” among many, many others. If there’s anything these projects share besides the tools used to build them, it is the lifeblood made up entirely of kink. Name a kink, and you can probably find an RPG Maker porno adventure catering to or centered around it.

While I cannot attest to playing all 800 of these games, I selected one of the most popular titles and decided to go whole hog (please pardon the pun). PUG readers, I’d like to introduce you to Tower of Trample: A Reverse Ryona Game.

There’s a lot going on here, but let’s get the background first. Tower of Trample is the latest in a line of femdom-based games created by a Chinese coder going by the name Bo Wei. For this project, he is joined by a native English speaker, named Koda, who primarily writes/rewrites text for the game and polishes up Wei’s work. Together, they’ve accumulated over 1100 patrons and pull down just over $2100 a month from the project. The forum I mentioned before has a thread for the game that’s currently sitting at 10,000 posts. And despite the last real update to ToT having been months ago, discussion continues at a fervent pace both there and on the Discord server for patrons.

But what is the game? It’s labelled as “reverse ryona”, which is a type of Japanese erotic fiction in which a male protagonist goes through abuse, both mental and physical, at the hands of a dominant female. It’s a form of pornography with elements of BDSM, rape play, and as the tags on the forum heavily imply, all forms of femdom. It’s also fascinating in how it uses the tropes of classic RPGs, and the RPG Maker toolset itself, to craft an experience with certain expectations and outcomes. Players are given control of a fairly blank character.They are allowed to name him and then set off into a strange tower in order to locate missing members from his martial arts dojo. There are items to loot, equipment to forge, and levels to up, but there are no random encounters. There are only boss battles. 

Where most RPGs involve slowly gaining power and avoiding combat deaths to continue a singular story of becoming a hero, Tower of Trample plays with the idea of the hero’s journey from the outset. The protagonist is subject to tropes familiar to both classical adventure storytelling and shonen anime. He has a “fiery spirit” that is kept alive by his hope to save the martial arts master he is loyal to and a girl that he deeply cares for. Even as the plot unfolds and the sexual encounters he goes through become more varied and kinky, he remembers his goal and tries his best to remain focused on that objective.

This story is about a character who sets off on a hero’s journey he is destined to lose. Repeatedly. You will lose your first fight and probably your second and third. This will continue to be true as the game progresses and each defeat of a boss opens the way to a new, more powerful one that will easily wipe the floor with you again. This happens because losing to these bosses, who all happen to be women with huge breasts, impossible figures, and domineering personalities, puts the player in a submissive position. Losses lead to new paths with the individual bosses where players can choose to submit to them outside of combat and are treated to CG pieces connected to that boss’s personality. The second floor boss is into boot play and will force the player to clean and smell the boots she used to defeat them in combat, while the third floor boss is more primalistic in nature and threatens to eat the player if they fail enough, leading to the game’s catering to sexual interests of violence and gore.

There’s a variance to the bosses that makes each an individual character with particular interests and a style, which isn’t necessarily common in “reverse ryona” fiction. Typically, these works demonstrate a “dominant” female subverting the very personality she is written with to better serve the sexual needs of the “submissive” male. An experience like hiring a dominatrix and providing an explicit list of “do’s and don'ts” ahead of time. The bosses of Tower of Trample instead play with this expectation and put the player into situations where they will actually be forced into specific scenes in and out of battle where they have no control over what interest will be displayed. Players are left to read (or at least mash) through until the scene has concluded. The game is very genuine in its core principle, and indeed the core principle of the genre: female sexual domination of a male.

Outside of the CG pieces that are intricately drawn by Wei and imported into the RPG Maker toolset, the entirety of the game comes from what is already available within. Characters on the overworld are edits, and sometimes not particularly creative ones, of sprites present within the base toolset. Every piece of music and sound effect is there as well, from the eerie dungeon theme to the frequently used and pitch-shifted “woman laughing” sound. The gameplay itself is confined within the limits of the RPG Maker system, incorporating the first-person turn-based combat, the overworld “puzzle solving” of finding shiny point A and taking it to shiny point B, and a rudimentary shop system that is conveniently run by other prisoners within the tower. As players progress and the creators become more ambitious in breaking away from the relatively simplistic premise of the first two floors, there is no escaping the RPG Maker-shaped heart at its center. The game is a wonderful example of how easily accessible and usable tools can allow those not necessarily adept at traditional game development to create experiences that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

And I remind you, this is just one game. The forum’s 800 topics each house another. While Tower of Trample may be the most popular, it certainly isn’t the only one with this level of polish or inventiveness. There’s an entire world of sprite-based pornographic content out there and some of those games are pushing the boundaries of what can be displayed or experienced in an interactive medium. Some are experimenting with the tropes and accompanying expectations we associate with genre and the games that have come before.

Sex is a fundamental part of the human condition. Even choosing to abstain entirely from it means to be fully aware of the act and the nature of it. In games however, the topic is often skirted around or poorly handled. These creators, working in dim rooms somewhere on these indie projects, seek to challenge the way we think about sex and games. Perhaps someday the two won’t seem so disparate and the climax of the work done in games like these RPG Maker titles will finally come.