Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 8, 2004

A bishōjo game or girl game is a type of Japanese video game centered on interactions with attractive anime girls. Although nearly all bishōjo games involve romantic or sex appeal of some kind, they may or may not be pornographic. Bishōjo games are a uniquely Japanese phenomenon: they have virtually no parallel in the American or European video game industries. They form a sizeable fraction of the Japanese market: the most popular have sold over a million copies, and they make up the majority of offline PC games in Japan. Nevertheless, because of real or perceived cultural differences, few have been translated and no major mass-market release has yet been attempted outside of East Asia. Thus bishōjo games remain by far the least known of the major video game genres outside of Japan. Notable subgenres of bishōjo games are ren'ai games (often called "dating sims") and H games (often called "hentai games"). (more...)

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