A game by Suxamethonium for PC and Switch, originally released in 2018.
Hakoniwa Explorer Plus is an isometric open world action-adventure, and it’s as quirky as they come. You take on the role of an unnamed adventurer who sets out across the world to fight monsters, uncover secrets, and fight buxom female boss creatures who do their very best to suck the life out of him/her. The game plays on numerous RPG tropes and is often silly for the sake of being silly, while offering a huge world to explore with few restrictions as to how your quest plays out.
At the start of the game, you are asked to choose your gender, and you are offered choices of male, female, or neither. However, what first appears to be a progressive gender-friendly option turns out to be a joke, as selecting “neither” results in a text box stating that the developers didn’t create graphics for a gender of “neither”, and then forces you back to a binary selection. While this attempt at humor may have elicited some laughs in the 80’s – the era after which the game is modeled – it’s completely unacceptable by modern standards (it was also unacceptable in the 80’s, but hey, we’ve grown since then).
The game goes out of its way to offer crass humor at every turn, but starting things out by taking a dig at nonbinary genders sets entirely the wrong tone. It’s hard to laugh this off as silly or infantile when it pokes fun at a group of people who are already marginalized by a largely gender-normative society. It begs the question: What prevented the developers from creating multiple sprites and allowing the player to choose one and then select between male, female, and neither… especially given that there are already mechanics built around whether the selected avatar is male or female. Also, the male character is referred to as a slacker, whereas the female character is referred to as a harlot. If you’re looking for a modern retro-style action-adventure that gets things right when it comes to gender, give this game a miss and check out Even the Ocean or Pyre.
