Harvest Moon: Gender Bender or Just Homophobic

            Harvest Moon, now called Story of Seasons, is a simulator role-play game that came out in Japan in 1996. Since then it has developed 30+ spin-off games with various story lines taking place in various eras. A large component of these games are marriage candidates; NPC's that a programmed for the sole purpose of raising their friendship and romance “levels” with the intent of eventually marrying them to have them help out with some of your daily routines in-game.

            A current source of scrutiny as new games develop is the inability to date characters of the same gender; attempting to date a candidate of the same gender only increases friendship and not romance. Many players have expressed their dislike at this mechanic and when questioned a few years ago year the company Marvelous (formerly Natsume) and creator Yasuhiro Wada said they understood is was a mechanic that had to be incorporated eventually but it would be more complicated than that; requiring “homosexual-specific” characters and that it would increase the overall game data capacity.

            However, with the 2016 release of the indie game Stardew Valley- whose creator Eric Barone (alias ConcernedApe) was heavily inspired by the Japanese sim- allowed every marriage candidate available to the player, regardless of gender. It is unsure if Harvest Moon will follow suit but in-between the interview and the release of Stardew Valley they came out with Harvest Moon: A New Beginning that unlocks all the customization options regardless of gender. So, for example, if you wished to marry a male character as a male you still had to choose female but there was the option of making your girl look like a male however they would still use female pronouns and your character would still wear a dress when married.

            Many think this is a cop-out since it’s not actually same sex but, for the conservative Japanese society, should this be considered progressive or would that be lenient towards them solely due to their social standing? While many medieval texts were actually quite progressive they were edited to hide “trans-gendered” males, women posing as men saving other women, and just women being with other women. Many see the medieval era as absent of any form of LGBT representation due to the later eras’ erasure and because of this it is many people’s basis to not include this representation in their video games. Is the Japanese company Marvelous being progressive with their “gender bender” options or is there still some underlying opposition towards the LGBT community?