The 2007 Bishoujo Game Award results are in, and the people have spoken: in the period covered by the poll (September ’06 through August ’07), Pulltop’s Harukani Aogi, Uruwashino (EGS) emerged on top in four categories (BGM, “Pure Love”-type, Scenario, and User’s Choice), sweeping the overall grand prize in the process. Bullet Butlers received honorable mention in the User’s Choice category as well as sharing the Media prize with two other titles, where it’s noted that given its release date the game didn’t get adequate time to be voted on before the voting period was closed. The full list of winners and a description of the voting and selection process follows:
Harukani Aogi, Uruwashino – PULLTOP
Grand Prize
BGM Award
“Pure Love” Genre Award
Scenario Award
User’s Choice Award
Koihime Musou – BaseSon
Best Character Award
New Genre Award
Figu@Mate – Escu:de
Theme Song Award
Seinarukana – Xuse
Graphics Award
Kowaku no Toki – TinkerBell
“Hard” Genre Award
Kouhou Miko – AIL
“Fetish” Genre Award
Minna Daisuki Kozukuri Banchou – Anastasia
Programming Award
Kimi ga Aruji de Shitsuji ga Ore de – Minato Soft
Promotion Award
Mutsuboshi Kirari – Dennou Club
DVD PG Award
Zettai Imouto Shijou Shugi – Nounai Kanojo
Bullet Butlers – Propeller
Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka – Feng
Media Award
What are the Bishoujo Game Awards?
The Bishoujo Game Awards are, as the name suggests, awards given annually to bishoujo game titles that excel in various meritorious categories. The first round of awards was given out in 2006, with the recently announced results of the 2007 polling marking the second year of this very new “tradition” in the eroge world.
Like any other system of judging merit, questions immediately arise as to scope, methodology, and authority by which the awards are worth more than the opinion of some random guy on the internet. The Bishoujo Game Awards are organized as follows:
1. The awards are sponsored by and have the backing of the EOCS (Ethics Organization of Computer Software, or Sofurin), the primary industry ratings organization that provides internal checks on game content and puts the bright, shiny “18+” stickers on game boxes that marks them as eligible for sale; the eroge equivalent of the ESRB.
This is all well and good, except there’s another ratings organization for eroge that does the exact same thing – the CSA. While smaller than the EOCS, the CSA still represents some heavyweight names in the bishoujo game world (such as Nitro+, Caramel Box, Tech Arts, and Lilith), and their exclusion mars the comprehensive claims of the awards.
2. The awards are chosen based on a combination of the popular vote and nomination by a panel of expert judges. The way it works is when you buy a new EOCS-sanctioned game, inside the game package in addition to the manual, game disc and any extras there will be a small sheet of paper with an unique voting code printed on it. You go to a special site set up for the purpose, input the code, and are allowed to cast a single vote per category for any game released in the current year to date. The number of votes an individual can cast is therefore equal to the number of new games he or she buys in the year, though votes can be held for later in the year and don’t have to be used on the game they were purchased with.
At the end of the year the three games with the most votes are automatically nominated as finalists, and a fourth game is chosen by the judges from those that placed #4-10 to provide an additional nominee. The panel of judges then selects one from among these four to receive each award, with the exception of the User’s Choice Award, which is automatically given to the game that receives the most votes overall.
3. The panel of judges for the awards is primarily composed of industry representatives and eroge magazine editors. The current judging committee consists of: the Editor in Chief of trade magazine PC Press, the Editor in Chief of PC Angel neo, the company director of Game Style, the Editor in Chief of Pasocon Paradise, the Editor in Chief of BugBug, and a joint representative of the Comic Market planning committee.
Notable for its absence from the judging panel is any representation from the eroge magazine with the largest market share in Japan, Tech Gian. My guess is that they declined an invitation to participate, as these awards are a conflict of interest that would diminish the magazine’s own internal polling and yearly awards program.
4. The award categories do not reflect the variety of games that deserve recognition with complete accuracy. This is something the committee is addressing in 2008 with tweaking of the categories to give “fan discs” and “low price” games their own categories, as well as establishing a much-needed prize for character design, and a separate category for games employing 3D graphics. An improvement over 2007, but I’m guessing we can expect to see some more minor tweaks as the awards mature in future years.
We’ll be keeping an eye out for further news on what looks, despite its faults, like the most reputable equivalent of Academy Awards to emerge for the eroge world. Coverage of the first two awards presentation ceremonies can be found below, courtesy of Galge.com:
Reputable, sure. But useful? It would be nice to get a view from one of the veteran eroge players out there (like, say, an expat running a fandom blog) on just how valid this year’s awards were.
>>lostdog
I kind of ran out of steam on this post after working through the description of the system, orz. I’m still planning a “year in eroge” post where I’ll try to put my own spin on games from ’07, but as far as the results of this poll I find a few things a bit puzzling. Setting aside the fact that CSA games are left out of the reckoning, all of the games that won are worthy contenders, but I have to ask – where’s Sengoku Rance? Of the games that won I’ve only played Bullet Butlers and skimmed through Kowaku no Toki, but I can’t be the only one who thought Rance would be the obvious favorite for the Grand Prize, User’s Choice, BGM, New Genre, and Programming awards, and would be a strong contender for Scenario and Best Character (Uesugi Kenshin – come on, people!).
Personally I’d treat these awards with roughly the same deference I’d treat the Oscars – namely, as an interesting bit of trivia and an indication that if you played any of these you wouldn’t be bored out of your skull, but a look at other metrics (EGS scores, Tech Gian polls) indicates that they don’t tell anything close to the whole story.
The fact that Selen’s Shin Ringetsu is not on there is a croc of you know what . . .
Didn’t Figu@Mate win the “fetish” award, not the “BGM” award?
I’m not too familiar with all the ero games released to comment with authority, but if games from Nitro+ and Lilith aren’t included in the contest, I think it’s not as good, right?
It’s just like the Oscars Awards excluding films from Sony and Dreamworks for judging. 8/
>>loplop
The way the year is divided for the purpose of the awards Shin Ringetsu would count as a 2008 game, but it doesn’t appear to a selectable option among the list of games currently in the running… odd. The list does seem woefully incomplete.
>>Terry Bogard
One would think so, but it seems MOSAIC.WAV won the day with their denpa anthem of a theme song.
>>blacklotus
The exclusion of Lilith wasn’t so big a deal, seeing as until this year there wasn’t an award category their games could’ve competed in (they produce exclusively “low price” games), but now that there is such a category they would be a serious contender if they were allowed to compete. Nitro+, of course, is one of the heavy hitters in the industry these days, and the lack of representation from them is a pretty major omission.
orz
Okay… I clearly see no Gun-Katana on this list, so I assume that means Cyc is in league with CSA. I’m too upset to really check on that, because if they are with EOCS… Narg will go trippy (although I do love TinkerBell)… However I really don’t care for these award things – or even sites such as ErogameScape – for three main reasons off the top of my head.
#1: What the eroge Japanese “polls” call quality eroge, and what I personally view as quality eroge don’t mix. Seriously. I have seen titles that outright suck in my opinion, score pretty high on ErogameScape… Then there are titles that I think absolutely kick ass, which score low on ErogameScape. However this applies to a lot of things: not just eroge. Many of us are aware of anime series that bombed in Japan, become major hits in the West (the Big O for example). We don’t always think alike.
#2: The more I studied how the eroge market works, the more I realized how “fanboy politics” are involved everywhere… which certainly does not get carried overseas. It’s a pretty heated topic that is not appropriate for this place… but just checkout Dies Irae for example. Then you have “loyalists” groups who support certain circles no matter what… which leads into TREMENDOUS bias here and there. The Ijitte Princess series keeps selling tons of titles, despite it being utterly unimaginative garbage (except for maybe Final Road. Now that can’t be right.
#3: Sometimes these experts have their heads stuck too far up the butt. Take action movies as a pointer: how many times have “professional movie critics” given a badass “guns and tits” movie 2 stars or less, when the “common man” rates it as a 5 star extravaganza? I don’t know what planet those idiots are on… but they aren’t watching the movie like me. Same goes for eroge. What they are looking for, might not be what I’m looking for… or what I think my “fellow blue collar eroge Westerner” is looking for.
I can tell ya right now: I certainly don’t agree with how some of those awards were given out. To begin with, I don’t think Harukani Aogi deserved such a LotR type showing. It’s a good game, but not that damn good. Then again if it had twincest… ;)