Otome Games Under the Imagine Label

I thought I’d make a post on this, since it came up in the Otakuism forums (Link is Work Safe, website itself probably isn’t).

First, I’ll just say that I’m not a big fan of Imagine’s advertising. For example, the box cover art for Imagine: Figure Skater…

Compare this…

Japanese Cover

…to THIS:

Ubisoft's Cover

I don’t really have anything against Ubisoft’s cover, but why didn’t they keep the Japanese cover? Then it could have appealed to shoujo fans maybe, or expanded their audience beyond adolescent girls.

It’s because of the infamy associated with the IMAGINE series that gems like this get passed over. Heck, other otome game fans don’t even realize that there are games like this because of how the games are marketed.

Even though they aren’t the most complex games in the world, I still got Imagine: Figure Skater and Imagine: Ballet Dancer series just to support more otome games coming over (And hey, it works. There’s Imagine: Ice Champion, isn’t there?).

The reason I found out about the figure skater game is because someone told me that it was the by the same creators of Princess Debut. And I thought Princess Debut was okay.

So, I turned back and looked at a game that I had formerly skipped over because it was an Imagine title. And I found out it wasn’t that bad. It felt like I was playing a different kind of Princess Debut (Complete with lots of the annoying “Whee!” and “La la la!” while you are performing).

I wouldn’t say that the figure skating and ballet dancer games really qualify as a “traditional” otome game as much as say…Ouran Host DS would, but they still do have underlying romantic relationships, and it’s dynamic in that you can choose the character you would like to play as.

Ubisoft must have kept the target audience in mind when choosing to localize these games, since I could see how the dialog could appeal to a younger audience. Otherwise, for me, I found that the dialog can be superficial, and the story is basic, at best.

I think what’s sad is, I probably normally wouldn’t buy these games if there were a wider variety of otome games localized. The Imagine games don’t exactly fit the even smaller niche of otome games I would prefer to play, and if Hakuoki was translated, I’d probably buy that instead…