Enzai - Falsely Accused

Encyclopedia : E : EN : ENZ : Enzai - Falsely Accused

Enzai (in kanji: 冤罪 - "False charge") is a Yaoi game made by the Japanese software house [Langmaor].

Contents

1 Plot
2 Legacy
3 Trivia
4 External links

Plot

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story is set around the middle of 19th century. The protagonist is Guys, a young boy that is 18 years old, being a bit of a street rascal like nearly all the young boys from poor families. One day, Guys gets caught for a mere candy theft. While he waits for the official to scold him and send him home, things suddenly get an unexpected twist. Guys finds himself accused not of stealing candies, but of murder - the murder of a man he didn't even know at all. In a very Kafkian scene, everyone seems convinced that he actually commit that murder, and no one really bothers to find further proofs or even to make the boy understand what is going on. So, as if in an absurd nightmare, Guys is locked up in the worst prison one could imagine; his normal everyday life destroyed without logical explanation. From that point on, 95% of Enzai's place setting is inside the dark, claustrophobic, dirty prison. In there, Guys experiences humiliation and tortures of various kinds; sometimes actually reaching peaks of bad taste quite unusual to be seen in a Japanese game for girls. The inmates of the prison are a bunch of quite unreassuring people, most of the characters Guys will meet there are mentally twisted in one way or another, and those who aren't psychos aren't fully trustworthy in any case. However, the people living around the prison who aren't jailed aren't any better. From sadistic, cruelly insane jailers to drunken and apathic lawyers, it seems that just all of Enzai's characters are either unreliable or plain dangerous, making it quite difficult for Guys to decide whom he might trust or find help from (if ever). The player, leading Guys's actions, must find a way to discover what has really happened, and must also try to keep the hero's body and mind as less damaged as possible.

Legacy

Enzai has become overly popular also outside Japan, mostly due to its unusually dark and twisted atmosphere and to such surprisingly bad-taste scenes as have been already mentioned. No BL game had gone to such bounds, so Enzai was the first girls-oriented videogame that showed not cute love scenes or charmingly perfect characters but blood, rape, insanity, and abuse - not in the romantic "shoujo way" but as rude as such scenes actually are. Also to be noted as a quality in that game are the psychological details of the characters and of the situations. In the first half of the game, the player is led to have the feeling of despair and hopelessness; the feeling of not knowing what is going on even if everyone else seems to, but knowing only that the events cannot be helped. The authors manage to convey such feeling by the constant repetition of similar scenes and phrases, nearly to the point of getting redundant. Another thing to be mentioned is the accuracy in portraying the different kinds of mental illnesses that the various characters suffer from. The various disorders afflicting Enzai's cast are efficiently represented in their real symptoms (mostly paraphilia such as pedophilia, S/M, bondage, voyeurism, urolagnia, but also non-sexual psychologial diseases, such as schizophrenia, madness derived from long periods of cell isolation, and apathy). Enzai is full of German imageries. The title itself is written in German ("eine falsche Beschuldigung"), and so are all the titles of the background musics, even if theorically they should have been in French.

Trivia

As of January 2006, the game has been translated into English, as Enzai - Falsely Accused, distributed by JAST USA. Unlike its Japanese counterpart, the English-translated game is presented with no mosaic censorship. Some players have noted that the translations are awkward and laden with typos.
The American version does have the mosaic censors removed; however, any scenes of urolagnia have said urine removed.
Due to the American censorship laws, the ages of all characters has been raised to over 18 years old - despite some of the characters clearly being below that age of maturity. Guys for example is 14 in the Japanese version.

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.