Era Game Series: Introduction

This is a bit of a different topic than I usually cover here, these games being freeware and not products on DLsite, but I think it’s worth covering nonetheless. I’d like to talk about "era" games today, and the odd and huge variety available.

The origin of era games (according to the wiki) was a erodoujin text game created by doujin circle Baku featuring the cast of the girls of Kannon, but they also released the tool to create them eramaker. This allowed different people to make their own doujin games featuring different franchises, and since this has been going on since 2005, the release of eramaker, there have been many, many different franchises have been implemented as era games, with many add on systems to new gameplay elements possible.

In a certain way, era games are the rogue-like of eroge, not in the idea that they are a procedurally generated game enviornment(because they aren’t), but in that they are a widely expanded upon and transformable genre that can become many different types of games from life sims to empire building.

The obvious first thing is these games are text-based. There may be some images displayed, but they’re mostly static portraits and not anything like an H-CG.

The game is split into two modes, TRAIN and BASE:

- BASE is where you save, load, and do miscellaneous upkeep and option tasks.

- TRAIN is where the normal gameplay occurs, in a straightforward eragame you would be performing sexual actions on a character, but most popular era games(at least from what I’ve been able to play) have added gameplay systems.

The last major element is that performing actions with a character leaves them with a record of that action, which acclimates the character toward or against their actions. If you want a more thorough description than my brief summary, I recommend reading the wiki page.

The era games available in english are (to my knowledge) generally available on the erawiki and the era git. The one problem with playing these games is the translations are partial, and quite often the japanese used is fairly more advanced than the limited Japanese knowledge that I’ve acquired over a combination of one and a half years of college Japanese with many, many years of anime and manga consumption, so reader be forwarned.

The fundamental way in which an era game presents sex is by offering a menu of options, various forms of caressing, non-penetrative actions like hand-jobs/fingering and oral sex, sexual penetrations both vaginal and anal, and various other things I don’t touch because S/M content and sexual humiliation don’t appeal to me, sorry (but there is some of that content if you want it).

It sound simple, but the trick is you need to build up a character’s acclimation, which is described as SOURCE, which at the end of an action is summed into PALAM, which at the end of training creates GEMS, that are also called JUEL, but just read the wiki if you want a more coherent description; just think of it as acclimating the character and you’ll have a good idea of how to manage the system.

Naturally, there are levels of comfort a character will have with various actions, so massaging the breasts will be far easier to convince a girl of than anal sex, and if the player is simply forcing themselves on a character her stress and fear increase by the more dramatic the actions forced upon her.

There are many different era games, check out the games page and git page that I previously linked for many that you can play in english, but the two that I have the most experience with are eratohoTW and eraAL-K. I’ll talk about those in the next few days.

As a brief summary, eratohoTW can be described as a Touhou Project parody life-sim with timestop abilities and eraAL-K can be described as an Azur Lane parody strategy game in a very simplified version of Koei’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms strategy game series(mostly implementing the map style of the older games).

Useful links

Era games wiki

Circle Baku