Господа геймеры, извиняюсь за этот излишне длинное послание на английском языке. Но Вы просто обязаны знать об этой игре. Эта игра кажется собралась ломать множество табу в игровой индустрии, может слово революция громко сказано, но всё же предлагая с этой игрой всем ознакомиться.
Q&A with Zach Meston About the Controversy Surrounding Rule of Rose Summary: GamePro sat down with Zach Meston Assistant Marketing and PR Manager for Atlus U.S.A. to get the lowdown on their latest controversial title Rule of Rose.
GamePro: Rule of Rose isn't a traditional survival horror game, is it? Can you briefly describe Rule of Rose for those who are not familiar to the title?
Zach Meston: Generally speaking, it seems like survival horror games, or action horror as we PR knuckleheads call it since survival horror seems to be a very Capcom term, are divided into two categories. The first category is the action stuff like Resident Evil and Dead Rising where you're blowing Zombies up. The second category is the psychologically based horror games that are slower pace and more disturbing and you can imply things instead of going for the gross out factor.
Rule of Rose is one of the later types where the horror is largely psychological. There are some nasty things you see during the course of the game and really nasty things that happen but it's largely psychological in nature. It's moody and has the same type of effects as Silent Hill with the grainy filter for the graphics. The stuff is dark, the music is moody, and it's definitely a messing with your head type of horror game oppose to the "Oh my god, there are a million zombies attacking me" type game. It's much more psychological. There is combat, but it's actually a much more Silent Hill style of combat as well where your character is not a commando but a regular person who is grabbing stuff from the environment to defend herself with.
The game is basically a really disturbing storyline that is told slightly out of chronological sequence. It's quite messed up, but by the time you finish the game you'll need a shower.
GP: Some of the early buzz about Rule of Rose was the comparisons the game has gotten with Capcom's Haunting Ground. But, it seems that the comparisons are a little inaccurate. Does Rule of Rose have anything in common with Haunting Ground other than the main character having a canine partner?
ZM: The games don't really have that much in common. The way the dog works is different. In Rule of Rose the dog is primarily used to find items. You can basically send the dog to locate a particular scent and locate items. Also the dog will defend you in the combat sequences by barking and try to bite the various Imp creatures that attack you.
I think what happened is that people saw the two games and they both have blonde chicks with dogs and assumed that they were the same, but both games have a very distinctive feel. Haunting Grounds, as I recall, only had a couple of creatures that were trying to find you. A lot of Haunting Grounds gameplay was a hide-and-seek style gameplay where you could crawl under beds and hide in closets while a huge deformed hunchback guy was trying to find you --almost a stealth type of gameplay.
Rule of Rose is nothing like that. It's exploration with combat mixed in with really "F-ed" up CG sequences and cut scenes. They're quite different games. Obviously they belong to the same overall genre but you're not going to play this and be reminded of Haunting Ground --both games have very different looks and feels.
Q&A with Zach Meston About the Controversy Surrounding Rule of Rose (page 2) Summary: 
GP: Is it fair to say there's a lot of underlying sexuality presented in Rule of Rose in regards to the many scenes which are centered on prepubescent British girls? There's a lot of questionable imagery and innuendo in the game.
ZM: The director of Rule of Rose, Shuji Ishikawa, describes Rule of Rose as a friendship that turns into an obsession of sorts. If you've seen the movie Heavenly Creatures you'll see that both the film and Rule of Rose have the same theme. The movie is based on a real event that happened in New Zealand where a friendship becomes an unrequited love story but happens to be between two girls.
The sexuality and the undertones never get overt in Rule of Rose. If you saw the E3 trailer there are things in there that will make you go "Wow." Toward the beginning, there's a girl who's hiking her skirt up and she keeps hiking and hiking, and you're like you need to stop hiking your skirt up.
Nothing is shown. You'll never see girls making out, you'll never see any nudity, but it's those scenes where things are implied. I think it's really cool, not cool because it's lesbian, but because it's pretty rare for a videogame to have an emotional impact just on implication of things. Videogames so rarely work with just subtext and implication. Usually videogames are pretty shallow --what you see is what you get. There's no deeper meaning to it. There's no attempt at another level of emotional impact. I think Rule of Rose does pull it off and that's pretty rare to do that --to be able to impact the player without showing things.
Is it questionable? Yeah. Is it AO rated? No. It's nothing that is going to get people protesting. It's too subtle for that. Subtlety doesn't work on those protest groups. They get upset when they see Night Trap with Dana Plato in her night gown getting some blood sucking device attached to her neck or when they see Carl Johnson going to town with full clothes on. That freaks them out. But, fortunately, Rule of Rose is too smart for those people. It's too subtle so it's not going to freak them out. Yes, I just said the videogame is too smart for them and that is an insult.
All of it has meaning and all of it is intended to either forward the story or disturb the player. None of it is "Hey look girls kissing." It all has a purpose.
Q&A with Zach Meston About the Controversy Surrounding Rule of Rose (page 3) Summary: 
GP: Considering Sony's decisions to not self publish this title in the U.S., what's behind Atlus' decision to bring over Rule of Rose from Japan? Do you guys know something that Sony doesn't?
ZM: I have never personally spoken to anyone over at SCEA about why they decided not to bring this game over here. The producer of the game had basically stated that to the best of his knowledge, SCEA felt that the game didn't match there corporate profile --which is really not weird for them because they pass on a lot of games. Sony America seems to want to focus on things that is or can be triple-A, which is why they decided to go with Siren because they felt that game matches their marketing approach better than Rule of Rose.
We see stuff that Sony passes on all the time. But this particular game, with its themes, got people particularly worked up. People figure right off the bat obviously Sony passed on this game because of the subject matter. Which I don't know if that's the case and I don't believe that's the case.
Regardless, we picked it up, and this is pure corporate truth here, because we needed another PS2 game for this year. So much of our lineup is handheld and we needed a release between Steambot and Metal Saga in the spring and Devil Summoner in October. We had this big gap that was just handheld, so we were on the hunt for a good PS2 game to fill in the gap there and fortunately this came along.
Also, we knew this would demo well at E3, which is kind of ironic --oh well, bye-bye E3. At least it served its purpose for us. So, we were looking for a game that would fill in the gap for us and also impress people more than all our handheld stuff would, and it was a good game. We evaluated it in-house and it got good scores. It was scoring a lot better than a lot of the stuff we were looking at and believe you me we look at a lot of stuff that we quickly realize we should not do. That's just how localization works.
It's so rare these days for a really good Japanese game not to come over here. It just does not happen now. It used to happen in the 8-bit and 16-bit days, but with the internet and everybody so savvy about what is out elsewhere it doesn't happen anymore.
If we hadn't picked this up, someone else would have. Usually that is the case with everything we localize. It's extremely rare that we're the only company bidding on something. The fact that we were willing to outbid other companies for this game tells you we thought it was a good game worth doing.
Also, it was a chance for us to dip into a new genre. We've been around fifteen years and we never delved into this genre before. We'll always service the RPG niche but we have to look outside that niche as well to grow.
Do we know something Sony doesn't? I don't know. I don't think so. I like to say we're now a very pro-lesbian company now. We're cool with the lesbian action.
GP: Are you going to put that on your business cards now?
ZM: Hey you know it's great, woman like lesbians and guys like lesbians. Just bring everyone in. Seriously, we don't know anything that Sony doesn't.
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