New details on Doki Doki Majo Saiban

With new screens comes new information on Doki Doki Majo Saiban, the somewhat infamous witch-hunting game from SNK. All we can say is that either we're reading a lot more into this due to our inferior translation abilities, or we're missing something completely. We are, however, happy to announce that there are lots of non-touching screens! We've put them after the jump, along with a few gameplay details.

So, it looks like this game may have a Pedobear alert after all, but we'd again like to stress that it's highly doubtful that we'll see a non-Japanese release on Doki Doki Majo Saiban, which may be a shame, because overall, the gameplay sounds intriguing. Maybe it's just our love for adventure games -- and this is an adventure game, just without the phallusFunghi. You, as the sullen main character, hunt around for clues on witchery, with help from your little friend, an angel who doesn't always seem to be quite happy with your behavior and performance. We're guessing that the main character may not be the best of fellows.

Here's where it gets interesting (or not, depending on who you are): once a suspect is identified, your mission is to make the "crest of the witch" appear. Apparently this is accomplished by staring at the witch in a creepy way that isn't too creepy, but only just creepy enough. Then you have to touch her in order to make her witchy form appear. And you can't touch her too quickly, or she won't like you. Which, really, only makes sense. But it's a little disturbing due to the age of some of the characters. One of the suspects, as listed in Famitsu's profiles, is only fourteen years old, and that certainly raises a few brows around here. But again we stress the idea that the Japanese audience is different from the American audience, and it looks like, at least, developers who are working to create for the Japanese audience realize that not all games are for children. This is something that a lot of other developers (and ad-makers) are a little late to the party on, but SNK is just powering across the line with a lot of their recent titles.

We can't really defend Doki Doki Majo Saiban any more than we would try to defend the idea that it's okay for young models to frolic half-clothed in Japan (the law says as long as they're not "indecent," it's allowable), and we're not going to try. But we do think it's an interesting measure of how very different things are in these two countries -- and that makes it even more fascinating because there are so many games that win over both audiences. At best, we can only shake our heads and mutter something about those wacky Japanese, and eyeball the screenshots with a sort of bemused tolerance.

In the end, we're glad there's an actual story, even if it only does seem to exist to encourage the stroking of young girls.