Have you ever been playing a hardcore strategy RPG and thought to yourself, “This is fun, but it’d be even better if it came with a sex toy I could use to pleasure myself?” Well, if you answered yes to that question, then I have two things to say to you: 1. you’re a freak and should be placed on an FBI watch list and 2. you should preorder Record of Agarest War 2’s special limited edition package.
According to Siliconera, buying the limited edition gets you the game, a blow-up doll, a towel (to, y’know, clean up your shame afterwards,) and an art book.
The original Record of Agarest War came with a mouse pad shaped like a girl with boobs, to rest your tired wrists (*ahem*) on, so the blow-up doll seems like a natural escalation from that… uh, bonus. If they keep this up, I predict the next game in the series will just come with a fleshlight and a written guarantee that anyone who buys it will die alone.
So, what do you guys think? Is the blow-up doll a funny tongue-in-cheek joke from publisher Aksys, or yet another example of the sad, pandering, lonely lows some developers will stoop to in order to get a particularly sad, lonely audience to buy their game?
Of course, I guess you’d have to put up a gimmick like this in order to get people to pay attention to this game — the original Record of Agarest War didn’t get particularly good reviews both in Japan and here in the States, and the developer Idea Factory kind of has a reputation for churning out shovelware: Japanese gamers have even nicknamed the company “Idea Fuck” (“Factory” and “Fuck” look sort of similar when written in Japanese katakana,) for their unenviable ability to turn any good idea into an intensely crappy game.