A Female-Inclusive STARTER JRPG for Otome Gamers! (How Persona 3 Portable breaks down barriers) 

On a really cool note, ever since 5th grade, the trombone section I was a part of was equally split between girls and guys. All the way up to high school, my freshman year in marching band we had 23 trombones total, and 10 of us were girls. And our two section leaders were female :) I was section leader my senior year, and of the 14 trombones, over half were girls. It was really cool in general how our brass sections seemed to break that stereotype of it being mostly guys (well aside from the trumpet section lmao). Going back to senior year, of my three best girl friends, two were sousaphone and french horn section leaders respectively, and one was a drum major. The inclusivity of orchestra and band programs at my school has always stuck with me, and I'm so grateful for the experience knowing how most schools don't have resources to invest in the arts 😞 Someday I'll make a "Collar x Malice, the Otome P5!" I also hope to convince the dudes interested in Japanese history and culture from my Persona videos to play Hakuouki. THESE OTOME GAMES LEGIT HAVE AMAZING NARRATIVE AND CHARACTER WRITING OKAY!! 🥲 Overall I'm really glad genres that appeal to more feminine interests are gaining traction. The more different kinds of games, the better! I really think guys can learn a lot about this perspective (importance of strong character writing, as well as the female gaze) by playing these "gateway" otomes. Especially considering so many women are used to dating mechanics as a male MC. 🎮TWITCH: www.twitch.tv/ladyvirgilia 🐤TWITTER: @VirgiliaLady twitter.com/VirgiliaLady 🌟PATREON: www.patreon.com/LadyVirgilia **ART OF TEA: Save 10% when buying the finest, organic, fair-trade teas while also supporting the channel, using my affiliate link: www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=928273&m=23080&u=3400278 At checkout, use COUPON CODE: AOTAFFILIATE10

I'd honestly say that Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the best example of otome games on the Switch other than P3P. Character relationships actually have an impact on the gameplay. During the turn-based battles, you'll want to fight alongside your love interest to boost your relationship.

P3P deserved the remaster because FeMC just has better social links overall. every social link she shares with MC is the best p3 has to offer, and anything they don't share is a direct improvement over what MC offers. i think the only exception is MC Hermit Arcana

So. I am a guy who recently found your channel. I hold a Ph.D. in Communication, specifically Computer Mediated Communication, and my Dissertation involved how the characters people use in games effect their behaviors and psychology during and after playing games. I'm incredibly aware of the state of women and gaming. My work in grad school involved work on video games, and amusingly, a lot of the people I worked with were women with interests in gaming, and used video games for their research. Some however wanted to use games for their research purposes but didn't identify as gamers (and some only played games to find ones that would work for their research purposes.) Some of the women I worked with were incredibly talented programmers and understood things I would never even hope to match. And I say that with admiration and not jealousy. Communication tends to be a female dominated field, but of the women I worked with there was a lot of diversity in if they played games or not. This might sound like I'm stereotyping, but almost 100% of the Korean women I knew played games, and most of the Chinese ones did. My one Japanese friend didn't play games very much though, and with the Americans, it was around 20%. In my life, I had an older sister who also identifies as a gamer, though right now she doesn't have the time to dedicate to the hobby. But amusingly, one of my earliest memories involves watching my mom play the Original Final Fantasy on NES. So for me, growing up, I never ever saw video games as gendered. Through elementary school, none of the other kids played video games, and I was the bullied nerdy kid who loved video games. It wasn't until high school that I met other gamers, and they were all male. None of the girls ever played games and at the time, I just wrote it off as they weren't interested because most other people I knew weren't. Though I did realize from TV and such that girls were rarely portrayed as playing games, so around high school, I was aware that for most people, it was something for boys, but I never really understood why. Years later, I believe early in my MA program, I watched a video relating to marketing and games, and it was when toy makers and such got into games, it was decided to focus on advertising gaming to boys because toys for boys had a higher return on investment and it was easier to do. Plus, in the 80s, parents were willing to invest more money into their sons than daughters, especially for something like a computer as it was seen as an investment in the son and his ability to one day be a provider. That did always seem silly to me though as clearly, advertisers should have had an open mind on how to double their audience instead of focusing on one aspect. Had they decided to focus advertising on games as girl toys, the market would have developed very differently. I don't wanna get off topic about how women prefer the fantasy of being an ordinary person in a fantastic world while men prefer the fantasy of being a fantastic (or superhero type) person in an ordinary world. Think Alice in Wonderland (written by Lois Carol for this daughter) vs Superman. I do think it's something related to think on though. Persona kind of blends these 2 things But back around to my main point... Because important women in life were gamers when I was small, I just never saw it as a gendered hobby. My sister and I bonded over our love of games, especially RPGs. That's also part of why when I find out women are gamers, I don't treat them like exotic beings which I've seen other guys do (which also drives women away from the hobby.) I always treat them like a normal person. One of the most interesting experiences I've had was when I made a female character as my main character in FFXIV. Most people typically don't make assumptions, but every now and again, you meet up with someone who thinks only women play female characters, and I've had eye opening experiences being hit on. I've had the experiences women get in these games and I've had moments where I'm like "Oh... This is how being hit on feels... man this is uncomfortable... How do I shut this down without being judged to be a bitch...?" It changes one's perspective. Another thing to briefly talk about before I finish this topic... At the place I got my Ph.D. I worked as a Teaching Assistant, and I lead discussion sections and also worked as an Associate Instructor, meaning I worked without any oversight from a professor and handled the class start to finish including lectures. I worked as a TA for my advisor teaching a course on Video Games and psychology, and about a third of the class was girls. However, the story I wanted to mention was one of my students in one of the first classes I taught was the coach for the school League of Legends team (It's California, so yeah. they had an E-sports Team) and he was always frustrated or upset when I'd talk to him before class. Over the course of the class, I'd hear how there was 1 female player on the team, and if anything went wrong, all the male players would blame her or berate her, and he was struggling with how to deal with it. It always bothered me personally that boys were so defensive of a hobby that honestly is likely only their hobby due to some marketing executives in the 80s deciding to advertise at them, and they can't accept women playing on equal footing. E-sports should be an equalizer, not another method of domination. So... basically, my experiences with women in games has run the whole gamit and it's a complex thing to talk about.

Loved this video! I'm a cis woman who was raised on video games. I started playing Doom in the 90s with my dad, and kinda went from there. I mainly got into Nintendo games and consoles, and for a long time played with friends-- mostly male--and really enjoyed it. I was definitely a casual player though and even in 5th/6th grade I would sometimes get stumped on puzzles in games like super mario sunshine. This was pre widely accessible internet, so it was pretty discouraging. Around 5th/6th grade was also when boys I used to enjoy playing with would start teasing me and saying my gender is why I couldn't complete these games without help. I didn't stop playing games, I just learned to hide it super well. I started buying two consoles/two of each game I wanted to play so I could complete any multi-player elements by myself. I did not play any games online or tell anyone I enjoyed games from 2006 until 2019. Around that time it started feeling a little safer/less judgy. Still, I picked a gender-neutral online handle and didn't reveal I was female online in any gaming space until 2021 with the animal crossing community. I just want to enjoy games without discrimination, so even now I'm still pretty wary of playing anything online.

Cis 33 lady. I actually grew up with my mom playing metroid and zelda and final fantasy. My dad wasn't very interested but he put up with her playing. She's been into gaming since like her first console atari 2600. So my mom was always hyped to play. She played up until n64 and quit but did enjoy watching her kids play games. She was also into trpgs. Loved D&D. All things science fiction. So I was never discouraged to play video games. I did however experience alot of my female friends never play video games and did have other people outside my family that said video games and stuff were only for boys. I can't say I was conflicted though no one could ever make me think gaming is not for me.

Reason nintendo has a 50/50 of male and female players is due to how their game are made for everyone, best way i can describe the difference between companies is their popular ips, microsoft and sonys popular ips character dont look so different from each other also bc their games seem to be focused on male demographic due to their genres but nintendo has more variety making it easier to get into

As someone who grew up mostly female-presenting I was never really discouraged from playing videogames by my family - my parents never wanted to limit my interests by gender. Even so, when I was playing stuff like animal jam as a relatively young kid I always “pretended to be a boy” or remained as anonymous as possible because I was acutely aware of the harassment girls got when they played games. I’m not sure animal jam or early roblox were the worst offenders but I still definitely got that feeling of inferiority even when playing with young children around my own age.

Im so glad I watched this video. I actually had the opposite experience with the pipeline. I got into jrpgs first through my brothers and then slowly through games like Fire Emblem, Persona, and Ace Attorney, I got into Otome games. It’s great to see someone talking about this topic and to help otome fans to broaden their gaming horizons!

23, girl here. My dad owned a PS2 growing up and I somehow I ended up playing sonic games on it. This lead me to becoming heavily invested in sonic characters, watching the show, talking about it, and trying to find other games like it. This lead me to hanging out with the neglected bullied nerd kid and playing a ton of Kirby games together. My mom was never exactly supportive of me as a gamer and any female friends I may have had at the time slowly started drifting away as I got older and got more and more into gaming. In high school, I had only 1 girl friend who played Pokémon with me and in college, I had 1 girl friend who didn’t play any video games with me. As it stands now, I’ve graduated. I’m in a male dominated field with my major and my job has only men working there. I’m heavily invested into visual novels, JRPGs, and mostly fighting games now. It sucks on some level that all my friends are guys due to my interests but I’ve grown accustomed to it. The appeal of being the only girl at a locals for FGC wore off but I do see that over time, more women are joining this interest. It makes me happy and hopeful!

I'm a girl who loves video games, but I have zero patience for banging my head against a difficulty wall or figuring out intricate battle strategies, so I always play on easy where possible, overprep, avoid the Hard Stuff and just... nose around having fun (Or watch let's plays). However, when I try to engage with other gamers I feel out of my depth. I used to play co-op Terraria with a guy who made me feel... i guess crowded out? Like, he was always in control and I just followed him like a lost duckling. I'm always afraid to look into gaming clubs and such, because I feel like I'll get laughed out of the room for liking otome visual novels, rhythm games and playing RPGs on easy mode. I got to be late to the party too: I only got a Steam account in 2019, and while my first console was the family Wii when I was a child, it wasn't followed until much later by the 2DS XL I purchased myself when I went to university. Since, I have obtained a Switch, a PS4 and a Steam Deck, and I do love and use them, but significant limitations on my free time and issues with mental health and focus make it pretty difficult to find the time and brainspace to "get good". In terms of otome recs... my intro to the genre was Amnesia: Memories, which I picked up in a Steam sale after falling in love with the artstyle. It remains one of my favourites, even though I found one of the routes wayyyy more horrifying than romantic. The other two of my top three are: Code:Realize, which doesn't focus heavily on the romance early on but the LIs' shenanigans and the angst are both top-notch for the whole journey. Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, which is on Steam rather than Switch, and doesn't really feel like an otoge as it prioritises telling a powerful emotionally resonant story about loss. Also most of the LIs are pretty sexist in a bro-ish kind of way, which isn't super uncommon but is definitely irritating.

I am a cis-guy but I like when the protagonist is female or would love some day to have a non binary pansexual protagonist in a JRPG so that I can really role play into all the relationships I want haha

this was a great video, and i think it brought up a lot of really great points! i was lucky enough to be raised in a household where my dad played a lot of video games (everquest, WoW, etc.) so i expressed an interest in games really young. my parents actually got me a winnie the pooh game for the PS or PS2 when i was a toddler. as i grew older, it became a way for me to bond with my siblings, and it became the go to activity in my house. a lot of my friends in school did not have as inclusive environments though and had little to no exposure to gaming. i did work at a nation-wide chain of gaming stores for about three years and was the only female employee most of the time. i interacted with a lot of new gamers, with a variety of ages, and i could tell they were more comfortable coming to me for recommendations than my coworkers who were males older than i am. a lot of times, people were overwhelmed by how much of a learning curve there was to games and i was thankfully able to recommend games that were a bit "simpler" to get a handle on. i did find myself recommending a lot of games like animal crossing, farming sims, or visual novels to customers who wanted something simple and mindless to start out with. it's pretty interesting to see the stats you provided, and i would be really interested in conducting an in-depth study to see if many players of the "cozy" game genre started playing those games because of a lack of experience or for another reason

I am a girl who has been gaming since I was 4 years old, and ironically, the person who was most strict about my gender roles and harbored the most hatred towards video games was the one responsible for me getting into it. My mother bought me my Wii for Christmas one year in hopes it would be a good way for my father and me to bond since he grew up with NES and arcade games. She has openly stated buying me that Wii would end up being one of her biggest regrets because it was the gateway to me becoming a gamer. I am not even an intense gamer; I have only ever owned that Wii, a DS lite which was a gift, a Wii U I asked my parents for, and then my switch which out of respect for my mother, I spent a whole year saving up money to buy it myself. I always followed the rule that I could only play video games on weekend with the exception of holidays and having friends if those friends want to play. Yet she always hated me gaming because she viewed it as a boyish activity, and my mother is rather traditionally feminine. She is not traditional in a bad way or anything and I admire her feminine nature a lot, yet at the same time it made me feel inferior and insecure when she would be distressed by my enjoyment of a “male” pastime. As I got older, we came to a better understanding of each other to a degree, mostly thanks to age and experience naturally developing me into a more feminine young woman and video games being responsible for me meeting a lot of good friends my mother absolutely adores. For instance, one of my closest friends is a guy I met on a summer swim league, yet we would have never spoken to each other if I did not bring my Switch to practice one day. We have been friends for maybe 3 or 4 years now and he is obviously my mother’s favorite of all of my friends. While he has managed to paint video games in a more positive light, my mother still overall looks down on it for multiple reasons, some not of any fault of my own. The worst may be that one of my closest non-gamer (a female by the way) friend’s youngest brother developed a troubling addiction to gaming over the pandemic, and has had a lot of behavioral issues stressing his mother greatly. So my mother heard about all of it and of course grew concerned that games would ruin me like him, even though during the pandemic videos games introduced me to some of closest friends through online gaming who kept me from the feelings of isolation and depression so many others had. She also kind of looks down on the online friends I have made through gaming. At first her concern came from being worried they were pedophiles or something, which is understandable because she is a high school teacher and is trained to assume this kind of stuff which unfortunately is a problem with the internet. Yet I would say I have done a very good job with protecting myself online because I have never had any worrisome interactions and a majority of the people I have met have been kind and chill, and of those people I have only let myself get close with a small handful. With time, she has had more faith in me, yet she still looks down on most of them just because they are gamers. Some friends and I actually recently have been doing watch parties of cartoons and shows, and I remember her once commenting “I am so glad you guys are watching stuff instead of playing games. Maybe now they can be real friends.” It took a lot of willpower to not get upset honestly. She is the reason I take being called a gamer as an insult. Last time I played Mario Party with my friends in fact, she called across the hall “You’re a gamer” when I told her there were only 2 rounds left (we had only been on for about an hour) after she said I have to get off. It was embarrassing because I told my friends in call about it as if I just found it funny, yet inside it just hurt. There have been multiple times, especially during high school, when I wanted to throw out all of my games just to appease her. I am glad now I am sure enough in myself to not feel like less of a woman just because I like video games, which was greatly helped by meeting another female gamer of my age online, yet even all these years later I still avoid getting caught dead with a controller in my hands by them. It sucks because it feels like I have to restrict a part of myself to stay on their good side, yet I am just used to it. Sorry this response was really long. Not a lot of RU-vid videos I have seen ever brought up the issue with girls getting into gaming and I had more to say than I thought heh. Great video by the way; watched the whole thing.

Cis girl here, I grew up with three older sisters who occasionally liked playing Nintendo games (mainly, Pokémon, Legend of Zelda, Fire Emblem, and other RPGs), and while they still play games sometimes (less often now due to less free time or loss of interest), I’m the pretty much the only one you’d point to and call a typical “gamer,” and in fact I chose to study game design and development. Our parents used to be very strict while my sisters were growing up, to the point where they had to save up to secretly buy GameBoys on their own without letting them know, but by the time I came around my parents became much more lax about letting us play games. They’d still tell me that playing video games too much was “unladylike,” but I ignored them and kept playing. Nearly all of my friends in elementary and middle school were boys because no girls my age had any interest even in Pokémon.

My sister has always been more of a gamer than me, and we would take turns at the PC. My grandma bought me a console for Christmas though, a reflection of how even as society gets more open minded, generational differences still influence our lives in significant ways that serve to perpetuate patterns in spite of our intent on progress.

my relationship with gaming is odd. My parents discouraged me from playing not because they felt I shouldn't be playing games, I think, but just because as the oldest girl, and the only girl in the family, I just had more responsibilities taking care of my younger brothers and my parents always implied that I should be doing other things with my time. It also doesn't help that my brothers overwhelmingly prefer fighting and western action rpgs - games where the whole point is that you feel rushed and in suspense, which I hate. Thus I have essentially played exclusively jprgs and visual novel-like games, at least until I discovered Fire Emblem. It's not even a matter of difficulty really. SMT and FE are the evidence that I will happily bang my head against a brick wall as long as I have a way to find all the information I need and take as long as I feel like to make my decisions. It's my relationship with the gaming community that's weird. As most girls in online gaming can probably attest, I rarely identify as female* online. It's part identity and part relational that I prefer not to use gendered language in online spaces for my own comfort, and community bias deems me male like 90% of the time. But even then I don't usually feel welcome because in a lot of corners, respect is hinged on a skill bar that I feel is kind of non-sensical. Like if you aren't an arbitrary level of skilled in a game, your opinion is afforded less respect. A lot are also not exactly welcoming when an issue that makes someone uncomfortable with certain things are brought up, especially if it's to do with narrative or presentation instead of gameplay. A lot of the time, I've heard that I'm overreacting, or being, dramatic, or just to go watch a movie if I'm so interested in the story. Which is kind of messed up? And the few times I've identified as a girl to make a point or provide a perspective, suddenly everything becomes about my not being the target audience, and how of course I wouldn't like something, it wasn't written for me. Yeah, I know that, genius. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem with specifically the female character writing in this otherwise good story. Funny enough I've never really felt the disconnect between myself and a male main character (*I'm probably a little genderfluid. There's some atypical whackery going on with that), but it only really jumps out at me when the narrative starts throwing bad romance into my face, especially when I've had a far more meaningful and emotional relationship with like all of the guys, because I actually spend time with them/follow them in the story

I'm 33f from germany. When i was very young, like up til i was maybe 11-12, my brother and i were treated as relative equals, at least by our parents. My dad built pcs with us and we played like.. DOS games like lemmings or commander keen. We were never allowed to have consoles. But then pokemon became a thing and even though my brother and i both liked it, only HE got a GBA. I still wasn't allowed to have any console. My brother also spent lots of time gaming with his friends on pc once we got internet access (legacy of kain and warcraft 3 come to mind), while i a) didn't really have friends at all, and b) when i did hang out with girls, they never wanted to talk about computers or gaming at all. Relatives also encouraged my brother way more than me to take an interest in technical things, and gaming was included as a "boy thing". This was in the 90s and very early 2000s. Then, when i was 15ish, i got an old ps1 from my (ex-)girlfriend, and a copy of final fantasy 8. My first "real game". My mother initially forbid me from bringing the console home at all and would not let me have a tv in my room - even though both my brother and i had our own pcs and interner access in our rooms... oh well. I played all of the final fantasy games (buying a used ps2 in the process), then lost odyssey (for which i bought an xbox 360), then eternal sonata - and sometime around the end of high school (2009ish?) I discovered a used copy of dragon age origins and just went NUTS with it. When i made the jump from jrpgs to western rpgs, i became a "real gamer". I started really identifying with the hobby, listing it as such, excitedly talking about it, etc. By then i had also - through my obsession with anime and manga - met some other girls who also played final fantasy and grandia and shadow hearts. I think we still felt very different from male gamers. Jrpgs were very niche and most guys would play halo, cod, halflife, warcraft, etc. Even today i find that i am very specific about the games i like. Maybe because i never learned good hand-eye coordination, i struggle a lot with shooters or platformers. I also never enjoyed strategy games or generally the brown, desert-y settings of most military adjacent games. I prefer jrpgs with turn based combat and lots of character interaction. Though I'm getting very tired of the standard good boi male protag. I've also veered into real time with pause titles with western fanatsy settings like tides of numenera or pillars of eternity. I've played skyrim for 300+ hours. And my playtime in all the dragon age games combined probably is around 900ish hours. I also enjoy some action titles like horizon zero dawn or ghost of tsushima - IF they have an easy mode. By now I'm an adult with a job, and i want to actually ENJOY my free time. Although... my 10 year playtime in league of legends is, uhm,... a good counter argument, i guess lol Games i absolutely HATE are soulslikes and roguelikes. There is nothing i find enjoyable about banging my head against a wall for hours on end. Again. I already have a job. Buuut that sometimes also makes me feel like "not a real gamer". No matter how many hours i pump into other games, i feel like men always look down on me for not playing skill based games. I think it's unfair though, to expect us to suddenly be good at and enjoy things that we never really learned at an early age like our brothers did. I think the persona games are PERFECT starting points for someone coming from social sims or otome games. Just like the aterlier games (which i ADORE and cannot recommend enough) or stardew valley. I think that in the past 10 years gaming as a hobby has achieved much more social acceptance among both/all genders, especially since the pandemic. So it's easier than ever, even as a newbie, to find games that suit your experience level and preferences, and i think that's amazing. Sometimes i cry about it because it makes me so happy to see how far we've come :D P.s.: my brother does not really game anymore, i am now a much bigger nerd and he thinks gaming is mainly a waste of time. Games and hobbies in general have no gender!

yeah. i've noticed a bit of an increase in my female audience too. it's not nearly as high as yours, but it's noticeable.

Code Realize is one of my all time favorite otome games

So I'm a trans guy that had brothers. So growing up treated as a girl I noticed that more often my brother would be the one given the console and the single player games, while I might be given the multiplayer games or laid back games like animal crossing or harvest moon if I expressed an interest. And if I was given my own console it'd be a pink gameboy or something. Then of course as I grew up I was able to buy my own. I bought the switch for myself and it kind of felt good for me being able to tell my brother 'ah no you can't barrow my switch right now, I'm about to play breath of the wild, as opposed to me being the one barrowing his consoles when he wasn't using them. Anyway nowadays, I have a few different consoles in my house and most of them belong to me, rather than my partner.

Trans woman here. Was raised male, so I was raised with the mainstream big hits; like FPS's and the sort, while getting flak from my peers whenever I asked for more female representation in gaming. When I did more playing games that sounded interesting to me, not what sounded interesting to my friends, I branched deeper into RPG games. It's thanks to my gf that I've very recently even learned about Otome games at all, and it's been a wonderful learning experience thus far.

Cis girl here. The main reason I grew up playing video games was that I had older brothers who played games. A lot of the games they played didn't resonate with me (Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Halo), but I still had fun. I vividly remember purchasing Persona 3: FES when it came out and booting it up for the first time I was like "This! This is what I want from games!"

I'm someone who has been playing video games pretty much all my life, but it wasn't always easy as a female. I started out with a gameboy colour because thankfully my dad gifted me one together with Pokemon yellow when he saw how much i Liked that game when I played my stepbrothers version. From then on I continued to play things like The Legend of Zelda, Harvest Moon, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, Persona and the like. I distinctly remember that everytime one of my favourite games that had a male avatar got announced to get a female avatar (Pokemon Crystal, Harvest Moon More Friends of Mineral Town and especially Persona 3 Portable) I would get so excited I would run up and down my apartment out of sheer happiness of being aknowledged and seen as a Person who can play video games as well. Which is why it was also a big disappointment when games like the Persona series didnt continue that trend further down the line. I remember that I would buy games specifically if they had a female character included because I just wanted to feel like myself. That isn't to say that I didnt play games with male leads, since obviously thats where I started. I was just hoping that both women and men were given a fair chance to enjoy themselves via games but I did notice a trend to design certain female character to cater to the male audience which often alienated me from them. I still wholeheartedly embrace games who can balance things like this out thought and I started avoiding games that obviously didnt see me as a worthwhile thought when creating the game. And I was also lucky enough to have mutliple female friends who liked games just like me when growing up so i didnt feel as isolated. As for the types of games I play I do avoid Fps and Moba not only for the unneccessary toxicity but a also because gameplay wise those games just don't appeal to me. If they are set in an ugly hopeless enviroment, or the only goal is to kill as many things as possibly i just loose interest since I'm a very story oriented person. The only exception being stuff like Dynasty Warriors which for some reason can hold my attention maybe due to the more asian art style. Other game series I love to play are things like Fire Emblem, Dragon Age, Tales of Games, Final Fantasy and so on. I also played a few otome games as well. And currently I'm very heavily invested in FF14 an MMO with an amazing story, a lot of stuff to do ingame and a very nice community.

This may be a bit of an oversight-since this is clearly directed toward otome gamers-but as someone who had never heard of the term before, I spent the first half of the video wondering if it meant social sim games or mobile games. Eventually I figured out it surely means female, tho. As for me, I had two friends who were sisters and were effectually like my extended family. One a year older than me, the other a year younger than me. From something like 3rd or 4th grade until middle school I would ride the bus with them to their house almost every day until my dad got off work to come pick me up. We played so much super nintendo and genesis together (eventually ps1 as well), and I never thought anything of it. 😄

I am a girl and I was raised with a dad and a brother who love video games and never discouraged me from playing them. My dad had an xbox 360 and he and i would play games like Halo or lego star wars together. I never got super into them back then cuz there weren't any games I was interested in then but i did have a nintendo ds I would play my little animal games on. I got into pokemon then got a 2ds to play some of the newer pokemon games at the time and then i got my first laptop and it's all history now. I love otome and visual novels so i never really was into the games the boys in my family did but they are the ones who got me into games so i am glad for that. most of my friends i made weren't into games, i was also into online games like animal jam and club penguin, to name a few of many. so i never really had anyone with the same interest in the games i played but i had fun by myself haha.

Growing up, my family was a pretty gamer friendly household. All my uncles were into gaming, and they would always put them on when we'd visit and I'd sit down and watch them play. My first ever console was a PS One, and I only had one game for it, Pac Man World. I was never able to beat the game since it's extremely hard, and as a kid I was incredibly terrified of certain levels (Anubis Rex I'm looking at you.) But also we didn't have a memory card for the system, so I had no way of saving progress when I was done playing for the day. So that game got a TON of playability out of me, lol. After my PSOne ended up breaking, the next console after that was the Vsmile, which is like a children's game console with liscensed games for learning alphabet, colours, numbers, etc. I have very fond memories with that thing (and I kinda want to try and get it again if I can find one) After that is when me being a girl kicked in, I got a DS Lite for Christmas (Pearl Pink and had my name engraved on it, loved it so much) But the only games I ever had for it were Liscensed Disney games, pet/animal simulators, fashion games, and Bejeweled twist, for some reason. I remember when I got my 1st 3ds for Christmas, I ended up getting that red one that had Super mario 3d World pre installed, and a 3ds game to go with it. I was so excited to see what the game was, but when I unwrapped it, it was Horses 3D. I ended up playing Mario 3D World for most of the day. I was even asked "Are you going to play your new game?" (Talking about Horses 3D) and I was like "Maybe later! :)" (I did end up playing it, it's... fine, for what it is. Could be really tricky at parts though, why are "girl games" really hard sometimes for no reason? The most amount of consoles I've had brand wise, is the DS Family. (DS lite, Dsi, Dsi XL, Original Silver DS, 3ds, 3ds XL, and New 3ds XL I've all had at some point in my childhood.)

Im 31 year old woman. I got into games young. As someone with a visual impairment. Games where a "area I could excell" I have what is essentialy brain damage in primarily the visual centre of my brain. But with a limited area to focus on, I can perform pretty well. Secondly, because of an abusive home situation, I became isolated from other social experiences. So, it was mostly me and some kind of computer, because I wasent really encouraged to do stuff. So. As Ive aged. Ive fallen in and out of the Gamer culture. I used to have to rely on it, but bc of harrasment wasent open with my gender. Ive tried everything from shooters to platformers, except the sports games. And now I enjoy indie games with a good story that you just can "exist in", since I have so many hobbies that I'm doing and socialising with since I moved out in my early twenties.

So I started honestly with basic RPGs Gauntlet for teh Nintendo 64, pokemon and the like. As I started growing up though I was always drawn to playing female characters. My dad originally didn't like it because I was the eldest child. After an incident where I opened his copy of 10-2 to play it and he yelled at me asking why I wanted to. I responded "Because I wanted to play a final fantasy with a female lead" he paused and dropped it. Started to focus on masculine activities with my brother. But showing his support in other ways. Getting me Dragon Quest 4 and Star Ocean 2 for my DS and psp... recently I came out as Trans finally realizing why I loved playing female characters. He is still trying to process it but he is being supportive in his own way. So I love games with strong female protagonists who are not afraid to show their feminimity.

P3P is so important because of the FeMC route. My parents always encouraged my gaming hobby from childhood, so I had been playing JRPGs before it like FFX, Eternal Sonata, Kirby, and Fire Emblem GBA etc....but having the option to play as a female self insert, having ME be the hero, and getting to even indulge in romance was groundbreaking to me as a little girl and resulted in P3 being one of my favorite games of all time. Its also the game that got my little sister into gaming (and even my mom played the beginning lol.) Its why I advocate for a female protag option as often as I can for any silent protagonists. It's so much more immersive and usually turns a potential purchase into a guaranteed purchase for me.

Growing up I had two sisters one sister who was two years older and one sister who is about three years younger. We all enjoy the stuff like Pokémon, Mario, Grandtheft auto; my aunt was cool and my mom was super lax as long as didn’t get in trouble by repeating the language and stuff like that etc. it was always a lot of fun to just play games with the family, watch others play while we’re wrapping up homework or trying to complete a super frustrating mission. As we got older though my older sister fell off of gaming for a lot of reasons, mainly school but she also has her other interest and never really gave gaming another chance unless it’s watching us play. Pokémon and Zelda was something that my little sister and I always look forward to, whether it be our 7th million play third of the legend of Zelda twilight princess or just messing around with Pokémon it was a great time. Then my younger sister more or less started falling off of gaming, she was more interested in stuff like K-pop or other well-known bands like Fall Out Boy. It got to the point where she only played the games when they first released for maybe a week or two max and then her 3DS/switch is just gathering dust. I felt hopeful when animal crossing New Horizons came out all of us were playing and after a while they stopped playing and they haven’t picked it up since. It’s to the point now where I am the most likely to keep playing the most recent release game. I know they have their own lives and everything but it’s always just so disheartening to ask you hey do you wanna play with me and for either them to say no outright or say maybe later and never bother coming back to me to say that they can’t play. To add more to this frustrating cake, I am also very visually impaired, not completely blind but I need major assistance when it comes to navigating game worlds menus and stuff like that when it comes to games like animal crossing and Pokémon; I got to give a huge shout out to my mom because ever since Pokémon Sun and Moon we’ve plan playing the games together when they come out and It got to the point where my mom actually really got into the newest games, Pokémon scarlet and violet and she even got a switch to play the games herself. I think it’s just a case of the main stream hype quickly sizzling out and not really getting into the more deeper part of the games like learning how to optimize and other stuff like that; I’m always grateful though for my female friends or those who identify as female having similar if not more passion than I do for these games. Sorry for the wall of text and maybe weird formatting issues, trying to type/dictate this out with my screen reader but that’s my story.

This topic is always fascinating to me, because I somehow grew up in a girl-gaming bubble that only burst when I went to college. I became obsessed with videogames the day I watched my neighbor play Doom on PC. We were both 5 btw, the joys of the last unsupervised latchkey generation :'D. But it truly blew my mind that there were "movies you can control"! What's more, I mainly socialized with women (in my all-girls school and outside of it) so all the gamers I was meeting were other girls as well. While I played a bit of everything with my friends like your Mario karts and street fighters, I had two favorite genres: single player JRPGs and survival horror. Very closed-off experiences. Never played online to see first-hand the sewage that women will get from other players on FPS' or LOL. What's more, the survival horror I gravitated towards was mostly female-oriented. So when I'd go to message boards to talk about Fatal Frame, Rule of Rose or even Clock Tower with the fandom, it was mostly women as well. Don't get me wrong, I lived in this world of ours, and I did get the message that boys were the target audience of gaming (hi sexy costumes :I ) but it didn't even occur to me that my gender was subtly barred from the hobby until I finally went to college and started getting lip from dudes over my interests. I love that there are slowly more and more strides and women are actually writing/producing/creating games. You can really tell the difference. And thank you for this video! I'm actually in the opposite spectrum of this video, I want to play more otome games because of how much I love the social link/dating aspect of P3P. I've definitely jotted down some titles now!

I was lucky to play Pokémon soul silver and sun on my ds and 3ds. The systems were shared by my brother and sister. I learned how to navigate a 3D platform environment when playing littlebigplanet and infamous on ps3. I can imagine how difficult it would be to play a persona game without understanding 3D navigation and dungeon fighting. I'm honestly still on my first playthrough of vanilla Persona 5 on my ps3 so I am feeling the struggle LOL. (im on the last palace with over 150hrs ahahaha)

i really felt the part about girls' brothers getting gaming consoles as gifts and not them :,) my dad bought my older brother a 3ds, a gaming pc, and a wii but even when i begged him he never bought me a ds. and my older brother definitely didn't want to share, heck even if i wanted to play with beyblades (he actually forced me to play against him one time so he could take the only beyblade i had after i lost) or basketball he always told me he didn't want me around. tbh as the only girl in my house i always felt excluded and treated differently from the rest of my siblings. rn since i have a computer of my own (although its definitely not meant for gaming) i have ways to play games and now they're my #1 coping mechanism lol.

Male here, when I was younger (Around 5 or so) my older sister was the one to play console games while I played handhelds, overall I was inept in playing most things and didn't understand core mechanics in games in relation to the controls, I remember at one point that I worked out a move in Banjo Kazooie required the a button to be pressed down for the move to activate, which took a few years of playing to fully understand. Anyway my sister ended up stepping away from video games pretty early on (Coming back in her late teens to mild interest in the ds and wii era) and I continued to randomly press buttons until the game said I finished until this day.

I'm 27 year old female gamer. I was never discouraged from playing video games. My parents had an N64 when I was 2-3, and my mom actually played it the most! So I have a lot of nostalgia for the music of the N64 games, but I found them too difficult to understand, and I took it very personally when I died 😅 so I was more interested in just watching. We had a gamecube when it first came out, and I was especially interested in watching those games. When I was 7, my dad got an Xbox that came with Jet Set Radio Future. That was the game that actually got me into PLAYING video games. Never really made any progress, just goofed around in the areas I had access to. Eventually, that led me into playing our gamecube, again goofing off in super mario sunshine not really accomplishing anything. We picked up Animal crossing and it was especially appealing to me because you couldn't die. So that was the first game I made progress in! I kept building from that, just getting more used to gaming in general. By the time I was a teenager, I felt pretty confident about going into any genre. My best friend growing up loves games too. We have 2 male friends we grew up with as well. We have all known eachother since.... well we don't remember ever not knowing eachother. We all were into games and they never made us feel like there was a gender barrier, probably because it was never even considered. To be honest, I never really noticed that it had been a rarity to be female gamer until online gaming became more prevalent.

Growing up my family were all gamers and some of my favourite memories were me and my mom playing games together. But then my mom really decided to be religous but she hooked me into games. I started then branching out into horror games and then found a little gem on the dsi called 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors which then lead me to persona 3 and honestly just the way these two games were quickly became some of my favourite. I am thankful for my current circles where we are a mix of people who just enjoy hanging out together. We invite eachother even if its not our type of game or we arent good at it we just enjoy hanging out together and it makes gaming wayyyy more enjoyable. Great video btw!

I was an RPG enthusiast who liked playing female characters, and I honestly fell in love with the character and the interactions. While the MaleMC stoicly and apathetically head towards his impending death, the FeMC looks on the bright side of life, and has a sunny disposition.

3:27 "oMG dey rip off PEWSONAH 5 AAAAAHHH111!!!111" Sorry. I just thought the actual Arsene Lupin showing up on your channel is funny. One noteworthy thing is neglecting the social elements is VERY punishing in P3 particularly, although I think Portable smoothed out most of it. Originally if you reversed or broke a Social Link, you lost access to any Personas of that Arcana until you patched things up with that person. $35 to $50.... [laughs in Australia $60-90] I definitely understand how hard it can be for someone without learned experiences from gaming to get into things. We take for granted things like... how a controller works, for example. Being able to play without looking at the buttons? That's HARD if you're just starting out. I story I can iterate here is my mother did get pretty into two games in her, I'd say late 40s-50's: Wii Sports and Mario Kart Wii. For Mario Kart, it was because of the Wii Wheel accessory. Controlling steering with an actual wheel was far more intuitive for her than using a controller. (Especially since she was always the driver of the family) "Hardcores" like to mock motion controls, but the Wii got many former non-gamers into gaming FOR A REASON. From my experience it wasn't just boys vs girls with Nintendo. If you wanted to be taken seriously at all as a gamer in the 2000's, you had to only play gritty M-rated franchises and bash "kiddy" Nintendo ones. I've only found out recently this is the entire reason those 2000's "edgelord" games like Shadow the Hedgehog, Jak 2 (though this one was genuinely good), and the Prince of Persia reboots exist. A lot of videogame companies used to pander to the try-hard GTA kids for sales. Not that GTA is a bad franchise, I'm just talking about those young teens who thought they were so "mature" for playing it when it was really the opposite. 10:58 Wait, what?! Damn that sucks. Oh wait. Um... DANG that sucks. 11:36 Please tell me this is on "greatest ratios". That guy won't just need ice for that burn, he'll need a GLACIER. It really sucks that there's so little girls into Trails. The later games definitely skew shounen and harem but I feel like a lot of women would like Sky and Crossbell. 13:15 Fun fact! "Anahazuru" is mentioned in Persona 5... but only if you can read Japanese. It's one of the mental-shutdown-induced accidents mentioned on TV. Did you just call FeMC Ries to go with calling your male MCs Kevin? Nice.

I grew up on the Playstation as a child. Persona I didn't get into til I was an adult but I am a woman who enjoys the persona series now and found you and got the inspiration to jump into royal to actually finish persona 5 since it's available on the switch for portable play. But my starting persona game was actually P3P. I loved the let's play I watched so much I got it on digital for my PSP.

So, my experience with hardcore gaming was very different, in that most of the most obsessed were all women. My homeroom/study hall teacher introduced me to games like Sword of Vermillion, Strider, plus sadomasochistic torture through Ghouls N' Ghosts and Eternal Champions. It's thanks to her heroic efforts to turn the Apple IIGS into a credible gaming alternative (one Genesis wasn't enough) that we were introduced to the Might and Magic series and HoverTank 3d. And Dangerous Dave - she was a fan of Id back when they still made 4 color Mario style platformers that were given away as free bonuses in floppy disc format magazines. Her passion for the underclocked underdog CPU inspired me to want to help too, and that's how Cinemaware's The King of Chicago glamorized a life of crime and vice in our small town public school before any of us ever heard of Rockstar games. Meanwhile, some of my friends went far beyond that level of fandom. 8-bit FFIV Rydia cosplay, speed running Left 4 Dead 2 like it was running on Naruto physics, treating multiple MMOs like Second Life: Hoarder edition because she broke every difficulty curve, then there was the largest collection of gaming magazines I'd ever seen... The thing of it is, I never met anyone through dedicated video game communities. They were instead artists and writers found in the femdom side of kink, and we bonded over this wild idea that having actual conversations with people was better than treating us all like we were the drive-thru window where you'd place your order for sex. Not that our minds never went to the gutter (my sex phobia/desperate efforts to remain sex positive was a thirst trap for sadists), but the quickest way to be forgotten in such places is unwanted harassment. (Especially from submissive men and women who confuse porn with reality. The sound of their demands are as common as sand in the desert) Partly as a result, I think "background noise" is how we tend to react to unreasonable expectations in general. And many gendered expectations might as well wear a target.

Girl here- My older brother got me into gaming as a hobby since I was 5. My brother and Dad never really minded me playing video games. Some female relatives kind of questioned it though. Middle school through high school, was the worst. Boys and girls mocked me for it. Felt really isolated by it. Still played video games anyway. College into adulthood, for the most part, guys and girls all think it's fine. I've seen groups do SMASH Bros tournaments and my guys friends are happy to discuss our gaming stuff. There was one guy I met who was obsessed about gamer girls, and that was... Unpleasant... To say the least...

I was raised male, but in more recent years have figured I'm somewhere on the gender fluid spectrum. (My parents are supportive.) As a young kid, my male and female were equally interested in games. As a teen, I didn't have many friends who I interacted with regularly because I was a distance student, but I tended to have more female friends than male, and they were interested in Nintendo games, but occasionally curious about games outside of that. As an adult, I have male and female friends who aren't as into games as I am, but are at least interested in listening to my passionate discussions about them and are willing to consider my recommendations. My Sister plays party games, and my Brother likes action games. My Sister's daughter loves to play video games, but I'm not sure about my Brother's daughter. I don't get to see my Brother's family nearly as often. Not sure why I'm including this, but I'd like to share how I feel about games with gender and romance options. I have played many that do them well. I don't like being forced into a romance, but if it's optional it's more appealing. If there's no romances OR female same-sex romance options, I prefer playing as a female character. If there's only hetero romance options, then I prefer playing as a male character. In case anyone is wondering, I identify as Asexual and Demiromantic/Gynoromantic. I prefer sapphic romances for some reason. Not sure why.

Since I was born female, my brother was actually 10 years older me and had all the gaming consoles until 2008 and I was introduced to gaming on a Gameboy but only to Tetris. It was only until his at-time girlfriend showed me Pokemon Emerald and I had no idea what I was doing but I enjoyed these two games. When I was 10, I played my first games properly on the 3DS which was Mario Kart, Pokemon X, Tomodachi Life, Smash bros, and some franchise games. But when I was 11 or 13, I watched the Catherine cutscenes, not uh, good idea but it kind of awaken my gender identity with it's main character Vincent. I was growing up with dolls but as I got older, I wanted to game and when I was 13 or 14 I got a WiiU and played Splatoon, then Mario Kart, and then Twilight Princess at 16 because I then got a Switch at 15 and became to love gaming. I never mind playing an existing character for stuff, I didn't care for gender since I'm a transmasc enby that loves pink and feminine stuff so the gender of the protagonist was never an issue but more of what I can do. I have more of an issue of joining my cishet male pals in cishet male places and sort of being an outsider since I still have a feminine voice and dudes can really annoying.

i'm a girl in my 30s and my mom got me a N64 when i was like 6, and we spent soooo much time playing together through the years; it's been such good times. i definitely remember more boys talking about gaming before but i've also always had girl friends who played nintendo games too. i think nintendo in past years was definitely more appealing to us, but now it feels a lot more balanced. maybe it's just my own outlook from growing up, idk! also i'm new to your channel but i love your videos, thank you for making them!

To me persona 3 portable is worth it for the social link of male party members. Seriously I’m annoyed in persona 3 fes you don’t social link with the male party members expect for technically komoura( as taking him on walks). Also it nice to have a gay option in a modern persona game(even if it is a robot). I hope we would have gender/sex option for persona 6.

As a gay man I’m immensely happy to play as a girl if only so I can date the gender I’m attracted to. I wish male characters could date other male characters but I’ll settle for playing as a “female” just to enjoy the romance aspect

My parents let us play on the computer as child. My sister's favorite game was Quake. She played mostly for fun, sometimes sharing the mouse/keyboard with friends. While I kept playing growing up, she stopped. But now that we're both in our 30, she actually took the keyboard back so we could play together sometimes. And now, we both play MMORPG such as Guildwars 2. She actually plays more than me, now.

I was raised by a single dad and with my two brothers, so naturally I’ve been gaming since I was very small. It made me sad growing up that so few of my female friends shared the hobby past elementary school. I’m seeing more and more women my age game though and it really makes me happy to see :)

This video is older, but for its worth I will share my experience with video games as a cis woman. In some ways, I was lucky, because dad really loved video games and didn't see any reason they should be limited to a certain age or gender. However, as a Southern white man, he gravitated towards that I was often intimidated to play. A lot of it was I sensitive and neurodivergent so I hated the idea of being bad at video games. Despite that, I still played all sort of computer games as a kid, and had an odd penchant for finding small indie video games inspired by Japanese sims and visual novels. I also kept trying things at my father's encouragement, including quite a few JRPGs I bounced off. My dad could tell I would like them but they were too often way to dense or obtuse for my ADHD to follow through. By the time I was in middle school I discovered Westerns rpgd like Fable 2 and Dragon Age Origins and crossed the threshold into "real gamer". It's been a distinct hobby ever since, but really in some way it always was. I just had to become confident enough in being adept at "real games" to claim it.

23, F. ive primarily played multiplayer & girly web game sites up until i was 10. my cousin's older bro was a collector for fun, and always had a Wii hooked up. so we would try guitar hero, smash, and mario kart constantly. we were getting "too old" for sleepovers, but then i got my first pc (my sis's laptop). tried every MMORPG for tweens i ever heard of, plus we got our own Wii at 12. obsessed over sonic games (if i didnt play it, i watched Lpers), almost completed a zelda game, figured out why 2 of my fave games are unplayable (hacked wii). then got into arcades, and fighting games. so much so that my first legit pc game was skullgirls, bc cartoony animations and hot girls. then i got my 3ds. befriended weebs and fellow players in middle school. chrobin was a constant thing to gush over during lunch...yea i moved on into animal crossing & kirby by then. im too broke to go ahead in consoles, but i watch a lot of gameplay. help me, all my fave music is from video games and its awkward bringing up composer names vs. artist names. my fam thought something was wrong with me, ngl. once i became gamer™, i was brattier and moodier once i was away from electronics. i would hole myself up into my room, begging to never be disturbed unless something cool was going on. and with my 3ds, if i hated the party, i could fuck off and game in peace. yea i was just autistic fam. the overrealiance on tech on high school reminded me of offline hobbies that i used to have, so i got out of my room more. but now phones are necessity, but i know how to break away from it easier then my parents, while still knowing how to use the thing. now they get that my expertise is technology and arts, but it took ages for them to find ways to get me to be chatty for them to know me. because pop culture is boring half the time, and thats all the fam cares about exept for like the young cousins. i was "one of the boys" until i was 15.

I feel like I was mostly encouraged in playing video games, some of my earliest memories were playing Age of empires 2 and Age of mythology: the titan with my brothers and dad. I would continue playing a lot of games with my brothers growing up, and we had several consoles (some of them were in my brothers' room, but that's because they shared it, and it was really big, and also I was pretty much always allowed in there by them). Most of my friends would also play games, though I usually only played the Sims with other girls, at least up until high school when I had a friend group of girls with most of us in the group playing a wide variety of games. The biggest divide I've felt was when I got to college studying game design, and we were about 5 girls and 20 guys, it was also like that with the game programming discipline, however the other game related disciplines like game writing, 2D/3D art, sound design and music were a lot more equal in the ratio of guys and girls. Also, a lot of people dropped out of our class during the years, but not any of us girls. Currently, I am in one of the masters course at the same school and there it is also a more equal split, and a lot of international students which is cool.

I'm currently playing this game on Steam. I'm romancing Akihiko. You should try the Seduce Me otome game series by Michaela Laws, and Monster Prom or Monster Camp.

quickly open the tactics menu and set to direct control as soonas-- MARIN KARIN!!!

I grew up with four older brothers and I was the youngest (and only) girl. I was often told video games weren't for girls, and being the type of person I am, I dug my heels in and said "YES THEY ARE" and I played and still play lots and lots of games. I will admit it's less now than when I was a kid, but I love games. I know some people play video games for the challenge (I'm looking at you Bloodbourne/Darksouls players) but I play to relax and enjoy a story. So nowadays when my life is extra frustrating, I pop in a game, and I turn that on EASY mode. If one thing in my life can be easy mode, it should be my hobby! I like niche games, I like cozy games, I like nearly anything with puzzles and clothing. Such a stereotype! But I also love and have lots of nostalgia for survival horror games. I LOVE them. Zelda, 100%. I think when I was a kid it was really hard to find other girls l like me, but as I got older, and the online communities started to pop up, it was so much easier.

I grew up playing games on the Wii with my family, particularly stuff like Mario Kart or Wii Sports but I didn’t really get into video games until late elementary school when I suddenly got REALLY into Legend of Zelda. I didn’t have any other female friends who liked gaming growing up, now in my senior year of high school I finally do which is nice! But anyways, I always just stuck to Nintendo consoles because I felt like any other console or PC gaming was just for people who played like “real games” (I.e. a lot of male dominated genres). I even have a male friend who used to make fun of me for only having Nintendo consoles and I just couldn’t really explain to him how it felt like other consoles weren’t “for me.” Nowadays games are my main hobby and I’ve branched out a lot more, I really like JRPGs and fighting games in particular and I finally got my first non-Nintendo console, the PS5, last summer. I still stay away from any online games with VC function though, I had a bad experience with VC on Smite around the time of the pandemic and it’s made me genuinely anxious of other people I’m playing games with hearing my very obviously feminine voice.

12:28 shoutout to the 60 year olds watching this video

I'm cis male but do have two little sisters, the way we all got into videogames was collectively through nintendo games like mariokart and stuff, I know that mostly my parents would trust me more than my first sister with all consoles and stuff cause I was way more cautious and we were poor at the time so if someone broke something one it would be hard to trust that kid, and that kid was sadly my sister who now isn't very good at games still loves many genres but rarely accepts playing with the fear of breaking something. I would say my parents always saw videogames more as a thing for kids than for a specific gender, they didn't trust much my sister but later on we had another sister she's still young so it's hard to say but they don't seem to exclude her out of videogames, I think they much prefer having her play videogames than stay on the mobile, so do I to be honest

Growing up, my siblings and I would share video games by having designated players to different games to prevent loosing save files. I would typically play jrpg's (FF series) and my older sister would play survival-horrors (R.E. series)

My parents both have nerdy interests and never really cared about encouraging me to fit into typical feminine interests or discourage me from "boy interests" so they never tried to dissuade me from playing video games. I was made fun of a bit for not being "normal" but I think that stemmed from other things than me playing games lol. But I did have a few (girl) friends who I liked to play games with! Together we would usually play Pokemon or Wii party games but they weren't as interested in some of my other games like tomb raider or kingdom hearts. I don't think anyone thought particularly weirdly about me playing those games buuut I was also a pretty naive child and didn't realize some of my classmates were bullying me until later when I thought back on it. So there's a chance people thought it was weird and I just didn't notice or realize. As for after my family moved out of my village, I was a pretty quiet kid so I didn't really talk about my interests unless saw someone else was into it. Eventually I got into cosplay and that was how I made a lot of my friends today! At work and stuff I talk about games occasionally to my co workers but I'll usually talk about more mainstream games like Assassin's Creed or (again) Tomb Raider since they're more recognizable titles for people who don't play games.

My parents didn't force gender roles on me (we could say I was raised gender neutrally, but that's ignoring that I was still socially a girl). They let me do what I wanted (within reason of course), so I was allowed to enjoy sports and especially video games. It also probably helps that my parents were also nerds. They both played DnD, mom loved the fourth Doctor, and mom did let me watch her play Tomb Raider (and later several point-and-click adventures games, the Myst series and The Longest Journey specifically, after I was in trouble in Kindergarten for telling someone I kill them). Dad also let me watch him play Civilization III. They also knew the stuff I liked when I was younger (mainly Nintendo games), so when a church we were going to started to tell them that Pokemon was the devil and they should stop letting me enjoy it, they decided to leave that church. My parents were raised in religious households (my dad was a preacher's son and my mom survived an insane household) and are/were religious, but that didn't really stop them. Heck, when I got Persona 2 Innocent Sin for Christmas, my mom was a little worried about the pentagram, but they still bought it for me.

My mom got me into video games when I grew up in the 90s! :) She was (and still is!) a computer programmer so maybe I am a bit of an outlier?

As a 18 year old afab nb, i never got to play games when i was a child. I got my first pc that's good enough to run anything other than chrome at 16. I got my first and only console when I was 16 too but I lived in dorms at the time and when I went back home, I didn't have a monitor i can plug it other than the family shared tv so I still never had the chance to actually play anything on it. My family is still very opposed to me playing games. They never bought me a computer. Hell, they never even bought me anything but barbie dolls growing up because anything other than them were for boys. I don't have any income at the moment since I'm still a student so I can't buy any games. My cousin who gifted me the pc and the console lends me his account but he only plays games soulsborne types of games which I don't know how to play. Persona 3 Portable was the first non-otome game I've ever played. When I emulated it on ppsspp, I felt really happy. I struggled a lot at first but it still was quite enjoyable. I'm still hesitant to play games. Especially online games scares me a lot. I know I don't have the motor skills for that and I know I'll be made fun of. In short, P3P holds a very special place in my heart even though I never got past new year's because I always delete or write over my save files by mistake lol. Also sorry for my grammar, English is not my native language.

I don't really have any interesting stories to tell growing up as a female gamer. No one questioned it and just let me play. This was certainly because *everyone* in my immediate family are gamers and irl I tended to keep to myself and the few friends I had played games themselves. Although I dont play multiplayer games at all unless it's with my friends because I'm scared of meeting someone hostile. Also my fav otome is Cinderella phenomenon

I am a trans woman who loves video games and the Persona series. Persona 3 is actually my favourite game of all time! This video seemed like a really interesting subject matter and I love hearing more about gaming from a feminine point of view.... but I really dislike that you went out of your way to exclude trans women from this entirely, under the argument that they "grew up with a male upbringing". First of all, I'm not even sure why that was relevant to be honest. You could have cut that specification from your script and no one would have batted an eye. Secondly, trans women did not have a male upbringing. It is a common misconception so I don't blame you for not realising, but trans women (even eggs who don't yet realise they're trans) are treated very differently from cis men. A lot of them (myself included) were outcast and made fun of for being different and tend to loath masculine tendencies. Basically, my point is you gained almost nothing by specifying it (you could've just said "women" and left it at that), but did serve to lose a lot by excluding us. I'm not mad. In fact I'm very used to it. I just wished to express my point of view on the matter

Just wanted to add, as a Zoomer boy with a younger sister I don't treat her any different when it comes to video games. We are super into emulating the 2000-2010s era of games and she whoops me at games like smash and sonic. It could just be my area but the same is true with my friends. The girls in my area are just as engaged with video games as we are and are not discouraged like how you describe. Hopefully that continues for future generations!

Yes. Through the otome genre, I was introduced to the persona series.

I'm not sure if it helped that my parents were older gen Xers born in 1966 that grew up playing Atari. They didn't gender restrict games. When I lived with my mom I played NES and SNES and when I lived with my dad he had a Sega Genesis, then he bought me N64, gameboy, and PS2 at various points of birthdays or Christmas. I was an only child in a male-lead household from age 10+, so that may have helped with a lack of gatekeeping. I never saw any women or girls in my family play videogames, however. It wasn't until I entered all girls high school that I was introduced to other gamers. They all had very different tastes. One played PC games like Heroes of Might and Magic and a game where you raised and breed cats with a surprisingly complex genealogy programming. One played Ragnarok Online and early MMOs. Another had JRPGs and fighting games. I fell in love with the Harvest Moon series playing Harvest Moon 64 at a cousin's house when I was 13. I think that series actually has a strong female demographic? Most of my memories are positive because I stuck to single player and stayed offline. Most of this was early to mid 00s.

As a girl that grew up without gamer friends but older gamer cousins, I was more of a viewer than a gamer. I had a DS Lite, DSi, & Wii so most of the games I had were party games or life sims. But when I visited my older cousins, they would play the usual Call of Duty, Madden, & etc. on Xbox. The few times that they left me play I would lose instantly from lack of reflexes and no instructions, so I'd end up just watching them most of the time and cheering for one or the other like chats so with streaming now.

Growing up, I never personally experienced the "games are meant for boys" concept. I only knew of it, because it was portrayed that way in the media. All the girls I was friends with liked gaming just fine, and my sister's, neighbors, and I often played games together. I had a lot of consoles growing up, and I put in a lot of hours as it was (and still is) my main hobby. My youngest sister plays a lot of the games that are usually targeted towards males like Call of Duty. Neither of us play games that feel especially targeted towards females (like dating sims and what not). I did notice that while I got my degree in Game Design, there were way more males than females. There were about 1-3 females in any of my classes of about 20-25 people. We were treated as equals, so that gives me hope that in the future more females can feel they can be involved in making games.

I identify as non-binary now but I was raised as a girl. My sis and I were raised a lot by our dad and when it came to games, it was more about cost than gender because we were flat-ass broke. Luckily Blockbuster was still a thing so the two of us were always renting Crash Bandicoot and Final Fantasy VII-IX. He really liked the RPGs we picked because of the core tenets of being heroic or a good comrade (and the fact we had to read the dialogue, often acting out the characters with each other). I knew he loved gaming for us when I woke up on my 12th birthday to a PS2, Kingdom Hearts, and the guidebook.

I'm a guy, though I have a sister. Growing up, we played multiplayer stuff like Mario Party, Mario Kart, Tony Hawk, and sometimes my dad's Medal Of Honor games. While there were a bunch of single-player games that I played that my sister didn't, there were a few that she played that I didn't, such as Nintendogs and Tomb Raider Underworld. Nowadays, I think she pretty much only plays Animal Crossing, though I assume her family life now eats most of her time. My parents don't play games apart from mobile games. My dad did have the aforementioned war games and had recently expressed interest in getting a PS5 for the new CoD (though it didn't happen). My mom occasionally plays Mario and Crash Bandicoot. When I was growing up, she played through the GBA port of Mario 3 and gave me tips for it (I assume she had played through the original on NES). The only Otome games that I've played were a couple of free ones that I stumbled upon and was curious about, namely the two Fantasia games (don't know if the third one ever got finished).

When my sister and I were growing up she had a ds and even played some Pokémon. But I think like you said for most young women in America she did fall off as we got older. But now she has a switch she doesn’t use a lot but sometimes does. And I see personally a few of my female friends getting into games like Fire Emblem and loving the variety of the newest entires. Three Houses more so than Engage thus far

I was extremely fortunate despite being AFAB and raised Christian that I managed to grow up as someone who actively engaged with gaming and was able to continue doing so as the years went on. I had no female friends that shared a love of gaming like I did and my hobby always felt really isolating, there was always a defining line of how I was interested in "guy stuff" Gaming is so, so special to me and I am always seeking to raise up games or consoles that seek to bridge the gap between "gamers" and "non-gamers." Accessibility is SO important and it has made me super happy to see more games including "Safe" difficulty options that allow new players to feel comfortable investing their time and money into games for the sake of their stories without having to feel intimidated by some kind of steep learning curve. Persona is a series I unfortunately found much later in life but I know that P3P and the option for a female protagonist would have meant the world to me as a teenager, despite being transmasc now. All that being said, I love that you made this video and that you're trying to help bridge this gap as well, you also made me super curious about a couple of those Otome games!!

I'm a dude, my best friend is a girl and loves Persona as much as I do, even more, especially we love Femc. Playing with her is so much fun

My older brother used to play video games so of course, I did too. Gamecube, then PS3, then we even shared a Minecraft account in 2011 (can't believe it's been out that long) I never felt shamed out of circles, it just so happened that I wasn't into the typical types of games everyone else in those circles seemed to be. My friend group now rarely has overlapping interests in games because they mostly play multiplayer games (Fortnite, League, Cod, etc). I never liked games like the souls series where the entire point is that you have to die however many times to get good. And while I liked fighting games I grew up with, my typical type of game was single-player (Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, Oblivion, Fallout, that kind of stuff) Although in middle school I had a circle of friends that I would play smash and Mario cart with (literally we would form a circle in the courtyard hunched over our 3Ds lol) Now that I think about it they were all guys. I guess I was lucky in that respect. It used to be so confusing for me that none of the girls I was friends with played video games cuz little me was just like, "What do you mean you don't spend hours a day playing video games? Video games are so fun tho???" I understand a lot more now as an adult. I know how intimidating it is to spend money on something you have no prior experience with.

Im a young teenage girl with an older brother. I live in a poor country where gaming isnt popular, finding anything that isnt fifa or something like that was IMPOSSIBLE. Most of my friends have never touched a console in their lives, male nor female. But i was blessed with my nerdy older brother who got his hands on a 2ds and modded it, before that little kid me was so envy of the people i saw online play all my favourite games. That was the only way i could play videogames but a part of me knows that if i didnt have my brother i wouldve been very discouraged of owning any consoles nor games

I'm definitely glad that many women gave a chance to this Entertainment and Marvelous World of Gaming. More that the gender, I always assimilate that it's more about how some people get more things to do during the days over the other ones. I mean, some people had less oportunity for playing VideoGames un their spare times over the others. And I'm really feeling that. I just spent more of my days at School and doing Excercise, and the only Consoles I'm hooked on are the 3DS and Switch. In Short words, I tend to play more Portable Games, but with a Huge Experience such as the Atlus Games. I'm feeling more relieved and I had more fun with it and my real life than before. But of course the theme that was given to the genre is still something to talk about. But I don't feel it's the reason. Even so, I wouldn't like to take away the merit that at last many Girls have the pleasure of Playing Video Games where there was more boys who play it. It's Fantastic and I'm Happy with 'em. One of my Aunts, a Very Young Aunt were talkinh with me about what Console could she buy for her Spare Times. She really yearns one of the Consoles of the moment; and I was very surprised that wants a Switch. She is a mom of one children and she loves the VideoGames. And about Persona 3 Portable, I won't lie... I'm Happy with the PSP Version. It's Fantastic for everyone, even the people who doesn't give a lot of time to VideoGames. Such a breath for your busy days 💙 💖.

Both me and my sister loved games growing up, what interests me is the platform difference, we both had GBAs as a kid, but other than that, she mostly played on her laptops and I mostly played on consoles, but now that we are both adults my sister mostly plays on her Xbox, and I mostly play on my Steam Deck Edit: I forgot to mention that I am a man, lmao

My sister did like video games a bit when I was growing up. She even helped me get a bunch of games as well since she used to work at GameStop so I could use her discount and she did abuse warranty a bit with my brothers and I. She even gave me some games she didn't want anymore instead of just selling it like Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxy, and Mario Kart Wii. She was Nintendo only and my brother did introduce me to Xbox and friends introduced me to PlayStation and PC but she helped me and my brother a lot with video games

Cis-gendered male in my early 20s here. My favorite genre is easily RPGs/JRPGs, but I'm also a fan of Smash, Splatoon, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Fire Emblem(Awakening and later), Animal Crossing, and Legend of Zelda. Some of my favorite RPGs are Paper Mario TTYD, Pokémon, and, just recently, Trails in the Sky(still playing through SC right now). In elementary/primary school, everyone I played video games with was male, however, I also wasn't very socially outgoing so everyone in my school could've been an avid Pokémon fan and I'd've never known. Due to various friendships in my life that came to be rather toxic though, I grew to be ashamed of my gaming hobby and kept it to myself until I made new friends in the latter half of junior high. This was the point in my life where most of my friends were girls and it was by talking to them more often that I felt comfortable saying I was into gaming hobbies and was met with a warm reception. I'm still friends with all of them and I'm now much more upfront with my hobbies. As I got to high school, I met more people with similar video game interests, some girls and some boys. To this day, I don't think I've ever heard someone irl make a comment about how "girls are bad at video games" or something similar. The people I knew had a wide array of experiences ranging from something they did personally as well as with their parents, something they did to enjoy time by themselves, and I even knew one girl who's parents got her a DS, but she just found she wasn't super into it so she gave it to her brother. My whole life, girls playing games was just a normal thing. When I got into Smash competitively though, it became rather jarring when it occurred to me that, at my locals, there wasn't even one woman present(except maybe a store employee to handle registration). And then I thought about it, and it occurred to me that I couldn't name a top level Ultimate player who wasn't cis-male(still can't, though I've kinda fallen off from the game this past year). Based on the history gaming has had, it didn't surprise me too terribly but it does make me wonder what it is about that environment that doesn't bring in female players who wish to take the game super seriously. Is it something unique to Smash or competitive gaming in general?

I got into gaming when I was four of five mainly from playing with my mum and my sister on the playstation, my mum always and still continues to play strategy games, my sister, lost interest in her teens, and she became the kind of person who sees it as a waste of time. I have had one female friend who was into gaming in primary/secondary school though those were mostly JRPGS. I do remember playing COD as a teen an see other people heckle female players never in real life, but well the FPS community was really a toxic one.

Though I do identify as non-binary I was AFAB and hence had to deal with some stigma around being into games. The male kids in my classes often talk about games and gaming consoles but whenever I tried to join these conversations people were surprised I knew about stuff like that and I was usually quickly pushed out of the conversation. Whenever I talk about the games I like people just assume the games I talk about are like card games for some reason??? (like solitaire) and that I can’t like “real video games.” Even though my family has been mostly great about my interests in video games I get asked A LOT why I play “boy games” and I’m generally unwelcome in gaming spaces at school due to presenting fem and none of the girls in my year play video games I think there is only two girls who play video games in my whole school though it is kinda small.

As a girl with more so traditional family i was told to not play “boy’s games” but i said I don’t care and i did say it to them and played anyway I used to play a lot of fps, simulator and assassin’s creed like games (i forgot the word) but what did stop me from playing for like 6 years was my financial situation but around 4 years ago I finally got enough to buy whatever the hell i want and I couldn’t be happier Now i play games like Hades, Hollow Knight, P4G, P5R, The Witcher, Valorant, overwatch, chinese/japanese visual novels, civilisation 6, etc (but not LOL hell no)

My sister didn't have this experience, she was girly but still played games with us. The thing that blocked her was me and my brother didn't like her at the time and preferred to play together. She still played on the xbox 360 with halo and COD.

I always called FeMC Minako, since folks on Message Boards always referred to the original MC as Minato as that was his name in the original manga for whatever reason. I never got used to him being referred to his anime name.

I think this section on mobile games is interesting. It seems to me that Mobile games are very different than console or PC games, almost to the point where they're separate markets entirely.

I always enjoyed encountering female players/gamers in multi-player games, as a male, it does bring me disgust to see how awful degenerates will harass female gamers, honestly it's a shame we have to be in the same bathroom as them. I do have a younger sister and from the moment she had interest in video games from when I play, I started her off with my Wii U, starting with SM64 and LoZ:OoT I do continue to let her play games, even allowing her to play pokemon if she ever feels like hunting a shiny on violet, its nice to see her have fun

Hi! I'm a Girl! I've grown up around video games my whole life, my brothers and sisters all played video games whenever they could so it was a very “wow! I'm in your face!” thing for me. None of my family members ever told me or my sisters we couldn’t play with my brothers, the only thing stopping us from playing with them was our brothers thinking we were annoying lol (specifically me since I’m the youngest). Though I never was pushed away from such things by my family, when I played the games themselves the community pushed me away, I’d sit and watch my sister play Call of Duty and be horrified by the stuff that was said to her if she forgot to mute her mic, though she always defended herself by saying some very 2000s stuff back at them so I’m happy she’d stand up for herself!

I'm a cis girl, but I'm also autistic and I played video games from a ridiculously early age. It started with computer games, and then I got used to playing on consoles. I had a GameCube, a PS2, an Xbox 360, a PS3, a Wii, a Wii U, and eventually an Xbox One and a Nintendo Switch. I played FPS games like Left 4 Dead, co-op games like Castle Crashers, sandbox games like A Kingdom for Keflings, handheld games like MySims and Cooking Mama 3 on my DS Lite, platformer games like LittleBigPlanet, racing games like ModNation Racers, and I even remember more niche games like Mini Ninjas and Wii Sports Resort. I struggled with Pokemon and Metal Gear Solid, though. Video games were a major special interest of mine, and I considered myself a tomboy for liking the gorier apocalypse games like L4D and Dying Light. Portal and Undertale were games that made me quite a few friends in school, and StarCraft 2 was something my dad and I bonded over.

I never really saw gaming as a gendered hobby. As a kid going into my teen years I never really thought about it much as since I was mostly a loner and didn't have many friends who played games as much as I did for the most part, other than my cousin, let alone had people to play with, but I would guess his younger sister picked it up because we spent a lot of time playing games. We never really played with her much since she was way younger than us but I have pretty much passed all of my old consoles to her whenever I got something new. Then I went to college, studied game design and production, and met a bunch of girls who were into the hobby as well, in and outside the game design program, some of them playing a lot of the same stuff I did, whether it was Pokemon, the Sonic series, or the various JRPGs or Action games that were coming out. Even had a short TTrpg group with a couple girls, and eventually it just became a regular thing to see girls who played video games. One friend of mine even played a lot of the gritty stuff like Resident Evil, various shooters, Devil May Cry, etc. While yes the target demographics were often males, there was really nothing other than taste that kept girls from playing whatever games they liked, assuming they were willing to put in the effort to understand the mechanics (I recall one girl I knew through class saying that she always wanted to pay DMC, but couldn't be bothered with the all the weapon switching it can require at times until she tried DMC: Devil May Cry). I've met more as I went through life and while yes its still more male dominated, girls are playing are still playing the exact same games I am and I still think it just boils down to personal taste rather than marketing, especially nowadays as games that do well these days, aren't marketed either way to genders, just marketed to sell well to everyone who plays them, whether it be pushing female characters to the forefront or not.

Ok, good video, but now I need the inverse of this, like "The starter Otome game for JRPG players" because I've been wanting to get into Otome games for a long time but outside mobile games with micro-transactions I have no clue how to get in.

Trans woman experience: I had a bad therapist who tried to use my love of video games to convince me I somehow wasn’t trans.

The Parasite Eve series was very, very female-friendly, and I supremely enjoyed that game. Until I discovered Persona 5, however, I was more of a fighting game gal. My sisters (one older, one younger) were into platformers like Super Mario and Crash Bandicoot. They also loved horror games like the Resident Evil series (fairly good gateway thanks to Jill Valentine and Ada Wong). They also enjoyed the Sims and Dino Crisis. PS for reference, I just turned 40, my older sister is 5 years older, and my younger sister was 1 year younger.

I was unaware of the term "otome" but searching it up, otome games seem like they're up my alley. As a dude, I did know girls who gamed, but it tended to be Nintendo stuff that they played in elementary and then wavered off around middle school. It's sad that many games aren't accessible to people who didn't grow up with them, but I'm glad the statistic is leaning into more & more female players as the years pass. Clicked on this vid for what I thought was a P3P review through a female lens, stayed for much more.

I dont romance dudes but I did like playing FMC way to much the pink side.

regarding socialization and gender, it's funny in a bitter sort of way how I was brought into gaming early in my life due to being amab, but when I started asserting my gender as female in my adolescent years, family and other people argued that I wasn't really a girl because I liked "violent video games"

I only played handheld games since I was really shy growing up. The only exception was when I played Pokémon Colosseum and the sequel XD Gale of Darkness. I didn't know how this one kid at my second elementary school found out though, since the only time I spoke to another kid was to be bullied. That said, I eventually transitioned to World of Warcraft. Aside from a few snide comments from my family, nobody bothered me. It probably helped that I went solo since I mained a Beast Mastery Hunter. Thankfully, that hasn't changed with Guild Wars 2. Granted, with the way I've been scapegoated by others who chose to play hard content, I'm better off letting people think what they want on the gender/sex front. Oh by the way, thanks for the actual tips. I've played P3P's route in high school when I called her Minako. I really enjoyed it so, it's kind of sad to see people insist that you need to just buy FES or wait for the remake (remaster). Never mind the former is hundreds of dollars and Atlus has confirmed that they're only redoing the base game!

Hi! I love all the persona and kiseki videos you do, and I want to talk about them more! Would you ever want to collab on a video on either of those games?

Great video, as a male myself I've grew up in a household that supported my interests in video games from a young age i feel extremely lucky. Video games are an amazing expansive medium that can portray stories and experiences from all walks of life, no one should gate-keep games from anyone. We're making a lot of progress but not there yet. Normalize that video games are for everyone.