Namco outdid itself with this one. Released exclusively in Japan in 1996, Dancing Eyes is an arcade game in which the player controls a relatively small monkey that runs around on marked pathways along tiles while avoiding menacing sprites that also venture around the pathways. Similar to Pacman, coming in contact with any of these enemies results in a death and do over of the entire stage until no more lives are left. The platform itself is composed of tiles that can be destroyed when the player places down a marker and lassoes around said tiles by walking their perimeter. The goal is to destroy all the tiles in the time limit while avoiding the opposing sprites. As the stages progress, the enemies begin to predict the player’s movements and chase or block off their path rather than move randomly across the terrain. Simple enough. However, the real kicker is that the surface area the tiles are composed of are, most often, clothes. Clothes of women. Yes, the goal of this game is to have the player’s monkey undress a female figure and reveal their underwear. Dancing Eyes is a straightforward and superficial game - however, its theme raises underlying questions on how seriously we should take it.
The initial issue is already apparent. In many of the initial stages the monkey runs around on a woman who is usually scantily clad or otherwise wearing tight fitting clothes, most often themed around some workplace. Various levels include a flight attendant and a female soldier at a military base except her uniform has a miniskirt. After the player clears the level, the figure underneath does a performance for the player. The woman will typically dance or sit down, splaying her legs and displaying her underwear to the player. I couldn’t figure out this particular feature because I was using an emulator but I did watch a playthrough where the players were even able to zoom in and out and change the camera angle so they could, in their words, get a “zoom [of] her ass” (timestamp 20:53). Dancing Eyes not only presents to the player a woman on a silver platter, it also gives them a mechanic to free hand the camera and truly enjoy any voyeuristic tendencies to their fullest.
It’s not uncommon for the player’s prize in a video game to be a woman and for that woman to be objectified. But, it’s less common to have it so brazenly explicit that their goal is to turn said woman into a sexual object to be viewed, and in such a way that suggests it should be taken for humor. There exists a particular tactic of making the perpetrators of unconsented and inappropriate sexual advances appear childlike in nature, small, or cute in order to make them appear less harmful and more disarming, or to make their behavior more humorous and play it off as comedy at the expense of the victim (I’m looking at you, Mineta Minoru). In a similar manner, the player’s avatar is a quite adorable little monkey barely the size of one’s palm. This innocent-looking monkey lets the viewer perceive the player’s actions as less of that of a malicious and lecherous pervert, and more of that of a child simply looking to make mischief.
Furthermore, as the stages progress, their premises and themes become more nonsensical and silly. Eventually the game begins mixing in absurd replacements for undressing women, pushing more for a humor aspect. In one level, the player frees a bodybuilder with a hypermasculine muscled body from the coil of a snake’s body, and in another level the player slowly chips away at a giant milk bottle to rescue the grotesquely misshapen cow trapped inside, only to watch it stand on its hind legs and do a funny little jig after completion. Mixing in these innocent and bizarre stages along with the more explicitly naughty eases the player into a false sense of moral acceptability. They’re just here to have some ridiculous fun. To be frank, the fact that these family-friendly stages appear in the same game is a bit unnerving.
Sometimes, it’s not necessarily undressing the women, but rather “freeing” similarly fanservice-catered female figures from a container or trap. I don’t know how to feel about this either, but it doesn’t exactly feel rewarding seeing a polygonal nekomimi cat girl in a bikini try to thank me for freeing her from a basket by going on all fours and arching her back suggestively.
Dancing Eyes’ cover art is already enough to say that the defining, if not “attractive,” feature of this game is the player’s ability to undress women who just sit there and make it possible to do so. The art presents a distressingly low camera angle panty shot of some poor girl in a sailor school uniform who seems more or less flustered over these tiny cute monkeys clinging to her thighs and hips. One part of me sees where the humor can be derived from this. The other part of me sees how this can also be upsetting.
The game mechanics in Dancing Eyes also actively encourage undressing the player’s “target.” There is no consequence for their actions, but rather only reward with time bonuses and special powerups that are unlocked by the speed and amount of area the player can demolish in one lasso. This game is literally rewarding them for being even more of a horny ravenous little monkey. The fact that there seems to be no punishment for succeeding goes to show that this game wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. However, that very intent to avoid the responsibility of criticism by being passed off as a joke exacerbates and perpetuates the inherent issue. Dancing Eyes, public health, and women who speak up about sexual harassment and assault - what do these three things have in common? They’re not taken seriously.
The intent of this game isn’t to convince you outright that undressing women should be allowed and trivialized into something funny. It’s a far jump to assume that it’s actively pushing for a “boys will be boys” agenda. The women in this game aren’t even sexy by modern standards. They’re angular, unexpressive, and mostly stay still helplessly as you obliterate the clothes on their body while you play, which helps to convince you that what you’re doing isn’t a massive breach of privacy and respect without clear consent. Approaches like this do still contribute to rape culture and victim blaming, something that would take another whole article to address. Both the dehumanization of the female targets and the placement of other ridiculous stages in between the fanservice ones can influence a mindset where one begins to see all stages as equivalent to each other in terms of severe implications (or lack thereof).
Dancing Eyes, as ludicrous as it is, is still entertaining to some extent. Some of the stages are harmless and meant to be a giant joke. However, the inherent issue in this is that because it’s integrated seamlessly with more uncomfortable and questionable content, it becomes a risky gambit that may lead the audience to also find humor in offensive or misogynistic content. I may find myself playing this game again in the future, because yes, I did have fun. Seeing the weird cow and muscle man doing their thing is funny. However, the notion that I’m finding entertainment in a game that wants me to point and laugh at the degradation of women will always sit in the back of my head.
(quick note sorry about the edit after due date i forgot to add the retro review category)