Conception 2’s Classmating seems innocent, but the rest of the game… ⊟
Despite being about creating babies with your high school classmates, Conception 2 is surprisingly chaste in regards to its signature feature. “Classmating” is successfully portrayed as totally innocent and nonsexual, at least in the couple of hours I’ve played.
Which makes it so much more jarring when the game gets bawdy elsewhere.
Conception 2’s Classmating is basically a religious ritual overseen by a priest, involving the magical energies of a young man and woman commingling in a special matryoshka thing to create Star Children, non-human fighters who look like chibi kids.
I mean, this is definitely a metaphor for actual procreation, and not even a veiled one. Even so, it’s treated as a relatively benign event. The player character frequently introduces himself to female students with something like “Well, we’re going to be Classmating a bunch, so we should know one another!” to a generally casual, upbeat agreement. Spike Chunsoft went to great pains to make Classmating seem totally innocent, just a way for two kids to use their star power to generate tiny cowboys.
Meanwhile, your friend Chlotz is constantly talking to you about how attractive other students are, and trying to get you to get closer to female students. One scene involves you and Chlotz being sent to find a new student who ranks high in combat potential; because she’s a high-ranking student, Chlotz assumes she’s going to be tall and large-chested, because… I’m actually not sure why.
Image via Valwinz
Oh, and that priest? Who is also the school’s headmaster? He seems to take Classmating seriously, but he’s not at all above commenting on the attractiveness of the teenagers around him.
The girls are just as weirdly obsessed with their own bodies. At one point, two students have a conversation about their relative breast sizes out of nowhere, and there’s a particularly embarrassing scene in which a bunch of students get drinks from a vending machine, leading to… well, this line:
Basically, here’s what I think is happening. The central mechanic of the game, which is just barely removed from being actual sex, is treated respectfully and tastefully as a side effect of being novel. What I mean is that there isn’t an existing anime/game template regarding this kind of metaphorical coupling, and so it ironically avoids the usual material.
Whereas the rest of the game is textbook Moe High School Anime, or at least fits my limited image of it, and thus subject to all the tropes that come along with that, including the dumb best friend, the male protagonist humiliated by accidental double entendres, and “waaah, they’re huge!”
Bear in mind, I haven’t completed the game; it’s possible the Classmating gets more moe-infused and the daily life less so. This is just a weird juxtaposition I noticed early on.
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