nakige

Borrowed from Japanese 泣きゲー (nakige, “crying game”), a combination of なき (naki, “crying”) and ゲー (gē), a shortening of ゲーム (gēmu, “game”), itself from English game.

nakige (plural nakiges or nakige)

1. A Japanese visual novel of a genre characterized by melodramatic plots intended to move the player to tears.
   • 2010, Brian Ashcroft, Shoko Ueda, Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential: How Teenage Girls Made a Nation Cool‎, page 154:

     Nakige are known for their sense of melancholy. Take 2001's Kimi ga Nozomu Eien (The Eternity You Desire), for example, which was released by eroge label âge, a division of ACID. Soon after high school student Takayuki Narumi falls for his classmate Haruka Suzumiya, she goes into a coma after a car accident. Depressed and shocked, Takayuki develops post-traumatic stress disorder and becomes involved with Haruka's best friend, Mitsuki. "To put it simply, a nakige brings players to tears as they read the in-game text," says [ACID CEO Hirohiko] Yoshida.

   • 2011 November 10, Alex Mui, “Visual Novels: Unrecognized Narrative Art”, in The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, Johns Hopkins University, page B5:

     The medium is dominated by nakige, the crying genre, much like how superheroes dominate comics and sitcoms television.

   • 2019, Robert Ciesla, Game Development with Ren'Py: Introduction to Visual Novel Games Using Ren'Py, TyranoBuilder, and Twine‎, page 90:

     Utsuge, on the other hand, stands for pretty much the opposite of nakige, aiming to be as depressing an experience as possible.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:nakige.

• crying game