Elsewhere, it’s noticeable just how much of the 1994 localisation also had to tone down the perviness of Kojima’s script. Now I knew that this was a trait of Kojima’s. Just look at the stir caused by the scantily clad Quiet in Metal Gear Solid V. I’d also played the fan translation of Policenauts about a decade earlier and was surprised by how many inappropriate choices are presented to the player. But Snatcher is just relentless… I honestly can’t think of a single female character in the game that isn’t objectified by the available dialogue options. If you so wish, you can pester women for their phone numbers, hound them for a date, ogle or even request to grope them. There are even the odd scenes of graphical nudity, such as the dead Snatcher with her breasts exposed, which serve very little story purpose and just feel gratuitous.
Now if you were being very kind, you might hand wave all of this away by saying, “It was a different time,” or “That’s just what Japan was like.” You could certainly claim that the unregulated PC games market allowed for more adult material than strict console platform holders would allow. Each of these statements contains varying degrees of truth but there’s something about the objectification in Snatcher that feels like more than just cheeky HBO titillation. It’s an all-pervasive perversion. One that makes every single woman an object first and a character second. One to be examined, inspected and acquired just as much as any collectible item in the adventure, even if they do all reject and repel Gillian’s childish advances in the end.