Caligula Effect apparently had some crazy homophobia too
Since I don't play much else besides Yuri and a few Otome games, don't know what its like in other genres, but that's rather sad, but not unexpected. Isn't most Japanese media whether they are JRPG's (Final Fantasy is pretty progressive comparatively speaking) or VN's use this kinda of joke homophobia? Atlus games are notorious for this stuff. I don't see how it's going to change unless culture attitudes shift in Japan.
You should try reading something from the Yuri genre. The last ten years there's been many examples of Yuri VN's that have focused on the LGBTQ community including Kindred Spirits, Tokyo Necro, and Seabed.
it's not really an atlus problem so much as it is a katsura hashino issue imo. the guy directed catherine and has been in charge of persona since p3 (p1 and p2 were handled by shoji meguro) and he's blatantly homophobic, so i'm not really surprised how bad the jokes about LGBT in p5 and to a slightly lesser extent p4 and p3 were. i was actually talking about this with a friend the other day and we were like Holy shit LMAO ryoji is just straight kaworu nagisa #fuckingseriouslyhashino
we've always been salty about p5 being a spiritual successor to p2, but after thinking about p3 just being nge but aggressively straight we were like,, wow! fuck! p5 is to p2 as p3 is to nge! p2 (innocent sin in particular) will always be one of the most iconic LGBT friendly games and there's like zero doubt hashino was trying to play off the vibe that earned p2 its dedicated cult following, but uh., yeah.. nooooo.. tatsujun is so integral to the main plot it's like cmoooon hashino, you wanna rip off p2 but the only LGBT in there is in the form of predatory caricatures?? cMOoOOon
like ann is literally a lisa ripoff but badly written and subject to 100x the narrative sexualization (despite ykno.. her entire arc being about subverting it??!?)
can't believe the gays wrote aggressively heterosexual teen boys better than the het smh .. i could go off on this for ages but anyway LMAO i'm always gonna be team eikichi mAN