Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemnia is one of the smuttiest RPGs on the market today, despite never saying one bad word or even showing a female character in anything skimpier than a rather modest swimsuit.

How did the game pull this off? By the same sort of language substitution that Gore Vidal once made famous. Vidal’s point was to prove that “dirty words” referring to sexual organs were not inherently dirty; it was how they were used in context that made them stimulating.

NIS America’s point is a bit less clear. The game casts a female-only race into a subservient role in a society that they once conquered but no longer rule. As such, they all have heavily-damaged egos and are mostly victimized by human males, used as tools and then tossed aside. You see, they wield powerful magic but can only release it in the form of songs brought out by the human males who “mind-dive” with them.

Mind-diving, and later on, “inserting,” (in this case, inserting means to install a crystal into a reyvatiel that boosts her power) become thinly-veiled references to intimacy and sex. Aside from this allegorical element, the game is quite clean, prim and proper. There are no sex scenes, no nekkid stuff, nothing that would trigger an M-mature rating from the ESRB.

And yet, in nearly every scene between the game’s hero, Lyner, and the two main Reyvatiels in his life, the innuendo is so think you could use it as insulation to keep your house warm in the winter.

Ar Tonelico looks like a harmless game with a lot of female characters in it, most of whom appear innocent enough to do little that is more risque than spending time in front of makeup mirrors, but that’s not the case. While there’s little that is smutty, Ar Tonelico is a genuine education in intimacy in general, and sexual relationships, with all their complexity and complications, specifically.

Consider carefully before letting your preteens near the game. The end-result message is a responsible one – treating women with respect, practicing caution before becoming intimate, and so forth; but the subject matter, however veiled, is quite mature.