Some titles take on a notoriety that extends far beyond those who've actually played the game. They become memes, they gain reputations. They wind up changing BL as a genre forever, just through their popularity. Here are some you've probably already heard of.

DRAMAtical Murder isn't NITRO CHiRAL's goriest or most violent game, but it was the one most visual novel players in the west encountered first. Rumours of its content – that one of the love interests is your dog, that the bad endings are shocking and intense, that the sex is very explicit – made it infamous long, long before its official translation into English.

(This is actually how my friends first introduced me to the game, in fact; they showed me Clear's sex/death scene in order to get an appalled reaction out of me. Joke's on them, I wound up working in the industry.)

 If you search "infamous BL games" on Google (I never claimed my methods in writing this blog were sophisticated) one of the first hits is an article from Kotaku discussing Absolute Obedience - Zettai Fukuju Meirei, which points out that the game's content was divisive and extreme enough that it killed Boys Love visual novel localisation in its tracks for over a decade. Absolute Obedience contains many scenes of assault and power imbalances, with little in the way of narrative consequences for these acts. Still, as the Kotaku article acknowledges, the game remains an important piece of BL history.

Masquerade ~Jigoku Gakuen SO/DO/MU~, soon to be released in English as Masquerade: Hell Academy, is notorious in Japan for its large variety of sex scene variations and remarkable creativity of acts therein. It's based on the 90s straight eroge Gakuen Sodom ~Kyoushitsu no Mesu Dorei-tachi~, which originates Masquerade's plot of students and teachers taken hostage in a classroom by a criminal and made to commit depraved acts.

Hadaka Shitsuji, released in English as Hadaka Shitsuji - Naked Butlers, sees you play a young man hired to be the interim "master" to a large household's worth of butlers while their employers are away. The game is a dark comedy about indulging taboo fantasies, and both the sexual content and the comedy content can get extremely weird, hence the game's high level of notoriety.