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making_games[repost from my DW, March 2023]
Well, I've been calling it Doki Doki Literature Jedao because I'm the troll who named my PC Jedao.
This is a horror visual novel.
The one thing I can say is that this probably, uh, should not be your second visual novel EVER. :p (The previous one I played was Coming Out on Top, which is an m/m dating game with that one GOLDFISH cut scene I have been trying to bleach out of my memory for years.)
DDLC comes with five zillion content notes/warnings before you can even play. Nintendo made me give my age to make sure I was old enough in my jurisdiction. (Look, I'm 44, which I'm okay saying because fucking Wikipedia lists my date of birth.) You have to click through a zillion things before the game lets you start.
Game-destroying spoilers follow.
The game starts by presenting itself as a standard dating VN, and this is where this being my second visual novel EVER was sort of not the brightest idea on my part - but I couldn't have made that determination without game-destroying spoilers, and I went into this only knowing that (a) it was horror (b) the cheerful dating-sim-looking cover art. I will say that at least I'd played Coming Out on Top and been subjected to Joe's high school/college romance anime tastes, so at least I had a general idea of the tropes. (Look, he made me watch all of Love Hina, one of the most boring anime on the planet. At least Ouran Host Club was really funny, but I guess it helped that OHC is a deconstruction.) Also Joe is the one who keeps having to explain to me the difference between a yandere and a tsundere, two terms I am incapable of keeping straight.
The premise is that your childhood friend Sayori, who has a crush on you, convinces you to join a Literature Club. The game introduces its major overt mechanics, which is "writing poetry" by selecting keywords from a list to appeal to each of the four "available" girls: outwardly genki Sayori, who proves to be masking depression; the confident Monika (later revealed as a? villain); grumpy Natsuki with her abusive father who STARVES and HITS her; and pretentious Yuri with her love of horror and knives and increasingly out of control cutting habit. (Sorry, I couldn't stand Yuri, and I get to say this because in high school I was the pretentious git.)
I have to add here that the characters are "probably" less unhinged in the "good ending" that I lacked the patience to play to reach. (I reached one of the? bad endings.) Because the fourth-wall-breaking shtick is that Monika falls in love with you (the player, not the PC) and edits the other characters to make them unlikable so you'll fall for her and then resorts to deleting them. I got to a? bad ending by deleting Monika in turn in the simulated filesystem. I was playing this on the Switch - the TV Tropes page seems to say that if you're playing on e.g. a Windows machine you actually have to go in and delete files the regular way???
Anyway, horror moments: the "club" seems normal up to the point that Sayori commits suicide after confessing her feelings for you; this happens whether you say you love her back or say you think of her as a friend, so it's a railroaded event. I believe Yuri stabbing herself after her SUPER UNHINGED obsessed love confession, ditto. Natsuki has unhinged moments. Monika of course reveals herself as OBSESSED and UNHINGED in that bit where she "traps" you with her after deleting everyone/everything else - I finally figured out that she would go on rambling foreeeeeever unless I quit out and Did Something Different. In my case, deleting her "character file" - hilariously, I have used Ren'py so I should have known better, but also that was in 2015, so it's not like I remember anything about syntax or filename conventions or whatever.
BTW, I got BADLY fooled during Sayori's suicide scene because there's a bit scripted in the game where it shows a fake runtime error along with a comment from Monika. This happened almost EXACTLY after I took a screenshot (I wanted to see if I could screenshot staticky video) so I assumed it was a REAL bug caused by the screenshot and didn't understand its significance until Joe (who has been spoiled for this game - he doesn't do horror so he didn't care about being spoiled) explained it to me. :p
So, I enjoyed the horror bits - this is my jam and these are types of horror content that I can do. (Among other things, I am functionally immune to suicide/suicide ideation as a content note.) And I was in a horror mood anyway.
What worked less well for me was the OMG SO MUCH REPETITION. I understand why it's in there as a design decision, because the slight divergences add up and pile on and come up at unexpected moments and should in principle add up to a sense of dread. I am afraid that my reaction after running through XYZ dialogue or the nth time, or dealing with some rando monologue, was to just put the Switch down and go off to do something else more enjoyable. I especially found myself wishing that the poetry word choice mechanic had been slimmed down a bit - picking 12 words I could have dealt with; having to pick 20 times over and over and over became tedious. I was whining to Joe, Do I have to go through this AGAIN to get to the "final" good ending and he just looked at me and said, You never HAVE to play a game, especially if it's not fun! So after I hit the reset "bad end" where Sayori becomes club president and takes Monika's place as The Unhinged (An Unhinged?), I gave up and hit up the TV Tropes page.
That said, the fourth-wall-breaking and metatextual commentary and "glitches" are really clever! I think a lot of the pacing/repetition stuff may just be me - I have SO LITTLE tolerance for repetition and I get bored very easily, and I bet it worked a lot better for other players.
I'm very glad to have played this game, even though parts of it made me impatient and even though a deconstruction is really going to work better for someone who knows the actual tropes better!
Well, I've been calling it Doki Doki Literature Jedao because I'm the troll who named my PC Jedao.
This is a horror visual novel.
The one thing I can say is that this probably, uh, should not be your second visual novel EVER. :p (The previous one I played was Coming Out on Top, which is an m/m dating game with that one GOLDFISH cut scene I have been trying to bleach out of my memory for years.)
DDLC comes with five zillion content notes/warnings before you can even play. Nintendo made me give my age to make sure I was old enough in my jurisdiction. (Look, I'm 44, which I'm okay saying because fucking Wikipedia lists my date of birth.) You have to click through a zillion things before the game lets you start.
Game-destroying spoilers follow.
The game starts by presenting itself as a standard dating VN, and this is where this being my second visual novel EVER was sort of not the brightest idea on my part - but I couldn't have made that determination without game-destroying spoilers, and I went into this only knowing that (a) it was horror (b) the cheerful dating-sim-looking cover art. I will say that at least I'd played Coming Out on Top and been subjected to Joe's high school/college romance anime tastes, so at least I had a general idea of the tropes. (Look, he made me watch all of Love Hina, one of the most boring anime on the planet. At least Ouran Host Club was really funny, but I guess it helped that OHC is a deconstruction.) Also Joe is the one who keeps having to explain to me the difference between a yandere and a tsundere, two terms I am incapable of keeping straight.
The premise is that your childhood friend Sayori, who has a crush on you, convinces you to join a Literature Club. The game introduces its major overt mechanics, which is "writing poetry" by selecting keywords from a list to appeal to each of the four "available" girls: outwardly genki Sayori, who proves to be masking depression; the confident Monika (later revealed as a? villain); grumpy Natsuki with her abusive father who STARVES and HITS her; and pretentious Yuri with her love of horror and knives and increasingly out of control cutting habit. (Sorry, I couldn't stand Yuri, and I get to say this because in high school I was the pretentious git.)
I have to add here that the characters are "probably" less unhinged in the "good ending" that I lacked the patience to play to reach. (I reached one of the? bad endings.) Because the fourth-wall-breaking shtick is that Monika falls in love with you (the player, not the PC) and edits the other characters to make them unlikable so you'll fall for her and then resorts to deleting them. I got to a? bad ending by deleting Monika in turn in the simulated filesystem. I was playing this on the Switch - the TV Tropes page seems to say that if you're playing on e.g. a Windows machine you actually have to go in and delete files the regular way???
Anyway, horror moments: the "club" seems normal up to the point that Sayori commits suicide after confessing her feelings for you; this happens whether you say you love her back or say you think of her as a friend, so it's a railroaded event. I believe Yuri stabbing herself after her SUPER UNHINGED obsessed love confession, ditto. Natsuki has unhinged moments. Monika of course reveals herself as OBSESSED and UNHINGED in that bit where she "traps" you with her after deleting everyone/everything else - I finally figured out that she would go on rambling foreeeeeever unless I quit out and Did Something Different. In my case, deleting her "character file" - hilariously, I have used Ren'py so I should have known better, but also that was in 2015, so it's not like I remember anything about syntax or filename conventions or whatever.
BTW, I got BADLY fooled during Sayori's suicide scene because there's a bit scripted in the game where it shows a fake runtime error along with a comment from Monika. This happened almost EXACTLY after I took a screenshot (I wanted to see if I could screenshot staticky video) so I assumed it was a REAL bug caused by the screenshot and didn't understand its significance until Joe (who has been spoiled for this game - he doesn't do horror so he didn't care about being spoiled) explained it to me. :p
So, I enjoyed the horror bits - this is my jam and these are types of horror content that I can do. (Among other things, I am functionally immune to suicide/suicide ideation as a content note.) And I was in a horror mood anyway.
What worked less well for me was the OMG SO MUCH REPETITION. I understand why it's in there as a design decision, because the slight divergences add up and pile on and come up at unexpected moments and should in principle add up to a sense of dread. I am afraid that my reaction after running through XYZ dialogue or the nth time, or dealing with some rando monologue, was to just put the Switch down and go off to do something else more enjoyable. I especially found myself wishing that the poetry word choice mechanic had been slimmed down a bit - picking 12 words I could have dealt with; having to pick 20 times over and over and over became tedious. I was whining to Joe, Do I have to go through this AGAIN to get to the "final" good ending and he just looked at me and said, You never HAVE to play a game, especially if it's not fun! So after I hit the reset "bad end" where Sayori becomes club president and takes Monika's place as The Unhinged (An Unhinged?), I gave up and hit up the TV Tropes page.
That said, the fourth-wall-breaking and metatextual commentary and "glitches" are really clever! I think a lot of the pacing/repetition stuff may just be me - I have SO LITTLE tolerance for repetition and I get bored very easily, and I bet it worked a lot better for other players.
I'm very glad to have played this game, even though parts of it made me impatient and even though a deconstruction is really going to work better for someone who knows the actual tropes better!
