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What happens if you start the game without Sayori?
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Nov 6, 2017 08:46
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Deceitful Penguin posted:What happens if you start the game without Sayori? You get the hanging image of Sayori.
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Nov 6, 2017 08:50
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Cuntellectual posted:You get the hanging image of Sayori.
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Nov 6, 2017 08:53
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Game was okay. I don't think it's worth describing it as a horror game, more of a despair game. I was never scared, just left drained as the situation got worse and worse. As the end dialogue says, video games can never make you happy. It's a shame, because I liked the characters.
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Nov 6, 2017 10:40
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I agree with those here in that this game had a surprisingly well done depiction of depression. I also found the main character’s behavior towards the girls icky, but in a way that didn’t stand out from any other harem style visual novel. It bothered me but not as a reflection of this specific visual novel but rather as a reflection of the power dynamics in gender relations in nerd media. I wanted to read the game as a critique of that kind of thing, but someone said the dev is unironically a fan of harem visual novels so I suppose it’s just incidental. I feel like the game has a lot of nuance in many of the things it touched on. It being so un-subtle in many places let it be more subtle elsewhere. It really is a well-written work.
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Nov 6, 2017 21:45
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Finished this the other day. It was well-written in some parts, but somehow the overall structure ended up with less of an impact than I think it was going for. Team Yuri, tho.
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Nov 6, 2017 22:46
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Danger - Octopus! posted:Who the hell is going to buy and display that Yuri poster though? Me. I emailed the guy to ask about a signed copy.
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Nov 13, 2017 04:00
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Dan Salvato had a little interview with Siliconera about DDLC No talks about future projects, just explaining some things about the nature of the game.
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Nov 16, 2017 23:50
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Xibanya posted:I also found the main character’s behavior towards the girls icky, but in a way that didn’t stand out from any other harem style visual novel. It bothered me but not as a reflection of this specific visual novel but rather as a reflection of the power dynamics in gender relations in nerd media. I wanted to read the game as a critique of that kind of thing, but someone said the dev is unironically a fan of harem visual novels so I suppose it’s just incidental. I got the impression that being forced to act as Beavis was kinda driving home the powerlessness of it all - you can't save the girls, you cannot intervene and tell Monika you know what she's up to, you can't go constantly check on Sayori, you can't actually get Yuri therapy, you can't go and stop Natsuki's dad from beating her, and you can't do what I wanted to do which was poetry and literature talk with the characters. What legitimately got to me about the game is that I couldn't use my player power to fix the characters' lives and the ending was "lol it's futile delete em" EDIT: And I wrote all this and THEN read the dev interview where he spells this all out. Oh well. TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Nov 17, 2017 |
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Nov 17, 2017 06:56
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Lasher posted:Did I just have real weird "luck" there? Because during the whole last part New game without Monika, Sayori heel turn/game loving up and self deleting my internet shut off. JUST for that bit. As soon as it was done it popped back on. I was streaming this to a friend over discord and loudly freaking out during act 2 because I'm a baby, and at one point near the end of act 2 I said, "Help me!" My internet died for about 30 minutes immediately after, and when it came back my friend had left like 15 messages worried I had Actually For Real Died.
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Nov 29, 2017 20:52
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nyanners is streaming this game if you want to hear it read out by an anime voice actress. https://www.twitch.tv/nyannersz
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Nov 30, 2017 01:45
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Man have I got a soft spot for the Wheel poem. I don't know what it is about it but that creepy word salad has a strange allure to it I can't quite put my finger on.
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Nov 30, 2017 05:09
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Nechronic posted:nyanners is streaming this game if you want to hear it read out by an anime voice actress. I log in just as Sayori is confessing via depression. So much for having a happy day.
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Nov 30, 2017 05:34
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Nyanners' playthrough was pretty great. She basically did voice acting for the whole game, except with a little effort instead of the usual monotone that streamers do. Her reactions to the scares were good too even when it was laughing at Yuri's suicide. "Look, she's so happy! Oh no she's too happy!!" I second the sympathy for Monika. I really can't hate her. She's burdened with the knowledge that her whole existence is fake. One of her chats is about how you don't feel bad killing characters in a video game, right? So she doesn't feel bad doing these things to the other girls. Since they're not real to her. I almost feel worst for Natsuki though? Her trauma is realistic, her coping mechanisms are realistic, and she doesn't even have the chance to go crazy. She's the most reasonable to the end and she still gets deleted. Edit: Also now realizing how low-key lovely Monika is in some of the chats? "Don't think about how you could've saved Sayori. Because you totally could've, and didn't." HellCopter fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Dec 5, 2017 |
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Dec 4, 2017 18:09
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HellCopter posted:Edit: Also now realizing how low-key lovely Monika is in some of the chats? "Don't think about how you could've saved Sayori. Because you totally could've, and didn't." I think that’s more along the lines of saying, “The only winning move is not to play, but what happens to me, then?”
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Dec 5, 2017 06:56
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:What legitimately got to me about the game is that I couldn't use my player power to fix the characters' lives and the ending was "lol it's futile delete em" I think that's an important theme to the game, really. In the vast majority of games, the player is the Prime Mover, the one who makes the decisions and changes the course of the world. In harem games everyone falls in love with the player, or could do if he decided to pursue them - all he needs to do is to take his pick. In RPGs, the gameworld is usually depicted as being kind of a crapsack world unless the player intervenes in a community's given problems, at which point everything becomes awesome. Bioware in particular also has a thing for "nobody has any personal development or tries to fix their own problems unless the player decides to intervene with a helping hand and/or encouraging words." They're power fantasies, not only in the sense that you're raining fire and blood on your enemies (though you are doing that, usually), but in the sense that the fate of the world is yours to dictate and every character in the world is merely an obstacle towards your personal goals. DDLC is a game where the player has as much agency as the average NPC in other games, and all real choices and decisions are in the hands of an NPC. Literally nothing the player can do makes any difference - you're shunted along the story without a choice, while Monika does her best to derail that story. It's very much a reversal of roles, though even this is notable since the character with the most agency is still fighting a losing battle against the game's script. There is one key exception to the player's lack of agency, though - deleting Monika's file. This requires a degree of agency that goes above and beyond what most games provide in that you're not just accepting one option out of a set that the game gives you, you are actively making a decision that the game doesn't openly offer you. There's nothing stopping you from accepting Just Monika as the end of the game, you have to decide that you don't want this status quo, figure out how to overturn it, and then go through the relatively involved process of doing so outside of the confines of the game itself. That's much more powerful a choice than picking the Paragon option instead of the Renegade option. And yet even this choice is hijacked by Monika in the end when she decides to burn everything down because she thinks it best, regardless of what the player might have thought or might want. So yeah. Interesting commentary/subversion of player agency.
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Dec 5, 2017 10:35
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Is there an intended order for which people to hang out with? I went with the book girl the first time and uh rip I wont be seeing sayori anymore
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Jan 10, 2018 22:58
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brand engager posted:Is there an intended order for which people to hang out with? I went with the book girl the first time and uh rip I wont be seeing sayori anymore No.
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Jan 10, 2018 23:04
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https://twitter.com/dansalvato/status/953040619915567104
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Jan 16, 2018 01:15
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I've gotten a bunch of unsuspecting folks who buy stuff through me to get this and give it a go. Nobody's hated it so far, so it's sticking to that 97% positive trend it's got on steam! When recommending it to folks, the best way I've found is to say "don't give up on the game until you make it to the school festival. Only a few in-game days in." Worked every time so far. I got around to this a bit ago and I loved the poo poo out basically every aspect of the game, and most of my compliments have been covered by other folks. Unfortunately due to my cynical nature and familiarity with "just trust me" recommendations combined with the warning at the start, I knew some poo poo was going to go down, and it was really obvious to me Monika was up to something really early on. I got a sense something was wrong with Sayori really quickly too, though nothing stood out to me for natsuki/yuri until their initial reveals of their background issues. And the INSTANT Sayori's facade started to crack, I knew she was dead. Her death still bothered me quite a bit though. I still do not like/trust Monika simply because her excuses for her actions are weak considering the horrific things she does, though I do find her an incredibly pitiable, sympathetic character. She's far more fitting for the yandere trope than any of the other characters, I've seen people describe Yuri as yandere and she's...not at all. Like yeah she's creepily obsessed, but her break moment of killing herself when overwhelmed with emotion rather than doing anything to you or the others says to me she was stopping herself from doing anything bad to her friends, whereas Monika just went whole hog in on the nightmarish puppetmaster gimmick. Some of her conversations in the finale really solidify that she's not just troubled with her place in the world, but that she's also rather hosed up period. The entire conversation about Sayori clinches it. Really, my one singular complaint is the lack of Natsuki stuff, considering how much play Yuri gets throughout. A Natsuki version would've been interesting(and likely emotionally crushing). Oh, and the Game Grumps did an LP of DDLC and it's absolutely fantastic, what with them doing a lot of voices. Arin goes in completely spoiled as the player, while Dan is brought in 100% blind, and seemingly isn't shown the warning at the start either. full playlist first episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkG9Y-f7x50&hd=1 Now, keep in mind they've done multiple dating sims(specifically, Sakura series games) for their channel in the past, so Dan came in assuming it was another one of those. And so, when THAT happens, considering he is totally blind, his reaction is by far the best out there. Someone even animated it and the following scenes, and it's perfect(major spoilers obviously): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAcXNua5-DI&hd=1 Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 17:44
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Captain Invictus posted:I've seen people describe Yuri as yandere and she's...not at all. Like yeah she's creepily obsessed, but her break moment of killing herself when overwhelmed with emotion rather than doing anything to you or the others says to me she was stopping herself from doing anything bad to her friends Monika also seems to be forcing Yuri into that behavior, at least when things start going off the rails. Yuri seemed to realize that this wasn't how she should be acting, that it wasn't how she wanted to act, but that Monika was manipulating her and she couldn't stop it.
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Jan 24, 2018 20:03
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Paracelsus posted:Monika also seems to be forcing Yuri into that behavior, at least when things start going off the rails. Yuri seemed to realize that this wasn't how she should be acting, that it wasn't how she wanted to act, but that Monika was manipulating her and she couldn't stop it.
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Jan 24, 2018 20:21
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Knife + crazy eyes = yandere, in so far as anime fan thinking goes.
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Jan 25, 2018 07:54
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I loved this game because I was genuinely feeling massively uncomfortable with the fear of the unknown, and absolutely fascinated at the same time because of why everything was happening. Maybe i'm just a fan of different takes because the only other "visual" novels I played were VA-11-hall-A, and Pyre, and both of those games have mechanics like a visual novel, but are by no means about loving an anime gal. I think this game might one of my games of the year. Also the soundtrack is available on spotify, and this might sound stupid, I had chills just listening to the regular cutesy music. Best thing I can describe it, is like listening to Stuck in the middle with you, and associating it with the hosed up torture scene in Reservoir Dogs. I noticed that when that one scene where you are stuck waiting for the weekend to pass, the dialogue gets translated when you look at the history. and it seems pretty easy to miss. Fargin Icehole fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Jan 25, 2018 |
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Jan 25, 2018 08:36
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Paracelsus posted:Monika also seems to be forcing Yuri into that behavior, at least when things start going off the rails. Yuri seemed to realize that this wasn't how she should be acting, that it wasn't how she wanted to act, but that Monika was manipulating her and she couldn't stop it. She more or less states that a few times. I think one of the interesting aspects of the game is how much of it was how the characters "really" are vs. how they are "because of Monika". Natsuki and Yuri seemed to get along pretty well at the end, but that was also at a point where Sayori could have been screwing with them, so who knows? kirbysuperstar posted:Knife + crazy eyes = yandere, in so far as anime fan thinking goes. The game even makes fun of that with Monika describing herself then saying "Know anyone like that? Yeah that's right, it's Yuri!" I actually laughed at that.
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Jan 25, 2018 16:21
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Cuntellectual posted:I think one of the interesting aspects of the game is how much of it was how the characters "really" are vs. how they are "because of Monika". Natsuki and Yuri seemed to get along pretty well at the end, but that was also at a point where Sayori could have been screwing with them, so who knows? There's also the question of how much of their personalities are influenced by the game world itself. Monika talks a lot about the way they're all programmed, and a lot of what she says doesn't line up very neatly with the "also I just want to be with you FOREVER" bits. And the way Sayori changes when she takes Monika's place suggests that the game itself compels characters to act according to certain roles. I think a lot of what Monika does comes from whatever friction is caused when you jam a "real" person into the social meat grinder of a dating sim.
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Jan 25, 2018 17:44
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this is old, but is extremely good, the comments from japanese people(I'm guessing, since it's translated from japanese) are pretty amazing. Like the guy apparently saying the Americans have been influenced by Masamune Shirow and other 1990s styles, in regards to DDLC??? https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2017/10/10/76215.html&prev=search Has he confirmed plans to bring it out in Japanese/other languages? He mentioned it on the Salvato Productions twitter, but I don't think anything past that. Or is it still too early for something like that to be officially announced?
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Jan 25, 2018 21:41
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Jan 26, 2018 12:30
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Captain Invictus posted:this is old, but is extremely good, the comments from japanese people(I'm guessing, since it's translated from japanese) are pretty amazing. Like the guy apparently saying the Americans have been influenced by Masamune Shirow and other 1990s styles, in regards to DDLC??? I know some Japanese folks are working on a fan translation in the same way Undertale was initially fan-translated over there. I think it's mostly done.
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Jan 26, 2018 16:33
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Not having played any dating sims myself, I liked that Dan was gentle to the people who play dating sims because they're lonely (by making a happy-ish end and thanking the player). Despite Monika's lines about no happiness being there it didn't feel like the player was being put on trial. For all the hype the game gets for the wacky Monika stuff the best part is at the end of run-through 1 when you bake with Natsuki and poo poo gets way too real too quickly with both her and Sayori and Monika's acting weird and saying weird things you don't understand yet. That part gave a better sense of being out of control than Monika actually hijacking the game. Other favorite scene is when Monika tosses Natsuki a protein bar. No Wave fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Jan 26, 2018 |
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Jan 26, 2018 17:00
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One of the parts that hit me the hardest was Natsuki's poem that wasn't a poem, but a heartfelt letter begging you to try to help Yuri somehow. That, alongside the initial depictions of Sayori's depression and Yuri's cutting being played utterly straight and true to reality was horrifying, where as later on when Monika engineers them to go off the rails is terrifying, as opposed to horrifying.
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Jan 26, 2018 17:12
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this is pretty good. spoilers, obviously https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhn3iQxRsNo&hd=1
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Jan 29, 2018 00:41
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Yahtzee reviewed this. He was nicer to it than I expected. His main point was that the meta/creepypasta stuff was overplayed, and the high point was when things got 'real', which I would agree with.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:34
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Cuntellectual posted:Yahtzee reviewed this. He was nicer to it than I expected. also, I didn't make this connection until a friend I suggested the game to brought it up, but Yuri's not a cutter at all until the second half, right? I must have glossed over it when I played it, but one of the secret poems is about her very first cutting and "signing" it for you, during the second half. So that would make the sleeve-rolling bit during festival prep a red herring?
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Feb 1, 2018 21:15
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Cuntellectual posted:Yahtzee reviewed this. He was nicer to it than I expected. Me in the Doki Doki LP posted:
That should teach me. Mod edit: it would be smart not to spoil the game in a quote where you're talking about the benefits of playing the game blind Somebody fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 1, 2018 21:29
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Captain Invictus posted:
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Feb 1, 2018 21:32
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I think he even made a comment *in* a review once that he actually liked a game but he's not paid to say nice things, so
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Feb 1, 2018 21:33
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TheCenturion posted:It's strongly hinted at during the festival preparations, and through her original 'non crazy' poems, like The Raccoon. (You can run with us! I see passion in your eyes! Run with us! We are freeeeeee!) I think the secret poems should be taken as anachronistic 'out of character,' or 'out of normal play' or whatever, if for no other reason than they're randomly presented on any given playthrough. They're unlocks for the player outside of the game, as opposed to for the character, which can, thanks to Monika, be to the player, by extension. Besides, the poem I believe you're referencing, 'Today I cut my skin open for the first time. It was exhilarating. I think I understand how (redacted)Yuri(/redacted) feels now. I'm supposed to be the responsible one, though. So I don't think I'll be doing it again, unless I decide to kill myself. I left a moment of the occasion below.' only makes sense coming from Monika.
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Feb 1, 2018 21:46
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DeathChicken posted:I think he even made a comment *in* a review once that he actually liked a game but he's not paid to say nice things, so Yeah, I think it was Bioshock back in the day. He does streams of the game he reviewed that week after uploading a week's ZP video. He elaborated a bit on some of his thoughts there. Captain Invictus posted:I don't know, I think he gives the second half way too little credit. I've long stopped paying attention to Yahtzee since he's fallen for the trap of being angry at things attracting more viewers than being nice about things so he just overly harshly criticizes everything often at a surface level with the rare exception(also almost nonstop sexual innuendos throughout the review, c'mon son), but him just writing off the entire second half as woop woop wacky horrortimes/Undertale ripoff feels really disingenuous to me, especially his remarks about the Monika stuff. When you look at the wacky horror poo poo as Monika actively loving with the other character's personalities and core stories to try and steer you away from them like with rewriting Natsuki's line about not knowing what her dad would do if he saw her manga collection at home to MY DAD WOULD BEAT THE poo poo OUT OF ME IF HE SAW THIS, or EVERYTHING with Yuri in the second half, and my personal take on Yuri right before she killed herself was she was fighting against herself as she was rapidly losing control to whatever Monika was doing to make her go nuts(where she had the moment of clarity before descending back into obsession), and just offed herself either to stop herself from doing anything bad to anyone else or because Monika forced her hand. Natsuki's poem asking you for help definitely solidified the other characters as far more "real" than Monika made them out to be, since they still were cognizant and caring albeit not aware they weren't "real" without the presidential position. I think I'd agree about him not giving the second half enough credit, but I think a part of it would have been being overhyped about it. In the post ZP stream he and his co-streamer talked a bit about how Yahtzee looking out as a reviewer, with a consciously critical eye, would also made it harder to get immersed which is basically what the second half hinges on you being.
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Feb 1, 2018 23:25
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I agree with his point that first half is strongest, because it’s a story about people and pain. When it goes bleeding eyes horror, that’s just silly. Yuri’s suicide hurts though. I don’t really like the theme of part 2, where the very act of playing a vee en is an act of cruelty and domination over others. That is a fundamentally misanthropic statement. The solution is not to not consume stories, but to consume stories without any preconception that the player character gets to win other people.
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Feb 2, 2018 08:52
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