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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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DreamShipWrecked posted:I personally agree that act one is a much heavier hitter than act two, but it's probably largely because I've gone through/am actively going through the same kind of poo poo that Sayori dealt with and seeing it laid down so well hit me like a sledgehammer. It's implied that Monika's causing all the changes by messing with the game's code. However, it's also implied that she's not actually a very good programmer, and that all the weird glitches are a result of her ham-fisted attempts at reprogramming. "They went away to a big farm up state" is probably beyond her skill level.
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Feb 3, 2018 23:53
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