140 - Doki Doki Literature Club! (feat. Anne Huston)

if you want a visual novel that deals with Christian Guilt you should really check out xeecee's Misericorde (15th century nun mystery). To my knowledge the story is not finished yet but I highly recommend it between the art, the writing, the historical RESEARCH!!!!, and the music.

So very late on this and its very much focusing on a throwaway line at the beginning but its something I find interesting. Hatoful Boyfriend gets mentioned in passing as called an example where the twist on the formula was just doing something zany but still playing it by the book. Which is not actually what Hatoful Boyfriend is, it is in fact a game like Doki Doki or Frog Fractions where the is a surface level that conceals of a twist of something very different underneath and yet its a rare case where its reputation is almost entirely based on its surface level of the pigeon dating sim. There's a few reasons why the biggest is which is it simply hides its twist in very very deep, deep enough the average player will probably feel that they've gotten a complete expereince and finish playing the game long before ever finding it naturally. But the other factor is its surface level already seems like the twist on the forumla. If you just heard about a game like Doki Doki or Frog Fractions through the grapevine without being full spoiled you'd wonder, why were people talking about this and either leave confused or assume more is going on. Hell a common way you'll hear people trying to recommend these games without trying to spoil them is something to the effect of, just keep playing it till you understand why I would have recommended it. But if you heard about Hatoful Boyfriend through the grapevine what you find on that surface level is, hahan yeah that's a funny joke I see why people were talking about this. Nothing leads you to think there would be something more.

You could also look at Monica deleting the game as an extension of narcissism rather than a genuine good act. She can't have you so she's going to go full scorched earth and delete everything and frame it as "I'm doing something good for everyone, look how nice I'm being by flipping the chess board over"

I was really confused by the bit about no ARG? Not that I had the skill for it, but I thought MatPat did a ton on it and I thought all that analysis, or a bulk of it, came before +

A year late but: I am the one other guy that played through Contact. Really underrated!

Very trippy to hear y'all talk abt my couch (Greg) and address him like a person, usually only I do that

undertale was such a great experience if you got in on the ground floor. i remain frustrated that the genocide route is obviously intended to be punishing people who play games that way but still ultimately rewards those who finish it with important lore information and a special ending. it makes the point of it ring kind of hollow to me.

Fantastic episode! Played the game and loved it when it came out so many years ago and I haven't really thought about it since, so this was a great Kind of surprised that there wasn't more discussion of Monika actually being obsessed with the real person playing the game and not Greg the player character. There was this line that she says when you're stuck in the netherworld with her that she doesn't even know the gender of the IRL person she's talking to cause the base game assumes the player is a straight guy.

so a comment josh made towards the beginning about making a visual novel about christian relationship repression reminded me of an old errant signal video about a game called “We Know the Devil.” I haven’t played it myself, but it sounds right up that alley. It’s about three repressed queers talking to god and the devil at a bible camp.

Does anything happen if you make a copy of the first character that kills herself and put the copy back into the directory after it’s been deleted? I assume nothing but just curious if someone has tried it.

This was a great retrospective on a game that hit hard for me at the time, but which I haven't really thought about that much since then. I especially liked the point you got to near the end about how it handles the theme of treating relationships as instruments in one person's life. When I played it, I remember finding protag-kun's inner monologue really off-putting in a way that became interesting with the way he's explicitly distanced from the player and eventually discarded completely, but couldn't really articulate what made that work for me or how it applied beyond the "genre satire" lens. What you brought up there were the pieces I was missing back then. Also a funny sidenote: This game had fallen into the back of my mind so much that I didn't even consciously think about the fact that I was wearing a DDLC branded shirt while listening (the "I want breakfast" design from an Omocat collab around the peak of the hype) because it's just one nice t-shirt in my weekly rotation these days. Going for the ones with somewhat abstract designs instead of loud anime girl faces was probably the right choice.

Technically Ace Attorney is a series of Visual Novels.

Needs more Ong's Hat

Really good episode, but it was genuinely difficult for me to think about the game again. I played it completely blind at a point in my life where Sayori’s story hit especially hard. Only 7 years later am I actually realizing how deeply the game affected me.

i turned on the episode while in an uber without realizing my bluetooth earbuds had not paired to my phone, so my uber driver heard "cuckoldry," at full blast and chuckled about it. so thanks for that!!!

I feel like if you play enough visual novels, the VN acknowledging the different timelines and alternate paths as part of the narrative is so common, its a cliche. Especially if you're familiar with Kotaro Uchikoshi.

The dialogue physically engages my cringe response

Dramaturgy% speedrun time 1:00:50

Oh, also, I liked the break in this episode a lot more than AJ screaming at me about horse cum from another dimension.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a game I absolutely cannot engage with at all because of the way it not only presumes, but requires, buy in from the player on the idea of a romantic relationship with a girl as something interesting or desirable. I'm an autistic gay man. It's not. It never will and I've come to actively resent things built on a premise of "Well of COURSE you find these completely flat stock characters cute and want to date them just because they have tits and big cartoon eyes!".

Please….chill air service….save me chill air service…..metro please…. Save me….

Pop that kernel? 🪇👉🧸?

The Company of Myself was about a death of a spouse/mental health. I remember playing that in like middle school and it really hit me

I think I just turned my coworker onto your podcast. She's an actor, and when I told her that part of what you cover is this evangelical children's radio drama, she actually said "Oh my god, is it 'Adventures in Odyssey?'"

OH MY GOD! Just hit with memories of Asagao Academy, the dating sim/VN where you date weabified versions of IRL Gaming YouTubers, the Normal Boots boys! Back before all the drama and grooming and racism and money stealing was out.

Wonder if the creator was inspired by Giffany from Gravity Falls 🤔

I was not expecting this one

haven’t started watching this yet, just wanna say I’m terrified of whatever the ad is going to be.

we eatin good today girls also, if I may add a suggestion: it strikes me that you would like Signalis. It's very strongly horror, acknowledges the media that inspired it in a subtle way, has amazing worldbuilding, and an absolutely tragic story. The player choices matter, but there are no choices directly presented; rather, the way that the player interacted with the game determines the ending they receive.

If you like scary games to not have death as a mechanic I suggest looking into the work of Kitty Horrorshow on Itch, most of her games are free but the stand out is Anatomy which I think is under $5. It’s short, though you’ll want to play it through a few times.

Finally, some real fucking culture

londondere

see i remembered this game came out in 2017 because EYE played it in college! our video gaming club booted it up at like, 8pm on a sunday. we had it projected on a smartboard, and it was a slow playthrough bc we were doing the voices. as the hours ticked by, more and more people began peeling off and going to bed until it was just me and two other girls, sitting in the middle of a darkened classroom at 1am, screaming & clutching each other as monika slowly materialized

as someone who's probably deeper in the visual novel community (my vndb page linked https://vndb.org/u185013/ulist?f=&l=2&mul=0&s=3q2w), my perspective is probably pretty skewed, but while i like ddlc a good bit, i think its less revolutionary than a lot of people act like it is. i dont get the sense that salvato had actually played *that* many visual novels before making ddlc, and i think as a result some of what the game tries to do ends up missing for me, because i don't think it speaks to vns as much as maybe it thinks it is? i also think that, frankly, kimi to kanojo to kanojo no koi came first and did the premise better (although to my knowledge it wasnt translated to english until after ddlc came out). exciting to see ddlc discussed on here tho! would love to see other visual novels be discussed in the future, as unlikely as that may be. we know the devil and heaven will be mine would both make for very interesting discussions, and are about the same length if not shorter than ddlc

Oh dear, if it isn't cute media with a gut wrenching twist and suffering. My favourite! .

loved this as always!! utterly besides the point, but you guys should play Indika - very, very *your* shit vis-a-vis faith (orthodox catholicism), declining empire (devs are Russian exiles), and general profound oddness

Oh my. Now this is a blast from the very recent, yet distinctly past. I'm scared to find out what you're doing for an interstitial with this game, but here we go!