Platforms: Linux, MacOS, PC
Release Date: September 22, 2017
Publisher: Team Salvato
Developer: Team Salvato
First off, and a little bit of a potential spoiler, this article contains topics and discussions involving mental health, self-harm, and suicide, so I just want to put that out there before we go any further.
I forgot where I first heard about Doki Doki Literature Club, but it must have been sometime close to the game's release because I feel like I have known about it for almost 10 years despite it being less than four years old. All I knew about the game before starting was that it was a visual novel that played against player expectations and that there were some horror elements to it. When playing, I did not use any walkthroughs* and I played through as blindly as possible, and honestly, I was not expecting to be as entertained and uncomfortable as I was. And I loved it!
And from here on out, there are going to be spoilers (even more so). Just saying.
If I was going to compare Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) to anything, it would be that it was similar in tone to the film Audition by Takashi Miike. Both stories start out in one camp (romantic and light-hearted) but end in very different places (horror), and that is about it. How the stories unfold are very different, the message in each is different, how the antagonist antagonizes is very different and the final outcome is different. So why bother even bringing up Audition at all if I am not going to spend the next XXX words comparing the two? Because that is not the article I want to write and this brief comparison by title is the quickest way of conveying what DDLC was like for me. So moving on now.
The game starts out like a lot of visual novels with picking the name for you as a character who does not have their own image or avatar for this story, which is not overly important but I felt it worth mentioning. The player is introduced to the character's best friend Sayori and you find out that you are both in high school and it is that time of year when students apparently find clubs to join; it has been a while since I was in high school so I do not recall if this was a thing, or at least it was not at my high school in California in the mid-1990s. The game mechanics are similar to a lot of visual novels in that you click the mouse/press enter to move the dialogue, never requiring the player to actually read all of the text, but being me I read all of the text because why bother playing this type of game? Every once in a while there are choices to make that can slightly alter the trajectory of the story.
DDLC is split up between being in school at the literature club meetings, and after school writing poetry in the barest possible form. You pick one word from a list of 10 possible words on each page 20 times to complete your poem and you present your poem to the other club members the following day. You never actually see what the poem is that you wrote, but when you choose words, avatars of three of the members pop up when you select a word for your poem that they themselves like. Sayori tends to like words associated with (I think, so don't hold me to it if I'm wrong) romance and relationships ("fireflies," "daydream," "together"), Natsuki likes stereotypical cute things like "Anime," "Cheeks," and "Kawaii", and Yuri likes more complex words like "Vitality," "Determination," and "Variance." The club president, Monika, did not have an avatar that would react, which I felt fine with because having three possible relationtionship options did not feel overwhelming. By the end of the first day, this was when I at least first noticed that things were slightly askew. Words like "Massacre," "Suicide," and "Scars" dot some of the pages but the characters do react when the words are selected so how your poem is written will determine how a character reacts to you and your poem the following day.
During the club meetings, the poems are shared and you pick who you want to share your poem with in the order that you want. During my playthrough(s) I only encountered one instance of the order having an effect on the characters and their reactions playing out, presumably, different than if I had gone with a different order. On my first playthrough, I found that I was focusing my poem style and choices more with Yuri partly because I can relate to being a semi-awkward person, an introvert, being anxious about sharing things that I have created, and reading anything in front of a group of people. During the poem writing sections though, especially after the first day and figuring out which words would have an effect on which characters, I still tried to have a varied selection favoring each character, never writing a poem that used all words that Sayori or Yuri would find pleasing. This ended up leading me down the Yuri path and as in any game that is (partly) based around relationships, pushed my character away from other relationships. During those interactions with Yuri, there were some indications that she self-harmed although the reasons behind it were never made clear.
I do not have many screenshots from the end of my first playthrough because they would have contained some major spoilers, but the game did lead me to this pivotal decision here. This was one of the few times I saved my game so that I could see both reactions and then decide on the one that I felt the best about. In this dialogue with Sayori, I ended up deciding on "You'll always be my dearest friend" after Sayori confessed her love for my character. I did first go with my final choice because I felt that admitting that my character loved someone, even a close and lifelong friend would be disingenuous if I was playing towards having a relationship with Yuri. Sayori had already expressed feelings of severe depressions and attachment anxiety so I felt that I did not want to feed into her feelings by giving her the answer that she wanted without consideration of my own character's feelings; something about lying to a person with this type of attachment seemed wrong if it was not what my character was feeling. As I said, I did also choose the "I love you" option but did not feel great about that interaction partly because the relationship I was building with Yuri seemed to be coming along, so I reloaded my save file and continued with just being dearest friends.
Well, let us just say that that option ended up going in a direction that I was afraid of, and when the time came to reading everyone's poems the following day in the club, Sayori had submitted her poem but had not attended school herself. When I read the poem, I definitely had an "Ah fuck" sinking feeling, but I continued the story along with the choices I had made because I wanted to see how it would all play out, plus I did not feel that I had made the wrong choice in a two-choice game.
By this point, there were no additional choices and I watched along as my character checked up on Sayroi only to find that she had killed herself. This was a strange feeling, partly because this was supposed to be a childhood friend, someone who was suffering from depressing and possibly other symptoms that were not disclosed to the player, but also because it felt like it was a death that was caused because I decided that my character did not want to be with Sayroi, that her life hinged on wether or not she could be in a relationship with the my character. That did not sit too well with me. So the game ended, really without much in the way of resolution between my character and Yuri or any of the other club members, and I was taken back to the title screen where I decided to load my previous save file after telling Sayroi "I love you" only to find that all my save files had been deleted.
This was strange, but then I recalled an interior monologue from my character saying "This isn't some game where I can reset and try something different," which seemed pretty fourth wall breaking and meta, but since my character had previously been reluctant to join a club and would rather instead stay home to play video games after school, the quote didn't really seem too out of place (although not so not out of place that I didn't take a screenshot of the text). So since I was not able to reload a save, I thought I would start a new game and make some different choice in poem word choice, and maybe focus on Sayroi to see how that story would unfold alongside the relationships with the rest of the club members.
But then stranger things started happening. When I started a new game, there was a glitch, but it felt programmed, like it was supposed to happen. During the opening when you would have first talked with Sayori on your way to school, there was only ??? and garbbled text instead of any written dialogue. Then there was some broken character art, some strange images came across the screen and I was brought back to the main menu, but Sayori's character was missing from the main menu, leaving only Yuri, Natsuki, and Monika. Then I started again and went through what felt like an abridged version of the opening of the game during my first playthrough, but with any mention of Sayroi removed, as if she did not exist in the game at all. The reason behind joining the literature club changed and upon entering the room where the meetings happened, there was another character glitch that put me on edge:
I did have a theory as to what was happening, why Sayroi was not being mentioned, the glitches, but I will get into that later.
This is where I am going to leave you before this article gets more out of hand in terms of length. I genuinely felt that I could cover it all in a single article especially if I did not go into all of the characters outside of their general introductions and left out a specific details with my interactions with the other club members, especially Sayori and Yuri. I will cover my second playthrough in Friday's article, so if this has piqued your interest at all, if you have made it this far and have not played or you have and just want to find out how I ended up finishing the game as I have read that there are multiple endings depending on the choices you make in the first and subsequent playthroughs, then please come back because I have more to share about this game.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
Instrumental
No comments:
Post a Comment