This review contains spoilers

Others can't understand.

It's hard to convey what I found so compelling about Momo's Diary. Perhaps it's because I've been having a pretty rough day today. Perhaps it's because it echoes something I've felt deeply with the journey into adulthood and growing with BPD in that friends who you haven't spoken with in a long time really truly do not understand the you you are now, only the you you were. Perhaps it's because I have been here before. Never at the point where I can't get out of bed, but definitely at points where I've felt I couldn't help myself anymore.

I find it hard to convey why I like this so much, though, because even though I resonate with it more than these other titles, it has a lot of the same things that made me dislike games such as Hello Charlotte and the Milk Bag duology. Games that I felt romanticized mental illness as much as they portrayed it accurately, to a particularly unhealthy extent in Hello Charlotte. There's something idealized about being a mentally ill little pretty doll. It's a fairly adorable way to be depressed. I'm not sure what's different about that than me taking umbrage with the girl in the Milk Bag games being a conventionally attractive anime girl.

Maybe it's only that she grows more and more resentful of her former friends as time soldiers on. When I graduated high school, I lost all the friends I had made throughout it. We never talk anymore, and when we do, I feel as if they understand me to be someone else entirely. The same thing with many online friends I've made. It's a very non-endearing trait for her to have. It's hurtful.

Nobody understands Momo, and she is hateful because of it. Sometimes I am too.

But I don't even understand myself.

Reviewed on Dec 27, 2022


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