Yes, I played the whole thing. All 4 endings. Having played it now, I'm totally unsurprised at the positive reception here (and on the broader internet) due to being written halfway-decently moment to moment, but man, y'all got fuckin psyopped into thinking a game about “fixing" an enby into being your doting submissive wife was good!

Ok, short review out of the way: Snoot Game is a parody/anti-fan-game of Goodbye Volcano High, a game which, as I am writing this review, is still a month or two off from release. GVH looks to be a story-driven graphic adventure game in the same indie niche as games like Night in the Woods and Life is Strange, and despite not being out, has earned quite a lot of ire from places on the net like 4chan. This revulsion is due to the fact... that it's a queer, furry, narrative-heavy game that showed up for a mere 1 minute and 35 seconds in some livestreamed PS5 showcase event. This bitter outrage and derision at something so mundane is nothing out of the ordinary for chanboards, but what followed was, at least in terms of scale.

Enter: Snoot Game. I’m not sure at what point in the development process they decided to focus on the de-transing and courting of Fang over making a “based” version of GVH, but in terms of playtime, this switch seems to happen somewhere about an hour or two into the game. This first section is pretty obviously terrible in a multitude of ways that’re impossible to ignore: the first line of text is a January 6th joke, which is followed up within a minute by the MC (named “Anon”) attempting to troll on a chanboard on his phone, there’s a teacher who speaks with a “comically” over the top Japanese accent (not pictured: the protagonist being like “huh? I can’t understand a single word this guy is saying…”). There is also a lot of blatant trans and enby-phobia on display in this section, from the protagonist accusing Fang of identifying as NB for attention to the constant mental misgendering of Fang with she/her pronouns (a trend which carries across pretty much the entire game, except for a short stint in one of the bad endings). Fang is shown as being short-tempered, rebellious, and is part of a band that sucks at playing music. Their bandmates and Fang’s only other friends at the school are a fentanyl addict, and a manipulative (rolls eyes) SJW Feminazi girl who goes around beating people up to let off her anger. This section also contains probably the single best “gotcha” moment against the writers of this game that I have ever seen within the span of only two textboxes, in the form of the MC complaining about the grammar of using singular “they” while also making two grammatical errors themselves within a single sentence.

But this section is just the opener and is, for the most part, the most spectacularly (read: obviously) bad Snoot Game gets. I think a lot of the people who shit on this game played or saw someone play this section, threw up their hands, and moved on. But not me! However, contrary to popular opinion that the rest of this game is “actually surprisingly heartwarming”, It’s also really bad, but in a much subtler and more insidious way.

There are lots of little things in which the game attempts to force you to accept its worldview to function. I already mentioned the internal monologue only referring to Fang with she/her, but as the story progresses, basically everyone in the game except the most "harmful influences" (Fang's 2 friends I mentioned earlier) switches to using she/her with no fanfare, including Fang's own brother. By the time you meet Fang’s parents everyone’s already switched to it, but they throw in the caveat of deadnaming Fang as well and reiterating that Fang is “just going through a phase” (something that the game later just tells you outright is true).

The sole SJW character from earlier, Trish, is probably the most blatantly propaganda-ish—she is also the only black-coded character, you know, just by happenstance (also Anon says she texts in “ebonics” in ending 1? which just doesn’t make any sense under the worldbuilding here, where species is just a substitute for race mostly? Very odd to fuck up your worldbuilding just to have your MC call something “ebonics”). In a particularly telling sequence of events, she pulls off a heist to embarrass Anon in front of everyone at school for the sole purpose of outcasting him from the band’s friend group, a tactic which succeeds at embarrassing Anon but fails at cleanly removing him from the friend group, as he takes Fang with him, something that Trish is shown at multiple points to be extremely angry about. This cements her (again, probably the only vaguely actively queer-positive main character left in the story at this point) as the “villain”, or at least, the single worst influence on Fang as a person.

There are 4 endings in Snoot Game (Spoilers from here on out! If you care about that, which you shouldn’t.), and only 2 in which Fang remains nonbinary. Of these endings, there is one where Fang shoots up the school, and the other leaves Fang (presumably) depressed, “looking like a junkie”, and with (gasp) tattoos, black lipstick, and a shaved head. During this second ending, which takes place 4 or 5 years after the events of most of the game, Anon thinks to himself that “I couldn’t save her (sic). Why would I save her? In her infinite talent can’t she see she’s a dump?”. Aside from the fact that all of Anon’s conclusions in ending 2 about Fang’s mental state are assumed to be true despite him having only seen them in passing at a restaurant (maybe Fang was just having a bad day or something, you never know), the only 2 endings which allow Fang to be nonbinary are also shown to be the “worst”. Take note of this!

In the other 2 endings, Fang switches back to using their old name (again, this is 4chan-written, so despite everyone else having birthnames like “Naser” and “Trish”, Fang’s birth name is “Lucy”. Real creative.) In these endings, Fang tells you something between that they were pretending to be nonbinary for attention, or that Trish drove them into it. (sidenote: Anon is able to switch almost instantly to calling Fang “Lucy” in both of these endings, despite only ever having known them as Fang. And yet switching names is simultaneously shown as something too confusing and hard for Fang’s parents to do. Interesting.) These are also the “best” endings. In one, Anon reunites with Fang years later and they have settled into a “motherly but still available” role helping out kids at the local church, so basically, the tradwife ending. And in the other one, and also the “best” ending in the game, Anon and Fang date for the rest of the year, break things off temporarily when Anon attends college, reunite after a time-skip and get married. Also, Fang is a schoolteacher in this one, which further reinforces the idea that for Fang to be happy, they need to not only detransition, but they need to take up the “traditionally female” role of being a caretaker. (Also, in one of the endings, you get the context that before Fang “started this whole non-binary deal” they were happier then too, so there’s another data point to correlate, I guess.)

Look—there’s nothing inherently wrong about writing a wish fulfillment romance story about a dominant and self-confident white guy finding his submissive caretaker white wife and living happily ever after. You do you bro. But there is something pretty fucky about presenting a traditional lifestyle as the ONLY path to happiness. And there’s something Extremely fucky about doing this by taking a queer character from someone else’s story, making your story about how de-transing them is the only way they can achieve happiness, and then releasing your story early in the hopes that your fanon interpretation supersedes whatever actually happens in the original source material.

But probably the most fucky is that a lot of this is subtextual and clearly is easily ignored by most, which allows its ideas to spread. Do not take me lightly by my saying that Snoot Game is propaganda, because it is. By word count, most of this game is just standard faire SoL wish fulfillment fantasy. Anon goes stargazing with Fang in one route, he goes to an aquarium with them in another. Normal shit. It’s just coupled with the added caveat of, you know, the whole arc of the game being dependent on the presumption of many of its characters that Fang’s trans-ness is just a phase, and that this presumption is ultimately proven correct. The shot is, (really, any number of bigotries, but most predominantly) transphobia and NB erasure, with SoL romance as a chaser. Again, really insidious shit.

This is why I feel uncomfortable giving this anything more than a 1/10. Snoot Game is generally paced well, has a lot of surprisingly decent music, and a lot of very well-done illustrations, but in service of what? Of fulfilling a delusional fantasy of “solving” someone’s trans-ness? Of spreading the idea that “if I just get them to fall in love with me, I can save them from their wicked ways (being queer)!” And of also spreading the idea that queer people are mentally ill and doomed to loneliness, lest they renounce their ways? Fuck riiiight off.

I genuinely thinks it says something about the degree of confidence you have in the texture and atmosphere of your own stages when one of the music options is "stage ambiance". The graveyard, the burning house, the war-torn bay... there's just something so dramatic but understated about all of these locales and I love it. Also any fighting game with a dedicated counter button is good in my book. Low-level play in this game looks like you and your friend countering at the same time and then continuing to do that four or five times before one of you gives up on the bit and attacks

The curtain falls on the Edo period, signaling the dying gasps of the samurai. Capping off two centuries of nationally recognized peace, the dawn of the Meiji Restoration saw the formal shuttering of the Tokugawa Shogunate and, in practice, the extinguishing of the samurai as a social class. As the country's foreign policies shifted, and an influx of Western ideas flowed into the formerly isolationist nation, the historical warrior of Japan’s past became a relic, both of the Warring States period and of the daimyo structure of feudal Japan. Finally without real meaning, the samurai of old were cast aside, left only as a remnant of the nation’s past, relegated to history books and academic study.

The fictionalized samurai, seen in SNK’s Samurai Shodown, is immeasurably brave, impossibly strong, a personified force of nature fit to confront demons and gods alike. This dramatization, of the samurai as more than a sword for hire to a high-paying daimyo, solidified their place in fiction, continuing the legacy of the bushi class through the modern day. But when we remove the pomp and circumstance, excise the bombast of gods, devils and demons, what remains? With no one to lead them, and stability leading to stagnation, where does that leave the wandering ronin at the end of an era?

Last Blade 2 is a double-sided blade, both a celebration and vigil to the samurai, showcasing the elegance and grace found in the tension of combat while reflecting on the mundane lethality of swordplay. As swords clash, the conflict is not scored by epic orchestras, but by the howls of wind, the crackle of a roaring fire, the voiceless bustle of a trodden dirt road. Each battle, a constant push towards retaining the way of the warrior against the sands of time, is foregone; if the fight itself doesn’t kill the combatants, time is sharpening the knife angled at their way of life. With the end of days in mind, they fight simply to prove it meant something. Without leaders, without a kingdom to defend or a war to die in, the samurai lives and dies through their sword. A final farewell to a remnant of history, Last Blade 2 tells apocryphal tales of beauty and bloodshed, a bittersweet finale to a bygone age.

must things be "good?" is it not enough to have consumed it during a weirdly vulnerable and foundational time in one's youth and promptly have it set a precedent for what one seeks out in other works of fiction going forward?

i'm not sure if katawa shoujo is entirely worth reading in this day and age; it is in almost every way a product of its time and place. its popularity was most likely spurned by a bunch of young dudes from /v/ expecting a funny little game with crass humor and walking away from it having genuinely felt something from a piece of media from the first time. again, time and place — in today's era of brutal honesty about commitment to fiction and fandoms wearing their investment in their favorite stories proudly on their sleeves, it may seem quaint at best and downright questionable at worst. but back in 2012 when the abstract concept of "feels" was all a lot of people really had to describe what this game and many other period-piece jp media had done to them, it was something truly special.

in many ways, it still is — at least to me. rin was my first favorite-ever character and probably my first hint that i was autistic was how much i related to her route at the tender age of 14. it set a precedent going forward for my investment in character writing above all else in fiction, and i really can't imagine where i would be without it.