i talked about this a bit in the comments to this review https://www.backloggd.com/u/TremiRodomi/review/103310#comments-header

honestly at first I thought he just wanted to make a cute little game that plays on the public's ignorance and preconceptions of VNs but I'm more unsure now after seeing the Kotaku article mentioned in there lol

https://kotaku.com/doki-doki-literature-clubs-horror-was-born-from-a-love-1819724999 (this one specifically)

Doesn't change the fact that DDLC reinforces the impression of VNs all being generic "waifu" dating sims and that this VN is somehow a "better" version of the format. I'll admit that I was wrong when I said that Salvato hates VNs, that isn't necessarily true but I still don't think that the game succeeds in being a loveletter to VNs.

Yeah, agreed. Just wanted to make the distinction that this wasn't necessarily made out of cynicism and more just a case of him not realising his game would blow up and accidentally be the face of VNs in the west for a good amount of time lol

(Someone commented before me pointing out the bit in the review saying "the writer clearly hates VNs" which is why I replied with that btw. Not clear now since they deleted)

"him not realising his game would blow up and accidentally be the face of VNs in the west for a good amount of time lol" That sounds like a reasonable explaination for how the game ended up like it is. Also I deleted that other guy's comment because it was annoying and unconstructive

I don't think the writer hates VNs blatantly, otherwise I'm curious as to why so much effort around this game that does lampshade some tropes from a few VNs and uses them around a character who does go through a somewhat genuine conversation around depression and suicide. I think, as stated by somebody else, that it's a combination of bad timing (in terms of the game getting super popular) and the writer possibly playing an anecdotal niche of VNs instead of a lot of VNs as a whole. I agree with the rest of the small review, though.

It really does consistently pain me, though, that this game has propagated an insane amount of "ironic" enjoyment around VNs as if VNs can't hold their own weight or there is no unironically good things about any of them, and the culture around the game feeding into this so heavily that I anecdotally have trouble recommending a VN to people whose only exposure to the genre is this game.

Honestly, I've seen a lot of people who had this as their gateway VN and went on to read more, so it probably depends on what they liked about it. But yeah, I agree with pretty much everything else said here.

(Also unrelated, but "lampshade some tropes from a few VNs" brought to mind a lot of people wondering if DDLC was inspired by Totono, an older VN that has a good amount of overlap. He's gone on record as saying he hadn't heard of it prior to making this)

shimokura has played the japanese fan tl of DDLC and thinks it's not very similar to totono, they just have ideas already present in the medium

this thread should read umineko instead of this :thumbsup:

Nha, just seabed or baldr or musicus

Umineko and Baldr are my top recs

I don't think Musicus is even in English yet lol
Have had Seabed and Baldr on the backlog for a while
Umineko is pretty amazing
Also love Muv-Luv Alternative and Subahibi a lot

Chaos child writer is also working on an anime I forgot the name of so that's good

definitely play chaos child or seabed instead of ddlc if you are tired of anime

Musicus is coming

I never started Chaos Child because I wanted to read Chaos Head and found myself bored by that

Chaos head sucks and you don't need to read it

The problem with chaos child would be, not every route matters to what it's trying to say and you have to read all of them (or watch a walkthrough and skip them like I did)

After you read it there's children's revive to read too

"short-term cashgrabs" - the game is free.

Also I view this game as more of a critique of the dangers of VNs for escapism. Similar to Undertale for rpgs, but that's just my take

@Door SSBM I said "one step above" that kind of VN. Of course I know it's free.

I'll be glad when this review goes off the recent reviews tab.

thanks yeah, game isn't sincere. like undertale it's a quick way for people to think like they understand an entire genre and thus feel superior to it.

hey do you guys think I should play ys i and ii next or some touhou 6

Ys II

@averypaledog I deleted your comment because it was shit lol.

thank you

ys 1 is definitely worth playing before 2 , v short and plays the same (both irritate me in different ways though)
touhou 6 is cool, i see those games as more just shit i play in downtime compared to actively playing though. even when going for 1ccs i was alternating between games personally

Touhou 6 is very unpolished and I don't get why it's recommended as an entry point into the touhou series so often (I guess it's just because it has the most popular character cast) but I still enjoy it a lot personally.

Agree that it's unpolished and yeah, most people interested will have probably had exposure to the characters, songs and setting in 6 more than anything else. I just normally add saying to check out 7/8/10 if 6 isn't doing it for them and that the series looks daunting but you can just dive into most of them with 0 commitment and start having fun. 6 does have a certain charm to it and I like it as well though

7 was my first touhou game. I only tried 6 after playing a few of the others beforehand.

i already kinda played 7 and 8 (on easy), and beat 15 on normal/pointdevice. now i just want to go through the windows series one by one to keep things simple. getting those normal 1cc's cant be THAT hard. right?

Once you 1cc about 3 of them the rest of the normal mode 1ccs will come pretty quickly, especially if you've 1cc'd LoLK legacy mode or SA on normal.