A while before the Wii U came out, I had sort of a feverish obsession with the crumbs of information we'd get on Miiverse, it came out 2 weeks later in Europe than in the US so I'd do a lot of digging through what it was like through YouTube demonstrations.
I already had a fascination for system UIs and I missed out on Flipnote so despite how drab and boring the idea must've been to average PC forum users that already had access to these things and then some, all of this was radically new to 12 year old me that was conditioned to be wary of befriending people online.
Maybe it was the assurance Nintendo could never pull off something like this without enforcing some pretty serious rules and moderation, something which proved to not really work out.
In retrospect it's not like there hadn't been weird things going on with Swapnote either from a year prior. Tough to forget the one weird incident I had where I asked someone how to get what I found out later was a US-only feature only to get some snarky Foul Language:TM:-filled response, I don't even remember what they were because I didn't understand them, I just intuited the meaning.
I guess the point is is that experiences like this stick with you, and I do get the want to revisit this weird fragment in time where mostly sheltered Nintendo kids clash with a niche novelty social media specifically made with them in mind, I mean I was sold on that premise alone as someone who was there but quickly drifted off of it, but it thankfully runs quite a bit deeper.
The Hypnospace Outlaw comparisons have already been made and I get it, but it feels like a serious disservice to how different this feels and especially the stories they tackle.
Hypnospace sees you as an omniscient lurker with authority above all else, there is no interacting with any of the subjects you're presented with, Videoverse however wants and practically pleads you to talk to other people, it borders on emulating the feeling of being 15 and trying to play as everyone's internet therapist because that's just kind of how it was for a not insignificant amount of people.
The Miiverse nostalgia is there but it's mostly to get you comfortable until it starts dishing out moral quandaries and questions of privilege and class, the things that sheltered above middle class Nintendo kids might never think about otherwise (I know who you are, I used to be you,, at least more than I still sorta am!!)
I would never call it aggressively confrontational or bitter about any of it though, there's a gentle pace to it and it's certainly not the kind of VN to just pull a bait and switch and have that define its entire identity.
It's not interested in villainizing the protag for not understanding the wider problems hitting his friends, there's too much kindness injected into Emmett for that to be the case, at least in my playthrough.
It's very hard to not feel for him because most of what I like to think I do is help people through talking but the barriers between make it really hard to do anything substantial besides being there. It's evolved to being there financially for people too over the past 2-ish years but it's not out of any higher-class guilt on my part, most of the time I wouldn't know what to do with it otherwise.
I'm sure all of this is making this game seem like a hodgepodge lesson in people having problems, truly shocking and riveting but I just needed to get that all out of the way because above all else, the character dynamics really grabbed me. There were multiple times it would remind me of actual conversations I've had with people, times where I or someone else was down or even just talking about interests and weird tangential things, there's a realness to it that feels true to the era it's depicting and it's just really really nice that a game like this manages to balance the dorkiness and raw enthusiasm of video game fans with the emotional reality of having life happen around you and everyone else.
It brought me back to the things I really wish I could've had, to go to cons with friends that care very passionately about the same dumb things I do, warts and all, it really really made me want to draw again which I've already been having a go at for a bit but this uplifted that so much more, the experience of having a bunch of ragtag friends to make art with, original or fan-made has always been the ultimate dream and even if I didn't manage to connect with everyone in Videoverse (as it felt about as situational as it does in real life), the ones I did were amazing, and they felt very real, because it's hard not to see my own friends in them.
I already had a fascination for system UIs and I missed out on Flipnote so despite how drab and boring the idea must've been to average PC forum users that already had access to these things and then some, all of this was radically new to 12 year old me that was conditioned to be wary of befriending people online.
Maybe it was the assurance Nintendo could never pull off something like this without enforcing some pretty serious rules and moderation, something which proved to not really work out.
In retrospect it's not like there hadn't been weird things going on with Swapnote either from a year prior. Tough to forget the one weird incident I had where I asked someone how to get what I found out later was a US-only feature only to get some snarky Foul Language:TM:-filled response, I don't even remember what they were because I didn't understand them, I just intuited the meaning.
I guess the point is is that experiences like this stick with you, and I do get the want to revisit this weird fragment in time where mostly sheltered Nintendo kids clash with a niche novelty social media specifically made with them in mind, I mean I was sold on that premise alone as someone who was there but quickly drifted off of it, but it thankfully runs quite a bit deeper.
The Hypnospace Outlaw comparisons have already been made and I get it, but it feels like a serious disservice to how different this feels and especially the stories they tackle.
Hypnospace sees you as an omniscient lurker with authority above all else, there is no interacting with any of the subjects you're presented with, Videoverse however wants and practically pleads you to talk to other people, it borders on emulating the feeling of being 15 and trying to play as everyone's internet therapist because that's just kind of how it was for a not insignificant amount of people.
The Miiverse nostalgia is there but it's mostly to get you comfortable until it starts dishing out moral quandaries and questions of privilege and class, the things that sheltered above middle class Nintendo kids might never think about otherwise (I know who you are, I used to be you,, at least more than I still sorta am!!)
I would never call it aggressively confrontational or bitter about any of it though, there's a gentle pace to it and it's certainly not the kind of VN to just pull a bait and switch and have that define its entire identity.
It's not interested in villainizing the protag for not understanding the wider problems hitting his friends, there's too much kindness injected into Emmett for that to be the case, at least in my playthrough.
It's very hard to not feel for him because most of what I like to think I do is help people through talking but the barriers between make it really hard to do anything substantial besides being there. It's evolved to being there financially for people too over the past 2-ish years but it's not out of any higher-class guilt on my part, most of the time I wouldn't know what to do with it otherwise.
I'm sure all of this is making this game seem like a hodgepodge lesson in people having problems, truly shocking and riveting but I just needed to get that all out of the way because above all else, the character dynamics really grabbed me. There were multiple times it would remind me of actual conversations I've had with people, times where I or someone else was down or even just talking about interests and weird tangential things, there's a realness to it that feels true to the era it's depicting and it's just really really nice that a game like this manages to balance the dorkiness and raw enthusiasm of video game fans with the emotional reality of having life happen around you and everyone else.
It brought me back to the things I really wish I could've had, to go to cons with friends that care very passionately about the same dumb things I do, warts and all, it really really made me want to draw again which I've already been having a go at for a bit but this uplifted that so much more, the experience of having a bunch of ragtag friends to make art with, original or fan-made has always been the ultimate dream and even if I didn't manage to connect with everyone in Videoverse (as it felt about as situational as it does in real life), the ones I did were amazing, and they felt very real, because it's hard not to see my own friends in them.