It was a thursday at the Square Enix offices, after releasing Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus, Tetsuya Nomura was discussing with his team what would be their next step towards tarnishing Final Fantasy VII for cash. They did not know what else they could do, but then Hajime Tabata stormed into the room, proclaiming only two words:

"ZACK FAIR!"

The others raised their eyebrows. "Tabata-san, you are a genius!", says Nomura, as he gets off his chair and proceeds to ask for more details on Tabata's idea.

Tabata: We can make a game about the events that happened before FFVII, back when Cloud was only a generic Shinra grunt. The protagonist won't be him, though, I'm thinking about bringing Zack into the spotlight!

Nomura: Oh right, Zack! That guy from Cloud's flashbacks, the game really didn't tell much about him aside from Cloud's POV, huh.

Tabata: Exactly, we can make this cool prequel story about Zack, showing how things were before FFVII, exploring different facets of Shinra, the original game's characters, Zack's relationship with Aerith, even Sephiroth! We can humanize Sephiroth a bit and it will make people appreciate him even more!

Nomura: Hell yeah, and that's when we'll put Gackt in it!

Tabata: ... What?

Nomura: Don't you know Gackt? He's a japanese rockstar and the perfect model for my original FFVII villain! Gackt loves poetry and his dialogue will mostly be quoting lines from that play called Loveless because that makes him a deep and interesting character!

Tabata: Nomura-san, don't you think that's a bit silly? I mean, people just want to see the events surrounding Zack being expanded, there's no need to-

Nomura: And then we'll reveal that actually the one behind all the events that happened in the original game was Gackt! He's the one who caused Sephiroth to go bonkers and murder everyone in Nibelheim!

Tabata: Are you serious, dude?

Nomura: Also Zack will have a mentor.

Tabata: Fair enough... What's he gonna be like?

Nomura: He's like Zack but older, and 90% of his dialogue will be about honor.

Tabata: Oh for fuck's sake. What about Zack, then? Are you planning to turn him into some generic shounen hero or something like that?

Nomura: Yes.

Tabata: Goddammit... Can we at least make the gameplay engaging since the story is very likely to be utter shit?

Nomura: Sure thing, the gameplay will consist of walking on hallways and button mashing as you get buffs, limit breaks and even level ups randomly generated by this thing called DMW I've been thinking of.

Tabata: Sighs Can we at least make the ending good? It's Zack's death scene, after all, it needs to be impactful, maybe it will even trick people into believing the game is actually good just because of the lasting impact.

Nomura: Yeah sure, whatever.

Tabata: Okay then...

Don't you just hate it when a game railroads you into doing a certain thing to progress on it and then proceeds to try to make you feel bad as if you ever had any say on the matter? It's basically what Totono does in its attempt at deconstructing romance VNs, and it didn't click with me at all. Maybe it's aimed at people who self-insert into the protagonists of the VNs they play or something, but as someone who sees himself as merely an observer through the protagonist's point of view, I didn't feel bad for "cheating" on Miyuki with Aoi after promising I'll be faithful to her, because as far as I was concerned, the one who promised to be faithful to her was that route's version of Shinichi, and the one who went with Aoi never made any promises to Miyuki.

Even if I were to examine my actions as the player, all I did was just follow the path the game was setting up for me and then experimenting with the choices in the second playthrough. Should I feel guilty about that? And most importantly, should I feel sympathetic towards fucking Miyuki? Sure, I may have "cheated" on her, but she literally murders Shinichi, Aoi and even the cat who had nothing to do with any of this without any sort of remorse. She also attemps to gaslight me throughout the rest of the game, she manipulates and negatively affects the lives of everyone else for her own benefit, she's plainly a selfish cunt. I assumed Miyuki was the villain of the game much like Monika was in DDLC, but unlike Monika, Miyuki never takes responsibility for her actions, all she does is blame other people for the shit she pulls off and feels like the writers actually agree with that reasoning, even the ending was unsatisfying as hell because Aoi who hasn't really done anything wrong suffers the biggest consequence by disappearing from the game and everyone's memories, while it's heavily implied that Miyuki and Shinichi will get a happy ending together eventually.

What made me curious to check Totono out was the fact that VN weebs kept talking about how it's the "good version" of DDLC, some even accusing DDLC of ripping this off and shit. Obviously that made me create high expectations, since I liked the concept of DDLC but felt it could have been more fleshed out, but I felt especially let down in this case because DDLC arguably does the whole meta twist thing better than Totono by being more immersive with the files, the random glitches and that kind of stuff, it also has a better antagonist character that the game actually treats as such. Totono was probably the most disappointing VN I've played in a while, and while I wouldn't say it's necessarily bad, it has a handful of interesting moments and ideas, but they're misused for the most part.