So, here's the thing. Monika is a fantastic antagonist. She is genuinely terrific, and this goes much deeper than her initial 'anime girl but creepy' persona when you reach the final act. At the end of the game, you're locked in a room with Monika at the end of the world. By this point, it seems like Monika is little more than a psychopathic yandere menace that needs to be taken down, an obvious threat that you want nothing to do with. You'd reasonably assume that given this point in the game - trapped in a room with a lovey-dovey serial for all eternity unless you do something about it - you'd think that game would start diving into the depths of Monika's fucked-up personality and really start etching out as much uncomfortable creepiness from her soul as it possibly can, given the game's attitude and approach to creepypasta antics. You reasonably think to yourself: this is the moment where the curtain falls and we see her for the monster she is.
What actually happens is quite a bit different. Monika just starts talking to you about... stuff. Surprisingly normal stuff. Music, spicy food, vegetarianism, anxiety, technology, making friends. And this isn't just flavor text - she has a lot to say about these topics, and she doesn't hold a crazy-person perspective on any of these things. In fact, a lot of what she says is very introspective, heartwarming, and even funny sometimes.
And then it hits you that the game has pulled its' greatest trick right at the end. After hours of creepypasta horror antics and building Monika up to be this sinister, ominous force that both desperately wants you yet dominates everything around you, when the story is poised to finally take a deep dive into the darkness of her soul... Monika, and the game around her, drops its' silly pretenses of being a horror game and instead looks inward, allowing Monika to just sit down and engage the player one-on-one because she knows that's the only chance she'll ever get. And there's a lot of really interesting subtext going on under the hood here. Monika isn't just aware that she's in a video game, she's trapped in the metaphysical constraints of that game. Now, her fascination with the player transcends her feelings of lovesick obsession with you - she wants you because you are everything she wants, and what she wants is freedom. Monika feels chastened and existentially mortified by her role in the game, and then you come along, this independent and unique figure to her world, and she just has to have you. It's not even necessarily because of you. It's because of what you represent. Freedom. Not only does this open up an incredibly interesting and potent can of worms on existentialism, agency, and parasocial relationships...
...But it also makes it that much harder to pull the trigger on Monika when the time comes. In a single, fantastic ending scene, Monika goes from being the obvious bad guy to the girl everyone wanted to save the most. Monika's explosive popularity was more than just her cute looks and her twist villain antics - she was shockingly easy to like at the end of the day, and there's a genuine sadness and tragedy that underscores her actions. She turns to murder not just out of spite and jealousy, but out of desperation. Desperation to feel an actual human touch instead of the cold, sterile nothingness of coding and circuitry. She killed her friends just to get a moment alone with you because the game simply wouldn't have allowed it otherwise, and there's something genuinely devastating and sad about that.
(Also, uh, Sayori's depression is handled in a surprisingly profound and harrowingly nuanced way. Her depression feels tangible and believable enough that her hanging comes not as an unpleasant surprise, but as the unfortunately logical end to not only her arc, but to DDLC's psychological-horror tone as a whole.)
Sayori and Monika work really, really well. They are genuinely well-written, likable, and there's a lot of depth packed into their characters that it makes it easy to care about them when the game gets dark. So why is this game only a 3/5?
Well, frankly, because the rest of it is just not fucking interesting, man. Those interesting and juicy themes about character archetypes and agency and feeling trapped by the confines of a seemingly-idyllic world only pop up at the end, and the depression stuff is only really tackled at the end of the first act. The rest of the game is either mindless fluff that winds up playing with the same VN tropes the game seems to be mocking, or fucking around with lame creepypasta bullshit like bleeding eyes and photorealism and jumpscares that wind up completely undermining the genuine psychological horror found in Monika's existentialism and Sayori's realistic depression.
The creepypasta shit is particularly damning - when DDLC indulges in this, it turns into a game with nothing to say, a game full of cheap 'gotcha' moments meant to be reacted to by streamers and Let's Players in funny and amusing ways. Because of the second act of the game choosing to hone in on the cheap horror tricks instead of genuinely developing the cast further outside of Monika, Yuri and Natsuki wind up feeling more uninteresting and shallow compared to Sayori and Monika's more fleshed-out characterization. Yuri in particular really suffers from this - at least Natsuki has some humanizing moments, but Yuri getting creepier and creepier as a result of Monika's machinations wind up not only robbing Yuri of her agency (in a way the game did not intend), but undermining whatever investment I had in her by turning her into the game's vessel for jumpscares.
There's a few moments of characterization I genuinely liked on their own (one of the best moments in the game is Natsuki handing you what you think is gonna be another poem, but it's actually a secret letter saying that's she's genuinely worried about Yuri), and there's some impressive coding and programming stuff going on under the hood of this thing, similar to Undertale. But I honestly can't fuck with DDLC outside of the Sayori-Monika stuff because I think it often strays too far from its themes and what makes it really click. In the moments where DDLC is either 'scary' or just trying to set up buildup to the scary shit in the hopes of catching you off-balance, it ceases to have anything to say, and that's a damn shame, because what it does have to say (when it bothers to) is compelling and devastating.
Very interesting experiment, though, and Monika alone narrowly bumps this up to a 3. I think if this wasn't free-to-play, I'd have a lot more issues with this game.
What actually happens is quite a bit different. Monika just starts talking to you about... stuff. Surprisingly normal stuff. Music, spicy food, vegetarianism, anxiety, technology, making friends. And this isn't just flavor text - she has a lot to say about these topics, and she doesn't hold a crazy-person perspective on any of these things. In fact, a lot of what she says is very introspective, heartwarming, and even funny sometimes.
And then it hits you that the game has pulled its' greatest trick right at the end. After hours of creepypasta horror antics and building Monika up to be this sinister, ominous force that both desperately wants you yet dominates everything around you, when the story is poised to finally take a deep dive into the darkness of her soul... Monika, and the game around her, drops its' silly pretenses of being a horror game and instead looks inward, allowing Monika to just sit down and engage the player one-on-one because she knows that's the only chance she'll ever get. And there's a lot of really interesting subtext going on under the hood here. Monika isn't just aware that she's in a video game, she's trapped in the metaphysical constraints of that game. Now, her fascination with the player transcends her feelings of lovesick obsession with you - she wants you because you are everything she wants, and what she wants is freedom. Monika feels chastened and existentially mortified by her role in the game, and then you come along, this independent and unique figure to her world, and she just has to have you. It's not even necessarily because of you. It's because of what you represent. Freedom. Not only does this open up an incredibly interesting and potent can of worms on existentialism, agency, and parasocial relationships...
...But it also makes it that much harder to pull the trigger on Monika when the time comes. In a single, fantastic ending scene, Monika goes from being the obvious bad guy to the girl everyone wanted to save the most. Monika's explosive popularity was more than just her cute looks and her twist villain antics - she was shockingly easy to like at the end of the day, and there's a genuine sadness and tragedy that underscores her actions. She turns to murder not just out of spite and jealousy, but out of desperation. Desperation to feel an actual human touch instead of the cold, sterile nothingness of coding and circuitry. She killed her friends just to get a moment alone with you because the game simply wouldn't have allowed it otherwise, and there's something genuinely devastating and sad about that.
(Also, uh, Sayori's depression is handled in a surprisingly profound and harrowingly nuanced way. Her depression feels tangible and believable enough that her hanging comes not as an unpleasant surprise, but as the unfortunately logical end to not only her arc, but to DDLC's psychological-horror tone as a whole.)
Sayori and Monika work really, really well. They are genuinely well-written, likable, and there's a lot of depth packed into their characters that it makes it easy to care about them when the game gets dark. So why is this game only a 3/5?
Well, frankly, because the rest of it is just not fucking interesting, man. Those interesting and juicy themes about character archetypes and agency and feeling trapped by the confines of a seemingly-idyllic world only pop up at the end, and the depression stuff is only really tackled at the end of the first act. The rest of the game is either mindless fluff that winds up playing with the same VN tropes the game seems to be mocking, or fucking around with lame creepypasta bullshit like bleeding eyes and photorealism and jumpscares that wind up completely undermining the genuine psychological horror found in Monika's existentialism and Sayori's realistic depression.
The creepypasta shit is particularly damning - when DDLC indulges in this, it turns into a game with nothing to say, a game full of cheap 'gotcha' moments meant to be reacted to by streamers and Let's Players in funny and amusing ways. Because of the second act of the game choosing to hone in on the cheap horror tricks instead of genuinely developing the cast further outside of Monika, Yuri and Natsuki wind up feeling more uninteresting and shallow compared to Sayori and Monika's more fleshed-out characterization. Yuri in particular really suffers from this - at least Natsuki has some humanizing moments, but Yuri getting creepier and creepier as a result of Monika's machinations wind up not only robbing Yuri of her agency (in a way the game did not intend), but undermining whatever investment I had in her by turning her into the game's vessel for jumpscares.
There's a few moments of characterization I genuinely liked on their own (one of the best moments in the game is Natsuki handing you what you think is gonna be another poem, but it's actually a secret letter saying that's she's genuinely worried about Yuri), and there's some impressive coding and programming stuff going on under the hood of this thing, similar to Undertale. But I honestly can't fuck with DDLC outside of the Sayori-Monika stuff because I think it often strays too far from its themes and what makes it really click. In the moments where DDLC is either 'scary' or just trying to set up buildup to the scary shit in the hopes of catching you off-balance, it ceases to have anything to say, and that's a damn shame, because what it does have to say (when it bothers to) is compelling and devastating.
Very interesting experiment, though, and Monika alone narrowly bumps this up to a 3. I think if this wasn't free-to-play, I'd have a lot more issues with this game.
Archagent
1 year ago