i like how this makes a board full of snuff film fans, with all their philosophizing abt pain and the pleasure in pain, as rly pathetic at their core. mad world plays as verge fails to kidnap women because he has no charisma for them to be interested in him, only ever capturing men w low self-esteem. the dark vampire steampunk vibe renders organized serial killings into a geeky shallow niche--looks rly cool truthfully but also brings out the underlying vanity of their obsession over aesthetics of their murders to be judged under a number rating system (safe :]) and a pithy blurb (not safe :[). love the muse/fan infatuation in how daily plays the game on verge, and how verge comes to play back...outside the cover art n that one tile--which i at least can appreciate how it exists to be suggested more than i do how it may actually be implemented--i think this aged well and is possibly better now than it was back then. suzy has its moments too but isnt as together as this, and therapist mind manager seems rly cool for what little of it i played (the cart life stat management thing is too strong for me) but is maybe too measured by comparison. for all their impulse to rile the player, calunio prods in ways that make them much more interesting than a lot of devs working in rpgmaker, and i do mean many of the "legit" ones too.

has a LOT of problems coming with being a ps2 adventure game in 2004 (specifically a slow 1st person one w difficult to find items and a localization that rubs against its atmosphere a little too hard) that bring it down in ways that i find harder to forgive than usual but god damn will i anyway. find its storytelling rly novel for asking you to find and put most of its pieces together on your own, and rly appreciate how its ties itself together thematically. awesome ending w kinda brutal implications. idk how the other echo nights stack w this one yet but it totally deserves more credit.

they finally invented a vn that is fun as fuck to read p much from start to finish. amt of cgs in this and how well they're employed is a genuine feat. so in love w kurosawa's writing and the localization feels rly good, little is wasted yet so emotionally transparent even in its vaguest motions, especially strong in its characterization btwn ch 2 and 3's couples. maybe goes a bit too fast towards the climaxes of ch 1 + 2 but i really like how ch 3 denies closure in a way that's necessary for the couple at its center. devilman but make it tomorrow won't come

the first chapter is cool bc it's one big map rather than a bunch of little ones you warp to via menu which just felt like giving in to adv convention, while it lasts here it's a solid early attempt at rpg navigation for an adventure game. loved that npcs would move around seemingly independent of triggers and the fact you can just miss some scenes, sets it apart from just feeling like pc engine rpgmaker and contributes to the suspense of knowing something bad's gonna happen but you won't see everything to get the full picture leading up to it. shame it doesn't properly capitalize on that for the actual mystery but that it gives you that feeling is worthwhile. after the haunted house the game gets so confused on what its doing that i couldn't care to continue. snake lady's cute tho

forgot to log this, its sad that this couldnt have been finished :( even if its rpg stuff is a little simple n plodding and even if the tonal shift feels a little too awkward compared to vague story or darkipt's consistent ambiguity, it rly felt like brownsugar's most ambitious thing up to that point, their "big game", that makes me wish it could've been seen thru. its not as amazing as the two by this creator i brought up n even in its complete form idk if i wouldve changed my stance on that, but that special something they bring to their stuff is totally here. glad they tried to salvage it into something for us to get some glimpse of what they intended at least

definition of a 6/10 (still the best id give any danganronpa) i love like a 10/10 and i know better than anyone how frustrating that is. teenage vomit franchise that for once understands its sticking it's own finger down its throat (continues to do so which i truly understand if it gets to be too much for some) and becomes the last place i would expect closure on a v complicated, decade-long question of what the series meant to me. my feelings aren't in danganronpa as the milked ip the fans ruined (despite what even ppl who like the ending might tell you, v3 believes its the other way around), or the murder mystery contraptions, or even its storytelling in any straightforward sense, but danganronpa as an ancient symbol of a language i had, to express myself and connect to others who were similar. calling it "fandom" feels gross for many reasons but mostly that it's too impersonal and implying i "belonged" to some whole, when to me it was more like my "use" of danganronpa became a signpost of how i was dealing with a bunch of identity crises. deflecting from who i really was through a bunch of gaudy interchangeable masks, dissolving my self into overexaggerated fictional teens that had more easily understandable backstories and consumable traits, lying and lying and being led by lies in turn, all subjugated to a binary world of hope and despair that would only mean anything within itself, never actually revealing any greater truth for me. it just was what it was.

this game, despite and because of its superficiality and its ugly blunt caricaturishness--forcing you to watch turds swirl in a bowl--finally understood that it can't actually give you the complex answers you need to whatever anxieties have been built up around itself. all that can be done is to let go and end things together, to be left with this: sadness and fear and anger and happiness and love have been and always will be the most precious jewels within anyone. whether living a fiction, believing a lie, i still live and believe! emotions from back then, or today, they can't be denied as not mattering, because i'd then be denying i was, am, alive. like of course this doesn't mean i'm not partially mad that there wasn't anything better than this franchise of trash fashioned into this trojan horse to say something so simple, no doubt someone will say there's something that did it "better", but it being the trash i have shaped memories and experiences with means it just is what it is. "you play my heart better than i play the piano"

if the idea was to make me wish i had stopped at ch 4, the one actually excellent and satisfyingly conclusive chapter, then mission accomplished i guess. really underwhelming waste of some good characters. some scenes strewn around that i do like is what keeps me from dismissing it as garbo outright but its such a lecture-y and self-satisfied slog to read through so much of the time that it exhausted any real emotional connection i could've made with this on the whole. i guess there rly is a fine line btwn when ryukishi07 is just relaying to you how much you should understand that he cares vs when he just cares, no bullshit, no overfixating on any sense for subtlety or delicacy. higurashi as the latter remains way more dear to my heart, not free of any specks of bullshit ofc but i'll take every single problem it has for what its worth over almost any "great" part of these arcs.

absolute hall of fame endgame idec how rushed it was. mechanisms and items stripped of any intuitive meanings outside of feeling around in the dark w your verbs, harnessing adventure game puzzle indecipherableness to have you completely in tune w the total dissolution of curtis's semiotic world. and no one cared or even thought it was worth evaluating outside of "bad fmv game puzzle" so that proves i deserve video games more than most of you. MY denpa eroge, MY documentary of my life where curtis is literally me and all of this actually happened