"Despair that comes after a moment of happiness is far more agonizing than despair alone."

The above quote is the sentiment that all of Fata Morgana is wrapped around. It is adhered to. It is challenged. It is subverted, deconstructed, and put back together again. Characters in the narrative will stab one another in the back if it means alleviating their despair; others will cast it off by finding truly, truly undying love. Some are redeemed, and some never find penance. Some wounds heal, and others remain eternally fresh. Yet through all of this, every thread returns to that same original root of despair, and how much harsher the sting when joy is stolen away.

Fata Morgana is one of the strongest pieces of queer fiction I have ever read. I've often said of stories such as Disco Elysium that many aspects within them are too personal, too raw for the author to have never struggled with themselves; Disco Elysium's many threads of substance abuse have retroactively been shown to stem from Robert Kurvitz's own alcoholism in a way that was open and pathetic, reflecting the struggles of many suffering (ex)alcoholics such as myself. I have no way of knowing if something similar is true of Hanada Keika, the writer of Fata Morgana — and it would be beyond gauche for me to make assumptions — but the struggles here are real. They are bitter and blistered, and in the same breath, beautiful.

What I do know of Hanada Keika, however, comes from a blog post he had written in July of 2021. In it, he both celebrated and lamented on the fact that the Nintendo Switch release of Fata Morgana had earned a 100 on Metacritic, drawing attention both negative and positive to the game. On the reception of the game, he wrote:

"I don't want to argue about whether visual novels are games or not, but I think there may be a point to be made. I think visual novels are a wonderful medium of expression, and I don't think we should look down on them just because they are visual novels, but it is true that there are fewer places to judge them as criticism than other games.

Fata Morgana has been highly praised as a doujin game in Japan, but it's not a successful market, and it's a game that only people in-the-know know of. The subject matter is very heavy, and it's not an erotic game, otome game, or gal game. It's a strange visual novel."

This societal and industrial adherence to genre, to being easily defined, to being able to be pitched and sold — had nearly caused me to miss out on this, for no more reason than my belief that "I don't really play visual novels". It's silly, in a way, that that's all it took for me to write off an entire segment of a medium; just my willingness to keep going as I've been without branching out. I was comfortable, and it was wrong. It's been too long since a piece of media has challenged my expectations not just of the art form in which it was released, but of my own understanding of myself. How often can that be said of anything?

Ultimately, there remains only one thing on which I can disagree with Hanada Keika: The House in Fata Morgana deserved to have that 100.

Reviewed on Nov 24, 2022


1 Comment


1 year ago

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