Accompaniment Song

Story written for the feminist murdergirls. Girls that were into fast paced shows like Invader Zim or Space Patrol Luluco but want a lesbian version peppered in pastel. People ate up the first one, became a cult classic. Murder as a zany comedy episode with a bit more characterization then you are used to. The first one isn't gorey, its very light on its violence and playful, the 2nd, taking place in high school gets a lot more graphic with 2 of the endings being about sexual fetishization of torture as sadism from male characters (only mentioned not depicted). In a violent world where murder is a barely concealed expression killing takes on a romantic meaning, the killing of or with people performs as a form of gift giving. Mainly protecting people via murder, sometimes killing them to Capture them. All the same Liar Liar treats this whimsical world with appropriate geriatrics preferring for jokes and over the top exchanges than anything serious or forlorn.

Liar Liar 2 does something that I've also noticed in the game Bad End Theater (2021) where a game is created out of having to sift through a bunch of bad endings for a good one. I recently complained in my blasphemous review that action titles shouldn't hide its best ending behind a bunch of obscure operations. However it makes sense for a Visual Novel to do that because typically the most 'challenging' a Visual Novel gets is having to choose a branching option, with Bad End Theater simply tweaking the optionality ahead of time. Since there's no action inputs and thus its incredibly easy to get all the endings Visual Novels are not burdened by this design limitation although it can still cause the player to focus less on the journey and more on a fixed destination. Thereby abstracting them from immersion in the story. To a large extent this is fine though as if you view it from a player agnostic lens it allows a rich story of potential motivations. Visual Novels with multiple endings are very similar to plays with actors and moving parts, 'set changes', etc. and so its really telling a story about those potential motives, Shakespeare move over because visual novels are stealing your job and making it better! This is also something that unlike a chose your own adventure novel visual novels can do with the grace of its visual design and expression, game books often have issues making its various endings feel fulfilling through how brief the depiction is.

Something else that this story does as a sequel to the original Liar Liar (2014) is change the perspective. The first story was first person, the sequel goes for a third person omniscient approach where an ensemble of motivations are displayed. Which feels like a surprise since you end up embodying the characters rather spontaneously. It's a pleasant surprise but this rather extreme shift decenters the protagonist Yukari which kills the 'episodic' feeling set up at the end of the first one. In fact it feels less like a sequel and more like a high concept fanfiction of the original story written by the same author. I pin this on the more intense tone that comes from disempowering the protagonist Yukari and the perspective shift but it's neat to do this, though it constrains a 'local' space of the fiction to work off of, people were probably disappointed when this came out due in part to those and how it ends, implying there wont be a Liar Liar 3.

Aside from all that the game and its prequel also have instant text appear and this works really well. Although its sudden this allows the player to get into the 'speed' of the murderplot and not feel constrained from the action via scroll text. We Know The Devil (2015) a much bleaker but also fantastic work also takes this approach and I really appreciate it as it allows my eyes not to feel distracted by movement (and even worse scroll text sound) when I'm trying to read. This effect only works if the music fades from track to track because otherwise it would be too abrupt, luckily tokimekiwaku recognized this. The music is also very fun, feels like a bouncy ball.

Particularly I like how killing is gendered, the men all tend to be really gross and slow moving about their killing, often obsessive. The girls on the other hand are distanced and straightforward they just focus on protection. Makes sense in a world where having to kill men to stop them from stalking women is a necessity. This gender binary is not put in flux all that much, and I think that does hurt the piece a bit for me. The original Liar Liar implies that only weird specific girls kill, so the application of social classes of murder on gendered lines does feel a bit awkward to the established chivalry of the first title, one that also gives the women empowerment. It's probably just that the dev wanted to present a complicated and ugly world of maturity, relationships not working out etc. to their young audience. I have no issues with this honestly, but I would have preferred more 'episodes' of liar liar before this 'finale' sequel. The world really felt fresh and easy to write in but it ended before it could even get off the ground. I suppose there's no issue in passing off the pen early but there's only and hour of story between both games so the next writer might not know what to write. It's a step down from the first but not by much. Oh I don't have much to say about the first one, its adorable and iconic play that one for sure. Yukari is also very cheeky and hides her hands and I love that for her.