For better or worse, I've found myself to be someone more willing than most to give games with extremely controversial or taboo subject matters a chance. This isn't to be some smug contrarian, but more so because I don't want to be swayed away from a game because of an incorrect initial reaction from the public that would label it as degenerate filth, while the game itself is actually a nuanced and interesting perspective on those subject matters that would otherwise be buried under an avalanche of controversy and dismissal.
With that said, having this game on my PC feels like it actively revokes my entry into Heaven. This is a disgusting game made by disgusting people, who I hope find some salvation through extensive therapy, or more preferably, extensively memorising the cracks and stains on each of the four walls of their cramp jail cell.
With that said, having this game on my PC feels like it actively revokes my entry into Heaven. This is a disgusting game made by disgusting people, who I hope find some salvation through extensive therapy, or more preferably, extensively memorising the cracks and stains on each of the four walls of their cramp jail cell.
this is fetish porn btw!
from "the guy who actually wrestled with their thoughts on super columbine massacre rpg" comes: this is just super stupid and lame and thoughtless. not even particularly interesting as an exercise on edge and mechanically really bad. cannot approach any sort of guilty pleasure, thankfully i suppose
My old review was too based for this website so all I'm going to say is that not only it's cringe and promotes abhorrent messages catered to incels but it's also a pretty garbage game
Ya know, the game could have said something, and it does feel like it's trying to with its almost nihilist protagonist. But it's too much of a 'mini game' game to truly get across any potential ideas it might have.
This is something I would write when I was 9, not waste hours upon hours adapting it into an RPG Maker shitshow.
CW: Murder, gun violence, child death, sexual violence, cannibalism, suicide, gore, eroticism of gore, knife violence, glorification of tragedy and crime, misogyny.
Updated version
Video version of this review
Preface
First, I would like to make abundantly clear this is a heinous work. On a surface level it is reprehensible. Digging into it makes every aspect of it worse. If it could only be played with a critical eye that would be one thing, but as I will get into this isn't just some curiosity to dissect.
The United States has had 27 school massacres since 1927. 16 of these occurred after Columbine. All but two were carried out with the use of firearms. Since 2000, there have been 388 school shootings in the United States.
Canada has had three school massacres ever (ignoring the genocide perpetrated by the Residential School system). One of these occurred after Columbine. It was carried out with a firearm. Since 2000, there have been 8 school shootings in Canada.
Japan has had one school massacre ever. It occurred on June 8, 2001. Eight children were murdered. All but one were girls. The perpetrator used a kitchen knife. There has never been a school shooting in Japan. There have been two multiple fatality shootings in Japan since 1952.
Potential
I think this is important to bring up because, from a Western and particularly an American perspective, school shootings are a dark reality that happens with shocking yet numbing frequency. The Onion's perennial publishing of their "No Way to Prevent This" article is testament to that. While it would be disingenuous to say school shootings have had no resonance in Japan, it is true that they have not happened there. The distance from tragedy lessens its emotional impact.
This is to say that, in a vacuum, Morimiya Middle School Shooting (MMSS) reads as intensely insensitive but not outright malicious. It is, in a vacuum, akin to Postal or Hatred, mimicking real world tragedy without outright reference to any specific event. An argument could even be made that there is some merit to MMSS in its commentary on the why of school shootings. The unnamed player character walked in on her mother's suicide, her father was an abusive alcoholic who disappeared. Her rage turns outward towards those who do not give her the attention she was missing from her parents. It ultimately manifests as a desire to commit murder after the game's fictionalised Japan reports on regional mass killings.
Like Super Columbine Massacre RPG, MMSS appears then to be a work which asks for a societal introspection alongside our abject horror. By not referencing a specific historical event, MMSS has the potential to make commentary without inflicting direct emotional harm. Its gamification and unnamed player character have the potential to instill a sense of being complicit with the act, as with Brenda Romero's 2009 board game Train. Even its arcade gameplay loop, high scores, and unlocks have the potential to increase engagement for some grand payoff of self-disgust that one would invest so much time into becoming good at murdering teachers and children. A part of me held out hope in my few playthroughs that there would be some message at the end of it all, that this glorification of violence would have a point. Instead, MMSS is closer to JFK: Reloaded. It teaches nothing. It has nothing to say. It exists to shock. It exists to hurt.
Play
On a technical and mechanical level, MMSS is something of a marvel. It is an RPGMaker game with gunplay. There is an undeniable element of strategy to it. Suffice it to say that every aspect of school shootings are on display here. If you have seen coverage of new schools in the United States being built to 'confuse and frustrate' school shooters, you can intuit how the prototypical Japanese school might facilitate mass murder with firearms and explosives. The player needs to slow down to increase their accuracy. I leave it to you to put two and two together. The unlocks amount to different weapons the player can use, as well as cheats. The player needs to manage the loaded ammunition between their weapons so as to not end up reloading while students wielding poles lunge at them to stop their advance. The player has a very strict time limit before the police arrive to arrest them. The player gets the most points for killing female students. None of this is particularly fun, even if it were removed from what it is depicting, but that it has been done on an engine meant for traditional JRPGs is impressive. That it is mechanically more than pointing and shooting is noteworthy. It is just barely engaging enough to warrant a couple playthroughs.
Precedent
Discussion of MMSS necessitates consideration of its creator and their niche. MMSS was developed by エリック aka erikku aka eric806359 aka kata235. They are an ero guro artist. Their depiction and obsession with the macabre is not in line with an H.R. Giger type, however. It comes across as more similar to the work of the Marquis de Sade. Reading through erikku's Twitter feed and scrolling through their Pixiv feels like trawling through The 120 Days of Sodom; it is a display of an amoral libertine.
Some choice textual excerpts from their Twitter (roughly translated):
"Drawing muscles makes me want to eat them."
"A touching coming-of-age story in which a young girl who has just lost her father gets a gun and grows up to be a splendid mass murderer."
"If I'm going to die anyways, I want the human race to perish while I'm still alive."
"I'm not a monster. Even for someone like me, I have human likes and dislikes. ...For example, what I love is 'Decapitation'"
I think you get the idea.
Their Pixiv is similarly naught but ero guro. Ero guro is not some 'release valve' for erikku, it is their sole purpose.
Perusal
Despite this, MMSS contains zero erotic elements. ConeCvltist stated in his review that MMSS probably exists for someone to get their rocks off. I think he is at once right and wrong in this assertion. Without explicit eroticism, MMSS is only a guro work, and thus cannot be said to be primarily for sexual gratification. However, it is also inextricable from its creator's main body of work. His illustrations of MMSS's main character are surrounded by nude women's stomachs being cut open, by school girls being strangled to death, of raw human flesh being consumed next to bare corpses. MMSS is not explicitly sexual, but it is implicitly erotic. The primary demographic is not you or I, but those already familiar with erikku's portfolio. And while not in the game itself, erikku has made numerous animations of the player character shooting school girls, their inflated chests jiggling, their panties digging into their crotches.
MMSS is unable to depict this level of fidelity for gore or lewdness in RPGMaker due to the rapid pace of gameplay. What illustrative art is present shows up in the introduction, endings, and when in the apartment at the start. For erikku's intended audience, however, those depictions don't need to explicitly exist within the game. One's familiarity with those short animation clips, those illustrations allows them to, in part, fill in the gaps during gameplay. In researching erikku and being exposed to the supportive art for MMSS, subsequent playthroughs have been marred by more accurate depictions of the violence and murder rendered in pixel form. Furthermore, I have seen that his illustrations and animation snippets are released in packs with other, non-MMSS related works of an ero guro nature. The mind fills in the gaps, the mind construes all of this as sexual.
Pang
In MMSS, during the news report on recent killings, one scene shows a middle school girl being escorted by police as her victims clutch their stomachs. This murderer committed their acts with a kitchen knife. They primarily targetted girls.
As mentioned at the very start, there has been one school massacre in Japanese history. It involved a kitchen knife. The perpetrator primarily targetted girls.
This is odious enough on its own, this unveiled allusion to the Osaka school massacre as tasteless as anything making light of the mass murder of children. erikku's fanbase will recognise this as a direct reference to his other game, Rouka de Onigokku (Tag in the Hallway). You sprint through hallways and stab students before you can be caught. It operates like an endless runner. The William Tell Overture plays the whole time. While MMSS references tragedy broadly, Rouka de Onigokku references it precisely. In MMSS one can even unlock use of a knife to carry out the game's mass murder in the same manner as Rouka de Onigokku's main character. It is despicable. It gets worse.
Perturbed
There is very scant documentation of MMSS on the English-speaking clearnet. I myself only came across it by chance on Backloggd. What I have found is deplorable.
Following the release of MMSS, erikku started answering fan questions on Twitter. Most of these are in Japanese, but some have been translated by erikku himself.
"Q: [...] how do you deal with negative feedback or criticism regarding the sensitive nature of 'taboo' nature of your art?
A: [...] I try not to care too much about negative feedback and so on :)"
"Q: [...] what do you use for inspiration before making a picture? Do you read about some real life murder cases?
A: I often read about real life murder cases, and watch a movie and TV series about murder. But I don't use anything for inspiration. I just draw what I want to draw."
His tweets continued in their perturbing statements. Above the aforementioned illustration of Rouka de Onigokku's main character, he writes "I was caught by the Thought Police and was temporarily suspended. It was caused by the cannibalism animation, but I think all the zombies are gone now. ...By the way, the situation in the picture is a very, very, very healthy illustration of a student playing a prank with ketchup and being taken care of by the police."
They also started answering questions on peing.net.
"I'm just painting 'imaginary violence against non-existent people.'"
"Murder, abductions, and transportation of body parts over long distances are very hard work, but it's better than repeating the incidents in a nearby area and narrowing the scope of police investigation towards you."
"I think there are various reasons why the culprit in Morimiya didn't commit suicide (including suicide by police). One of the goals is to know the suffering of the victims, including the survivors and bereaved families. It may also be the result of hatred towards the mother who took her own life. No matter how many people you kill, the hatred toward your mother, who took her own life and became a 'suicide statistic' cannot be cleared, but 'I won't die like that!' Is that the result of trying to persevere?"
"I have been drawing pictures of killing people since I was a child, but it was when I was a teenager that I start having interest in killing (anime) girls."
MMSS and Rouka de Onigokku are not just gamified depictions of perturbed minds. They are the machinations of a fucked up pervert. It gets worse.
Perverse
When looking up MMSS, one of the only results is the RPGMaker Fandom wiki. It provides the Google Drive link I got the game from. Far above that download link lies a link to the 'Official Discord,' with the blessing of erikku.
The rules for the 'Morityu Community Server' notably state the following:
"Rule 3. Don't be a weirdo. Keep edgelording to a minimum. If it's TMI, don't post it.
You can love seeing girls suffer all you want, just don't tell everyone, because nobody wants to hear about it.
Don't be that guy who idolizes mass shooters. It's cringe as hell and a sign that you should probably go outside for once."
"Rule 5. Do not talk about planning any mass murders or crimes of any form.
You may talk about previous cases of mass murder, but do not talk about the possibility of yourself or others committing crimes.
Even if you're not going to do it and are just posting it as a "what if", it is punishable by a ban.
This is the one rule you don't want to break."
The server is a cesspool of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generally making light of school shootings as a topic. Users have /k/ommando avatars and names and banners. They share gameplay clips and compete for high scores. They share links to movie clips of school shootings, they share DOOM WADs for school levels. They pontificate about whether or not women get aroused during shootings. They cheer for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for police murdering black people. They hide behind the thinnest veneer of respecting Discord's ToS.
Searching for MMSS information led me to a danbooru post making light of the Christchurch mosque shootings. The artist's commentary notes the inefficacy of focusing on the victims of mass murder rather than the perpetrators themselves, particularly when those criminals understand how to effectively use the memetic nature of modern media.
It was also on that Fandom wiki I learned that the art room in MMSS has portraits of several school shooters. Real school shooters. If this is not glorification, I don't know what is.
The citation for that art room tidbit took me further still. A forum dedicated to Columbine and other school shootings and crimes. A thread titled Video games about Mass Murder. Users laud MMSS as one of the best games about mass murder. Avatars depict children holding guns threateningly. The Similar topics at the bottom of the thread ask what games school shooters played.
It's then I decided I had had enough.
Perpetuity
I wish there was a conclusion I could make here. Some hopeful message about erikku realising this is fucked beyond belief. That Discord being banned. The host of the Columbine forum shutting down.
There is no conclusion. There is no takeaway. This is revolting. Researching put knots in my gut. Writing evoked constant self-doubt.
I believe there is room for societal introspection on serious, challenging topics through games. But when the act of playing tragedy is not contextualised, is not condemned, then those games will function as just that, games. Tools for amusement, not for learning. Something to strategise about, not think critically about. A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it.
Irredeemable.
Updated version
Video version of this review
Preface
First, I would like to make abundantly clear this is a heinous work. On a surface level it is reprehensible. Digging into it makes every aspect of it worse. If it could only be played with a critical eye that would be one thing, but as I will get into this isn't just some curiosity to dissect.
The United States has had 27 school massacres since 1927. 16 of these occurred after Columbine. All but two were carried out with the use of firearms. Since 2000, there have been 388 school shootings in the United States.
Canada has had three school massacres ever (ignoring the genocide perpetrated by the Residential School system). One of these occurred after Columbine. It was carried out with a firearm. Since 2000, there have been 8 school shootings in Canada.
Japan has had one school massacre ever. It occurred on June 8, 2001. Eight children were murdered. All but one were girls. The perpetrator used a kitchen knife. There has never been a school shooting in Japan. There have been two multiple fatality shootings in Japan since 1952.
Potential
I think this is important to bring up because, from a Western and particularly an American perspective, school shootings are a dark reality that happens with shocking yet numbing frequency. The Onion's perennial publishing of their "No Way to Prevent This" article is testament to that. While it would be disingenuous to say school shootings have had no resonance in Japan, it is true that they have not happened there. The distance from tragedy lessens its emotional impact.
This is to say that, in a vacuum, Morimiya Middle School Shooting (MMSS) reads as intensely insensitive but not outright malicious. It is, in a vacuum, akin to Postal or Hatred, mimicking real world tragedy without outright reference to any specific event. An argument could even be made that there is some merit to MMSS in its commentary on the why of school shootings. The unnamed player character walked in on her mother's suicide, her father was an abusive alcoholic who disappeared. Her rage turns outward towards those who do not give her the attention she was missing from her parents. It ultimately manifests as a desire to commit murder after the game's fictionalised Japan reports on regional mass killings.
Like Super Columbine Massacre RPG, MMSS appears then to be a work which asks for a societal introspection alongside our abject horror. By not referencing a specific historical event, MMSS has the potential to make commentary without inflicting direct emotional harm. Its gamification and unnamed player character have the potential to instill a sense of being complicit with the act, as with Brenda Romero's 2009 board game Train. Even its arcade gameplay loop, high scores, and unlocks have the potential to increase engagement for some grand payoff of self-disgust that one would invest so much time into becoming good at murdering teachers and children. A part of me held out hope in my few playthroughs that there would be some message at the end of it all, that this glorification of violence would have a point. Instead, MMSS is closer to JFK: Reloaded. It teaches nothing. It has nothing to say. It exists to shock. It exists to hurt.
Play
On a technical and mechanical level, MMSS is something of a marvel. It is an RPGMaker game with gunplay. There is an undeniable element of strategy to it. Suffice it to say that every aspect of school shootings are on display here. If you have seen coverage of new schools in the United States being built to 'confuse and frustrate' school shooters, you can intuit how the prototypical Japanese school might facilitate mass murder with firearms and explosives. The player needs to slow down to increase their accuracy. I leave it to you to put two and two together. The unlocks amount to different weapons the player can use, as well as cheats. The player needs to manage the loaded ammunition between their weapons so as to not end up reloading while students wielding poles lunge at them to stop their advance. The player has a very strict time limit before the police arrive to arrest them. The player gets the most points for killing female students. None of this is particularly fun, even if it were removed from what it is depicting, but that it has been done on an engine meant for traditional JRPGs is impressive. That it is mechanically more than pointing and shooting is noteworthy. It is just barely engaging enough to warrant a couple playthroughs.
Precedent
Discussion of MMSS necessitates consideration of its creator and their niche. MMSS was developed by エリック aka erikku aka eric806359 aka kata235. They are an ero guro artist. Their depiction and obsession with the macabre is not in line with an H.R. Giger type, however. It comes across as more similar to the work of the Marquis de Sade. Reading through erikku's Twitter feed and scrolling through their Pixiv feels like trawling through The 120 Days of Sodom; it is a display of an amoral libertine.
Some choice textual excerpts from their Twitter (roughly translated):
"Drawing muscles makes me want to eat them."
"A touching coming-of-age story in which a young girl who has just lost her father gets a gun and grows up to be a splendid mass murderer."
"If I'm going to die anyways, I want the human race to perish while I'm still alive."
"I'm not a monster. Even for someone like me, I have human likes and dislikes. ...For example, what I love is 'Decapitation'"
I think you get the idea.
Their Pixiv is similarly naught but ero guro. Ero guro is not some 'release valve' for erikku, it is their sole purpose.
Perusal
Despite this, MMSS contains zero erotic elements. ConeCvltist stated in his review that MMSS probably exists for someone to get their rocks off. I think he is at once right and wrong in this assertion. Without explicit eroticism, MMSS is only a guro work, and thus cannot be said to be primarily for sexual gratification. However, it is also inextricable from its creator's main body of work. His illustrations of MMSS's main character are surrounded by nude women's stomachs being cut open, by school girls being strangled to death, of raw human flesh being consumed next to bare corpses. MMSS is not explicitly sexual, but it is implicitly erotic. The primary demographic is not you or I, but those already familiar with erikku's portfolio. And while not in the game itself, erikku has made numerous animations of the player character shooting school girls, their inflated chests jiggling, their panties digging into their crotches.
MMSS is unable to depict this level of fidelity for gore or lewdness in RPGMaker due to the rapid pace of gameplay. What illustrative art is present shows up in the introduction, endings, and when in the apartment at the start. For erikku's intended audience, however, those depictions don't need to explicitly exist within the game. One's familiarity with those short animation clips, those illustrations allows them to, in part, fill in the gaps during gameplay. In researching erikku and being exposed to the supportive art for MMSS, subsequent playthroughs have been marred by more accurate depictions of the violence and murder rendered in pixel form. Furthermore, I have seen that his illustrations and animation snippets are released in packs with other, non-MMSS related works of an ero guro nature. The mind fills in the gaps, the mind construes all of this as sexual.
Pang
In MMSS, during the news report on recent killings, one scene shows a middle school girl being escorted by police as her victims clutch their stomachs. This murderer committed their acts with a kitchen knife. They primarily targetted girls.
As mentioned at the very start, there has been one school massacre in Japanese history. It involved a kitchen knife. The perpetrator primarily targetted girls.
This is odious enough on its own, this unveiled allusion to the Osaka school massacre as tasteless as anything making light of the mass murder of children. erikku's fanbase will recognise this as a direct reference to his other game, Rouka de Onigokku (Tag in the Hallway). You sprint through hallways and stab students before you can be caught. It operates like an endless runner. The William Tell Overture plays the whole time. While MMSS references tragedy broadly, Rouka de Onigokku references it precisely. In MMSS one can even unlock use of a knife to carry out the game's mass murder in the same manner as Rouka de Onigokku's main character. It is despicable. It gets worse.
Perturbed
There is very scant documentation of MMSS on the English-speaking clearnet. I myself only came across it by chance on Backloggd. What I have found is deplorable.
Following the release of MMSS, erikku started answering fan questions on Twitter. Most of these are in Japanese, but some have been translated by erikku himself.
"Q: [...] how do you deal with negative feedback or criticism regarding the sensitive nature of 'taboo' nature of your art?
A: [...] I try not to care too much about negative feedback and so on :)"
"Q: [...] what do you use for inspiration before making a picture? Do you read about some real life murder cases?
A: I often read about real life murder cases, and watch a movie and TV series about murder. But I don't use anything for inspiration. I just draw what I want to draw."
His tweets continued in their perturbing statements. Above the aforementioned illustration of Rouka de Onigokku's main character, he writes "I was caught by the Thought Police and was temporarily suspended. It was caused by the cannibalism animation, but I think all the zombies are gone now. ...By the way, the situation in the picture is a very, very, very healthy illustration of a student playing a prank with ketchup and being taken care of by the police."
They also started answering questions on peing.net.
"I'm just painting 'imaginary violence against non-existent people.'"
"Murder, abductions, and transportation of body parts over long distances are very hard work, but it's better than repeating the incidents in a nearby area and narrowing the scope of police investigation towards you."
"I think there are various reasons why the culprit in Morimiya didn't commit suicide (including suicide by police). One of the goals is to know the suffering of the victims, including the survivors and bereaved families. It may also be the result of hatred towards the mother who took her own life. No matter how many people you kill, the hatred toward your mother, who took her own life and became a 'suicide statistic' cannot be cleared, but 'I won't die like that!' Is that the result of trying to persevere?"
"I have been drawing pictures of killing people since I was a child, but it was when I was a teenager that I start having interest in killing (anime) girls."
MMSS and Rouka de Onigokku are not just gamified depictions of perturbed minds. They are the machinations of a fucked up pervert. It gets worse.
Perverse
When looking up MMSS, one of the only results is the RPGMaker Fandom wiki. It provides the Google Drive link I got the game from. Far above that download link lies a link to the 'Official Discord,' with the blessing of erikku.
The rules for the 'Morityu Community Server' notably state the following:
"Rule 3. Don't be a weirdo. Keep edgelording to a minimum. If it's TMI, don't post it.
You can love seeing girls suffer all you want, just don't tell everyone, because nobody wants to hear about it.
Don't be that guy who idolizes mass shooters. It's cringe as hell and a sign that you should probably go outside for once."
"Rule 5. Do not talk about planning any mass murders or crimes of any form.
You may talk about previous cases of mass murder, but do not talk about the possibility of yourself or others committing crimes.
Even if you're not going to do it and are just posting it as a "what if", it is punishable by a ban.
This is the one rule you don't want to break."
The server is a cesspool of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generally making light of school shootings as a topic. Users have /k/ommando avatars and names and banners. They share gameplay clips and compete for high scores. They share links to movie clips of school shootings, they share DOOM WADs for school levels. They pontificate about whether or not women get aroused during shootings. They cheer for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for police murdering black people. They hide behind the thinnest veneer of respecting Discord's ToS.
Searching for MMSS information led me to a danbooru post making light of the Christchurch mosque shootings. The artist's commentary notes the inefficacy of focusing on the victims of mass murder rather than the perpetrators themselves, particularly when those criminals understand how to effectively use the memetic nature of modern media.
It was also on that Fandom wiki I learned that the art room in MMSS has portraits of several school shooters. Real school shooters. If this is not glorification, I don't know what is.
The citation for that art room tidbit took me further still. A forum dedicated to Columbine and other school shootings and crimes. A thread titled Video games about Mass Murder. Users laud MMSS as one of the best games about mass murder. Avatars depict children holding guns threateningly. The Similar topics at the bottom of the thread ask what games school shooters played.
It's then I decided I had had enough.
Perpetuity
I wish there was a conclusion I could make here. Some hopeful message about erikku realising this is fucked beyond belief. That Discord being banned. The host of the Columbine forum shutting down.
There is no conclusion. There is no takeaway. This is revolting. Researching put knots in my gut. Writing evoked constant self-doubt.
I believe there is room for societal introspection on serious, challenging topics through games. But when the act of playing tragedy is not contextualised, is not condemned, then those games will function as just that, games. Tools for amusement, not for learning. Something to strategise about, not think critically about. A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it.
Irredeemable.
edgy enough
Swat: Back to L. A.
Morimiya Middle School Shooting is an arcade-style top-down shooter made in the RPG Maker MV engine. The plot plays out like a bizarre Japanese version of Hatred: A violent, misanthropic middle school student with a death wish arms herself with as many guns as she can take into her local middle school with the express purpose of killing as many as she can before getting arrested.
The standard game play loop is comparable to a rouge-like version of the original Postal. You have 5 minutes per run, and you have to rack up kills before either the time limit runs out or you get caught/killed. You get graded on the number of people killed/wounded on a 5 star scale, and depending on your score, you gain points to spend on permanent upgrades like new weapons and permanent perks.
The game is technically impressive, turning the standard RPG Maker engine into a admittedly decent top-down shooter, and it has a surprising amount of depth to the moment-by-moment game play. You have a base 50% accuracy and you have to go into an aim mode to raise it, at the cost of your movement speed. Running and gunning is a surefire way to get yourself caught, as it makes your aim absolutely atrocious. While most of the students are defenseless, the rare hero or two can catch you off guard and very quickly take you down if you get cornered. Teachers also roam the halls, the females alerting others of your presence and the males running to pin you down and end your run. Despite first impressions, the game is not the mindless "cathartic" murderfest I was expecting. There is a certain level of strategy and planning involved in each run, and from a certain point of view, it could even deconstruct the murder fantasy of its own premise, seeing as the murder fantasy is very quickly ended if you get too careless.
Let's address the elephant in the room though: It's a game about children murdering children. Even though the limited graphics and frankly cheesy sound design take the edge off somewhat, this is a pretty alienating premise for the vast majority of people (even the original Postal drew the line at child murder!) Plausible deniability isn't even a factor either, seeing as the game was developed by a guro artist, so the violence is definitely meant to get someone's rocks off. It's an abhorrent production all around, and the only reason to play it over other arcade shooters is if you're morbidly curious or if it's your kink.
The standard game play loop is comparable to a rouge-like version of the original Postal. You have 5 minutes per run, and you have to rack up kills before either the time limit runs out or you get caught/killed. You get graded on the number of people killed/wounded on a 5 star scale, and depending on your score, you gain points to spend on permanent upgrades like new weapons and permanent perks.
The game is technically impressive, turning the standard RPG Maker engine into a admittedly decent top-down shooter, and it has a surprising amount of depth to the moment-by-moment game play. You have a base 50% accuracy and you have to go into an aim mode to raise it, at the cost of your movement speed. Running and gunning is a surefire way to get yourself caught, as it makes your aim absolutely atrocious. While most of the students are defenseless, the rare hero or two can catch you off guard and very quickly take you down if you get cornered. Teachers also roam the halls, the females alerting others of your presence and the males running to pin you down and end your run. Despite first impressions, the game is not the mindless "cathartic" murderfest I was expecting. There is a certain level of strategy and planning involved in each run, and from a certain point of view, it could even deconstruct the murder fantasy of its own premise, seeing as the murder fantasy is very quickly ended if you get too careless.
Let's address the elephant in the room though: It's a game about children murdering children. Even though the limited graphics and frankly cheesy sound design take the edge off somewhat, this is a pretty alienating premise for the vast majority of people (even the original Postal drew the line at child murder!) Plausible deniability isn't even a factor either, seeing as the game was developed by a guro artist, so the violence is definitely meant to get someone's rocks off. It's an abhorrent production all around, and the only reason to play it over other arcade shooters is if you're morbidly curious or if it's your kink.
playing this game is like looking into a paper bag that says "human feces: do not eat" and then taking a big bite out of it like you can't be too surprised, 99% chance this is just someone's fetish game, CHANGED for edgelords
what the fuck.
There are some realistic details I appreciate (students playing dead) but otherwise this is just edgy surface level fluff. I can’t believe a game about school shootings can even be compared to generic fluff.
There are some realistic details I appreciate (students playing dead) but otherwise this is just edgy surface level fluff. I can’t believe a game about school shootings can even be compared to generic fluff.
shouldn't even exist.
reb and vodka did it better
Funny text XD
According to a quick Google search, Japanese middle school children are between the ages of 12-15. The fucking fact that I took the time to install RPG Maker and this game just to literally play a glorified edgy incel game about a child, a child that does a literal fucking school shooting makes me cringe and sick. No punchline with this review just actual shit material. Fuck shooting glorifiers.
Ben gibi.
Pretty mid actually, the writing is edgy enough sometimes.
There's enough content (weapons/endings/highscore) to justify replaying it but overall. Hatred better, postal 1 better.
Anime epic
There's enough content (weapons/endings/highscore) to justify replaying it but overall. Hatred better, postal 1 better.
Anime epic
In ways a spiritual successor to Super Columbine Massacre RPG! except you put yourself in the shoes of a depressed anime girl and frankly that makes this the superior game. A bit less technically complex than the former but has a surprisingly addictive gameplay loop despite the hit detection being very finnicky at times. Think it's funny that people give this like half-stars, maybe I'm just a desensitized zoomer but I find it hard to be offended by stuff like this, and all in all I find it surprisingly empathetic in that it's essentially about a depressed sociopath who has lost everything coming into contact with forces that want to help her yet she refuses. Makes the gameplay feel a little more tragic in comparison to the almost gleeful abstraction of SCMR's turn-based system.