Dohna Dohna : A Colorful Ethical Paradox

AliceSoft is a company which always found itself in an interesting paradoxical crossroad when it comes to tackling heavy subject matter and putting it under the lens of morality. Being a eroge company and not the kind to half-ass the erotic side of their production like most Eroge seems to do out of convention (and for the most part to sell to a niche audience while bypassing censorship on more touchy subject matters) but embracing that aspect as part of their core identity puts them under a pretty unflattering light in the eyes of the general public. But AliceSoft being enjoyed mostly by a niche community of people on which its western side is the size of a small Italian mountain village means there’s not really any further or widespread discussions about the company and their works even within the fringe community of “Visual Novel fans” (I don’t like the etiquette but this is off-topic).

Usually the conversation ends as soon as it starts : AliceSoft is a porn game company, they make porn games for weirdoe otakus to jack-off to. And while we could end the discussion there, trying to be reasonable and actually explain why AliceSoft titles are more than the sum of is part is like explaining that there’s a difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia, like it exists, but it’s really hard to explain the subtle difference without sounding like a pedophile yourself and in the case of Alicesoft without sounding like a porn addicted weirdoe (which I absolutely am btw… anyway where was I ?).

And this is where yours truly chooses to bite the bullet and actually defend the idea that while being a porn game company, AliceSoft's entire existence is fascinatingly paradoxical. On one hand, Alicesoft is an eroge company and one that owns the mantle and wears it with pride, the people working at Alicesoft define themselves as “eroge makers” which can even be found on their logo and it’s not like they’re shy about it. In fact, Alicesoft has always been very transparent about their main goal when making these games : They love eroge and they want to make eroge and thus they put a sisyphean amount of effort into delivering on the erotic front, not because they wanted to sell to a niche market, not because they want to be edgy but because they genuinely enjoy and have a clear passions for the act of drawing naked women doing the deeds and then contextualize them within a thinly veiled plot with characters and complex gameplay systems to accompany said drawings.

Just one look at the Alice Mansion which is this super cool Dev Room feature present in almost every single of their titles will show you how transparent they are about that fact. They are a bunch of goofy hornballs that likes to make goofy lewd shit to please a crowd of people already averted to that type of writing or find an appeal in eroticism and pornography. Porn artists at the end of the day are still artists, they vibe with different shit, they bond over their weird quirky love for superficial details like girls in glasses and the “moe” side of their misery, there’s a lot of thought that’s put behind these elements and it’s impossible to remove that aspect of their catalog because it would just result in a different somewhat truncated experience.

So you think that something like this can only approached through an ironic lens and appreciated only by complete sociopath especially since a lot of the fetishes displayed in those games ranges from pretty extreme to downright criminal (may I remind the RanSill audience that our boy Rance isn’t an UWU soft boy but an honest to god criminal AND a rapist ?) but if it was that simple of course, the company wouldn’t have any sort of following.
Because on the other hand, Alicesoft also wants to tell good stories and more times than not, stories which actually challenge the view and the morals of the people they are trying to cater to. Being founded in the 80’s where most erotic game developers were making a quick bucks selling cheap strip poker, mahjong, shifumi or quizz games without much thought behind it, they wanted from the outset to create interesting scenarios, worlds and characters to contextualize the action. Suffice to say that in my opinion it serves the purpose of rendering the erotic situations even hotter, goofier and/or horrifying depending on what the games are aiming for and help them make more memorable in the long run because you end up having something to attach yourself to beyond the typical plumbers and stepmom scenarios.

And while that’s fine and all, I don’t think this exaggerated attention to detail and care alone would’ve made people stuck with series like Rance or their other less popular productions and they would’ve most likely died to the general indifference of many. As soon as Rance 1, the game present Rance as an awful criminal that you don’t and should not relate to or sympathize with in any capacity but that doesn’t change that he is the hero and he has to face adversaries and he alone isn’t what’s wrong with the world at large and that if people like Rance are able to exist and succeed within such a setting it’s mostly because of deeper problem with the way the world around him works, which in Rance 1 is portrayed by Lavender, the ghost of a girl who was killed by Lia, the princess of the Leazas Kingdom to quench her twisted desires and which Rance promptly punishes in his huh… own kind of way.

Very early on, AliceSoft was already toying the line between indulgence and the criticism of certain moral failings that may lead people to sincerely engage and create this type of content in the first place. Toushin Toushi 2 all the way back in 1994 did the whole “Sans Undertale judging you for your sins'' thing a lil bit more than 20 years before it was cool by including within its game mechanics a morality system which affected certain parameters in your games as well as changing the outcome of some scenes with a very obtuse way of absolving your sins if you so desired.

It’s a game where the protagonist is very different from Rance or even Kuma the character we’ll focus about in a bit, he’s a dude with a girlfriend who sadly finds himself in a pretty shitty situation regarding her well-being and his own deeper desire to progress that relationship to the next level followed by a second half so brilliant and so thought provoking that I really don’t want to spoil it for you or analyze it in details here (maybe some other day ?). Suffice to say that a morality system works with the type of story TT2 wants to tell but the nature of the game being an eroge and thus feeling the need to cater to an audience who genuinely enjoys and likes that type of content is a bit of an awkward position to find yourselves in.

Mind you, I think part of the reason this came to come through for the most part is because Alicesoft is pretty mixed in terms of gender ratio within the company, and a lot of the hard hitting and brutal scenes from these games were written by a female writer by the name of Torii who did her damn best to add her personal female leaning vision in the core DNA of these burly sex stories mostly consumed by a male audience, to the point that the modern western Rance fandom is surprisingly left-leaning and feminist at their core because they could pick apart the more subtle thinly veiled themes that these games had to offer.
In fact, when Torii doesn’t work on a game, you can instantly feel it in the level of indulgence and a lack of subtlety in regards to thing she had previously installed like that cynical biting edge that comes through when shouting into the void that the world is complex and the winds of change can come from the most unlikely and at times unlikable people. I’ve already talked about this in my review on Rance IX if you care enough to check it and give you a proper idea of what I think Rance under a new author might look and sound like (spoiler : I’m mixed on a lot of narrative choices in that game despite enjoying it in the end) but that’s not why I wrote this lengthy introduction.

I wanted to show you that deeply, Alicesoft never forgot about consequences, they may be fetishizing stuff like sexual assault and everything but it’s only a filter through which they can tell stories about the deeper implications of said actions and the multiple consequences that can be born from them and how people explore their own insecurities about sex while still keeping a mostly fun and lighthearted tone to disorientated the distracted players. Kichikuou Rance, one of their most popular and widely acclaimed titles is a game entirely built on a push and pull gameplay loop based on facing the consequences of your actions, making tough decisions and having to adapt to them and accept them as they come. And while a lot of this was lost after Torii’s departure from the company, I believe one writer took the mantle of what she once wanted to accomplish with her works, and that writer is known as Dice Korogashi.

Dice Korogashi was part of a newly formed team of developers at Alicesoft that I will now refer to as “Team Dohna” for the sake of simplicity. When the question of remaking Rance 01 for a modern audience was brought up by TADA who initially wasn’t fond of the idea. He thought that if it had to happen it should be done under the same condition the original game was made in : by a fresh team of young developers, a risky bet for what will eventually become the newest best entry point into the series but a bet that paid off significantly in the end, since Rance 01 is considered by many as one of the best titles in the series and the other remake they worked on, Rance 03 saw even more praise by the general public which faith were starting to dwindle during the few dry years of the company after the release of Sengoku Rance.

Dice and team Dohna perfectly captured the feeling of the franchise and what made it work in the first place, and with a material as shallow and honestly not that great as Rance 1 they managed to pull a lot of its best quality while reinventing the game for a new audience, coupled with a lot of retroactive continuity stuff, a more fleshed out adventure and generally better more witty writing which reminded people of the good days where Torii was at the office.

It is no surprise then than Dice was brought onto Rance X to take the role of main writer replacing Yoroide Dragon who only served a minor co-writing role this time around, the guy understood his stuff and Team Dohna were perhaps even more passionate and talented than their mentors when it came to making fun games which pleased a grand majority of people.

Soon, Team Dohna will start working on their own original IP, a game that will shake the world with a stunning artstyle and a level of presentation never seen before for the company.
Is it all style and no substance ? Or is there more to it ? Let’s see for ourselves.
Dohna Dohna was originally announced in 2016 and went onto a long development period of 4 years after its announcement after the scope and technical aspect of the project found itself to be too big for Alicesoft and Team Dohna to handle in a timely manner especially with the addition of guest artist joining the fray to design all of the unique heroines of the game and of course COVID, anyway the game was eventually released in 2020 to celebrate 1 year too late the 30th anniversary of the company. It wasn’t director Ittenchiroku first title within the universe as there exist a sort of prototype of Dohna Dohna called Haruurare which was a small mini-game in the Alice 2010 compilation, although no english version of it is available, the main premise is roughly similar with an heavy emphasis on kidnapping and forcing girls into prostitution which is what Dohna Dohna is mostly (but not entirely, we’ll get there) about.

The game takes place in the fictitious Asougi City, a modern Japanese metropole controlled by a big corporate conglomerate called “Asougi” who managed to claim its independence from the rest of world and establish a sort of cult of personality fascist regime with all the bells and whistles that come along with it such an heavily armed police force, propaganda everywhere, surveillance, “cleaning” drones and forced labor for anyone who steps too out of line with the system in place. To oppose the oppressive regime a couple of gangs whose goal is to trample on the establishment were founded, these gangs known as “Anti-Asou” clan engage in illegal activities such as property damage, stealing but most importantly the dangerous business of “hustling” which can be roughly translated by the act of kidnapping innocent women and selling their bodies to illegal prostitution.

You take control of Kuma, member of an anti-Aso clan by the name of “Nayuta” and the one managing the hustling business. he’s accompanied by other members such as Zappa the clan’s leader, Torataro the milf enjoyer, KiraKira your chainsaw wielding gyaru childhood friend, Porno the hypersexual loli and a slew of colorful characters joining the party as you progress through the game. Your goal on top of following the story is going to go inside various dungeons in order to “hunt” for potential new “talents” , bring them to your hideout and “train” them to perform well and bring you lots of cash during the “hustling” hours.

Let’s get something out of the way first before going in detail about this very peculiar premise. The game is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, it’s something that many people, even those of the mainstream gaming sphere who don't know about the concept behind the game have said. I would go as far as to say that out of all of Alicesoft’s 30 year old catalog of great games, this one easily has the best presentation of them all. Alicesoft being an eroge company means that they are of a relatively humble size and their games are relatively low budget compared to even low-profile indie games and thus are mostly carried by their sprite art and CG’s as it is tradition in that field. But here the game is just fucking popping, the illustrator Gyokai did more than an amazing job giving life to this game, the colours are flashy in a certain pop-way, the character design are ultra solid and most of all, the game has actual battle animation and those wouldn’t have to envy those of productions commonly found on Steam.

Many people say that Dohna Dohna feels like the “Persona 5” of Eroge and from an aesthetic perspective, it’s hard to deny, everything is so fluid, the UI is really nice, it feels like a proper professional game release and is far above the standards of these kinds of production, as far as the art go, the game is freaking gorgeous and I personally love it ! Even the H-Scenes are… well not to be a gooner but the art pops even in those.
One quick look at the Alice Mansion section of the game informs us that the team went for this sort of Hip-Hop, World End With You artstyle because they felt that telling a story in a modern city would make the visuals of the game rather dull and they wanted to contrast with the heavier subject matter of the game and that was a more than excellent choice, in fact I would even dare to say that some of the more… let’s say harsher and hardcore scene wouldn’t work nearly as well with an artstyle less detailed and with less flair, I gotta admit that I rarely praise H-Scenes but some of the H-Scenes in this game really made me stop to take care of important business if you know what I’m saying.

When I said earlier that the game was considered to be the “Persona 5” of Eroge, I also meant it a bit more literally as a lot of the main criticism people have towards the game because of this poppy artstyle combined to quite a dark premise meant the game was supposedly all style and no substance, that it’s just a fun game with fun mechanics and that the stories failed at delivering any thoughtful deeper commentary about the subject matter it was trying to tackle, I must admit, that was a bit of my impression at first. Like I said, it’s really hard to release an Eroge who very obviously indulges in some crass stuff while trying to sell and please to an audience of jerkers who are only there to appreciate the “art” and the game general tone didn’t really indicate at first that the story was going to take that whole “hustling” thing all that seriously and put it as an excuse to be primordially fun first and a bit needlessly edgy second. I was actually wary about this throughout my playthrough but then I remember that the person who recommended this game to me had a lot to say positively about the game’s handling of said topic and the deeper political themes the game tries to explore.

But to talk about these, we first need to understand how the game works. The game is divided in multiple phases, you have a hideout phase where you can buy items, manage your party, participate in character events to further your relationship with your party members and manage your “talents” (more on that later). After that, you have two choices, either spend the day “hustling” which will trigger the Hustling phase of the game or go on a “hunt” which initiates the Hunting Phase of the game AKA Dungeon exploration. We’ll focus on the hunting phases first as it is the more “video gamey” aspect of the game.

After selecting a dungeon, you move your characters on a series of linear branching paths which sometimes leads to an icon triggering a fight, giving you an item or triggering an event. The battle system of the game is actually pretty fun, it’s a less hardcore version of “Darkest Dungeon”, if you ever played that game, your characters and the opposite party are placed in a round of 4 and you have to slide them left or right before using their abilities, you have to consider placement because some of your abilities only work within a certain radius or only hit a certain row (which can be seen by a line connecting to where the attack will land) and also to avoid damages yourself, as some of the more fragile units could potentially get killed easily if they’re misplaced. While Dohna Dohna, doesn’t really have the same level of complexity of Darkest Dungeons with its permadeath system and various amounts of status effects (here most of them are just stats debuffs), it does have a few “puzzle” fights when it comes to recruiting talents ! Sometimes when on the field, you’ll hit a case with a girl icon, this triggers a fight with a talent on it and if you want to recruit it, you will need to defeat that girl last and so you need to time and use your techniques right as to clear all enemies before dealing with the talent who always die in one hit ! It’s a nice change of pace on top of the bosses which are also pretty damn fun and well designed.
The game’s difficulty on a first playthrough is “just right” and the character variety of your party is pretty damn solid, it’s also nice that you can swap party members at any time in battle and an unlimited amount of time to as to keep the general flow of battle intact and not punish the players too much for harsh decisions. Fights are usually not all that hard but there were some that took me by surprises with how challenging they were, combined with the entire resource management aspect of dungeon exploration. I have a few complaints with the game's systems however : for one, only the active party members at the end of a battle get any XP which is pretty annoying to keep everyone evenly leveled by the end of the game and two the enemy variety isn’t super high. I understand this was done because animating hand drawn sprites for every characters probably was already a huge time commitment as is but It wouldn’t have killed to at least have swap colored version with different aptitudes instead of just pulling from the same pool of generic soldier troopers with more HP for new zones, that’s no to say it’s always these types of enemies as some story dungeons switch things up when the other gangs are involved but still.

Another thing that I didn’t really enjoy was the weapon upgrade system, for some reasons, Alicesoft weapon systems have always been obtuse and RNG heavy for no reasons and Dohna Dohna is no exception. To get new gear, you need to first find the material and then buy it at the shop, problem is the game doesn’t tell you where to find these past Rank 2 and even if you figure it out somehow, you need to be lucky to be able to find said material in a dungeon during an hunting phase, it makes the endgame unnecessarily grindy if you want the most optimal gear to tackle the last few challenges of the game unless you want to spend a lifetime killing one tanky enemies in one of the late game areas while making sure they don’t send your ass to the shadow realm.

Speaking of buying items, the main means of collecting money in this game is through the “hustling” part which is where the game hides its true ludo-narrative experience. One thing that I’ve noticed when playing through the game is that this aspect of the game was pretty secondary, you need it to gain money and gain more resources but aside from the time the story requires it, the hustling is something almost entirely optional and even when you are forced to interact with it the requirement to progress to the next stage of the story is usually not that high.

At first, I thought this design decision was a bit odd. Why would the secondary mechanic of the game, arguably the one the marketing of the game was centered around and one of the main sources of inner conflict for our protagonist, be left being so optional ? The main answer one could arrive at is that much like the RPG aspect of the game, they wanted this part to not be too much of a weight on the players, especially the ones that were more familiar with RPG mechanics but not nearly enough with management simulators. After all, the Alice Mansion section of the game talks about how they wanted the game to remain easy and accessible in order to sell it to a larger audience as this big bright and colorful game celebrating 30 years of the company’s history.

But by actually investing myself deeper within that part of the game out of my own volition and also mostly so I could gather enough resources to mitigate the end-game grind, I think that I was understanding why they decided to do it this way as it says a lot about you the player and how you start naturally fitting in the shoes of the main character Kuma, experiencing a similar level of cold detachment as you invest more time in those mechanics.

Kuma is an interesting protagonist as far as the wider range of Alicesoft protagonist goes, unlike Rance he isn’t some lust and ego-driven asshole looking to dominate the screen time and the world while hiding his weaker side behind a veil of macho man behavior, unlike Seed from Toushin Toshi II, he isn’t an innocent constantly struggling with the morality of his actions and the vow he gave to his S.O. Kuma is a bit like Walter White from the Breaking Bad series, a man who after losing everything turns himself to a shady business and has grown colder and more indifferent in order to protect his own psyche from the harsh reality of the acts he’s committing. Kuma lost his family after they were used as experiments for Asougi which led him to a life of crime and joining the Nayuta clan. Nayuta, initially wasn’t fond of “hustling” as a business but Kuma began introducing it to the clan under the suggestion of “Mistress” a shop owner who gives out weapons and items to other clans around the city as “hustling” is shown to him to be the most optimal way to found Nayuta’s illegal and revolutionary activities.

Kuma sees hustling as just a means to an end, just something that he absolutely needs and has to do in order to avenge his family and further his goals within Nayuta. Kuma is a young man, still going to school during the events of the story even if his presence in class isn’t the most consistent, he even embarks his childhood friend KiraKira into that business which he probably didn’t want to do in the first place but much like anything in his life, dealing with a life of crime had terrible effects on his mind. Kuma being responsible for such a business had to grow distant and cold when dealing with “talents” and usually, he wants to deal with the hustling alone, not letting the other members of Nayuta handle that side of the clan activities and only focusing on the hunt. Of course, the other members interact with him throughout the course of the game, but they don’t really question him on that subject for more than a few seconds and it’s only when Kuma is gone from the team for a short while during the campaign that another member by the name of Joker takes the mantle temporarily and say something “well that was fucked up” and not much else.

As the story progresses, Kuma kinda loses himself in his job, leaving aside his humanity in order to perform well and grow the numbers even larger, he lost himself in the sauce and it’s not even sure that he could even escape from it, he’s not even sure of why he was doing in the first place and why he’s continuing. This is why the hustling part of the game is very light and not too player demanding in my opinion, just like Kuma, you can just treat it literally like a side-hustle that you need to participate in even a little bit to progress in the game but if you want to perform better, you need more money, you need more numbers, you need better talents, with better stats and thus any further implication within that side of the game is only greed from the players perpetuating the cycle of violence and cruelty for his gains.

In the game, you manage your talents through the uses of a tablet showing different stats like their looks (how likely they’ll get picked up by clients), their techniques (how much money they’ll bring) and their mental health stat which is akin to HP in other game and when that reaches zero, the talent “breaks” and thus cannot perform as well and is a wasted asset that you need to dispose of. Talents also comes with a series of attributes which give bonuses during hustling for example by giving a “sexy” talent to a client that demands it means you’ll get more money out of them but in return they can also add attributes to them some beneficial and some not like making them blind or disabled, these attributes have different effects on the talent stat growth and stat decrease every time they participate in sexual activities with mental health almost always systematically dropping down each time.

Of course in order to keep your talent in check, you can feed them different training items which increases their stats so they can either perform better and for longer, you also need to make sure they stay on the pill so they don’t end up getting pregnant which is about as bad as them being broken and making them discardable. It’s in this aspect that I found my mind was starting to look at these talents like just replaceable assets, things that you can just break and replace by the next talent with better stats and initially, the game actually encourages such a playstyle because it’s more efficient to discard your broken talent and replacing them with newer, better ones than keeping them for too long.

This is encouraged by something called the “Hustle Appreciation/Desperation Day” : while you can hustle at any point during your playthrough, it is preferable to keep your girls for these special day which give more money and dedicate the other days to hunting in dungeons and progressing the story. Desperation day in particular is pretty good for your wallet, as the clients give way more money per hustle but in exchange sadly are rougher with your talents which reduce your talents mental health to mush, faster than it took me to write this review and give them a lot of bad attributes !

Realizing the reality of this situation, I started trying to invest more in my talents mental health, showering them with goods to boost their moods and I realized that it was kind of harder to do than just discard them but I didn’t wanna lose some of my best talents as they were a great asset to my business and I grew attached to them. It’s upon this realization that something clicked in my head, I asked the friend who recommended the game to me about tips on how to get more mental health items to keep my talents happy and not leaving them to which they responded that “Yes indeed, it is hard to take care of their mental health, but think about it, isn’t it worse to feed them lies in order to cope with their situation ? It’s not really ethically better to subject them to continuous trauma like that instead of letting them go” and suddenly it clicked, the true horrors of hustling were coming to me. I didn’t treat these poor women as people, I treated these poor women as assets…

I was turning into Kuma, colder, harsher, more disinterested, only caring about the well-being of my talents because I profited off of their pain. I thought that I was mitigating their suffering but truly, I wasn’t. Every Time one of my “talent” mental health started dropping, I was afraid to lose those I called “My best earner” (or “bottom bitch” like that one South Park episode about Butters turning into a pimp). And the complete irony of my line of thinking was put right in front of me when the last tier of mental health training item was literally making my “talents” read the fucking “Myth of Sissyphus” which is a touch of humor on behalves the developers but made me realized how much of an ass I really was when it comes to understanding what the game wanted to say. I was feeding these girls lies to make them feel like their work here was not as bad as it actually was and in the middle of all this, I forgot that this was a game about kidnapping innocent bystanders and forcing them into a life of trauma.

And the downward spiral of awful shit that I was committing naturally without question didn’t stop there. See in this game, there are “special talents” that you can recruit after passing certain points in the story. They usually come with better stats and a unique design provided by the many guest artists who worked on the game but that’s not all. Because these are unique heroines, they have stories attached to them that you can experience by unlocking events by meeting certain conditions, usually involving hustling them to specific people.
When this happens, an ero-scene plays, with a CG and everything and it’s there that the horrors buried deep inside this colorful game starts to show themselves in a much more “in your face” kind of way. See, one of the most interesting narrative decision when it comes to the game story is that the game is told only through dialogues, it’s not an unusual style for Alicesoft of course but the absence of 3rd person narration during the story was purposefully done as to not to embellish or hide the intents of the characters during the regular story sections. Every thought and every action that Kuma or other characters take or have is presented bluntly to you without flourish as to keep the flow of the story intact and the intent of the narrative clear with the exception of two cases scenarios : The Unique Heroine Ero-Events and the “humiliation” scenes that I’ll cover later down this essay.

Here the narration flips the POV from the players, to the victims depicted in the scene because let’s not mince any words, these are harsh, sexual assault scene and the “talents” that you set to the gutter are victims in this specific scenario. During these moments, you can clearly, hear, see and read every deeper thoughts of the story at large, heck one of the CG’s in the game also happens to be in first person view, giving you a frontal look at what it means to be in these people's shoes. Notice how I said “people” and “victims” and not “talent” here because in these circumstances, with the absence of the filters provided by the fluid UI and gameplay mechanics, you can only perceive them as human beings, being progressively destroyed by your actions. You could’ve avoided this, you could’ve just ignored the event requirements for these heroines, but you likely did so out of morbid curiosity or an empty goal minded interest in completing the game CG collection and now you are granted with your “reward” which is these intensely hardcore scenes of psychologically horrific abuse.

There are over 13 unique heroines that are this way and what I do actually enjoy about them is that while their fate is equally as horrible for each, they’re all on a different spot on the spectrum of trauma. Some girls, who lived in Asougi city, who believed in the good of the people living there and the system working for their own benefits, suddenly saw their entire world crumble in front of their eyes. Some of them, whose regular lives were already not enviable before you kidnapped them, see this activity as an escape from the far harsher reality that awaits them in the outside world as being sent to prostitution is marginally better than their previous life. Some of them, who never received or understood the concept of love and are receiving praises for the first time, finally feel values in this body of work. Some of them revel in this situation, as they were already inclined to work with you even if you didn’t force them too.

You might even think that some girl’s situation is “not that bad” until it becomes worse. One of the girls is a pompom girl who gets specifically requested by her childhood friend on behalf of his father buying a prostitute for him to lose her virginity. But after the sighs of relief from realizing that she only has to deal with someone she knows and can trust, it’s immediately followed by the second event where the guy breaks that trust to get out of a bad situation by offering her to his bullies. Feeling guilt over this fact, he starts menacing Kuma, who responds with a cold demeanor that he chose this, that he has his information and that if he attempted to do anything against him, he will expose him and that he need to find another solution and the best solution was simply to buy off the girl to be his private property, removing her freedom for good, just to be the one exclusive to her and give himself a good conscience.

Just like every road leads to Rome, the fate of these girls all end up in the deepest, darkest, places regardless of their circumstances or if they find new meaning in this wretched parody of what they call “their new life”. Whether you keep them around for longer because you wanna keep using their good stats to further your gain, or tire them until they can’t move and break them to replace them with others, in the end, you are always in the wrong, you are always doing bad things ! Your eyes were bigger than your stomach, you can and should’ve avoided this, you could’ve just participated “a little” but you went all in and even then you still participated anyway. Because while these heroines could express themselves directly to you as they were designed as such by the game, how about the slew of generic, interchangeable NPC talents that you sent to the gutter ? You probably only saw them as numbers on a tablet and nothing else.

This is what it means to be Kuma, this is what it means to lose yourself in something that you can’t control anymore. In the end, you’re no better than him, in the end the game molded you into what he become and it’s in this moment that you realize that much like Joker when Kuma leaves the party that the reality of hustling is much more fucked up and that you could probably never do it yourself and yet you did !

There are also other observations one could make of such a system, like how the game seems to privilege younger looking characters when it comes to distributing the beauty stat (with the more child-like ones systematically being S-tier and in high demand) or the fact that talking to your talents is yet another, pointless attempt at trying to sympathize with the victim of your crime and all of this starts to paint an interesting ludo-narrative tapestry that viciously hits where it needs to.

But see, this is where my praise for the game kinda comes to an end, because, the thing that is unfortunate about Dohna Dohna, is that this “style over substance” reputation isn’t entirely invented out of the blue. A lot of the systems that I did mention are secondary and we did see how it was an intentional choice but the problem is that the game expects you to play it in a certain way in order to get the most juice out of what it’s trying to do and this way is pretty counter-intuitive. I guess I haven’t talked about the main story but it’s because my thoughts on it are a bit of a mix bag. I think the cast is charming and the writing can be funny at times and yes, sometimes it can be thoughtful but it feels like it spectacularly ignores all of the narrative potential of the story told by the hustling mechanics.

It’s like Dohna Dohna is two facet of a coin, on the surface, if you play normally and doing the minimum to progress through the game, you realize that the story is a bit of standard and not that entertaining gang-war story with tints of themes of revolution and fighting against oppression, you’ve likely stories like these before and you’ve likely seen them done better. Heck, the game actually has heroines that are not tied to the hustling mechanic but are regular party members and the way the game writes and treats them is a bit… strange ?

When doing a regular playthrough of Dohna Dohna, you can participate in events with your party members to get closer to them and gather affinity points, they’ve become quite popular in JRPG’s these days but this mechanic took its origin from the dating sim genre to which Dohna Dohna is clearly a derivative of. Because this is an eroge, most of the events are for the most part erotic but in the end they all serve the purpose of getting Kuma closer to the girls and the rest of the gang and getting to know them better.

These are called “feelings” event and they’re all sorts of your typical romantic, weird and wacky sex scenario that you come to see from your average eroge with the character arc of said characters usually involving them discovering what sex is and the joy of having healthy regular intercourse with a respectful partner (who just happens to be a freaking criminal on the verge of psychopathy) and eventually falling in love with them or something. Of course, I am vastly exaggerating and there is some variation and some more complex arcs thrown in there but it’s in these moments that the game drops any pretends of being a deep commentary on the commodification of abuse, the cycle of violence and a character study on the fall of a broken man to dive head first into the typical kind of indulgent content meant to titillate the player’s noodlestick.

Combined with the main story itself barely acknowledging the hustling part of the game as an afterthought and you get quite a strange whiplash that might confirm initial expectations. It’s also not helped that the story itself doesn’t really care to explore a bit more deeply the conflicts that exist within its settings. There are 2 other clans that confronts you during the game, they are also Anti-Aso, also participate in similar shady business that you sometimes get to see but most often not but they never really expand on why these gangs who seemingly aiming for the same goal of taking down Asougi don’t actually work together. Is it because they have other methods that don’t fit with Nayuta’s mindset, or they’re using means that they don’t agree with ? It seems like the only reason these gangs fight each other is because it’s traditionally what happens in these types of stories instead of some more deeply rooted reasons.

This sadly has the unfortunate result of making the story go around in circle, never really progressing from hours on end and hinging on similarly repeated conflicts to create intrigues, drama and tension and while it can be entertaining and sometimes fun thanks to the writing being charming, it’s far too shallow to be able to tell an impactful story through the main mean in which the game communicates with you which are the characters, their dialogues and interactions. While there’s definitely some moments, they’re not really reflective of the main conflicts that exist within the world and what our characters are led to do in order to survive in it. The game does try to mitigate this by some neat twist near the end of the game, where it is revealed that in order to maintain the illusion of peace within its system, it had to create, manage and control the Anti-Aso clans from the shadow, manipulating them in order to create a criminal underworld where the more “problematic” citizens can give in to their deeper twisted desires. This reveal should’ve shook Kuma to his core especially when it turns out that Mistress, the shopkeep who led him to this life of crime in the first place, worked in tandem with Asougi’s CEO to maintain this masquerade.

During the final moments of the game, there’s a betrayal arc that ends as soon as it starts because of some friendship speech, there’s a big team-up of all the Anti-Aso clans working together and they try to attack and dethrone the wretched capitalist overlord and their big giant robot of doom. This ending while conceptually interesting concludes in a bit of a wet fart in my opinion, with the characters triumphantly exposing Asougi’s crime to the general public without actually dismantling the company and their influences and most importantly, without facing any real consequences for their action. It was in this moment that Kuma should’ve been punished for his crimes, and face his ultimate fate after realizing that all he did was for nothing and he can only bear guilt on his conscience for the rest of his life or face death but there’s none of that shit and it kinda throw me off a little bit.

You can definitely feel that perhaps, Team Dohna was planning to continue the story and expand on its world, characters and conflicts in a sequel and the multiple endings of the game is definitely opened to it, but with Team Dohna leaving Alicesoft to move on to greener pastures and Dohna Dohna being one of the last high profile games of their catalog that isn’t an exploitative gacha mobile game, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

And it’s a shame because this story in all of its classicism and in all of its shortcoming and lack of completeness and ludo-narrative consistency is the Dohna Dohna that most people who didn’t push the game further than the credits and the basic requirement to progress through the game will experience and it’s a fun story don’t get me wrong ! But, I wouldn’t blame anyone for getting out of Dohna Dohna feeling unsatisfied by its promising premise that ends up being nothing more than a gimmick at first glance !

The thing is that the game has a very counter-intuitive way to push you towards a deeper, more impactful experience which hinges on you being bad at the game. See, when I’ve talked about the heroine's events earlier, I didn’t mention that all of these feeling events have a “variant B” to them which completely flips the script on its head to deliver on some hard hitting confrontation of Kuma’s action and their consequences. To access these alternate events, you have to not participate in any events with the girl (and thus not furthering their relationship and rendering them less useful in battle) until a certain point in the scenario where they get kidnapped. If you fail to save them in a reasonable amount of time, you will witness something called an “humiliation scene” which is, you guessed it, them getting treated similarly to how the unique heroine in the hustling mode gets. While it does offer another H-Scene to complete your gallery, the deeper, long-lasting effect however is changing every subsequent “feeling events” you’ll do with them to have additional dialogues to reflect the traumatic events they went through !

This is a brilliant idea on paper, most of these variant B scenes are actually miles more interesting conceptually than their regular counterparts. One of them is literally Antenna, the goofy autistic hacker girl having some sort of an existential crisis when she realizes that Kuma might actually be as much of a monster as her aggressor and Kuma retorquing that it’s indeed true and that he doesn’t want to feed her lies by pretending the contrary. Or KiraKira trying to convince Kuma from stopping all this madness and trying to go back to a regular school-life as girlfriend and boyfriend with Kuma sadly refusing as he is in too deep to back down no matter how irrational it may be and how uncomfortable it makes KiraKira.

I say on paper, because, getting to the conclusion that the heroines are “more interesting with traumas than without” is a bit of an awkward statement to make as factually true as it may be. Some of them like Porno and Medico, still have solid enough arc regularly especially Porno since her relationship to Kuma is deeply tied to her troubled past and how she’s learning to cope with it in a very unhealthy way but for the grand majority, you’re better off reaching for the heroine bad endings, if you want the game’s tone to fit the harsh subject matters brought up by its gameplay mechanics and Kuma’s inner conflict. It’s also just kind of badly handled in execution, the requirements to even access these bad endings are so specific, and so hard to miss due to the game treating them as punishments for not playing the game right that it kinda misses the point and is where it would’ve helped if the game was just a tad bit more challenging and tad bit less forgiving when it comes to managing your time and your ressources.

Because as it stands, these bad ending variants feel like rewards rather than punishment because you need to actively seek them in order to make the story more engaging and the point the story wants to get at clearer. And unlike Rance IX, where its bad endings were kind of pointlessly edgy to please to a certain demographic without any meaningful addiction to the game story and what it wanted to accomplish, here you’ll actually want to get to them because otherwise, you just end up with a shallower experience and less completion percentage on your save file.

And isn’t it all a bit ass-backward ?

By treating that side of the game as just an optional, easily missable part of the experience, you ultimately sabotage the potential the story could’ve had in the long run and I don’t think that as it stands, Dohna Dohna can hold its ground naturally as a great entry in Alicesoft’s catalog without these pointless detour. But on the other hand, Alicesoft loves their replay value and also loves their generosity and providing their players with tons of contents to satisfy their craving for erotic gaming.

This is where the philosophical dilemma lies with Alicesoft production and more specifically with Dohna Dohna. It’s clear that the reason all of the story’s depth lied semi-hidden behind obtuse condition was only made this way to turn that darker side of the game into something that players are actively seeking and while the scenes in question can be very heavy in terms of atmosphere and content, I’m not a fool to suggest that to some people, these scenes actually feels like a reward regardless of the writers best effort to accomplish the contrary. Because of the way the game leads the player to that content but also because simply, some folks are just “into that shit” and there’s nothing we can really do about that unless turning the game into a family friendly RPG where these subject matters could barely even be brought up in the first place.

But for those who can set aside their fantasies to read between the lines and really absorbing where the game is trying to lead them, they will certainly find what they were looking for story-wise and learn a valuable lesson with this cautionary tale of a broken man, breaking a lot of woman in his path for what he believed was the right thing to do in order to survive and overthrow the system. Alas, I also hoped that the actual main storyline supported that line of thinking.

As a man in my mid-20’s playing eroge I can only admire and scrutinize the story from a media analyst perspective. I can also empathize with the subject matter and the characters interacting with it and also enjoy the game for simply being a fun game to pass the time. Unfortunately, I could never entirely relate to the pleas and the struggles of these victims because I am not one myself and thus perhaps my review might be just as shallow and disinterested as the story itself was to its deeper narrative elements.

With that out of the way however, I think that while Dohna Dohna is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, I still think it’s one of Alicesoft strongest title and that while the attempt was a bit messy, I can only appreciate that they’ve tried and create a story that might connect to someone out there who will find more value in it that I have. However I have one last thing to share before finishing up this essay.

I’ve mentioned countless times during this review that the game was recommended to me by a certain person that I had yet to mention : My good friend Kitty, mostly known by its pen-name of “Antenna” or “.Farside”. if my review made you curious about the game or if you simply want a more thorough and engaged analysis of the work by someone with more insight on it as it unfortunately has a first-hand experience with the subject matter and felt deeply touched by it, you can check what its article on the game has to say about the game here :

https://fuwanovel.net/2023/08/why-dohna-dohna-matters/

I highly recommend it personally, it’s better written than anything I could come up with myself and I consider this to be an essential companion piece to a first hand experience with the game.

Recently, it has occurred to me that the harshest thing that could be said about any sequel is that it makes you "appreciate the original more". What initially may seem like a positive comment is anything but. In actuality, such a statement is essentially saying "This game took an imperfect original and failed to improve upon it so spectacularly that I'm left wondering if the flaws of the first one are really so problematic after all".

Anyways, Pikmin 2

Chapter 1 - Earth: The Final Frontier

The original Pikmin game was fairly coy about the possibility of this game taking place in our very own backyard, perhaps after some sort of unnamed armaggedon. The sequel, on the other hand, hardly waits 20 minutes to smack you across the face with mustard lids and toy gundams. Such a setting would be fine, cute even, if it ever actually amounted to anything. At risk of getting ahead of myself, caves (which I'll get into more later) are given a vague "Earth stuff" wallpaper, but it's not like they're actual locations, just a mish mash of junk. They more closely resemble those AI-generated images that look like a hoarder's bedroom at first glance, but if you try to focus on any details your brain will start dry heaving and saying hail marys. Above ground is given token dandelions, though I hardly remember the forest having so many electrified gates and toxin-spewing vents. Maybe that's more common in Japan.

Chapter 2 - Hocotate Pawn

So, what is it that possesses the blue-collar hero Olimar to return to the site of his 30-day nightmare? Well, MONEY, of course! The plot is novel, as Olimar and his junior Louie are sent back to Earth in order to scrounge up enough money to save their (presumably non-union) jobs. Hazard pay is, I imagine, off the table. That being said, "novel" feels like such a disappointing step back from Pikmin 1. For any of its faults, the first game shined in mood. Olimar was in a genuine life-or-death struggle, completely alone on an alien planet. There was a constant danger and he clearly knew it. Now, it's Olimar and his jackass friend playing junior Bargain Hunt. There is nothing pressing about the situation except the occasional nagging email from their boss. The development of his situation was funny, especially by the time he was becoming king of the woodland creatures, but it once again undercuts any sense of isolation.

Chapter 3 - All the Time in the World

The time limit in Pikmin 1 was at once the bane of my existence, and its most essential feature. I was constantly fearful of inefficiency and working too slow, but it was a healthy kind of anxiety. Like a low heat stove, there was a constant simmering tension that merely asks you to avoid pissing around. Now, there is absolutely no urgency. Despite the plot explicitly concerning repaying late debt, the boss will presumably indefinitely hide out from the knee-breaking loan sharks until you're good and ready to proceed, Olimar and Louie free to spend all the time in the world prancing through flowers and singing hymns. Bizarrely, the game mysteriously retains the day-night cycle. Since there is no day limit, it's just an excuse for a recap of stats from the last arbitrary period of time and a chance for the boss to guilt trip you with the cigarette butts and half-eaten cheesecake he had to scrounge out of the trash for dinner. Previously, the end of a day was a further tick on the doomsday clock, that much less time to save your life; now, it feels more like that screen where the Wii would tell you to take a break and go outside.

Chapter 4 - The Louie Factor

Another new feature is of course the presence of Olimar's "he's trying his best" sidekick, Louie. Aside from the aforementioned total destruction of the atmosphere this creates, it does allow for some interesting gameplay opportunities, as Pikmin can now be set to two tasks at the same time - occasionally, at least. Since there's absolutely no automation, the only tasks you can set a captain to supervise passively is things that take a long time for the Pikmin to do, like destroying walls. That's not nothing of course; it's nice to not have to stare deadeyed as your Pikmin dash their brains out against a stone wall for 7 hours in a prolonged metaphor for their entire existence. Still, it would be nice to even have some basic captain commands (ex. "Return to the Onion with your Pikmin", "Go here on the map by the safest possible route", "Collect pellets near you"). Having two captains also allows for you to divvy up your Pikmin easier - still not as neatly as would be ideal, but definitely an improvement. Louie in specific is an interesting character, coming across less like Olimar Jr. and more like some sort of savage animal who's simply too stupid to be scary. He doesn't think about anything but food (which seems to rub off on Olimar somewhat), culminating in Louie's journal, an entire compendium built around one joke. I can't imagine reading the entire thing when it is, again, one joke, but the fact they put that much effort into it honestly does make the joke a lot funnier. To add to Louie's charming weirdness is the unexplained implication that he tries to kill Olimar, something which absolutely did make me laugh.

Chapter 5 - It's a Duracell World

Populating Olimar's new recurring vacation destination is a number of treasures for you to collect. These are Pikmin 2's equivalent to the ship parts in the previous game. There is absolutely a funny novelty to the idea of junk scavenged out of a dirty hole being considered treasure, as Olimar proudly displays rotten pickle chips and broken Hot Wheels next to Hocotate's Mona Lisa. The issue with this feature is a simple one: Pikmin 1 featured a total of 30 treasures to collect. Pikmin 2, a marginally longer game, features over 200. Despite this overwhelming amount of junk, each of which is worth a handful of pennies and a Subway coupon, the game still requires you to one-by-one carry them back to your ship for a little celebratory cutscene. Then, all my Pikmin gather around for a jovial applause and the Evangelion "Congratulations" scene because I brought back a feather worth literally 10 coins (reminder that the total debt is 10,000). It's impossible not to find it incredibly tedious after a while. There are only so many times you can laugh at the novelty of seeing a screw or a kiwi or one of the four(?!) Duracell batteries they make you collect. The most damning thing I can say is that, after defeating the final boss, I felt absolutely no impulse to collect the remaining treasures, in a game where such an exercise is ostensibly the entire point.

Chapter 6 - Meet the New Pikmin, Same as the Old Pikmin or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Purples

Like that story of James Cameron writing "Alien$" on a whiteboard, the inclusion of more Pikmin is an obvious step forward. Here, we have technically two new members of the Pikmin posse, though it's functionally three. The ability for yellow Pikmin to carry bombs has been removed, a mechanic that will not be missed. Instead, they focus on electricity, opening electric gates and giving electric enemies that fluoride stare when they try to zap 'em. The first fully new addition is the white Pikmin, whose primary function is to open poison gates and fight poison enemies - noticing a pattern here? It's like the whole games been recalibrated around making sure you have different keys for different doors. It could be argued that bombs were that too, but a) it's more explicit now and b) in these games, two keys feels very different from three. Hell, is it four? I don't remember fire gates in Pikmin 1, but that might just be the dementia. Beyond the poison immunity, white Pikmin also damage anything that eats them, something which will be very useful when Pikmin introduces the Divine Wind Pikmin and suiciding your units becomes a viable strategy. Thirdly, they can dig up buried treasures, a contextual "locked door" that seems to only exist to give you the double bird if you thought that "no poison" in a cave meant it was safe to not take whites, you oafish simpleton. Finally, they can carry items faster, an ability that's totally useless, since I don't really see any good reason to carry more than a few white Pikmin; you're not rolling out the White Ranger Recovery Squad to speed haul those Duracells, especially when there's, again, absolutely no urgency in this game. Further exacerbating that is the fact that whites and the secret third Pikmin are both fairly rare and not easy to replace. Ah, yes, that secret third thing: the purple Pikmin. Perhaps akin to Dr. Oppenheimer, I was initially naive to the awesome power I was meddling with. Rest assured, once their true potential dawned on me, I did indeed become death, destroyer of worlds. There's no reason not to roll up with a backing crew of these big boys. After getting cold cocked by a purple Pikmin air barrage, 80 - 90% of enemies fold like wet paper. These chunky fellas not only do gonzo damage, they can also stun enemies. That's not just those they hit, but also nearby enemies, their wife, pet dog, and those who happen to have run an errand in the same postal code. In addition, they seem to have basic homing abilities, so even my Olimar's crosseyed aim is enough to make bulborb pancakes one right after the other. It's not an exaggeration to say the vast majority of enemy encounters are totally trivial if you just bury them in purple Pikmin, including most bosses. Purple Pikmin being limited is not an issue because purple Pikmin simply won't die. If that wasn't enough, they can carry more than any other Pikmin, meaning you don't even need many for treasures.

Chapter 7 - The Earth Defense Force

Enemy variety is one area of improvement here, though the actual quality of the specific enemies is something of a mixed bag. Some, like the Careening Dirigibug or the Decorated Cannon Beetle can add a fun challenge, though become extraordinarily frustrating in the wrong situation. Others, like all the little Dweevils or the Jellyfloats, are not threatening at all, just annoying to deal with. The new bulborb variants are frightening suckers; the halloween-colored guys will pull an "omae wa mou shindeiru" on eight of your Pikmin before you can even react. As far as bosses go, they were unique and fun, though most were made fairly trivial by the purple Pikmin. The final boss, similarly to in the first game, is deeply frustrating to figure out, but once you do, he's a fun challenge. I probably prefer this boss to the first one, as your responses feel more varied, not just repeating the same hit and run until he throws in the towel. Finally, I can't not mention the Waterwraith, my new best friend, who turns into a Looney Tunes character after he loses his rolling pin. Replace his theme with Benny Hill for the same effect.

Chapter 8 - Addressing the Deep, Dark Hole in the Room

Finally, we get to caves, the foggy, wet hole at the center of this game. This is the part where I would normally say "it's a good idea in concept, but the execution leaves something to be desired". The issue, however, is that it's not a good idea in concept. In fact, I struggle to grasp how a team of developers decided the best evolution of a somewhat open world game about exploring and finding items scattered around a nature environment was a series of cramped, linear tunnels devoid of any discovery. Since these are such a major part of the experience and I have so many different things to touch on, this chapter will be broken into subchapters.

Chapter 8.1 - Pikmin's Baby Park

I really can't stress enough how much I hate caves. Let's start with the biggest, most glaring issue - the aforementioned linearity. Most floors are not strictly linear, to be fair, but that just means you're not TECHNICALLY forced to wade down the lane of the swimming pool because you're allowed to explore the hot tub to your heart's content. Every floor is a tiny area, mostly devoid of any puzzles, fun level design, or sense of discovery. They pretty much all boil down to a mix of fighting a bunch of guys (far from the most fun part of Pikmin) and clearing one of the many doors that you hopefully have brought the full rainbow to deal with like you're Captain Planet. Caves are, at first, fine, and by the end of the game, they're a merciless trudge. I feel like Alex DeLarge, having my eyeballs held open and being forced to watch increasingly elongated sequences of the same tunnels with the same enemies (mostly) and the same four kinds of doors until I break. The worst offender is Glutton's Kitchen, in which you "explore" an entire cave's worth of large, blank rooms where a crowd of bulborbs are holding a singles mixer to meet some nice breadbugs. These empty rooms populated by a bunch of basic enemies feel like the Pikmin equivalent of Mario Kart's Baby Park. Thankfully, it's mercifully short. Speaking of length, what starts at a compassionate 6 floors by the end of the game becomes upwards of an eyewatering 15. If you'll recall back to Chapter 1, I also alluded to how the artistic direction of the level design seemed to be "public park or public restroom after a tornado". Maybe I would enjoy it more if these were real environments, but they're not. I just remember bathroom tile texture over haphazard "baths" and randomly placed props, or something meant to resemble a sandbox or play pen if it was, as they say on Chopped, "deconstructed". I concede gameplay should come first, but environmental cohesion should probably be some sort of a factor, no?

Chapter 8.2 - Poison Vents to Nowhere

Much of these caves are procedurally generated, and by god can you tell. It's honestly atrocious. Spawning immediately next to a giant bulborb ready to make pik-kebabs and hazardous traps set up carefully to guard the cave's vast stock of dead ends are just a couple of the many wonders Pikmin 2 will generate regularly, the second one seeming to happen on essentially every floor. What is even the point of putting me through all these rooms if 90% of the dangers will spawn so haphazardly they're entirely irrelevant? The most important button map you need to remember to get through Pikmin 2 is your reset button. Don't like a level? Just reset it, and it'll be entirely different. There was one level where an extremely narrow bridge over a pond spawned off to the side, but after I was forced to reset the level, it spawned obstructing my path every single time. Since I refuse to play the Pikmin Shuffle with 100 little idiots, I just kept resetting until it would get out of my way again. So, we have a system that makes every level feel samey and terribly structured, and said system is easily abused, to boot. To add on to that, apparently some of the cave music is procedurally generated, which explains why some parts sound like cats remixing a soundboard of Weird Al songs.

Chapter 8.3 - The Great Bulborb Spanking Line

The degree to which these caves begin to rely on "fight huge hordes of guys" as their one and only challenge feels like if a movie director decided they'd done enough plot and made the back half of the film a series of disconnected scenes of people bowling. One right after another these dwarf bulborbs line themselves up, and one after another they get the goomba experience from my purple Pikmin air squadron. For most of these enemies, it's not difficult, it's not fun. By the time Cavern of Chaos has 54 bulborbs on one floor, it's hard not to imagine Miyamoto like Peter Venkman running his psychic tests at the beginning of Ghostbusters: "The effect? I'll tell you what the effect is - it's pissing me off!" Except by that point, I don't know if I had the enthusiasm to be pissed off, just totally drained. Who enjoys fighting grunt after grunt after grunt like this?

Chapter 8.4 - Live, Die, Repeat: The Pikmin Killing Zone

The horrible little reality that only dawns with time is how vital that reset button really will be. In every cave, you can bring 100 pikmin max and you're unable to ever go back for more until the cave is completely cleared and all the curtains are washed. With that change, suddenly Pikmin become a precious commodity - the loss of just one can be devastating, in part because the game only gives vague hazard warnings before entering a cave, so you have no idea of the ratio of colors you should bring. Pikmin in combat being stupid, sometimes difficult to control, and sometimes the victim of random game bs wasn't really a huge issue before, but now? Every one is like a hot needle to the brain. I'll reiterate what I said in my review of Sea Salt: you can't give me wild, uncontrollable tools and reasonably expect me to act with a great deal of precision. I can't make a ship in a bottle with a sledgehammer, and I can't thread the needle of mecha-frog artillery strikes without a couple troopers getting blown to kingdom come. Even the basic grunts, as easy as they are, can sometimes get in a lucky shot. Between the level reset and enemy behavior, you just have to keep trying until you get lucky enough to lose next to no one, since you never have any idea what precisely you'll need on the next floor. The most egregious example of all four sections here is a floor that is an entirely straight line, crossing over itself just enough so that the higher points will block your camera on the lower points. Along this straight line is one decorated cannon beetle after another. There had to have been upwards of 20 total, all lined up, technically easy to crush with purples, but with enough of a random factor to screw it up intolerably outside of any control when one of them gamer rages and chucks the 20 blue Pikmin I need into the Great Beyond to meet Pikmin Christ. If I didn't have access to save states through my... Nintendo Gamecube I honestly might have quit the game right there. But that's the thing - in Pikmin 1, there's a button to reset the day when you make too many mistakes. In Pikmin 2, meanwhile, you just have to reset the console for every little slip-up. It feels wrong, like you're cheating, but they clearly expect you to do it. This does not seem really doable without it.

Chapter 9 - The End of Pikvangelion

This turned out larger than I expected, but Pikmin 2 elicited stronger emotions from me than many other games. Honestly, I really did gain a new appreciation for Pikmin 1 through playing it. That's why this game is more saddening than anything else. Not only to see it ruin so much of what made the first game not just good, but especially unique, but to see it being lauded for it. I can't begin to understand the critical response to this game, but its worst crime is making me dread playing the rest of these. Pikmin 4 is supposedly "Pikmin 2 2", which is about as effective at selling me on it as if you told me playing it would lock my fingers in a Saw trap I can only be released from by killing 10,000 breadbugs in the name of Hocotate Freight.

Iwata’s dead, Shiggy’s checked out, and there’s no one to tell Aonuma no.

What the fuck is this.

I really shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am. This is the same game. It's the same people who made Breath of the Wild. I loved the first game, but still didn’t pay attention to the hype cycle of this one at all. I guess all the paraphernaleous cultural impact still seeped in somehow.

Remember when people thought there’d be playable Zelda? Fucking lol.

This review is only based on the five (5!) hours it took to get the paraglider, and I gotta say, it only kept making me appreciate the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild more. The thematic cohesion. The mystery. The framing of how that whole game was going to work in miniature. What my abilities would be, what my relationship to game information would be like, what kinds of emotions I could expect to experience playing that game.

Maybe Tears of the Kingdom is a fine game. Maybe it is every bit as fun to exist in as Breath of the Wild, in theory. But in practice, it won’t be, can’t be. It didn’t start in the wilderness, letting me discover its game essence on my own terms. It started with a prestige-game walking-sim lore dump. A lore dump that ended with a bunch of Hot Anime Nonsense™.

Zelda and Link confronting mummy Ganon was like walking into the mid-season finale of a show that’s already on its second or third season. Except I’ve already played the previous season, and that context did not help me at all! Ganon’s no longer a miasma, but a dude with a voice? And there’s a goat dragon that’s Zelda’s great-great-grand-furry? And the Master Sword’s just useless?

Here’s my beef. All of this is great for trailers and generating “hype” because “hype” is fueled on speculation and curiosity. But the elements that generate hype are not the same as the elements that fuel a sincere emotional connection with a character, story, or world. I’m frustrated because Breath of the Wild knew this so well.

The old man on the Great Plateau was mysterious, but allowed to be goofy. He was generous, but mischievous. You could see him in different contexts, learn about him by exploring his house when he wasn’t around. There was a fun little emotional connection built up by being around him. The twist of his true identity, and the further twist of his ultimate fate, made me feel little pings of emotion. Nothing fancy, but he was the tutorial NPC. He primed me to think, “Oh, this is a game and a game world where it’ll be fun to get invested in people.” And he was the perfect segway into telling me what my mission was, what the stakes were, and why I, the player, should care.

The goat dragon great-great-grand-furry is none of this. We know he’s dead when we first meet him. His dialog makes no sense. There are a ton of slave robots on his little island that he comments with surprise are still running. Did he not program them? Can he not de-program them? Am I supposed to feel something about how he made a race of robot slaves? Are they sentient? I would have rather had signs in the ground Super Mario Style telling me all the tutorial things I needed to know. Because it feels weird for a robot to jovially say “Hey, there are some robots that’ll try to kill you, so, like, don’t feel bad about killing them. Here are some combat tips for killing them!”

And then his sequence at the end of his tutorial level practically screamed to me, “Hey, remember when you felt something at the end of your time with the Old Man in Breath of the Wild? We’re doing the same thing here! Don’t you feel something? Don’t you remember loving that?” And like yeah, I do remember that. And now I’m mad you’re trying to copy your own damn homework without understanding why it worked the first time. I have not built up a relationship with great-great-grand-furry goat dragon. I do not know why he is chill with Zelda. Honestly, all the statues with him and Zelda holding hands at the end of every shrine is weirding me out! Is Link a cuck now?

I want to say this is all superficial, but it’s really not, because everything about my time with Tears of the Kingdom so far felt like it was being led around by the tail. This is a re-skin of Breath of the Wild, but it doesn’t even have the decency to be honest with me. If we’re gonna have shrines, and they’re gonna function exactly the same way, why did you go through the bother of giving them new, thematically incoherent designs. Why do the upgrade orbs need new names, new lore. Changing the shrines’ glowy color from blue/orange to green is a downgrade, actually! Those other colors were a lot easier to see at a distance in a game world that has lots of green!

Jumping ahead of myself for a moment, I knew I was done when I unlocked the first new Shiekah Tower. (You can’t even call them Sheikah Towers anymore, these days!) The emergence of the Sheikah Towers in Breath of the Wild was iconic, cinematic, promising adventure in a changing world. The equivalent cutscene in Tears of the Kingdom felt like getting a homework assignment. Hey, someone you know has already explored the world, had time to build fantastic structures in every corner, and just needs a cable guy to come by and make sure the wiring is up to code! You know, that person who was a 100-year old loli in the last game! Well, now she’s been aged up to guilt-free fuckable waifu status! And she’s super plot relevant! You’ll get to talk to her more than Zelda over the course of the game, probably!

Seriously, that loli was my least favorite part of Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom felt it important to put her loli portrait on her encyclopedia page?? When she will never look like that in this game??? She has the gall to rename Zelda’s magic iPad after herself! I was thinking about her (and taking internal bets as to whether she’d be a waifu or had somehow de-aged even more) hours before I saw her.

ANYWAY. None of what I said so far really matters more than the gameplay. And a Great Plateau 2 this was not.

I was so disappointed with how linear this was. In theory, I understand the concept that led to it existing the way it does. Tears of the Kingdom is a Lego game. It purposefully had sections of little Lego kits structured in a way where pieces from one would not mix with pieces of another and confuse people who have never touched Legos before. But giving kids Lego kits can change the way they interact with Legos. Hell, I remember I thought it was sacrilege when my sisters disassembled my Bionicle to make their own Voltron-esque monstrosities. But to them, who had not, could not, would not read the instructions, their style of play was more intuitive, more pure than mine.

Fundamentally, Tears of the Kingdom was not encouraging me to think for myself, to become resourceful, to seek my own path through things. It was priming me to expect that for any task that needed to be accomplished, the tools and materials would be provided for me. And without the spark of original creativity, putting the Lego pieces together was the dull monotony of fulfilling someone else’s factory work blueprint.

When I saw the jumble of lumber next to a korok in an adorable backpack, I immediately mentally put together what needed to be done, and thought, “What kind of Nintendo Labo bullshit is this?” The tediousness of rotating wood, sticking it to a hook, waiting for the korok to go down the slide - this was minutes of gameplay execution from the seconds of intuition I had of what the game wanted from me. And the reward was a measly two gold turds. I felt like I deserved five.

I feel like Aonuma has gone off the deep end. He’s spent so long in this game engine that he’s forgotten what made the original Breath of the Wild experience so special. He’s made a game for speedrunners without designing a game for the common folk first. In Breath of the Wild, the myriad systems, the freedom of choice, the hidden depth of the game’s chemistry and physics mechanics - all of those were introduced slowly in juxtaposition to a Link who had nothing but a shirt and a stick to his name. Everything felt special because the game beat you down and dead early on to make you appreciate and critically examine anything that could provide the slightest advantage to survival.

In Tears of the Kingdom, you gain the ability to Ascend through ceilings, (without stamina cost!!!), before you get the option to increase your stamina. Before you have even found anywhere worth climbing, any heights out of reach. There is nothing to instill that feeling of “I can’t climb there now, but some day, I will!” This is so wild to me. That emotion will never blossom when you’re given a cheat code at Level 1. It will cause people to look for places they can exploit their cheat code instead of… engaging with what was the entire foundation of the freedom of exploration in the first game!

Cannot overstate how much I felt something thematically crack inside of me when Tears of the Kingdom did not even suggest the possibility that I could upgrade my stamina wheel with my first blessing, locking me into more health. For a cutscene.

For a god-awful cutscene where Zelda fucks off before we chase down some NPCs to chase down some other NPCs to watch her fuck off again.

Does this all sound nit-picky? Do I sound insane? I sound petty to myself! But I have to be honest, this game failed to ignite my curiosity! And I gave Breath of the Wild 5 stars! It really does make me wonder how much of a game experience is built on the expectations built by its opening hours. In a way, if the only difference between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is the introduction and framing, that would be a valuable lesson on how important those beginning elements are.

I know that’s not the only difference. Tears of the Kingdom is anime as fuck. It’s tacky as hell. I lost it when Zelda’s magic iPad made the real-world iPad camera shutter sound.

Tears of the Kingdom is not a new game. It’s a jerry-rigged retrofitting of an existing game by an old man who saw Fortnite once since 2017, approved by a company who has no idea what he’s doing or why the old game sold so many millions of copies. Of course they’d be up for a direct sequel asset reuse that sounded vaguely like Minecraft! I’m just disappointed that the same team who showed they were capable of creating such a fully realized thematic throughline of a game were content to corrupt something beautiful just for the sake of convenience.

Maybe Link’s awful haircut and corrupted hand are a perfect visual metaphor for this game’s soul. A bunch of concepts grafted onto something great with no regard for how inelegantly they clash, while also showing a lack of maintenance to keep what came before presentable.

I’m so glad I didn’t pay $70 ($70!) for this game, or else I would have felt obligated to stick around long enough to understand the gacha mechanics enough to get mad at them.

——

June 28th 2023 Edit: wish different reviews could have different play statuses. Oh well. “Completed” the game with more words,, but in my heart this review should stay Abandoned.

The Involvement of the Minions in World War 2, and the Near Extinction of the Minion Species.
Introduction:
It is a widely debated subject in the Despicable Me community that the Minions served Hitler between 1933 to 1945, with some claiming that such events could not have taken place given that the Minions were trapped in an ice cave for a long duration of time. However, some evidence in the Despicable Me universe points toward a possibility that the Minions not only served Hitler and Stalin, but engaged in a brutal civil war that nearly wiped out the species as a whole.
Evidence No. 1: The Minions trapped in the ice cave are NOT the only Minions in the world.
Proof:
In the Despicable Me and Minions films, we see the Minions interacting with Human society on a rather normal scale. Whether it be going on vacation, joining the French Military, hitch hiking to the villainy convention, wandering through TV studios, getting ice cream and going out in public no one seems to bat an eye to the existence of the Minions. Given that the Minions have been around before the Dinosaurs, its not impossible to assume that there were millions, if not billions of Minions alive on earth given the time they had to spread across the globe. Some possible evidence that there were millions to billions of Minions is how little people react to them in society.
No one seems to bat an eye to the Minions, implying they've been abundant and around long enough to be completely normalized by Human society. In fact the Minions may have well been completely integrated into human society instead of being viewed as a different species. In our universe, if a few hundred 3 foot half naked lemon Tic-Tacs speaking gibberish appeared in the middle of Times Square, not only would people immediately bat an eye, but all of the nation's three letter organizations would be swiftly mobilized to New York. This isn't the case in the Despicable Me universe.
Evidence No. 2: The Minion species, while very resilient, is NOT immortal due to a severe weakness to biological and chemical attacks.
Proof:
In the starting paragraph, I mention that the Minions nearly went extinct from a brutal Minion Civil War. While this point may be contradicted by the Minions being able to survive explosions, torture devices, bullets, kinetic impact and many other lethal threats, the Minions are not very resilient to biological and chemical attacks. In Despicable Me 2, we see the Minions become mutated by the PX-41 Mutagen. Rapidly altering the effected Minion's DNA and causing drastic changes regarding:
Tooth and mouth structure
Abnormal hair growth
Eye color
Skin pigment
Physical structure
Personality and behavior
Later in Despicable Me 2, we see Dr. Nefario cure the Minions using an antidote mixed with the Jelly from earlier in the film. The PX-41 Mutagen, and its respective cure are solid evidence that the Minions are not entirely immortal and possess a severe and potentially lethal vulnerability to biological and chemical attacks. While some may argue that the PX-41 Mutagen and its antidote did not kill the Minions, a disease or toxic gas could prove fatal showing they can be drastically effected by chemical and biological substances.
Evidence No. 3: Stalin and Hitler both attracted Minions in large quantities to both sides of the Eastern Front, which would result in the gruesome Minion Civil War.
Proof:
Stalin and Hitler were both evil tyrants who would be seen as nothing more than soulless monsters to any human, but for the Minions, saying they were gods amongst Minion would be an understatement. With Stalin's gulags and Hitler's concentration camps, the two of them would be the greatest villians Minion kind had witnessed. With World War 2 beginning in the 1930s, the Minions suffered a brutal split in their society and culture, now voluntarily choosing sides of the Second World War between the two tyrants of the Eastern Front. Because of this, the Minions would engage in a brutal war to end the disagreement of whether Stalin or Hitler would be more deserving of Minion service and worship.
Given their vulnerability to chemical agents, both Human and Minion soldiers of the Eastern Front would release chemical agents such as Chlorine, Phosgene and Mustard Gas across the front lines to attack the other side's Minion forces. Given the sheer bloodiness of the Eastern Front, its likely that the majority of the Minions would be killed in the Second World War. Only a few isolated pockets of Minions would survive following the Second World War, with a primary example being the Minions in the ice cave, having emerged following the World Wars with no knowledge of Stalin Or Hitler and the near extinction of their race.
Evidence of a Minion Civil War occurring and being possible can be found at the end of Despicable Me 3, in which a sizable chunk of Gru's Minions defect to Dru, having deemed Dru more evil and more worth their service, along with the remaining chunk of Minions choosing to remain with Gru.
Closure:
It is unclear what happens after Gru gives chase to Dru at the end of Despicable Me 3, however it can be safely assumed that Despicable Me 4 will cover the complete extinction of the last remaining Minions as they battle it out through various means of chemical warfare over whether Gru or Dru is more evil.
Despicable Me 5 will potentially cover Dru and Gru putting their differences aside from their battle in Despicable Me 4 and the two will begin tampering in the realm of genetic engineering in an attempt to revive the Minion species. However the Minions created via Gru and Dru's genetic engineering research would go wrong, and the new Minions would resemble the Post-Humans from All Tomorrows. Leaked script details suggest that the Post-Minions would follow Kevin becoming a female Temptor, Bob getting turned into a Colonial and Stuart being morphed into a Hedonist. It is currently unknown what other All Tomorrows species will appear in the 5th Despicable Me film.
Overall, It is very likely that the minions did serve Hitler to some capacity, and nearly went extinct following World War 2. The tale of the Minion is nothing short but a tragic one. A culturally rich and intelligent race, which had been around before the Dinosaurs, choosing the path of annihilating themselves over two questions with no answer. Today they are a reminder, that Humanity must avoid the same fate as their Minion brothers. The Minions of the World Wars are to today's Humans as a grim teaching, telling us we must be careful with how we treat the choices of conflict and geopolitics, otherwise, we will hear the rhymes of the history books once more.
Works Cited:
1. Renaud, Chris and Pierre Coffin, directors. Despicable Me 2. Illumination Entertainment, 2013.
2. Healy, Janet, et al. Minions. Universal Pictures, Illumination Entertainment , 2015.
3. Meledandri, Chris, et al. Despicable Me 3. Universal Pictures, Illumination Entertainment , 2017.
4. 2020 Oregon Measure 110. Oregon Hosue of Reps. November 3rd, 2020

This game is unimaginably horrible and it's baffling it's the hill so many are willing to die on. There is no enemy variety, which is for sure a good idea for a modern open world game. There is no spell variety either (26), which again certainly was a great idea for a modern rpg based solely around it's magic set at a magic school, but hey Harry Potter has always had a terrible magic system so ¯\(ツ)/¯. For reference Final Fantasy (1987 NES) has triple as many spells (60), and Skyrim a more modern open world game for comparison has over 100 AND both those games have multiple combat classes besides magic. The game will let you use the "unforgivable curses" but it has no morality system to give any meaningful consequences to your actions because according to the devs it would be "too judgmental on the game maker's part". The world is empty, which is always a problem with open world games (not remotely a fan of the genre tbh) and every door is a loading screen. The game is also a buggy mess and anyone saying otherwise is just lying, the game literally has Denuvo lmao. But none of this is surprising, ignoring the original author for a moment, every trailer made it look lackluster and it's made by the developers infamous for Disney tie-in shovelware.

And now for the elephant in the room... The game doubles down on all the racism and antisemitism of its source material, anyone saying Terfling had nothing to do with this game is bending the truth. The official Q&A for the game on their site says they worked closely with her team so it perfectly fits her world, and that it does a little too perfectly. The main premise is squashing a goblin rebellion riddled with antisemitism. The goblin rebellions are not new to the franchise, they are a thing mentioned in the books and expanded material as something the students learn in history class. And what were all the rebellions about? The lack or basic rights like using wands, and checks notes wizards attempting to enslave them "as house elves" but we’re supposed to believe they’re still the villains throughout the franchise?
Which brings us to the next topic, the house elves... As in the source material Hogwarts is run by slave labor and the franchise doesn't want us to look deeper into what that means, waving it off with "well they like it". But if wizards can attempt to enslave goblins as “house elves” what does that actually mean, what exactly is a “house elf” and why doesn’t the series creator want us to examine it? The head house elf at Hogwarts becomes a companion, so you don't actually get to own a slave but you still get one by proxy. The game also lets you decorate the Room of Requirement with mounted house elf heads, with how controversial this aspect of the books has always been idk who on the dev team didn’t think “maybe we shouldn’t keep the mounted head of a sapient creature decoration item”. Again none of this is surprising given the source material where they decorate houses with elf heads and the kids put little hats on during christmas, oh isn’t it so cute and whimsical? And the fact that one of the lead devs was a gamer gate youtuber (them stepping down was never going to divorce the game from these elements). The game is also a prequel set in the 1800s so it can't actually effectively deconstruct the issues with the source material, the goblins are still the anti-semetic bankers, the house elves are still slaves, and the ("good") wizards are still the good guys that have every right to oppress them. Just like Terflings own politics and the politics of the source material the game's message is about preserving the status quo, nothing meaningful can change and it shouldn’t cause we have a continuity to uphold damnit!
The game also throws in the series "first trans character" who they named "Sirona Ryan", this is a name of a Celtic goddess (as many people will point out in an attempt to ignore criticism, despite the origin not being the issue with the name) but just like "Cho Chang", "Anthony Goldstein" and "Kingsley Shacklebolt" it's certainly a choice out of all the Irish names to deliberately use that one for your first trans women. Sirona was also very obviously thrown in last minute in an attempt to save face and say the game was divorced from Terflings and her raging transphobia, but as you can see the game is quite the opposite.
But you know despite all that 9/10 IGN-ostalgia am I right!

In conclusion this game is truly the “Legacy” of this franchise and I can see why fans say “this is everything I ever wanted in a Harry Potter game” because this is all the franchise really truly is. I certainly hope everyone who bought the deluxe edition for the sole reason to spite a minority the author is actively harming daily love their overpriced shovelware and fuck off. Remember yall were the same people in the 90s who hated and wanted to boycott the books for being “satanic” and "progressive". (spoiler alert they never were)

And for anyone who can’t let go of the franchise because of “childhood” and cause “it’s so magical”, let me recommend “Earthsea” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Discworld” by Terry Pratchett, and “Percy Jackson” by Rick Riordian. None of those series are perfect and have their fair share of problems, but they were written by authors who actually cared, who actually took criticism and grew from it. You can let go and grow too.