To everyone who has recommended this as the best VN I need to ask - do you read books?
Aggressively gauche piece with the malformed bones of a decent narrative. Insists on making incest and pedophilia justifiable in the narrative for some reason. Narrative beats indulge in a deluge of pointless details and tired anime clichés. Also feels the need to explain literally everything to the reader. It tried explaining to me misdirection and I nearly quit playing the game. That was a mistake.
The creator wrote it earnestly enough, there's no malice here. A story about an intersex person in a cursed house, the subtext should be worn on its sleeve. Instead we get a series of imprudent narratives which only serve to propel a tired tale of revenge and redemption.
I'll sum it up with an event from the game
"The world around me went brown"
And they proceeded to dunk her head in shit
How I felt the entire time.
Aggressively gauche piece with the malformed bones of a decent narrative. Insists on making incest and pedophilia justifiable in the narrative for some reason. Narrative beats indulge in a deluge of pointless details and tired anime clichés. Also feels the need to explain literally everything to the reader. It tried explaining to me misdirection and I nearly quit playing the game. That was a mistake.
The creator wrote it earnestly enough, there's no malice here. A story about an intersex person in a cursed house, the subtext should be worn on its sleeve. Instead we get a series of imprudent narratives which only serve to propel a tired tale of revenge and redemption.
I'll sum it up with an event from the game
"The world around me went brown"
And they proceeded to dunk her head in shit
How I felt the entire time.
8 Comments
This comment was deleted
I don't know why you people are defending the game that's cool with incest and pedophilia. Give me an even remotely comparable piece of literature, I'd love to see where you people are working from.
Frankly I don't know why you went and called a clearly trans-masculine character a "hermaphrodite" in your original version of your review. I also don't know how you came to the conclusion that the game endorses those things when Jacopo for example was clearly a bad person.
The pedophilia is a superfluous detail that is not commented on and adds nothing to his character. You don't add details to a narrative without commenting on them in some way. He's just a pedophile because he's a "bad person"? He was already a bad person throwing pedo on top doesn't add anything to the subtext of the narrative. And I called him a hermaphrodite because that's just what I thought intersex people were called. Are you getting pissy because I made the correction?
If you didn't know the proper terminology than that's fine, you at least acknowledge it. You can have your viewpoints of the game that's just something we'll have to agree to disagree on. It was just a bit upsetting as a transgender person to see the term "hermaphrodite" used on a character whose arc is centered on that he has the heart of a man and wants to be acknowledged as such. However I do appreciate that you corrected yourself and used a better term.
You're entitled to your own opinion the same way everyone else on here is but you're cherry picking.
About your comment from the other day, the game isn't trying to be 'cool' with pedophilia or incest at all and when someone counters your opinion its pretty unfair to accuse them of defending that stuff. It is never glorified once in the entire game, the incest is shock value and it's literally the biggest part of door 1 and for the pedophilia part, Jacopo is supposed to be seen as a good person, his relationship with morgana is a huge part of the series and his whole character is based around being a complete scumbag. If pedophilia and incest was praised in the story I'd fully understand your point but its not... not once.
About your comment from the other day, the game isn't trying to be 'cool' with pedophilia or incest at all and when someone counters your opinion its pretty unfair to accuse them of defending that stuff. It is never glorified once in the entire game, the incest is shock value and it's literally the biggest part of door 1 and for the pedophilia part, Jacopo is supposed to be seen as a good person, his relationship with morgana is a huge part of the series and his whole character is based around being a complete scumbag. If pedophilia and incest was praised in the story I'd fully understand your point but its not... not once.
I'm hardly cherry picking by using an example of the game being frivolous with it's details. My central problem is that the game uses loaded topics like pedophilia, incest, and child abuse and then says nothing about them. Shock value is the right term because that's the entire game.
Did we play the same game? The child abuse with Morgana and/or Michele was spoke about so much its impossible to not see this unless you skimmed through text to force yourself to finish the game. The incest part in door 1 has so much behind it you just might not have picked up on it. For the pedophilia part, I do agree its not really talked about much in this game but there's a prequel based solely around jacopo and morgana which im sure it will explain more on this.
It has these elements in the story, but they're only talked about for plot purposes. They are in no way incorporated into the subtext. Incest in this case is used as a character flaw and by the end is redeemed, as in door 8 he explains that if they had caught it early they could have curbed Nellie's infatuation. Then by the end their love is affirmed after the time skip where they're technically no longer siblings. The incest is used as a plot device - nothing more. The child abuse is again discussed, Michel's brothers are redeemed by the end, and the child abuse was again used to achieve a tired subtext of redemption. Discussing the details of the abuse does not amount to depth. He needed to say something about it outside of "child abuse is bad". He really wants to get across that no one is truly evil, people have their motivations, but this is merely a nice sentiment. Not the foundation for a complex narrative.
clotilde
9 months ago