Addenum: I read Subahibi at a very miserable time in my personal life, detailed with erratic behavior, prolonged mental illness, suicide attempts, and watching as my life became more polished and privileged than ever -- and simultaneously crumbled to the ground. A year later, I am attempting a reread in a far better mental state, and will update this review with some additional notes and closing thoughts. My original review will stay at the bottom, unchanged, as a permanent fixture in my digital consciousness of my past. As a reminder that, in spite of my past struggles, there still exists a sentiment in me -- in all of us -- that yearns to live happily.





TW: rape, mutilation, violence, porn, bullying, dogs
non-spoiler review since I don't want this to be 8000 words
honestly, subahibi in of itself should be a trigger warning

Wonderful Everyday: Down the Rabbit-Hole, or Subahibi as it is commonly referred to, is the single costliest game I have ever purchased. Not only is it 30 dollars, or the equivalent of four hours of minimum-wage work in the United States, but it also is responsible for the destruction of a 20 dollar logitech keyboard I bought from walmart, two chopsticks, and a ceramic mug. More importantly, it also was directly responsible for me accidentally breaking a small clay figurine I made in 1st grade, something so dear to my heart that when I moved to America I wrapped it in paper and stored it in the front pouch of my backpack. And that's not even counting the monetary costs of the two pills of my grandmother's high blood pressure medication I ate (along with double the normal dose of my Prozac) while playing this game, which looking back was a terrible idea both for my own health and my grandmother's, but was a choice I decided to pursue given just how much stress and anxiety this game was causing me.

Why? Well, it is garbage, trash, rubbish, and refuse. It is an extraordinarily banal work with zero artistic value, where philosophical depth extends down to the collective value of three litcharts summary pages and a sparknotes prep book, and where an underaged girl being raped or having her limb cut off is considered an acceptable subsitute for any sort of character development in the classical sense. Bullying is not character development, rape is not character development, gore is not character development, and fucking a table is not fucking character development. I'll excuse myself from mentioning the dog rape part, as the most ardent subahibi defenders could probably twist my words into stating that the dog rape scene is innovative as it represents a reversal of traditional power structures. After all, in basically every other piece of media where man fucks man's best friend, the human being is the one doing the fucking, but...you know what I won't add fuel to the fire. Let's move on with the review.

I am known for heavily emphasizing an unified creative vision. And, in a swiftian sense of irony, this game has one of the strongest creative visions I've ever seen. In that, I mean that it represents a creative vision of someone unfit to live in a civilized society, and Japanese prosecutors should probably take note. SCA-DI's creative vision is less of a vision and more of a blindness, a darkness that spreads across the whole novel, and a plague on the visual novel genre.

Given that this is a visual novel, it is only sensible to start off by critiquing the writing quality. After all, a visual novel with poor writing is automatically a poor visual novel. And in terms of subahibi, the writing quality is disgustingly awful, to the point where it is actually incredible how consistently terrible it is. It's unsensible, unstable, and unfocused purple prose that is astoundingly massive in its own sense of self-importance and lilliputian in its actual depth. In fact, I almost have a fleeting suspicion it was intentionally written to be bad, because there is almost no way a 50-hour work of fiction can be this goddamn bad for the entire fifty hours. Even David Cage games have their moments of midness, a break away from the dumpster bin, DDLC and euphoria have genuine emotional moments, and Banban is sometimes funny. Many of the 0.5 star games I rate are middlemarket mobile shovelware created for the sole reason of exploiting underaged Timmy and his mom's credit card, which makes them obviously bad games, but at least they have zero effort put into them. This game has effort put into it, is 30 fucking bucks, and yet somehow is consistently worse than all of the games that I listed above.

My favorite games overwhelmingly tend to skew towards the depressing and miserable, and I absolutely adore the misery found in literary realism like Jude the Obscure, Germinal, Crime and Punishment, and Middlemarch. And I'm not someone who is averse to the weird and sometimes disgusting: I love Naked Lunch and photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki! In Subahibi, however, the greatest misery I experienced from this game was my own misery in questioning the life choices that lead up to me buying, downloading, and playing this game. Indeed, this game holds the onerous distinction of being the first (and likely last) game where I purposefully wished that all the main characters would just die, not because they were written to attract a negative perception, but because I just wanted the game to end quicker.

I rarely come across games with zero redeeming qualities. Subahibi is the epitome of a game that fits that bill. Shock porn for the sake of shock porn, with zero emotional weight placed behind the situation and treated with an air of levity that does not suit the context. Actual porn for the sake of actual porn, inserted in the middle of the narrative with no cohesion or substance or even simply a purpose behind said porn, other than maybe to sell more copies by targeting a demographic completely at odds with the game's stated intent of creating a deeply interwoven psychological character drama tackling questions of fate, existence, confronting reality, and living happily. Purple and inelegant prose that creaks and stutters across the page with heavy-handed themes and uneven rhythms all masquerading as faux-philosophical depth. Incomprehensive and flat characters with negative development and even worse motivations, where erratic behaviors are justified as "oh, that's just how he is" and where the community is still to this day debating the merits of several character actions in the game, because they're written so vaguely and with so little depth that piecing together your own retelling of the events that happen unironically gives you a better narrative than the game's official explanation. An overarching plotline so confusing and muddy that it seems to completely detach and run away from itself multiple times in the first half alone, and let's not even get started about Jabberwocky 1 and 2 and the swiss cheese of plot holes they poke into the narrative fabric of the overall story. Even the music and the art, things that visual novels typically excel at, range from terrible at worst to painfully average at best.

Oh yeah, and the ending is not good.

There is nothing in Subahibi that has been explored, and explored better, in other media. Hell, there's nothing that has been explored better in other visual novels. If you want fetish eroge bordering on the insane, Nitroplus and Alicesoft games gives you the same demented fap. If you want vanilla eroge, Innocent Grey is pumping out genre-bending and absurdly well-written visual novels that will change your perspective and worldview: in particular, both Kara no Shoujo 3 and the entire Flowers saga sit in my current top 5. And if you just want a good story to read in the company breakroom without getting weird looks from your colleagues and manager, there's Umineko, Fata Morgana, and a whole slew of quality visual novels to bide your lunch break with. (I haven't even played Umineko yet, and I know it's better than this.) Or, you know, you could play ten quality indie game in the time it takes to finish this "thing" (I shudder to call it an actual game), of whom at least eight would have far greater philosophical depth without having to namedrop whatever philosopher names SCA-DI found interesting in the five minutes of researching Wikipedia articles during the writing of this game, because clearly he didn't actually read any of Wittgenstein's works. Or you could read actual books! That's right, there's tens of thousands of high quality paperbacks that can be yours for a fraction of the price of this (not accounting for blood pressure medications of course), and each of which contains a story of far greater depth and profundity than anything SCA-DI can dream of. You could read Pale Fire, in my opinion the greatest piece of prose on paper, in the time it takes to play...this.

Unless you are in the very small category of people who has the exact same fetishes that SCA-DI apparently has, or you are in the very small category of people who want to sound pretentious on anime twitter forums by quoting random philosophical quotes out of your ass without truly understanding what they mean (instead of reading the actual philosophical treatises they come from, which would take far less time than the 50 hours it takes to read this piece of shit disgrace to the Japanese language), there is simply no reason to play this game. Malware has more value on my desktop screen compared to this literary smallpox. SCA-DI is an absolute hack, and excuse me if you must, but I need to go play a good indie game to wash my eyes from this cancerous filth.

Damn it, I'm mad again. Fuck you SCA-DI, and fuck you subahibi, for making me this mad. Don't you realize how much high blood pressure medication costs these days?