[Games] Doki-Doki Literature Club

[jordangreywolf]

Okay, so you've already played Doki-Doki Literature Club, right? You haven't? Well, if you haven't, then this is going to be spoileriffic, and you'll have no context for what in the world I'm talking about, because this is a game more about the experience of going, "What the HEHHHHHHH-CK is going on here?" I'll push the spoiler part pretty far down, though.

First off, I hate video novels. I mean, really, I can see so much potential. In theory, it could be like a book, only taking advantage of multimedia so you've got sound effects and music and illustrations with limited movement to accompany the text. It could be AWESOME.

Or, it could offer the reader varying depth of detail -- maybe you, as a reader, would really, REALLY like to know more of the intricate details of the personal philosophical views of some character within the story ... or maybe, no, you're sick of hearing all his babbling, and wish you could just fast-forward through all that. You could basically present a story with hyperlink footnotes like crazy, or "supporting materials," so if you want, you can take a little side-quest to read up on the history of this fictitious world, or an exhaustive side-story about the hero's day off hosting a tea party, OR, you can just skip that and go straight for the next action-fest.

As a writer, it could be a big relief for me, because, for instance, it could be a story about a musician, and I could actually write up lyrics for the entire song ... but I don't have to worry about BORING the reader with all that, because it's an optional pop-up.

OR, it could be like "Choose Your Own Adventure," but on steroids. Seriously, you could have SO MANY branch points that would render those old 1980s books positively childish by comparison. As a writer, you could explore so many what-if scenarios, and you could have conditional elements far more sophisticated than just "go to page 42, or go to page 54." Events could loop back for a bit (when appropriate), then split up again, based upon "remembered history" of your previous choices as a reader.

But ... that's generally not what REALLY happens with "visual novels," in my experience. Most of the screen gets taken up by a static location image (a schoolroom, a street, someone's house, etc.), and these flat images of characters you encounter appear, much as the pop-ups that would appear in "talking head" portions of JRPGs ... except that the heads don't really talk, per se -- generally it's the same character art, but with little changes to suggest changes in expression, and occasionally some pose variations. Granted, there's a certain elegance to making it patently clear when dialogue is going on, WHO is speaking, as if character A is speaking, then character A's image appears, and if two characters (not involving "you," the viewpoint character) are interacting, then both their images can appear, and they might be portrayed as looking at each other. (By comparison, I've read stories where I get LOST during long dialogue exchanges, because the writer got tired of going, "Joe said," "Bob said," and just started alternating paragraphs of dialogue -- but then misses a beat here or there, and then I think BOB said that, when it was really JOE, and once I realize my mistake, I have to backtrack to sort things out and -- ARGH!)

Ahem. Anyway, the story almost always revolves around "you," the viewpoint character. Hey, you might even get to type in your name, and then that gets inserted into all the dialogue. However, your choices typically boil down to just at some point you can pick whether you want to chase down A-Ko, B-Ko, or C-Ko, and further the storyline with one or the other. There might be bad things that happen if you're flaky, and on Day 1 you decide to pursue A-Ko, then on Day 2 you try to spend time with B-Ko, and Day 3, it's C-Ko. Another trope seems to be that you are "rewarded" with full-screen illustrations of "key points" in the story -- usually a closeup of the viewpoint character engaged in some sort of activity with the girl of choice.

(And ... as I discovered from one of the games Gwendel got a while back, even if it seems like the characters are all children, and everything is cutesy-innocent that is NO GUARANTEE that it won't suddenly turn into physics-defying PR0N without warning. Yikes. Exit game. Delete all save-games. Warn Gwendel if she wasn't already there when things turned belly-up. Seriously, I feel like if I ever made the mistake of running for political office, someone's going to dig up evidence that I played such-and-such game and it's all downhill from there.)

But mostly, the game machine calls for a whole lot of clicking. Only a short paragraph can be displayed at the bottom of the screen at a time, and it takes a lot of clicking-through. No wheel-scrolling. At least, not that I've seen. And control? I had far more control in dialogue trees in Fallout: New Vegas.

Good grief, I arguably had more control in dialogue trees in Fallout 4. (Note for the uninitiated: Dialogue trees in Fallout 4 are a joke, because generally no matter what you choose, you still end up in the same place. The only way to avoid the same outcome is to avoid initiating dialogue with the NPC in the first place. "Will you take this quest?" "Yes" = "Okay, I'll do it." "No" = "I snarkily object, but I'll do it anyway, under mild duress." There are a few exceptions, but with little more nuance than if you pick "No," it becomes, "Well, now I'm your enemy, and I KILL YOU NOW," because Fallout 4 doesn't seem to store dialogue tree data or NPC favorability scores the way the old engine did. This is a major reason why some folks claim New Vegas was a better game, even if it's not nearly as pretty.)

...

But I digress.

Gwendel sometimes likes to get a game, and then rather than play it herself, she'll have me at the chair, put the game play on the big screen, and she just watches while she knits or whatever. (As one might expect, she ends up missing a few important details, though, because she's not watching the whole time.) We did this with the Sam & Max and the Monkey Island series of games from Telltale Games, for instance.

So we started that up with Doki-Doki, but there's a problem. There's no voice acting. It's purely a read-on-screen thing, so that really kills the "play this while I do something in the background" option. Furthermore, there's no Japanese language option, so it largely negated any interest for Gwendel to actually try it for herself. She watched as I clicked through a few paragraphs, but it was a bit tiresome as she's a slower reader than I am (multiplied when one is halfway across the room from the screen), so she'd have to declare, "Next!" every single time for me to advance. She gave up on it and bid me to just play it sometime on my own and let her know if anything interesting happened.

...

There's no point in me telling you what happened, because if you've already played it, you KNOW, and if you didn't, then this is largely irrelevant. But basically it plays out much like an archetypical video novel, and the big gimmick for how you choose which "story" you follow (i.e., which girl you pester for more attention) is that there's a "poem-writing" phase where you simply go through 20 pages of picking one word from a list of options. Some chibi "stickers" of three of the girls (the fourth is omitted for some reason) give you a clue. The idea is that if you write a story that will appeal to one of the girls, you'll get "closer" to that girl.

In-story, you get clues as to what sorts of things appeal to each girl. Sayori, the childhood friend who walks to school with you (and who reminds me of Gwendel when I first met her, so some of this was quite the emotional gut-punch) likes bittersweet topics -- a mix of words that express happiness and tragedy, togetherness, marriage, childhood, etc. Yuri, the quiet, shy, reserved, socially-reclusive, self-deprecating and creepy "yondare," seems to like big words and tends toward darker themes. Natsuki, the cute but abrasive little girl, likes cute, fluffy words (kitty! puppy! cute! doki-doki! kawaii!). And there's a bit of overlap in the words -- something might appeal to two of the girls at the same time, but the sticker of the girl who likes a word THE MOST will bounce up and down happily when you choose it. So, if you really want to pursue winning the heart of a certain girl, you could just save before starting the poem "game," watch for reactions, and start over if you don't manage to get more happy reactions from the girl of choice than the others. (I found that it was terribly easy to get the desired outcome. This isn't really meant to be challenging. It's mostly a DISTRACTION.)

Oh, and Monika, the president of the club? There's no option to "pursue" her. That's ... kind of important to the plot.

Anyway, I'm serious now ... SPOILER ALERT. There was plenty of opportunity to stop before now. Really, if you want to play the game, you can pretty much do it by just clicking through the dialogues and RANDOMLY picking choices. You will get a slightly different experience, but you WILL get through to the main ending. Apparently there are some slightly different endings if you try really hard to find all the possible outcomes BEFORE the conclusion of your first "story." I found one of the alternate endings by accident.

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Oh ... and right when I got to the end of the game (or, that is, the "end of the game" before you start messing around with steam application files), when Monika's face popped up, staring directly at "me" out of the screen, THE POWER WENT OUT. But I was on a laptop, so the screen was still on, and all I got to see was the end-screen room and hear the creepy mood music, as the rest of the world plunged into darkness, including the street outside. (Power didn't get restored until 3 am. Whee. I took a break from the game.)

GYAHHHHHHH. Seriously, my mind did a bit of "Is this really happening? Am I awake? What's happening?" as it tried to catch up and interpret the squeals of the UPS backup and sort out what was going on, and that this was just coincidence, NOT evidence of causality.

Okay, so Monika is "self-aware," and she deliberately turns this game into a horror-show to try to get the other girls NOT to fall in love with "you," and ostensibly so that you'll spend more time with her. As if, y'know, there was some sort of in-game AI or logic to this game world and not just a set script you click through with little to no control over how events unfold. But at last she just deletes the other characters, and basically breaks the game world, so it ends with you just staring into her eyes, in a trippy school room floating in space, and after you click through her dialogue, a while will pass before she'll start up a random "conversation" you can click through.

If I were to feel sympathetic toward Monika, that's quickly killed when she morbidly shares the details about Sayori's suicide in the first play-through, making it clear that Sayori's death was even more traumatic and horrible than might have been otherwise assumed. Gee, how sweet of you, Monika. Grr.

So she eventually blabs some details, revealing the presence of the "characters" folder in the game directory, practically giving you instructions on how to go there and delete the files. Of course, by this point, there's only one ".chr" file left -- "Monika.chr" -- because she's deleted the others.

So ... goodbye, Monika. I went and deleted it. She somehow is still semi-aware even after her "character" has been deleted, and curses the player. I accidentally discovered one of the alternate endings because I was too impatient. Rather than sitting around and waiting for her to say more after her "deletion," I closed out the game and started meddling with the character files.

I reset the game, and this time tried deleting just the monika.chr file and left the others intact. Would that result in a game without Monika?

Well ... yes, sort of. But not quite.

The game restarts just as it originally did, with Sayori popping up ... but she's horrified. "Wait. What. Huh?" "Is this ... all there is?" (Horrified expression.) "No! No, make it stop! Make it all END!" And then she starts deleting the game herself somehow. If I try to open it again, I'm treated to a cheery screen showing Sayori hanging herself. Again. RRRRRRGH.

I was about to just delete the game and wipe it out, but at that point I decided it was time to check out the wikis and find out how the game was "supposed" to be played. There I learned that if only I'd waited around a little longer, "Monika," despite being deleted, and no longer appearing on the screen, would decide that she was wrong, and would allow me to play the game again, but without herself.

The game teases me with what appears it could be the setup for a happy ending ... and then yanks it away. "There is no happiness to be found here." And when the final credits roll by, the game slowly self-destructs, as represented with a little DOS box showing various components being deleted, and images vanishing. Yay.

Apparently there's a "slightly less horrible" ending if I would have "save-spammed" the first phase of the game -- basically tried to follow EVERY SINGLE possible iteration of play-through, and had a save-game with each of the possible end-states BEFORE the first "act" ends with Sayori's hanging. (After that, it's impossible, because once you are treated to the sight of Sayori hanging herself, all save game files are "corrupted," and there's no way to try another path. Monika "resets" the game, but therein you're playing a version of the game where Sayori doesn't exist, and things get progressively uglier and more insane.)

I'm only mildly tempted to try for that, but the thing is, clicking through the game is SO TEDIOUS. It really stinks to know that I almost qualified for it, as I tried in vain (doing a full restart of the game, and then went back to the beginning to try different paths to assure myself that, no, it wasn't possible to save Sayori from suicide by some other choice), but I didn't fully pursue the "Yuri" path.

...

Anyway, it's an interesting concept. In some ways, Monika might seem a "sympathetic" character, but I think she's also delusional. She faults the other girls as not being "real" the way she is. After all, the other girls have no free will -- they are inexorably drawn to fall madly in love with the main character. She apparently sees no irony in the fact that she's just as obsessively "in love with" the main character -- or even the PLAYER, even though she admits that she knows nothing about the player, even "whether you're a boy or a girl." The "conversations" with her in the end-game are entirely one-way -- she doesn't even ask any yes-no questions to "get to know you better" or anything like that. Also, at the end where she "confesses" to the character, there is no option to say "no" to her -- only "OK."

Furthermore, when she resets the game (or when as a player you reset the game and delete Monika.chr, thus forcing Sayori.chr to be the new club president -- which apparently curses the character with self-awareness) and Sayori becomes "self-aware," Monika still apparently has little remorse about deleting Sayori and the rest -- even though her argument about the others being less-than-real (at least, less real than SHE is) demonstrably holds no water. After all, Sayori just demonstrated that she's aware that this is a GAME, and that there is a REAL WORLD out there. She's no longer as "2D" as Monika accused her of being, but she's still (just like Monika!) obsessed with the main character/player.

If I were to read too deeply into this, I might think that this presented Monika with an uncomfortable truth she would rather escape by simply DESTROYING everything.

In the end, it's a terribly sad story -- made all the worse by Monika's reports if you quit the game and then re-enter it at the "forever with Monika" end-game phase. Basically, she'll complain that for some reason she "dies" in a way, and wonders if it's something you (the player) did. Do it again, and she'll report it happening again. She'll suppose that this is what happens when you quit the game: she experiences a period where all goes black, and her mind begins to get overwritten with jumbled voices and screams, to where she can't even control her thoughts anymore ... but then she feels overjoyed when you come back and pull her back out of the Abyss, even though she can STILL REMEMBER the experience. It's like, every time you quit the game, SHE GOES TO DIGITAL HELL. How's that for horror? Given how horrible Monika was, perhaps I could get some sick schadenfreude out of it (I don't), but the implication is that at least Sayori now experiences that as well (having reached self-awareness) ... and quite possibly EVERY OTHER video game character, while we're at it. AAAAAAAAAAUGH!

Anyway, it's an interesting concept, but the whole thing is a bit messy. I suppose it's kind of interesting how she's aware of an outside real world, but her perception of time seems to be bound to that of the in-game progress: at one point, you're stuck with a dead body for an entire weekend (you can either click through it all -- ha! -- or use the skip forward option to fast-forward, and the lighting changes to suggest sunset, nighttime, and morning again, for multiple day cycles) and she'll express remorse as if you had honestly spent that entire amount of time there. No, really, I'm not spending an ACTUAL DAY going through a game day. But I suppose it makes "sense" that she couldn't possibly realize that (unless among her various powers she figured out to read my computer's system clock).

The conceit of this world seems to be that if you tweak a few things in the game files, the characters will behave differently. Monika presents herself as a sweet girl, but apparently she overtypes the dialogue of the other girls at times (the text becomes a larger font size, and the outline becomes jarringly thick, often going outside the text window) with crude dialogue, dropping a lot of F-bombs. Apparently she's not just rewriting the script, but rather putting words in characters' mouths and somehow adjusting "behavioral properties" of them (as if they really WERE some sort of AI) and events play out from that point onward.

Only, of course, this is a visual novel game, not a holodeck or VR simulation. At times she seems to be aware of how the player is bound by "the script," even though that seems to contradict the sort of flexibility the in-game universe has to her "tweaks." As such, it at times feels as if the writer isn't QUITE settling for just how this cosmology is really supposed to work. But then ... I suppose I'm just thinking a little TOO deeply about it.

(Good grief, I can't help it. I lost sleep over it. Bah. Power went out right about bedtime, and there was no air conditioning, no fan, and I had to get up to work in the morning. I did get some sleep, but THE DREAMS, mentally substituting Gwendel for Sayori and trying to keep her from hanging herself against the vindictive interference of some computer AI manipulating reality. NOT FUN.)

I suppose this story wouldn't have worked as well if it didn't suffer the same limitations as the typical visual novel: too many choices, and either the player might thwart the main storyline, OR it would be so hard-coded against interference that a player might give up in frustration at the inability to "Win." The extreme LACK of choice is what makes it clear that, hey, past a certain point all you can do is just keep moving forward to see how it plays out.

(I do wish that the end-end game bit of manually deleting Monika.chr from the characters folder could have led to some interesting alternate endings. What if I restarted the game with some combination of characters present or absent? Alas, as I found out from experimentation, ANY meddling with the characters folder on a "fresh" game install will result in the Sayori-freakout-self-destruct ending, as I think it's assumed by the authors that no one is going to THINK about meddling with that folder until they've actually played through this game before, so it only follows that any attempt to do so would -- within the storyline -- amount to some "digital necromancy" that deserves a sour ending.)