a recounting of the old ddlc wank from a person who has not played ddlc and in fact not really played many romance vns in general and isn’t at all qualified to have a respectable opinion on the subject
for those not in the know already the context is basically the same as the Dream Daddy discourse wherein the creators of both ddlc and Dream Daddy made comments in interviews to the effect of “the Japanese romance vn genre has so many problems and we did it better, also we haven’t really played that many vns”
that’s the end of the recounting bc I’m not invested enough to go look up who said what in relation to what specifically. ultimately I think this is an incredibly annoying sentiment but also like, just annoying, rather than unforgivable. like it’s a symptom of a large scale demeaning attitude towards jp media in the west
so I bought and played DD a little and it was fine. I had less inclination to give ddlc a try not bc DD seemed better or the creators seemed better but just cuz I was more willing to give my money to the gay agenda than danseimuke in general, and also my laptop at the time could barely run DD and definitely could not have run ddlc
otoh DD also inspires a lot less reason for wariness in the sense that it is just doing it’s own thing while ddlc is explicitly a subversion of a genre which the creators are supposedly not actually into, which as we know has historically always gone great
but i find the story of a character who realizes she's in a game trying to manipulate the code and force herself into having a route compelling, because that's the part that ISN'T trying to be condescending about an existing genre
and also the fact that I haven’t actually played many romance vns before (see: laptop could barely run Dream Daddy) will probably work in ddlc’s favor if I play it first before the realization that I can just play every eng release otome game ever now finally kicks in
mostly i just find the fake(?)/the non-monika plot kind of shallow because it doesn't really go beyond 'wouldn't it be fucked up if girls in a VN had MH issues?'
I am on mobile and got distracted by my mom multiple times while in the midst of putting these thoughts down so I didn’t see any of the rest of your replies until now. hello. please no further spoilers than have already occurred
i will say, less a spoiler than a tip: the game will give an objectively happier ending if you scum save until you get every route’s CGs before [the day of the school festival], but arguably the ending you get if you don’t do that is more in keeping with the Vibes.
DD devs put their foot in their mouth a bit too but it soured me on the game less because it was ultimately trying to do its own thing to a point that it was enjoyable to me on its own merits vs "this genre and medium suck except for this one I did, by the way I obviously don't know anything about this genre"
my own perspective playing it as someone who doesn’t really play this genre of VN was that i found the horror effective in the moment but ultimately not groundbreaking; what actually stuck with me was finding myself feeling an amount of compassion for the cast out of proportion with their actual screen time, and that’s kind of nice.
which I don'ttttt really hold against him at all or think that he meant anything by it but it was part of a larger attitude trend that you saw with western devs that was sort of peaking at that point and I was just like wow! bye.
honestly it's not even a thing exclusive to ddlc, like. i am deeply tired of the droves of otome parody isekai manga + webtoons lately, the "i got reincarnated as the villainess character!" type, purely bc nobody seems to have anything new or interesting to say abt the dating sim genre lmao
I know extremely few magic school otomes and one of them is Wand of Fortune which is still very different feeling premise from whatever the fuck all these isekai are referencing.
yeah when i was complaining abt this, it was like. i can't even remember the last time i played an otome w a villainess. what are you all going on about as if it's the most common thing in the genre.
tbh also it is nice when things just straight up discuss mental illness. jp media and eng media live in really different atmospheres when it comes to discussion of mh and so in some ways eng vns don’t actually do anything worthwhile for the jp discussion around it but,
like for the jp mh discussion it’s like “if someone utters the name of a diagnosis out loud we have ABSOLUTELY LEAPT over the bar” but in the eng discussion it is a little more complicated than that
the problem with ddlc is that it uses the framework of its medium and genre to tell a compelling story, using specific tools that only more recently have become available while also claiming that this makes it unique and better than all those other stories that have never even attempted to do such a thing
so it has one component that is sincere and one that isn't and the sincere component is good but dampened by the nom-sincere component and also the author just being kind of contemptuous and wrong about being the First Of Their Kind in anything but using ren'py in this specific way
which like, is genuinely cool and great, in the same way that undertale doing the same for gamemaker is, but it's like if undertale was kind of derisive of the concept of rpgs and all previous rpgs rather than an actual examination of them
it's also in this weird spot where if you haven't actually seen the general creator and resultant fandom vibe of lmAO vNs it doesn't come off as nearly as bad in that way but if you have it's really easy to tell what parts of it are definitely supposed to be that, imo
vast energies
: I think about this with hatoful all the time. every time. even the part of the first game that was an otome parody was still obviously coming from a place of love for the demographic/with the intent of getting you invested in the story, they just like, are also all birds and hiyoko is hiyoko
the game will give an objectively happier ending if you scum save until you get every route’s CGs before [the day of the school festival], but arguably the ending you get if you don’t do that is more in keeping with the Vibes.