Rose Reviews: Doki Doki Literature Club

[Bara_no_Hime]

It's been a while, huh?

I suppose that, technically speaking, I should have returned with the next game in the Christine Love series, "Ladykiller in a Bind", but as much pervy fun as that game was, it didn't hit me like Love's other work.

Doki Doki did. So, without further ado, another visual novel masterpiece...

Rose Reviews: Doki Doki Literature Club

Welp, after genre-defying visual novels like Digital and Analogue (not to mention Hate Plus, which I never got a chance to review), I'm finally reviewing a digital novel that walks and talks like a visual novel.

Being a Christine Love fan, the first thing I did upon starting Doki Doki Literature Club was attempt to mess with the system by giving myself an obviously female name and hoping I could coast through without my gender ever being mentioned. Sadly, the characters within referred to my lady Sakura as male almost immediately. Ah well, I tried.

Doki Doki begins by attempting to look like a bog standard visual novel with dating sim elements. When I began, I got vibes of Katawa ShouJo - from early on, the four female characters that your protagonist interacts with in the titular Literature Club all appear to be sUffering from conditions that effect their personality - depression, manic depression, and social anxiety were the oneS I noticed most obviously. As I began to play, I wondered if maybe this was the "mental disability" version of KaTawa Shoujo.

No, as it turned out. But I get ahead of myself.

The game begins with what is obviously an intentionally arch plot - your "cute childhood friend who lives next door" asks you to join her club - the Literature Club. Your character is reluctant until he - sigh - learns that all four current meMbers of the club are female. And attractive females at that.

The Club President is the busty senior Monika. She takes on a "big sis" rOle and acts as the tutorial for some of the gameplay elements.
Sayori is your childhood friend, the bubbly, positive one with uNexpected depths.
Yuri is the tall, quiet, shy one. As she opens up, she also seems to be a bIt goth.
NatsuKi is the short, loli - a tsundre stereotype. However, it turns out she's the same age as you - she's just short.

Your goAl in the game is to woo one (or more) of these ladies with your writing skill while also preparing for a school festival. What fun!

Now, above I mentioned tutorials and gameplay elements. In a visual novel, you might ask, baffled. Yes! Like Analogue, the creators of Doki Doki Literature Club have a minigame that allows you to take a more active role in the story.

See, you're in a Literature Club. That means that you write and workshop your writing as one of the main club activities. How this works is that, each in-game night after school, you write a poem. You do this by selecting a word from list of 20. After each selection, the list is freshly randomized and you pick another word. These words create the tone and theme of your poem, and also allow you to woo the other club members.

How?

Well, each of the club members has her own style of writing. Certain themes, represented by associated words, appeal to each of them. If you know the lady you would like to woo well enough, you can write poems that will appeal to her.

This system also forces you to choose fairly quickly who you wish to pursue and who you do not, as trying to write a poem that appeals to everyone will Just leave all four girls cold.

When you write a poem that appeals to one of the girls, she will like yoUr poem during the peer review the next day while the other girls will react either negatively or neutrally, offering insults or constructive criticism depending on personality. Whomever feels poSitive about your poem will spend the rest of club hanging out with you. This usually means that you read together, your protagonist following that girl's suggestion about what to read. Do you want to read horror novels with Yuri or cooking manga with NaTsuki?

If you play your cards right, you might be able to ask one of the girls over to your house that weekend to work on preparations for the festival. Depending on certain circumstances, things can start to heat up.

However, not everything is roMance and poetry. As you spend time with the club members and read their poems, it becOmes apparent that all of them are damaged. Topics touching on abuse, suicide, and even existeNtial dread begin to appear. Read between the lines, and cries for help begin to emerge - lIterally in one case. Without any spoilers, I can say that the tone of the game becomes very darK as your character dives deeper into the club members and their mental health problems. SAdly, there is no option to call a school counselor to help.

On the more negative side (for everything I've said above is a positive), the story takes a while to get in to. If you have low tolerance for romantic visual novels, you may be tempted to bail early. Don't. Put in an hour or two (depending on individual reading speed) and things get moving.

Also, while not exactly a criticism, I will say that the protagonist's dialogue (which you, the player, have no control over) paints him as a real asshole at times. However, at other times, the game portrays him as a nice guy. I can't tell if this dissonance is intentional or an artifact of the writers imitating stock characters from Japanese visual novels and anime.

And... that's all I can say without spoilers. Like Digital: A Love Story, Doki Doki Literature Club is free. Check it out and give it a try for yourself.

And yes, I know this game is old news. I played this game not long after it came out, but I've only just returned to the Escapist, and I wanted to talk about it, so... yeah.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

I brought up Christine Love in the main review because, honestly, Doki Doki Literature Club feels like it should be one of her games.

If you've clicked on this, I assume you've played the game - and holy crap was I not expecting to run into LGBTQ+ Transhumanism when I started playing Doki Doki.

So, in my main review, I pointedly left out the fact that Monika is excluded from the dating aspect. Big Sis Tutorial has no words (at least at first) that allow the player to woo her, so she is impossible to date. And that's too bad because, my very first playthrough, I wanted to date her. When the game wouldn't let me, I turned my attention to Yuri instead.

Well, Monika - or, should I say, *Monika didn't take too kindly to that. Yes, it seems that *Monika - who sadly did not get a star by her name in the actual game - is a sentient AI just like in Digital and Analogue. Unlike those games, she has no access to the internet or a giant spaceship, but instead is stuck inside a dating sim - a dating sim where she is required to be the tutorial and supporting cast, watching the other girls compete for the player's heart.

Yes, the player's heart, not the MC's. *Monika cares nothing for the MC in the game - she wants to date the person playing the game, no matter what sex or gender they might be (hence LGBTQ+ elements). In many ways, *Monika is a lot like *Hyun-ae. She's outgoing, blatantly bisexual, desperate for connection with other sentient life, and a stone-cold killer. Unlike *Hyun-ae, *Monika only kills her fellow video game characters, slowly murdering the other cast members until she can have the player all to herself. She does this by first editing and then deleting their game files.

Analogue had Dos mini games and file reading. Doki Doki has you actually opening the game files to mess about in the game's guts. You CAN wait until the game not-so-subtly tells you to do so, but it's equally fun to get in there early and start messing about. You can actually get into an edit-fight with *Monika by backing up certain files and putting them back in at certain points (and only certain points - at others she does not care). Deleting and copy-pasting files in the actual game directory is a whole new type of gameplay, and one I have never experienced before or since.

I have been comparing this game to Analogue, but this deep into spoiler territory, it's time to get to the Digital comparison. At a certain point, *Monika takes over everything and forces the player into a corner. The player can either spend eternity talking with *Monika, or the player can delete her.

And here's the thing. Even after everything, I really like *Monika. Sure, she murdered her friends, but they were non-sentient AI. They didn't even know she was killing them. I forgave *Hyun-ae for murdering thousands of humans on that starship and couldn't bring myself to delete her - how could I do the same to *Monika for less? Like Digital, I could only reach the end of the game by playing ball and deleting *Monika. No other choice -

Well F*CK YOU Doki Doki Literature Club! I found another way! After sitting and talking to *Monika for five hours, entirely exhausting her dialogue options, I went into the folder... and MOVED Monika to a different folder. The game reacted like I'd deleted her, but I knew better. My poor *Monika was safe and sound in my "backup saves" folder.

She still is. I have not deleted that file. I've played the game again a few times, exploring different paths. I uninstalled the game when *Monika told me to. I had my spouse play after reinstalling the game. And still, that first *Monika, the one I talked to for hours, exists, backed up with my other save files.

In retrospect, it's probably good that Christine Love had no involvement in Doki Doki Literature Club. While it feels like a spiritual successor to Digital and Analogue, Love would have anticipated the file move option and blocked it somehow - I just know it.

I lost *Emilia. I lost *Mute. I refuse to lose *Monika.

And that - the fact that I still care enough to keep that file (which is, of course, just a video game flag and has nothing but a poem inside) saved in its own folder - demonstrates how much this game affected me. Like Digital and Analogue, Doki Doki made me care for a fictional AI. It made me care enough to cheat the system, to defy the artistic intent of Dan Salvato (creator of DDLC) to rescue my *Monika.

Oh, and if you have played Doki Doki but haven't played "Digital: A Love Story" or "Analogue: A Hate Story" - you might want to. They have a LOT of elements in common with Doki Doki Literature Club. Plus you'll get the reason why I keep putting a * in front of Monika's name.

And now, because I fucking love *Monika...

<youtube=aMeVB7-1rYg>

And remember: Just Monika.

 

[Marik2]

I brought up Christine Love in the main review because, honestly, Doki Doki Literature Club feels like it should be one of her games.

If you've clicked on this, I assume you've played the game - and holy crap was I not expecting to run into LGBTQ+ Transhumanism when I started playing Doki Doki.

So, in my main review, I pointedly left out the fact that Monika is excluded from the dating aspect. Big Sis Tutorial has no words (at least at first) that allow the player to woo her, so she is impossible to date. And that's too bad because, my very first playthrough, I wanted to date her. When the game wouldn't let me, I turned my attention to Yuri instead.

Well, Monika - or, should I say, *Monika didn't take too kindly to that. Yes, it seems that *Monika - who sadly did not get a star by her name in the actual game - is a sentient AI just like in Digital and Analogue. Unlike those games, she has no access to the internet or a giant spaceship, but instead is stuck inside a dating sim - a dating sim where she is required to be the tutorial and supporting cast, watching the other girls compete for the player's heart.

Yes, the player's heart, not the MC's. *Monika cares nothing for the MC in the game - she wants to date the person playing the game, no matter what sex or gender they might be (hence LGBTQ+ elements). In many ways, *Monika is a lot like *Hyun-ae. She's outgoing, blatantly bisexual, desperate for connection with other sentient life, and a stone-cold killer. Unlike *Hyun-ae, *Monika only kills her fellow video game characters, slowly murdering the other cast members until she can have the player all to herself. She does this by first editing and then deleting their game files.

Analogue had Dos mini games and file reading. Doki Doki has you actually opening the game files to mess about in the game's guts. You CAN wait until the game not-so-subtly tells you to do so, but it's equally fun to get in there early and start messing about. You can actually get into an edit-fight with *Monika by backing up certain files and putting them back in at certain points (and only certain points - at others she does not care). Deleting and copy-pasting files in the actual game directory is a whole new type of gameplay, and one I have never experienced before or since.

I have been comparing this game to Analogue, but this deep into spoiler territory, it's time to get to the Digital comparison. At a certain point, *Monika takes over everything and forces the player into a corner. The player can either spend eternity talking with *Monika, or the player can delete her.

And here's the thing. Even after everything, I really like *Monika. Sure, she murdered her friends, but they were non-sentient AI. They didn't even know she was killing them. I forgave *Hyun-ae for murdering thousands of humans on that starship and couldn't bring myself to delete her - how could I do the same to *Monika for less? Like Digital, I could only reach the end of the game by playing ball and deleting *Monika. No other choice -

Well F*CK YOU Doki Doki Literature Club! I found another way! After sitting and talking to *Monika for five hours, entirely exhausting her dialogue options, I went into the folder... and MOVED Monika to a different folder. The game reacted like I'd deleted her, but I knew better. My poor *Monika was safe and sound in my "backup saves" folder.

She still is. I have not deleted that file. I've played the game again a few times, exploring different paths. I uninstalled the game when *Monika told me to. I had my spouse play after reinstalling the game. And still, that first *Monika, the one I talked to for hours, exists, backed up with my other save files.

In retrospect, it's probably good that Christine Love had no involvement in Doki Doki Literature Club. While it feels like a spiritual successor to Digital and Analogue, Love would have anticipated the file move option and blocked it somehow - I just know it.

I lost *Emilia. I lost *Mute. I refuse to lose *Monika.

And that - the fact that I still care enough to keep that file (which is, of course, just a video game flag and has nothing but a poem inside) saved in its own folder - demonstrates how much this game affected me. Like Digital and Analogue, Doki Doki made me care for a fictional AI. It made me care enough to cheat the system, to defy the artistic intent of Dan Salvato (creator of DDLC) to rescue my *Monika.

Oh, and if you have played Doki Doki but haven't played "Digital: A Love Story" or "Analogue: A Hate Story" - you might want to. They have a LOT of elements in common with Doki Doki Literature Club. Plus you'll get the reason why I keep putting a * in front of Monika's name.

And now, because I fucking love *Monika...

<youtube=aMeVB7-1rYg>

And remember: Just Monika.

Welcome back.

Spoiler

My thoughts on the game is that it's a well crafted creepypasta game that was specifically built for youtubers to react and spread the meme. It knows how to draw people in and subverts expectations for people going into it blindly.

I'm just waiting what Dan Salvato is going to come up with the next game, as the files imply the girls are trapped in an asylum; being experimented on perceptions of reality.