Saya No Uta Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love The Tentacle Monster

The Wooster

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Saya No Uta Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love The Tentacle Monster

Sometimes erotic horror visual novels actually can tell rich, genre-defying stories. Grey Carter writes about the popular yet controversial Saya No Uta.

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SlumlordThanatos

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The Wooster said:
Trust me, there are easier games to masturbate to than Saya No Uta. There's a box quote for you.
I will certainly keep that in mind.

I remember Extra Credits talking about this game in one of their "Games You Might Not Have Tried" segments a while back, and as I recall, it did a good job at creeping Daniel Floyd out. It looks fascinating in its own morbid way...but I think I'll just observe at a distance for this one. I'm probably doing the writing a disservice (I have heard nothing but good things about the author), but I never was a huge fan of this sort of thing in the first place.
 

maninahat

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I am often critical of visual novels (or at least, the ones that follow the common format) and this is the one people most often recommend to me when trying to defend them. I might give it a try, especially if it avoids that god awful children's picture book set up wherein you have only one sentence of text on screen at a time, next to a giant, not very good picture that takes up the whole screen and never changes.
 

Ragsnstitches

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Gross fleshy nightmare worlds are my thing.

I would love to see this animated as I'm not fond of VNs as a platform for stories. Give it to me animated with hyper violent 80's anime graphicness and pull no punches.

Gotta say though, I'm mighty tempted to give this a shot. That opening piece was great.

EDIT: Looking at the background stills, this is exactly how I pictured Nurgles realm in Warhammer. And how the protagonist describes the sights, sounds and smells are perfect too. Noxious smells, heaving masses of putrid flesh, wet fleshy sounds... beautifully horrific.
 

09philj

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Sometimes we get beauty in unexpected places. I'm probably going to end up reading/playing this, which will be even harder to explain to people than Katawa Shoujo. ("It's a romantic visual novel about disabled girls that was made by people from 4chan. No, it's not porn. No, really!") Although it looks like it'll be hard to source a copy in the UK.
 

Sleepy Sol

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I'm not the biggest fan of VNs but I've never sworn them off. This is one I really need to give a shot eventually.

Gotta have some more serious material to balance out the Nekoparas of the world.
 

09philj

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Sleepy Sol said:
Gotta have some more serious material to balance out the Nekoparas of the world.
I just Google Imaged searched that. It looks appalling. I must play it.
 

SlumlordThanatos

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09philj said:
Sometimes we get beauty in unexpected places. I'm probably going to end up reading/playing this, which will be even harder to explain to people than Katawa Shoujo. ("It's a romantic visual novel about disabled girls that was made by people from 4chan. No, it's not porn. No, really!") Although it looks like it'll be hard to source a copy in the UK.
I should read this again, so I can keep wishing that there were more like it. The only VN that I've ever bothered with, to be honest.
 

Callate

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It's not hard to empathize with Fuminori because he's been dealt a terrible situation and is grasping for the one bit of light to be found within it. Repairing the way he sees the world means turning his back on the only "person" who was willing to reach out to him in his isolation and despair.

But, you know...
allowing that relationship to reach its natural "conclusion" means the utter destruction of the human race in perhaps the most horrifying way imaginable
... so empathy can only stretch so far.
 

Sleepy Sol

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09philj said:
Sleepy Sol said:
Gotta have some more serious material to balance out the Nekoparas of the world.
I just Google Imaged searched that. It looks appalling. I must play it.
It's certainly got some awful writing in spots (possibly so bad it's good depending on your perspective), but hey, the catgirls are cute, so I thought it was worth it.

I have very high standards.
 

cleric of the order

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This reminds me of how much the ending i wanted scared me.
No matter what horrors this world might hold I still have some power against the madness
 

Metadigital

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This is a very twisted and interesting game. Or interactive novel. Whatever you'd like to call it. It's worth the time so long as you're able to handle its heavy themes (which are neither the nudity nor the violence or morbid imagery).
 

hentropy

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I'm a person who doesn't particularly enjoy horror, I actually tend to think that real pornography tends to have more capacity for artistic merit. I would never say that a genre or style of storytelling can never be artistic or enjoyable, but horror is just a genre I find little actual merit in for a variety of reasons. I do like suspense and gorey (but mostly non-horror) stuff can have a certain charm about it, but straight-up horror is just boring and cheap to me.

Saya no Uta is one of the few pieces of media that could be called horror that I find is a truly artistic experience, and makes one sympathize not just with the antagonists of this particular story, but can at least provide some interesting insight into such horrific insanity, even if I wouldn't exactly call it realistic.
 

Fox12

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SlumlordThanatos said:
The Wooster said:
Trust me, there are easier games to masturbate to than Saya No Uta. There's a box quote for you.
I will certainly keep that in mind.

I remember Extra Credits talking about this game in one of their "Games You Might Not Have Tried" segments a while back, and as I recall, it did a good job at creeping Daniel Floyd out. It looks fascinating in its own morbid way...but I think I'll just observe at a distance for this one. I'm probably doing the writing a disservice (I have heard nothing but good things about the author), but I never was a huge fan of this sort of thing in the first place.
I'll be the voice of dissent, and say you're not missing much.

It had some really interesting ideas, and I like the way it combined beautiful and disturbing imagery. The music was quite good, and the art was generally okay. It has great atmosphere, and a very unique premise. The prose, though... the novel part of the visual novel wasn't the best. More then that, the story was really inconsistent in quality, and there were a lot of plot holes. It just felt emotionally manipulative somehow. It's one fucked up ride, though, so if misery porn is your thing, check it out. If not, you won't be sorry. I would say it's Gen Urobuchi's worst work to date, and he has a pretty spotty record. You'd be better off checking out Madoka, and deciding from there if you want to check out his other work.
 

Theminimanx

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Mar 14, 2011
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I'll gladly recommend this VN as well. Even if the story is not exactly your thing, it's a great example of how to use the Visual Novel format well, by leaving a lot up to the imagination, while still giving enough visual and audio hints to send your thoughts in the right direction. Also, it's only a few hours long, so it doesn't overstay it's welcome, making it unique among all the visual novels I've played so far.


It's interesting that Grey thought Fuminori was innocent, because I never really had that impression. I assumed from the start that Fuminori must have some idea of what's going; he can't be that dense. But what I like is that the story still works when you go into it with that mind-set. In almost every scene, there's a set-up for Fuminori to do something that puts him more firmly in the "Mentally Fucked-Up" category, and each time he willingly does it. There's one scene that perfectly examplifies this:

So Fuminori arrives home from spending time with his friends, and is exhausted from having to be in the monster world. And Saya is at home waiting for him, being all: "Welcome home, dinner is almost ready!" In response to that, Fuminori comments that Saya would make a great wife. So my mind immediately goes: "Please don't tell me that means what I think it means."

[cuts to a sex scene]

"Oh god it does help help make it stop!"
 

wulfy42

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Jan 29, 2009
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Spoilers so be warned.


Ok, Fuminori was never innocent. He was messed up in the head right from the start. When he ate Omari, he didn't know what it was, but he figured it out very fast after that and knew what it was when he killed the neighbor and didn't care at all. He had hated all of his old friends and people in general. He was even intially, worse then Saya, as she was not human and eating them isn't as bad for her.

In fact, it's quite likely that she never ate a human before she got together with Fuminori (Although there was a baby missing form the hospital she might have eaten). Left on her own, she might never have hurt anyone more then just giving them a scare etc.

Btw, you can watch the whole thing on youtube without any of the sex scenes if you want (I don't care about them). You might miss out on some of the story but it's pretty much all there.
 

xitel

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Aug 13, 2008
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09philj said:
Sleepy Sol said:
Gotta have some more serious material to balance out the Nekoparas of the world.
I just Google Imaged searched that. It looks appalling. I must play it.
It's adorable. Completely empty in terms of plot, but adorable. Also has a rather interesting engine for a VN in which characters actually animate, rather than using still images.
 

VondeVon

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Definitely want to play this now. Don't have time, of course. -_- I'll put it on the list for when I'm a grey-haired retiree.
 

crimsonspear4D

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This goes as one of the few things I actually hope is made into an anime, like movie or a one-episode OVA, but not a series though, fucking christ no.