Quote:
Originally Posted by Dinglesberry
half the reason its popular is because it was free so anyone could play it
if the game cost like 10$ do u really think it would have become as "hyped" as it was
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That's pretty much exactly the problem. In a complete vacuum, Doki Doki Literature Club is average. My beef is that the hype for this game is excessive and, consequently, this shit is the face of Japanese visual novels to the majority of the West (which is quite obviously an issue). It's natural that someone like me would care and would retaliate in a hyperbolic fashion in order to counter a hyperbolic crowd reaction.
And, before someone brings it up, "it's free" is not a reason for any game to be considered good. The price should not factor into any reflection on the quality of a product, only the cost-benefit analysis of purchasing that product.
There are good things about this game. People like the art. I don't like the style, but it's professional. I actually quite enjoyed the interaction design in this game: the typical "flag" system was masked with a creative poetry construction task. This is unique and also allowed for fun foreshadowing.
The game also tricked me into thinking it might actually be good (before the hanging scene) so... I suppose that's a sign of some kind of writing.
There are numerous reasons to hate this game. The characters are bland (especially Monika, which is a huge problem since she's the most important one). As others have mentioned, any seemingly interesting thing about the game has been done more effectively before. The yandere archetype has been popular for 2 decades now. This specific kind of yandere escalation existed back in 2002 with the advent of
Higurashi. Even for those outside of the anime fandom, the movie
Fatal Attraction came out in 1987.
Perhaps the Monika-player relationship would be interesting if you've never seen that kind of fourth-wall-breaking before. Film and literature have both formal and informal models for how the "viewer" exists in the context of a story (e.g. transportation theory and cinematic voyeurism). Games are especially interesting in this context because the "viewer" is now an interactor and their position relative to the story is more complicated: we recognize that the "main character" is their own person but is also controlled by "the interactor", somebody who is distinctly NOT the main character. You could view DDLC as a kind of metafiction that explores this idea. However...
Metafiction in video games isn't new (
Undertale did fourth-wall-breaking and file system shenanigans but actually used these elements to make a commentary about the nature of gaming as a whole).
Metafiction in visual novels isn't new (
Ever17, from 2002, makes the player-character relationship the center of the entire story). Repeating routes as a narrative technique was a crucial element of
Muv-Luv and several other games that I won't list because at least one user is reading them now.
So any kind of shock factor or uniqueness is lost on me because I've seen this all before (in better forms).
Of course, even if none of the singular elements of a game are novel, perhaps the interaction of these elements allows something interesting to emerge. Specifically, if all of these elements work together to produce some theme, the experience is still valuable as a holistic one.
The issue is that DDLC doesn't actually make any sense when you look at it as a whole. Everything in the story exists as a direct consequence of Monika's actions. She's aware that she's in the game and has the other characters kill themselves so that she's the only one left in the dating sim environment. First of all, this is super not convincing because Monika is so ill-defined as a character outside of her possessive, obsessive love for the player. Second of all, there's no stated or implied reason WHY Monika would even love me in the first place. It's forced. Lastly, why the fuck does this matter? What's the point?
I brought up
Undertale earlier as a positive example.
Undertale isn't actually trying to say that you're a bad person for killing enemies in a video game, it's trying to make sure that you actually fully understand the consequences of the actions you're taking in the gamespace. The cardinal sin in the game isn't becoming genocidal, it's endlessly resetting the game to achieve the different endings because you are toying with the fates of the characters for purely self-centered reasons. Every narrative element of the game ultimately works towards this end (roughly). The metafictional elements WORK because there's actually a good reason for them to be there.
Now back to DDLC: what was the fucking point? What kind of statement is it trying to make? A video game character falls in love with the player? What does that even mean outside of the context of the game? Answer: it means nothing because there is no point.
Doki Doki Literature Club is the videogame equivalent of a jumpscare. Everything in the game is in service of shock value. Character suicide? Shock value. Yandere? Shock value. Monika altering the game files? Shock value. What I haven't really touched on is what I think the game is actually abhorrent: it seriously discusses mental illness and treats these issues with some kind of gravity
solely as a reason to provide shock value when the characters commit suicide later. It's tasteless, trashy, and evil.
And, above all, meaningless.
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Somebody defended this game to me by saying that this game is only really some kind of demo for a larger project underway by Dan Salvato. The DDLC game files have some kind of AR scavenger hunt that acts as an advertisement for this "real game."
My response is that if you want people to play your "real game" then you should make a demo that doesn't actually suck balls.