Plurk paste

Doki Doki Literature Club rant (SPOILERS)


I may be one of the minorities that doesn't like this game while still regarding it to be a not-bad game. But if you don't like cookie cutter anime girls, jumpscares, unsettling imagery, 4th wall breaking, you're not gonna be into this game. I myself was just pissed off even before the start.

Wondering why the rating was so high, I tried to look at the reviews and could not find a single properly constructed review outlining why it was good or how the game mechanics are like or anything. Nearly all of them were "Just play it. The less you know the better," or trying to be a poem, or using that distortion text, or spamming words and names repeatedly. Even the negative reviews were a lot of "This game made me feel bad 0/10". By the time I found a proper positive and negative review, I'd lost any interest in experiencing the game blindly and just watched a Let's Play to see how they implemented the twist.

tl;dr plot: You play as a typical anime teenager dude who's all "Why am I joining this club--oh cute girls and cupcakes!". Said cute girls are Sayori (your childhood bff), Natsuki (the local tsundere), Yuri (the local shy girl), and Monika (the president). And then you write poems by selecting words on the screen. Certain girls will like certain words and then you get a moment of intimately reading a book with them.

While on the surface it's an ultra cliched visual novel with anime-like characters, the game's real intention is subverting the very concept of trying to win over one of the girls like in a dating sim by choosing the dialogue options that appeal to them more. Instead, Monika who at some point realizes she's in a game, dicks around with the code to try and make her your only option, quite literally.

That's where the disturbing but also clever stuff comes in. She basically indirectly kills the other girls by "enhancing" their existing mental issues and driving them to kill themselves in very graphic ways, all the while the game begins to glitch out and give you jumpscares. But the kicker is that if you have the game files open, she'll put some weird shit in there, and the character folders which supposedly hold the characters' data vanish when they die. You can actually delete those folders yourself and mess with the game in real time. I thought that 4th wall breaking mechanic was pretty neat.

Unfortunately, you'll first have to play about 3-4 hours of long ass dialogue back and forth between the characters and even longer narration that does little more than explain what's going on before Monika gets jealous and decides to screw with Sayori's mind just after she confesses her feelings to you out of insecurity, and you have the rare moment of making a dialogue choice of rejecting or not.

Now, I've been in Sayori's shoes before and this was probably the most emotionally deep moment, even though it still felt pretty shallow to me. And then the game decides to jumpscare you with her hanging herself the next day. Game crashes, you reload, and the title screen is glitch and your save files are gone. From here on you replay everything all over again but Sayori doesn't exist and you get jumpscare glitches now and then. Monika also fudges with the dialogue of the girls. Rinse and repeat for the other two girls, Yuri who has a knife obsession and stabs herself to death, and Natsuki (in the playthrough I watched) throws up, possibly to death, but I don't remember how she died.

In the end, it's just you and Monika and she basically explains the entire game to you and why she did this. It all boils down to her being self-aware and hating the fact that she's just a side character and that her "friends" are programmed to love the player character. She comes off rather obnoxious since she's talking to you, the player not the character, which I guess is the point because you have the option of deleting her character folder out of spite and watch her suffer in mosaics while she's like "NO BUT I LOVE YOU, HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME." Game restart one more time and you get to play through the game without Monika! up to a certain point and then Sayori gains 4th wall awareness. Then somehow out of the abyss of non-existence, Monika again with the "NO BUT I LOVE YOU, I WON'T LET YOU HURT <PLAYER>" and deletes the whole game as credits roll.

Really cool concept. But the narration and dialogue that's supposed to get you to be invested with the characters and make the game twist powerful is just soooo boring, and at some points it reads as cringey as a scanlation that decided to be a little too liberal. It was only when I watched the Game Grumps play and add their silly voices and extra narration that I actually enjoyed what I felt was the most lacklustre part of the game.

I'm sure people rated it so highly because of the thrill they got from the game doing a 180 on them after getting so into making poems with cute girls, as well as the 4th wall breaking mechanics that encourages you to replay and mess around. But that initial investment has to be there for it to work. For me, it just didn't.