After the release of OmOneko I felt the need to share a little.
There is always a strange feeling when reviewing something you worked on, there will always be doubt on the sincerity no matter how much it is. So instead, to keep it meaningful I will share the path of how it led me to here and how I view the game in that context. Hopefully you will find that more interesting and genuine. I waited for the game to have enough reviews before posting mine.
Almost some 10 years ago, I was following a youtuber named GullOfDoom(channel now deleted) originally for Terraria content I believe, but he would dable in other games and some visual novels. At that point I had no idea what those really were, and I wasn’t particularly interested, mostly following for the sake of it. He began making 1 or 2 videos on Katawa Shoujo, but never continued I guess because it was barely watched. However it left me extremely frustrated because it barely went past the prologue and the themes felt pretty interesting and close to home for once. To resolve this, I went “Fine, I’ll do it myself” and searched for the game on my own. Back then, I was thinking “Do it really want to play this?”, but the need to know pushed me and I spent a whole week going through the game. It was a pivotal moment(I’ll keep the details to its own review), and after another week pondering my own life I finally set on a resolution.
Stories and experiences through games can transform your way of thinking and viewing life. It was something I felt so important it made me want to celebrate and perpetuate it, which is also part of how I ended up doing so much reviewing but that’s another story. In the aftermath, I watched some videos from a different youtube channel called VoicesFromTheDark(due to a certain video of his, if you know you know), and one of them was about something called Higurashi: When They Cry. This time again only 2 videos were available(the rest was gone I think? I forgot), however I never could get enough courage to go play it because I was terrified of how it seemed to be about horror so it went forgotten in a corner of my mind and my VN journey stifled there. Later on, a certain game had come out fairly recently and was all the talk, you might have heard of it, it was called Doki Doki Literature Club. During the new years celebration following it, for fun the idea came to play it with cousins, though I used it as a dare to finally play through it despite knowing it also played on horror. Without doing this, I think I never would have been able to do it, and as we got through (they sort of lost interest near the end) I had to keep going, the more it went, the less I understood why I was scared before. It ended up being a really interesting experience, and made me realize that maybe the fear I felt came from my own imagination and that reality(and fictions) were just not frightening anymore.
It was at this moment that I stopped feeling fear, not because I was brave, but just figuring out that I had no reason to feel fear. So the day right after, I remembered about Higurashi and how I never read it because of that non existent fear, then I decided to break my old mental barriers that had no reason still being here and got the game. I played through it in a single sitting, still being fresh from being freed of fear, it was somewhat of a surreal experience finally doing it. I will pass on the many details of my journey with this saga, the important points being that I ended up working a part of the team doing patches on the games and this is where I learned on my own to work in the innards of a visual novel. It went on for many years (it’s a very long series…) and KS, DDLC, and WTC became sort of foundations to my want to explore stories that felt meaningful and pychological. It’s also where I learned that I disliked a good amount of the common tropes of more standard VNs. At some point I learned about another VN one of the KS devs was working on, named Historia, it was another good one and I ended on the discord server(wild to think this journey saw the rise of discord) for it. Some interactions with a certain person led me to a youtube channel with interviews of some of the KS devs (which were very interesting), and I noticed some videos about a VN project but I didn’t go further. With some more interactions later, the topic of needing some technical help with the code came up, and turns out I had gained some knowledge about it so I said “why not”, it was also a good excuse to finally work on a VN myself. I didn’t want to get too invested in terms of work, so my “deal” was that I would do anything I was able on the code front but would skip on everything else. Four years later, the game was completed. I wasn’t that young at the start, but it felt like achieving a childhood dream to finish a proper game, one that was inspired by exactly the same game that had been so pivotal to me.
I had little to no knowledge of the story beyond Act 1 due to my “deal”, so I was able to jump in fresh. Although I didn’t work on the story itself, it still feels a bit autocongratulatory to praise it so I won’t spend much words saying how much I loved it. The way each route took on a different aspect of the same problematic of identity was interesting. Finding it, affirming it, nurturing it. Not letting others dictate, but also not dictating others, and figuring out your own place. There’s an authentic approach to the story and it’s the kind of visual novels that made me love this genre. I succeeded in perpetuating the movement that changed me, and so this is a game I will always be proud of.
I hope you enjoy it.