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Review of Heaven Will Be Mine

SubjectHeaven Will Be Mine
ByHelpfulness: 1
Vote: 7.5
swordfish96 on 2020-12-09
ReviewIt’s very much like its predecessor We Know the Devil, but more. More production values, more developed side characters, a more ambitious setting, more mind screwy, more confusing and opaque, more queer flirting etc. It's alright in the sense that there were a quite a few things I liked about it but it really is written too inscrutably for me to call it good.

The background setting is actually pretty interesting, taking place in a world where the physical laws of reality are in part defined by human perception and culture, with a defeated ‘alien’ ‘threat’ (for a certain value of alien and threat) in the background sparking a 3 way civil war between factions who desire humanity to come back to Earth, live in space or become something different to humanity. Of course it takes a while to realize this because the game spells out nothing about the setting and only implies things about it in bits and pieces

Each scene is essentially two of the pilots fighting/flirting/arguing, frequently at the same time and written in a very trippy way and honestly I’m not sure whether I liked the writing or not. It’s pretty much all metaphor and symbolism bordering between pretentious and meaningful and it does have some neat themes such as the tendency for humanity to ‘other’ that which is different. It is a fairly poetic sort of prose and relaxing to read in itself and at the same time it’s abstract and confusing and a pain to understand. I’m sure a large part of the ambiguity and abstractedness is intentional but it does actually get in the way of reading the VN and resulted in me spending a lot of the time confused.

Originally posted on Reddit WAYR
1 point
#1 by version
2022-08-27 at 17:45
< report >I think that it's one of those novels where you just have to frequently stop and think about what that thing you just read meant. Doing so can be a real fucking headache, I'll admit. But it ends up being pretty rewarding when you see all the interesting ideas the game has. Not only on it's LGBT themes, but in regards to culture, conflict, what we consider to be "human", etc.
The style of writing kinda has the advantage of conveying abstract ideas better imo.Last modified on 2022-08-27 at 18:04