Review of Doki Doki Literature Club!
| Subject | Doki Doki Literature Club! Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! |
| By | Helpfulness: 0 Vote: 7DrClownQueen on 2023-02-05 last updated on 2023-02-06 |
| Review | Reviewed on: Xbox Series S Before I begin my review of Doki Doki Literature Club!, I'm just warning you right now this will contain spoilers because it is 100% impossible to truly review this game without spoiling anything. If a review advertises itself as spoiler-free, then either it is not really spoiler-free, or it is not really a review. The game has received universal acclaim all across the board; on Steam, it currently holds a 96% positive score as of this writing. I played the Plus version on Xbox Series S, and I didn't just simply play through the story; I went out of my way to obtain every single achievement, which took roughly 6 playthroughs, so I know the entire game forwards and backwards. Despite all the hype, I was honestly disappointed. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying I think this game is bad, but after seeing all of the hype and fanfare surrounding it, after playing through everything, I thought it was alright. Not particularly great, not particularly bad, just alright. The story, from an ostensible perspective, follows an MC whose name is of your choosing, who gets invited to join a literature club at school by his childhood friend, Sayori. Upon entering the club, he is greeted by three other girls; Natsuki, Yuri, and Monika. All four of these girls are anime archetypes, and you decide which girl you want to woo based on specific word choices in poems and who to side with during the occasional dispute. In actuality, however, this is made obvious after the third poem, something about this club is very off, and when Sayori opens up to you about her lifelong struggles with depression, she starts behaving less and less rationally to the point where she ends up taking her own life. No matter what path you choose, she is doomed before you even start the game. You're taken back to the main menu with Sayori glitched out, and you're prompted to start a new game. This game is now a hideously glitchy mess, and Yuri starts acting more yandere while Monika is acting strangely aloof about it. Your objective is to figure out who this culprit is and why they're breaking the game. The best part of the game by far is when it focuses on character writing, especially when it comes to the subject of Sayori's struggles with depression. The first act of the visual novel is intentionally generic dating sim fluff, but when Sayori opens up to the MC about her struggling to trust others and simply love herself is disturbingly accurate to how people who struggle with depression behave in real life; and while the MC's reactions, especially if you choose to make him confess that he loves her, can be summed up as a manual on what NOT to do when helping someone suffering from extreme depression, I'd actually argue it makes for an amazing cautionary tale because the average teenager would definitely mean well and actively try to help their friend, but because they have no true knowledge on how to handle a situation like this on their own, at best, they would solve nothing. At worst, they would only push them further off the deep end. The only downside, however, is the scene where Sayori takes her own life is played as horror, but to anyone who has struggled with depression, such as myself, and to people who've had relationships with people who have passed judgement on themselves, this scene is way more sad than it is scary. It's even worse when you realize there is nothing you can do to prevent this, which somehow makes it even heavier. This is thankfully revised in Plus; the biggest feature added in Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! is the addition of Side Stories. Despite being an ostensible prequel, this takes place in a separate timeline from the main game. The first episode, Trust, and the second to last episode, Self-Love, are the real standouts here. Trust explores Sayori's feelings of worthlessness and struggles to simply find happiness in such a respectful, impactful way that I didn't think was possible for video game writing. Monika wants to start the literature club, and Sayori introduces herself and wants to help Monika find new members to join her. At first, Monika doesn't know what to make of this overly cheerful girl, but when Sayori accidentally leaves a folder behind containing poems she wrote that are very personal, Monika starts getting concerned. When Sayori returns and Monika asks her about the poem, Sayori is upset that Monika found out something so personal about her so fast, but eventually, Sayori opens up and reveals she has thoughts about suicide frequently. Monika offers her a shoulder to cry on and promises Sayori she will do everything she can to support her and keep her secret, as long as Sayori is open and honest with her if she ever has any thoughts about hurting herself or if she ever feels like giving up. This is one of the very few times in a video game where I ended up crying hard. It's such a sad and powerful moment that feels so genuine and earnest. The other episode, Self-Love, is another real crusher that I wasn't really expecting, but I'm glad it happened. In that episode, Natsuki and Yuri struggle to rekindle their friendship after their dispute over literary tastes. Because of Yuri's anxiety, she prefers to have her lunch break on a broken stairwell since nobody comes there, but Natsuki discovers Yuri's secret place and starts coming by more frequently because she's tired of her friends always picking on her and making fun of her. Natsuki's relationship with her friends is very toxic; they acknowledge her achievements in a backhanded way, they always make her the butt of their jokes, they make her afraid to stand up for herself, and they gaslight her into thinking that everything is always her fault, even when it isn't. Natsuki, at first, is defensive of her friends when Yuri comments on how horrible and toxic they sound for always putting Natsuki down and making her feel like she has to give them sweets to make it up to them, but as Natsuki starts hanging out with Yuri, she starts to have less patience for her friends' cruel behavior. Eventually, Yuri gives Natsuki the courage to cut off her friendships with this group, and Natsuki ends up going into a panic attack because of it. Yuri helps Natsuki recover, and she promises to be her new bestie, being there when she wants to get out of the house and helping her whenever she feels down about herself. Aside from depression, this writing also handles the subject of toxic friendships extraordinarily well. Even though we never really see Natsuki's friends, the way she describes them is very accurate to how people stuck in toxic friendships feel; she's constantly feeling put down, treated like she's a coat hanger they put in the closet, and take out when they're ready to use her, feeling too scared to stand up to them because she'd rather be blamed for everything than be left behind. It also explores why it's difficult for those to leave toxic friendships because someone like Natsuki has spent most of her life with them, and she hasn't really experienced a truly healthy relationship. What also surprised me was that after Natsuki cut them off, she did not feel immediately happy; she felt very, very depressed and when she thought Yuri wasn't interested in being her friend after taking her advice, she ended up completely breaking down into a panic attack; not the usual cartoonish anime/Hollywood types, but once again, a realistic, painful one. I, too, have been in a toxic friendship. There was someone in a previous job I had who offered to be my friend when it seemed like few others were interested. Unfortunately, after a few months of treating me like a friend, I found out from one of his friends that he was talking about what a freak I am behind my back. I made him promise to communicate with me if anything I did was bothering him, and even though he agreed, he never did. Eventually, after months of uneasiness but trying to reason with myself he was my friend, he decided to try to get me fired from my job by pretending stuff he asked me to do was me harassing him. Because he was in a position above me, I eventually realized I was fighting an uphill battle; despite claiming he felt "unsafe and on guard" around me, he still acted buddy-buddy whenever he got the chance to see me, always going out of his way to find me, acting all happy greeting me, and checking to see how I was, begging to talk to me whenever I called the workplace, and telling me about his life and accomplishments after his promotion. Just when I thought we finally worked things out, he tried passing off him hanging around me as me harassing him and filed another report, and I realized he wasn't someone to be trusted, so I dropped contact with him altogether. Despite actively avoiding him, he was STILL complaining about me, making up bogus stories about me threatening him through social media and making inappropriately sexual comments about him. I felt like staying there was only going to make things worse, so I left. Looking back on our friendship now, I think the reason he wanted me as a friend was just because he viewed me as a vulnerable girl to be exploited. He never made time for me as a friend, acted like he wanted our relationship to be strictly professional, and kept lecturing me about "boundaries" whenever I asked if we could hang out, talk, or do something together; unless, of course, he wanted money, he wanted me to buy him something, he wanted a favor, he wanted me to look at photos of him and tell him how amazing and beautiful he is, or he wanted to complain about how nobody appreciates how generous and wonderful he is; even after he reported me for harassment, he still reached out to me and made these kinds of demands. I was scared if I said no, he would file another claim as revenge. He lied all the time, even about little things, not just to me and about me, but also to other people and about them because he was too much of a coward to have a proper confrontation, and he enjoyed meaningless drama way too much to care about how his words affect other people. Even though I always apologized for my wrongdoings, he never apologized for anything; he would either say it never happened, he would try convincing me it didn't happen the way I remember it, or he would try to shift the blame on me, his friends, his coworkers, his parents, pretty much everyone but himself. Despite all of this, once I left, I felt a huge hole in my heart; it felt like cutting off someone who I was once close with, who seemed happy to see me, helped me come out of my shell, and was just such a huge part of my life, was cutting my heart in half. The reason I am telling you all this is because I want you to understand that even after departing with someone as narcissistic, sociopathic, and unapologetic as him, it is truly hard to depart with someone who you feel you had a strong connection with, no matter how horrible the relationship was. It will get better eventually, but it takes time and a good support group of honest friends. No video game I have seen, even to this day, has captured the feelings of a toxic friendship better than Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!. After reading all of this, you're probably wondering why a game that has such strong moments as these would wind up receiving a 7/10 from me. Well, that would be because, unfortunately, while I truly adore how much compassion and care towards mental health has been shown in the game's writing, including the trigger warnings in the game's opening, these moments do not represent the entire game, or even a majority of it. The first act is okay; it's mostly generic visual novel fluff, but the reveal of Sayori's depression really made up for it, making the drama supremely effective. The final act is also surprisingly really, really good, giving Monika an outstanding amount of character development, offering genuine words of wisdom, and, if you did everything right, giving a really satisfying ending with a heartbreaking song in the end credits not unlike GlaDOS' Still Alive at the end of Portal. The second act, however, is where most of the "horror" resides. As a horror title, this game is...not good. It feels like a bizarre mixture of the nightmarish atmosphere of Eversion, the nauseating music and brutality of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, and the cheap jump scares and slow pacing of most video game creepypastas. Influence from Eversion and Kane & Lynch 2 is more than welcome, but when your game contains bleeding eyes, excess profanity, hyper-realistic eyes and blood, and leaving me honestly surprised nobody ever said 666, that's what ruins it for me. I especially hate how Yuri's character was portrayed. Even though it's explained in the game her personality was being heavily amplified, her yandere behavior was a complete 180 from Sayori's depression in terms of writing; which, by the way, it was also explained Sayori's depression was also heavily amplified, so there's no excuse here. Rather than a respectful, realistic portrayal of yandere behavior, we get a cartoonishly violent, heavily sexualized, one-dimensionally obsessed caricature; the kind that even Yuno Gasai would look at and tell her to calm the fudge down. Another issue I had with the game was in the side stories, while they are way more heartwarming and provide tremendously better character development, most of them felt a little too self-important for my tastes. Part of the reason why Trust and Self-Love worked so well at delivering their messages of their respective titles is because the characters' established troubles and personalities were integrated expertly into the story, so the lessons they learned felt like real struggles they were overcoming. The others, however, felt more like forced scenarios that matched the respective characters to a superficial extent. As a result, quite a few of the side stories feel less like actual character studies, and more like 20-minute soapboxes about understanding, respect, personal boundaries, and reflection. These are good lessons to teach and learn, don't get me wrong, but when 95% of the dialogue feels less like characters having a genuine discussion and more like the writer preaching to you, assuming you won't feel insulted and talked down to, you're more likely just going to feel bored and disengaged. Occasionally, there are moments in these stories that feel genuine, but for the most part, it feels like a game you would have a middle schooler play in a social skills class. Dok Doki Literature Club is a decent game. Despite its ambition and its unconventional use of the visual novel format, it can't really break free of its experimental state enough to truly be a groundbreaking masterpiece. It wants to be a genre-breaking game like Eversion, a game that criticizes the conventions of its genre like Kane & Lynch 2, a fourth wall breaking horror experience like a video game Creepypasta, and a strong message about mental health and loving yourself and others, when just being a strong message about mental health and loving yourself and others would have been more than enough. Its respect and care when it comes to writing about depression, toxic relationships, and compassion for others despite differences you don't understand is surprising and welcome, and it's enough for me to recommend the game to an extent, but it's not the main focus of the game, and the horror is just too over-the-top to be taken seriously, and it lacks a style original enough to be called its own. It's definitely not a game you should play if you're feeling miserable, and there are many visual novels out there with much stronger stories and far more effective horror atmospheres, but nevertheless, Doki Doki Literature Club has enough lasting impact to warrant a look, though I'd recommend the Plus version over the original. |
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