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(Copy/pasted from Facebook, following up on the previous post.)
Doki Doki Literature Club post 2 of 2.
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So, yeah, I'm going to cop-out and, in lieu of writing an actual post here, just copy/paste the 8 pages of notes I ended up taking while replaying the game, some of which was "live-blogged" so to speak, in the midst of playing it. Let's see if Facebook can handle it... >_>;
-----
Doki Doki Literature Club Notes
Other game comparisons:
-- Eversion (for starting cutesy then subverting expectations)
-- Eternal Darkness (for having to do three playthroughs to get "good" ending, also for being dark as fuck, too)
-- Undertale (for fourth-wall breaking stuff on both the pacifist and genocide routes)
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-- Words that you think would be Natsuki words or Yuri words turn out to be Sayori words
-- "Misery," "depression," "dark," "misfortune," "scars," "hopeless," "death," "empty," "broken," "tragedy" are Sayori words.
-- "Anger," "papa" are Natsuki words. “Papa” especially seems a bit weird for Natsuki. “Anger” maybe not so much.
-- "Suicide," however, is a Yuri word and not a Sayori word.
-- Sayori likes MC's "Natsuki" poems, but does not like MC's "Yuri" poems.
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-- If you follow Natsuki/Yuri route, then Yuri/Natsuki will completely shut you out after the first (technically second) day and not show you their poems anymore. By the last day, they basically tell you to fuck off entirely.
-- If you follow the Sayori route, Natsuki shows you her poems all three days, but Yuri does not on the third day, though not due to disliking the MC or anything.
-- Yuri and Natsuki seem to get closer on the Sayori route, without the asshole MC focusing on one of them and causing the other one to be shut out.
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-- The game really does not let you do anything with Monika in Act One. Even if you actively pick Monika at the one point it gives you the option to do so, the game shuts you down immediately, via Natsuki and Yuri vetoing the choice.
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-- Monika knows everything from the very start, of course. “Epiphany.”
-- Also, just to note, almost all of the music involves piano in some way, except for the specific character poem themes.
-- At some points in every route, Monika tries to interfere or interrupt, which annoys that route's character, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the character.
-- "I gently open the door." This is *THE* just-before-point-of-no-return text box, from which you can still reload Act One saves.
-- Sayori words are still present in Act Two, but become Natsuki/Yuri words. Most but not *all* of the negative Sayori words go to Yuri and positive ones go to Natsuki. "Joy" becomes a Yuri word, though.
-- Monika's first poem of Act Two is a continuation of her first poem of Act One. "I brandish my pen."
-- Natsuki and Yuri are arguing, you have to choose one or the other, each choice just glitches and causes the selection boxes to get bigger, then, suddenly, giant Monika face filling the screen. The “insanity effects” in this game are pretty good, for the most part.
-- "Why don't we
step out side
for a bit."
-- "I'm sure Natsuki will forget about it by tomorrow. Completely."
-- Yuri wanted Monika to leave at the end of day two so that she could talk to MC alone. Monika agrees, but then just immediately force advances the game to the next poem-writing section anyway.
-- When MC leaves the club room to look for Yuri, the music becomes muffled, as if it were actually coming out of the club room (you know, where Monika is).
-- Game (via Monika) "rewinds" back to MC *not* following Yuri (and finding her cutting herself on the arm). Not sure why Monika would *want* to backtrack that, though, given that her goal was to make the MC dislike the other two. I guess she figured this would make the MC even *more* worried about Yuri (and more likely to ignore her, Monika)?
-- Except that Monika explicitly brings it up later ("I think you saw something earlier you weren't supposed to see.")
-- Yuri's second poem in Act Two: definitely not the same as the second poem of Act One.
-- Monika's second poem is similar to the one from Act One, but more fucked up. ("Delete her.")
-- And right after that is the first time Monika directly addresses the player. (Well, not counting the "save your game" bit from Act One.)
-- Monika apparently doesn't have full control, because day three ends before she can say what she wants to say. ("Wait! No! Stop it!" as the screen fades to black.)
-- Exact repeat of the "Yuri goes to make tea, MC follows, sees Yuri cutting herself, scene rewinds" bit, until Yuri and MC are alone in the hallway and Yuri mentions deja vu.
-- When Yuri and MC are "alone" in the hallway, Monika's faded image is seen overlaying Yuri, slowly fading in.
-- Yuri's third poem is just fucked up, bloodstained, and illegible.
-- Natsuki's third poem is not a poem at all. It’s a letter worrying about Yuri and how Yuri needs help (first mention of anything like a therapist at all in the game). Also it’s a warning about Monika.
-- When the choice to pick who to spend the weekend with comes up, the mouse gravitates toward Monika. If you pick anyone else, Weird Shit™ happens and you have to pick Monika anyway.
-- Honestly, after a while, all the Weird Shit™ just got kind of boring this time through, the second playthrough, since you know it's coming.
-- Outside of dialogue choices, I’m pretty sure that the MC never says a single word during the entire scene leading up to Yuri stabbing herself with a knife (or the "who to spend time with on the weekend" scene before that).
-- Three full "days" of staring at Yuri's corpse, which actively decays during that "time" (i.e. blood turns black, skin pales, etc.)
-- Files in the game folder that appear during the game:
- hxppy thxughts.png (creepy hand-drawn picture of Sayori)
- traceback.txt ("This would probably be a lot easier if I just deleted her.")
- CAN YOU HEAR ME.txt ("All I did was untie the knot.")
- iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.txt ("All I want is for you to hate them. Why is that so hard?")
- have a nice weekend! (Just gibberish that can apparently be decoded into a plug for Project: Libitina.)
-- All such files are deleted at the start of Act Three.
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-- "There's no point in saving anymore. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere."
-- Game accesses System Owner name. *yawn* *eye roll* I considered changing it to something stupid like "Spoopy Buttfarts" or whatever, but it would have been more effort than it was worth.
-- MONIKA KNOWS IT'S JUST A GAME OH SPOOKY. *sigh* The second time through absolutely lacks bite, that's for sure.
-- "You do know I'm aware that this is all a game, right? Could it be possible that you didn't know? That doesn't make much sense... I even told you right on the game's download page, didn't I? Man... If only you had paid a little more attention, this would have been a little bit less awkward, you know?"
Okay, you're starting to bore me here a bit, Monika. (Or, I should say, Dan Salvato or whoever wrote your dialogue. Because, despite everything, the conceit that you're an actual, living, aware being is still just that: a conceit. Monika is not real. And it doesn't matter how much fanfiction is written in which she somehow comes out into the "real world." It's still not actual reality. I mean, unless you happen to subscribe to the multiverse theory in which fictional characters do indeed truly live, somewhere, in their own universe, but even that is utterly irrelevant, unless someone finds a way to open a portal into that universe or something. But, whatever, discussing that is way outside the scope of this.)
-- I'm just going to let Monika ramble for a while, see if she says anything actually interesting, from a meta standpoint or otherwise.
-- "You made them fall in love with you." Right, because A) out-of-universe, that's what you do in games like this, unless you happen to go for some kind of "Forever Alone" bad ending or something, the likes of which isn't in this game, and B) IN-universe, the MC was already a manipulative shitgibbon from the very start whose main motivation was to “impress one of the girls.” But maybe I'm being too harsh on him. Doesn't matter now. He's just an empty shell at this point, ha ha ha. I mean, if he was ever anything more than that at all to begin with. Either way, fuck him. I hate him.
-- And if Monika was real, she'd be a truly horrific monster, too. I'm talking Lovecraftian eldritch abomination shit here. On the other hand, from an in-universe standpoint, she kind of went batshit crazy when she became aware she was just a character in a game, so in that sense I guess it's possible to feel sorry for her, despite what all evil shit she did, and from a meta standpoint, it's not her fault at all because she was simply written to be that way.
-- "What kind of cruel game is this, <insert player character name here>?" I have more to say about this, but it'll probably be its own post. Or I might... save it, for something else... I don't know. ¬_¬
-- "But now you're here." Nope, I'm still out here in the real world. There is no "there," where you "are," because none of it, including you, exists, outside of computer code and art assets. And the fiction and suspension of disbelief wears a bit thinner after I've already experienced it the first time, sad to say. Besides, whether I delete her .chr file, in order to "finish" the game, or not, there's nothing stopping me (outside of morbid curiosity to see what all she'll ramble about) from just picking Settings->Quit and then starting up Skyrim or X3AP or something.
-- I do still want to legit see the "golden path" ending, though, which was kind of the whole point of doing this second playthrough, really.
-- Yeah, I'm not going to comment on all the "It's all about you, <player character>. I probably would have died in this world if not for you, <player character>." type of dialogue. It's... not as effective as the first time through, at least for me. It's still vaguely interesting, but that's about it.
-- "As for the others... How could I miss them? A group of autonomous personalities," (calling them even that is being charitable) "designed only to fall in love with you? I tried everything I could to prevent them from doing so... But it must be some kind of weird inevitability etched into this game. I felt really bad that you had to witness some nasty things. But I realized that you have the same perspective that I do..." (uh huh, yeah, sure) "That it's all just some game. And I knew you would get over it."
Again, as I mentioned above, this brings up something else that I've been thinking about, something along the lines of a game which has the "game designer" being an active force in the game world, in a very meta but simultaneously real sense, maybe even the ultimate villain, even if that wasn't necessarily evident from the start (and it would probably be better if it wasn't), which I think could be an interesting thing. And I don't just mean stuff like Koji Igarashi being a secret boss in Bloodstained or Lord British being a character in the Ultima games or John Romero’s head in Doom II or whatever. I know for a fact that there have been a few games that have sort of touched on this (though I can't think of any of them off hand) but nothing to the extent of what I'm envisioning. I'm talking about if, like, Toby Fox showed up in Undertale as a thing (beside the Annoying Dog thing, which sort of counts but not really), or, hell, Dan Salvato showing up in some capacity in DDLC, even. (Which he *sort* *of* does at the very end if you get the "good" ending? But still, that’s not what I’m talking about.)
-- I have to admit, the "Just Monika" music track is actually kind of soothing and relaxing after listening to it for a while (given it keeps playing the whole time I'm tabbed out of DDLC to type into this thing), in a sort of Aphex Twin "gwely mernans"/"gwarek2" sort of way. I mean, those were creepy and disturbing, too, the first time I listened to them, but after listening a bunch of times, they're familiar and more... cool, interesting.
-- "I'm in love with you. You are truly the light in my world." *sigh + eye roll + yawn* Honestly, I think it would have been more interesting (but, ultimately, just as banal on the second playthrough) if they'd made Monika actually hate you or, like, be jealous of you for being real or whatever.
-- "Will you go out with me?" (Yes) being the only option given. Blugh. Really, I don't mean to be a hater all of a sudden, because the game is fucking awesome, otherwise, but for some reason, the whole "just Monika" scene is really falling flat for me now, this time through.
-- And then, the whole "so easy to delete the others, it's kind of scary how easy it was, I guess I could have committed suicide myself that way if things hadn't worked out, but now I don't have to do so because we're together forever now, oh and here's how you access the character files, but please don't delete my file hint hint this is how to finish the game" scene.
-- "Oh you wrote a nice poem that was just my glitched name repeated over and over how sweet." Yeah... I'm just not feeling it.
-- "Not all good times must come to an end."
-- "I didn't want to ruin the game or anything, you know?" She says, after "ruining" the game. "You might have gotten mad at me... Maybe even deleted my character file, if you preferred playing without me." You know, in most other games, deleting a character file would cause the game to crash or not load or whatever, rather than simply causing the game to go on as "normal" but without that character involved, but yeah, okay.
-- "I have so many things to talk about! Where do I start...? If it takes me some time to collect my thoughts, then I'm sorry. But I'll always have something new to talk about. In the meantime, we can just look into each other's eyes.~ Let's see..." Game freezes for a bit to load whatever random topics, I alt-tab out to type into this, let's alt-tab back in... yep, she's saying something else now.
-- I'm probably going to read all her random stuff, but not comment on it, unless it's especially interesting. Besides, all of it is probably available on the fandom.com page anyway. Why look, there it is: https://doki-doki-literature-club.fandom.com/wiki/Monika%27s_Talk
You know what... now that I'm to the actual point where she's saying the random stuff, I don't think I really want to bother reading it all in game. I think I'm just going to go ahead and delete the .chr file and move on now. Sorry, Monika. *shrug*
-- And now I feel bad again about deleting her. Hahaha. *eye roll*
-- ...at least at first, but now, a minute or so later... the game is... trying too hard again. *sigh* "How could you? I trusted you! Did you just want to see me suffer?" No, I just want to see the golden ending, that’s all. Which, to be honest, I could have just looked up on Youtube and been done with it. So… just be glad you got to "exist" again, even *this* much, you ungrateful so-and-so. Blah blah blah.
-- "I still love you. I can't help it." Oh come on, just cut to the new shit already. Maybe I'm just overplaying how bored this is making me, for the sake of theatrics, because I know I'll probably just copy/paste this shit into a new post and call it a day instead of writing an *actual* new post, but still... seriously, the whole "just Monika" stuff is getting a bit tiresome, for real. I mean, I've replayed Undertale pacifist at least a couple times now, and it never hit me as being banal and trying too hard, but this... I don't know... I don't want to start disliking DDLC over this, because it's worth at least two playthroughs, the initial "what the fuck is going on" playthrough and the "Ooooh, look at all this delicious foreshadowing" second playthrough, but getting to this, the actual "shadow" part that comes after the "fore-" part is just kind of... meh, and that kind of sucks honestly.
-- Back to the title screen, no Monika in sight. So, finally, let's see this so-called golden path ending.
-- MC is still sort of a bit of an asshole to Sayori, even now.
-- Sayori: "You really didn't want to miss a single thing in this game, did you? You saved and loaded so many times, just to make sure you could spend time with everyone. Only someone who truly cares about the Literature Club would go that far. But... All along, that's all I ever wanted. For everyone to be happy and care about each other. Ahaha... It's kind of sad, you know? After all you've done for us, there isn't much I can do for you in return. We've already reached the end of the game. So... This is where we say goodbye. Thank you for playing Doki Doki Literature Club. I’m going to miss you <player character>. Come visit sometime, okay? We’ll always be here for you. We... We all love you." And then it cuts to Monika's voice-acted scene and song, plus credits, and then the special message from Dan Salvato himself. And now, after all that bagging on the cloying banality of the "just Monika" scene on the second playthrough, by god if I'm not actually tearing up a little bit now. I really like this game. It's great. You should play it. Twice.
-- “Error: Script file is missing or corrupt. Please reinstall the game.” Then the game exits out to desktop.
-- Reload of the game just brings up the Dan Salvato letter again, and anything else brings up that error message again.
Doki Doki Literature Club post 2 of 2.
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So, yeah, I'm going to cop-out and, in lieu of writing an actual post here, just copy/paste the 8 pages of notes I ended up taking while replaying the game, some of which was "live-blogged" so to speak, in the midst of playing it. Let's see if Facebook can handle it... >_>;
-----
Doki Doki Literature Club Notes
Other game comparisons:
-- Eversion (for starting cutesy then subverting expectations)
-- Eternal Darkness (for having to do three playthroughs to get "good" ending, also for being dark as fuck, too)
-- Undertale (for fourth-wall breaking stuff on both the pacifist and genocide routes)
-----
-- Words that you think would be Natsuki words or Yuri words turn out to be Sayori words
-- "Misery," "depression," "dark," "misfortune," "scars," "hopeless," "death," "empty," "broken," "tragedy" are Sayori words.
-- "Anger," "papa" are Natsuki words. “Papa” especially seems a bit weird for Natsuki. “Anger” maybe not so much.
-- "Suicide," however, is a Yuri word and not a Sayori word.
-- Sayori likes MC's "Natsuki" poems, but does not like MC's "Yuri" poems.
-----
-- If you follow Natsuki/Yuri route, then Yuri/Natsuki will completely shut you out after the first (technically second) day and not show you their poems anymore. By the last day, they basically tell you to fuck off entirely.
-- If you follow the Sayori route, Natsuki shows you her poems all three days, but Yuri does not on the third day, though not due to disliking the MC or anything.
-- Yuri and Natsuki seem to get closer on the Sayori route, without the asshole MC focusing on one of them and causing the other one to be shut out.
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-- The game really does not let you do anything with Monika in Act One. Even if you actively pick Monika at the one point it gives you the option to do so, the game shuts you down immediately, via Natsuki and Yuri vetoing the choice.
-----
-- Monika knows everything from the very start, of course. “Epiphany.”
-- Also, just to note, almost all of the music involves piano in some way, except for the specific character poem themes.
-- At some points in every route, Monika tries to interfere or interrupt, which annoys that route's character, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the character.
-- "I gently open the door." This is *THE* just-before-point-of-no-return text box, from which you can still reload Act One saves.
-- Sayori words are still present in Act Two, but become Natsuki/Yuri words. Most but not *all* of the negative Sayori words go to Yuri and positive ones go to Natsuki. "Joy" becomes a Yuri word, though.
-- Monika's first poem of Act Two is a continuation of her first poem of Act One. "I brandish my pen."
-- Natsuki and Yuri are arguing, you have to choose one or the other, each choice just glitches and causes the selection boxes to get bigger, then, suddenly, giant Monika face filling the screen. The “insanity effects” in this game are pretty good, for the most part.
-- "Why don't we
step out side
for a bit."
-- "I'm sure Natsuki will forget about it by tomorrow. Completely."
-- Yuri wanted Monika to leave at the end of day two so that she could talk to MC alone. Monika agrees, but then just immediately force advances the game to the next poem-writing section anyway.
-- When MC leaves the club room to look for Yuri, the music becomes muffled, as if it were actually coming out of the club room (you know, where Monika is).
-- Game (via Monika) "rewinds" back to MC *not* following Yuri (and finding her cutting herself on the arm). Not sure why Monika would *want* to backtrack that, though, given that her goal was to make the MC dislike the other two. I guess she figured this would make the MC even *more* worried about Yuri (and more likely to ignore her, Monika)?
-- Except that Monika explicitly brings it up later ("I think you saw something earlier you weren't supposed to see.")
-- Yuri's second poem in Act Two: definitely not the same as the second poem of Act One.
-- Monika's second poem is similar to the one from Act One, but more fucked up. ("Delete her.")
-- And right after that is the first time Monika directly addresses the player. (Well, not counting the "save your game" bit from Act One.)
-- Monika apparently doesn't have full control, because day three ends before she can say what she wants to say. ("Wait! No! Stop it!" as the screen fades to black.)
-- Exact repeat of the "Yuri goes to make tea, MC follows, sees Yuri cutting herself, scene rewinds" bit, until Yuri and MC are alone in the hallway and Yuri mentions deja vu.
-- When Yuri and MC are "alone" in the hallway, Monika's faded image is seen overlaying Yuri, slowly fading in.
-- Yuri's third poem is just fucked up, bloodstained, and illegible.
-- Natsuki's third poem is not a poem at all. It’s a letter worrying about Yuri and how Yuri needs help (first mention of anything like a therapist at all in the game). Also it’s a warning about Monika.
-- When the choice to pick who to spend the weekend with comes up, the mouse gravitates toward Monika. If you pick anyone else, Weird Shit™ happens and you have to pick Monika anyway.
-- Honestly, after a while, all the Weird Shit™ just got kind of boring this time through, the second playthrough, since you know it's coming.
-- Outside of dialogue choices, I’m pretty sure that the MC never says a single word during the entire scene leading up to Yuri stabbing herself with a knife (or the "who to spend time with on the weekend" scene before that).
-- Three full "days" of staring at Yuri's corpse, which actively decays during that "time" (i.e. blood turns black, skin pales, etc.)
-- Files in the game folder that appear during the game:
- hxppy thxughts.png (creepy hand-drawn picture of Sayori)
- traceback.txt ("This would probably be a lot easier if I just deleted her.")
- CAN YOU HEAR ME.txt ("All I did was untie the knot.")
- iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.txt ("All I want is for you to hate them. Why is that so hard?")
- have a nice weekend! (Just gibberish that can apparently be decoded into a plug for Project: Libitina.)
-- All such files are deleted at the start of Act Three.
-----
-- "There's no point in saving anymore. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere."
-- Game accesses System Owner name. *yawn* *eye roll* I considered changing it to something stupid like "Spoopy Buttfarts" or whatever, but it would have been more effort than it was worth.
-- MONIKA KNOWS IT'S JUST A GAME OH SPOOKY. *sigh* The second time through absolutely lacks bite, that's for sure.
-- "You do know I'm aware that this is all a game, right? Could it be possible that you didn't know? That doesn't make much sense... I even told you right on the game's download page, didn't I? Man... If only you had paid a little more attention, this would have been a little bit less awkward, you know?"
Okay, you're starting to bore me here a bit, Monika. (Or, I should say, Dan Salvato or whoever wrote your dialogue. Because, despite everything, the conceit that you're an actual, living, aware being is still just that: a conceit. Monika is not real. And it doesn't matter how much fanfiction is written in which she somehow comes out into the "real world." It's still not actual reality. I mean, unless you happen to subscribe to the multiverse theory in which fictional characters do indeed truly live, somewhere, in their own universe, but even that is utterly irrelevant, unless someone finds a way to open a portal into that universe or something. But, whatever, discussing that is way outside the scope of this.)
-- I'm just going to let Monika ramble for a while, see if she says anything actually interesting, from a meta standpoint or otherwise.
-- "You made them fall in love with you." Right, because A) out-of-universe, that's what you do in games like this, unless you happen to go for some kind of "Forever Alone" bad ending or something, the likes of which isn't in this game, and B) IN-universe, the MC was already a manipulative shitgibbon from the very start whose main motivation was to “impress one of the girls.” But maybe I'm being too harsh on him. Doesn't matter now. He's just an empty shell at this point, ha ha ha. I mean, if he was ever anything more than that at all to begin with. Either way, fuck him. I hate him.
-- And if Monika was real, she'd be a truly horrific monster, too. I'm talking Lovecraftian eldritch abomination shit here. On the other hand, from an in-universe standpoint, she kind of went batshit crazy when she became aware she was just a character in a game, so in that sense I guess it's possible to feel sorry for her, despite what all evil shit she did, and from a meta standpoint, it's not her fault at all because she was simply written to be that way.
-- "What kind of cruel game is this, <insert player character name here>?" I have more to say about this, but it'll probably be its own post. Or I might... save it, for something else... I don't know. ¬_¬
-- "But now you're here." Nope, I'm still out here in the real world. There is no "there," where you "are," because none of it, including you, exists, outside of computer code and art assets. And the fiction and suspension of disbelief wears a bit thinner after I've already experienced it the first time, sad to say. Besides, whether I delete her .chr file, in order to "finish" the game, or not, there's nothing stopping me (outside of morbid curiosity to see what all she'll ramble about) from just picking Settings->Quit and then starting up Skyrim or X3AP or something.
-- I do still want to legit see the "golden path" ending, though, which was kind of the whole point of doing this second playthrough, really.
-- Yeah, I'm not going to comment on all the "It's all about you, <player character>. I probably would have died in this world if not for you, <player character>." type of dialogue. It's... not as effective as the first time through, at least for me. It's still vaguely interesting, but that's about it.
-- "As for the others... How could I miss them? A group of autonomous personalities," (calling them even that is being charitable) "designed only to fall in love with you? I tried everything I could to prevent them from doing so... But it must be some kind of weird inevitability etched into this game. I felt really bad that you had to witness some nasty things. But I realized that you have the same perspective that I do..." (uh huh, yeah, sure) "That it's all just some game. And I knew you would get over it."
Again, as I mentioned above, this brings up something else that I've been thinking about, something along the lines of a game which has the "game designer" being an active force in the game world, in a very meta but simultaneously real sense, maybe even the ultimate villain, even if that wasn't necessarily evident from the start (and it would probably be better if it wasn't), which I think could be an interesting thing. And I don't just mean stuff like Koji Igarashi being a secret boss in Bloodstained or Lord British being a character in the Ultima games or John Romero’s head in Doom II or whatever. I know for a fact that there have been a few games that have sort of touched on this (though I can't think of any of them off hand) but nothing to the extent of what I'm envisioning. I'm talking about if, like, Toby Fox showed up in Undertale as a thing (beside the Annoying Dog thing, which sort of counts but not really), or, hell, Dan Salvato showing up in some capacity in DDLC, even. (Which he *sort* *of* does at the very end if you get the "good" ending? But still, that’s not what I’m talking about.)
-- I have to admit, the "Just Monika" music track is actually kind of soothing and relaxing after listening to it for a while (given it keeps playing the whole time I'm tabbed out of DDLC to type into this thing), in a sort of Aphex Twin "gwely mernans"/"gwarek2" sort of way. I mean, those were creepy and disturbing, too, the first time I listened to them, but after listening a bunch of times, they're familiar and more... cool, interesting.
-- "I'm in love with you. You are truly the light in my world." *sigh + eye roll + yawn* Honestly, I think it would have been more interesting (but, ultimately, just as banal on the second playthrough) if they'd made Monika actually hate you or, like, be jealous of you for being real or whatever.
-- "Will you go out with me?" (Yes) being the only option given. Blugh. Really, I don't mean to be a hater all of a sudden, because the game is fucking awesome, otherwise, but for some reason, the whole "just Monika" scene is really falling flat for me now, this time through.
-- And then, the whole "so easy to delete the others, it's kind of scary how easy it was, I guess I could have committed suicide myself that way if things hadn't worked out, but now I don't have to do so because we're together forever now, oh and here's how you access the character files, but please don't delete my file hint hint this is how to finish the game" scene.
-- "Oh you wrote a nice poem that was just my glitched name repeated over and over how sweet." Yeah... I'm just not feeling it.
-- "Not all good times must come to an end."
-- "I didn't want to ruin the game or anything, you know?" She says, after "ruining" the game. "You might have gotten mad at me... Maybe even deleted my character file, if you preferred playing without me." You know, in most other games, deleting a character file would cause the game to crash or not load or whatever, rather than simply causing the game to go on as "normal" but without that character involved, but yeah, okay.
-- "I have so many things to talk about! Where do I start...? If it takes me some time to collect my thoughts, then I'm sorry. But I'll always have something new to talk about. In the meantime, we can just look into each other's eyes.~ Let's see..." Game freezes for a bit to load whatever random topics, I alt-tab out to type into this, let's alt-tab back in... yep, she's saying something else now.
-- I'm probably going to read all her random stuff, but not comment on it, unless it's especially interesting. Besides, all of it is probably available on the fandom.com page anyway. Why look, there it is: https://doki-doki-literature-club.fandom.com/wiki/Monika%27s_Talk
You know what... now that I'm to the actual point where she's saying the random stuff, I don't think I really want to bother reading it all in game. I think I'm just going to go ahead and delete the .chr file and move on now. Sorry, Monika. *shrug*
-- And now I feel bad again about deleting her. Hahaha. *eye roll*
-- ...at least at first, but now, a minute or so later... the game is... trying too hard again. *sigh* "How could you? I trusted you! Did you just want to see me suffer?" No, I just want to see the golden ending, that’s all. Which, to be honest, I could have just looked up on Youtube and been done with it. So… just be glad you got to "exist" again, even *this* much, you ungrateful so-and-so. Blah blah blah.
-- "I still love you. I can't help it." Oh come on, just cut to the new shit already. Maybe I'm just overplaying how bored this is making me, for the sake of theatrics, because I know I'll probably just copy/paste this shit into a new post and call it a day instead of writing an *actual* new post, but still... seriously, the whole "just Monika" stuff is getting a bit tiresome, for real. I mean, I've replayed Undertale pacifist at least a couple times now, and it never hit me as being banal and trying too hard, but this... I don't know... I don't want to start disliking DDLC over this, because it's worth at least two playthroughs, the initial "what the fuck is going on" playthrough and the "Ooooh, look at all this delicious foreshadowing" second playthrough, but getting to this, the actual "shadow" part that comes after the "fore-" part is just kind of... meh, and that kind of sucks honestly.
-- Back to the title screen, no Monika in sight. So, finally, let's see this so-called golden path ending.
-- MC is still sort of a bit of an asshole to Sayori, even now.
-- Sayori: "You really didn't want to miss a single thing in this game, did you? You saved and loaded so many times, just to make sure you could spend time with everyone. Only someone who truly cares about the Literature Club would go that far. But... All along, that's all I ever wanted. For everyone to be happy and care about each other. Ahaha... It's kind of sad, you know? After all you've done for us, there isn't much I can do for you in return. We've already reached the end of the game. So... This is where we say goodbye. Thank you for playing Doki Doki Literature Club. I’m going to miss you <player character>. Come visit sometime, okay? We’ll always be here for you. We... We all love you." And then it cuts to Monika's voice-acted scene and song, plus credits, and then the special message from Dan Salvato himself. And now, after all that bagging on the cloying banality of the "just Monika" scene on the second playthrough, by god if I'm not actually tearing up a little bit now. I really like this game. It's great. You should play it. Twice.
-- “Error: Script file is missing or corrupt. Please reinstall the game.” Then the game exits out to desktop.
-- Reload of the game just brings up the Dan Salvato letter again, and anything else brings up that error message again.
