boys only want love if it's torture, don't say I didn't say I didn't warn ya
I haven't written in a really long time. I know this. So part of me thinks, "oh, the next thing I post needs to be really good or really deep or meaningful."
(And I don't like Blank Space that much. I don't hate it either. Meh. Just that line. And it was topically applicable to the post!)
I no longer can tolerate horror movies like I used to be able to. It's really depressing to me. I'm not talking about gore-fests, either, I'm talking your standard horror film. Lily and I watched Oculus on Halloween, and that movie isn't particularly gory. But both of us had some trouble with it. We agreed if we'd watched it five years ago there would've been no problem.
Lily jokingly said something along the lines of "Maybe we've gained more empathy for our fellow human beings," and maybe so. Maybe it's the loss of some of the immortal feeling of teenager-hood, so the violence seems more permanent. I can still handle a fair amount, mind. (Although I don't like extremely gory things, I think they're gratuitous and more disgusting than necessary.)
Sooooo, this is all fascinating and I'm sure I could expound and elaborate and weave even more tenuous theories about it, but that wasn't what I wanted to do here. I wanted to preface the next bit with, essentially, "I'm a bigger wimp than I used to be." *cry*
I've been lately playing 18+ boy's love games from Japan. One of them had an English patch, but the rest I've been struggling through with my half-assed Japanese. I often will take the trouble to translate the choices, but the rest of it? Yeah, I pick out words I know and then use the pictures (especially expressions), tone of voice, and what little context I have to fill in limited blanks. To say I do not understand all of it would be a huge understatement. To say I understand 10% of it is probably fair. Oh, and I understand the sex scenes, because they're quite straightforward, snort, a bad pun just came into my head but I'm leaving it alone. So maybe I understand 15% of any given game. More or less depending on whether I do translate any of it and how many playthroughs I give it. I'll pick up certain repeated vocabulary but I don't think it'll stay in my head.
The game I have been playing most recently has, among other things, taught me the kanji for "to kill, to murder". It also drove me to find a walkthrough in Japanese, which I don't usually bother with since unless they're really nicely laid out I have to then decipher them. But the bad endings, they were SO BAD and I became frustrated. Gah. So technically boy's love games are visual novels, and also technically they'd be categorized as romance, since the goal is, although storytelling is not irrelevant, the goal is to set up two characters with each other. And avoid terribad things happening to the protagonist. But mostly setting up two characters with each other. And obviously, in an 18+ game, get your H-scene(s). This is your reward. If I spoke Japanese, the story would be more important, but since I don't, I obviously don't get a lot out of the story. I get something out of it. In the current game, I was trying pretty hard to guess who the bad guy really was. I was totally right. It was the voice actor that really gave it away. Or more like, the peculiar inflection of the voice actor, he was disguising his voice.
The name of the game is Shingakkou -noli me tangere-, which means, literally, Seminary -don't touch me-. Some subtlety is lost there, clearly, although the second part is Latin, not Japanese. It is . . . a horror romance game. I'd put horror first, I think. You can choose to play with gore turned on or turned off, but I am not a person who takes a challenge like that lightly. I pride myself on being able to handle things, and I also thought, "well, it's just animated anyway" (←idiot). I wonder if turning the gore off would turn off the sounds as well as images, because the sounds are almost worst. Like, squishy blood sounds after someone is stabbed. Not that I'll find out, because I won't turn gore off.
The story, which I found out both by playing and by reading some English summaries on the internet when searching for a walkthrough, takes place in England or America (not sure which) in the thirties or forties. The protagonist, Michael, and his twin brother go to a boarding seminary (although they're teenagers, so I presume it's both a regular school and a seminary). When they come home for Christmas, they find their house in flames and their mother, father, and little sister all dead. Their father wrote a symbol on the wall in his blood, and it turns out to be the symbol for a secret society in their school. Their father was a minister, and I think he went to the same school. So then Michael tries to find out how the secret society is related to the death of his family. Oh, and he's also lost his faith in God for letting his family die (this I did not pick up from playing the game-this I found in summaries on the Internet). The head of the cult/society goes by Lucifer and he is a Bad Guy.
So I have no clue exactly how the secret society is directly related to the deaths of his family, even though I've played to the end several times. I have seen several bad ends more times than I really needed to (seriously), and all five happy endings so far. I try to get all the endings if possible, which one could say is because I'm a completionist or because I want porn, you pick. It's probably really both. Honesty is not always flattering. Anyway, I really liked one of the love interests, so I clearly went with his path first, and I did find the happy ending to be worth playing through the game. Another review I read said it would be, and I agree. It made me all fuzzy. (Although the fifth 'happy ending' involved me sobbing like a baby for some time before and during the end.)
However, the game . . . first of all, I was up until 4 am playing it, which is something I haven't done in an extremely long time, but I just couldn't stop (partly because I was just getting bad endings and was really frustrated . . .), and the second notable thing is that although I wouldn't say it gave me nightmares (things don't give me nightmares), it certainly fucked with my head. It does cheat with some jump scares-but they are, all in all, quite effective. It is seriously trippy. I have not seen insane laughter used so effectively in some time. I mean, it was really creeping me out. I don't get creeped out (although I guess, as I started out with, I may be more susceptible in my oooold age, haha). There's this one point where this bubbling ooze in the floor grows a face and starts talking (in his father's voice). That is the kind of crack that goes on.
One aspect reminds me somewhat of one of the tactics in Event Horizon. (That film is one on a short list of movies that scared me.) My dad watched the special features after we watched it, and although I don't usually care for special features, I watched at least part of them. There are these flashes of really disturbing images that don't stay on the screen long enough for you to really realize what they are, but somewhere in the back of your brain gets it. The special features showed these parts in slow motion, and the images were indeed disturbing, and I think knowing with my conscious brain what they were was worse than my previous ignorance, although it was creepy both ways. This game did similar things with flashing of disturbing images. Very effective.
The score is also good. Some of the music reminds me a little of the score of The Exorcist. (Which I actually really like, which is part of why one of my ringtones is the theme, although my father is probably right that I shouldn't tell my mother I assigned it to her, as she'll probably take it the wrong way and not believe that I honestly like the song.)
The treatment of Christianity is, as far as I can tell, not terribly accurate. It's probably good I can't understand it all or I might find it problematic. I don't know if they refer to all ministers in Japan with the honorific 'holy father' but I doubt it. *shrugs* They could, I guess. But the thing is that the protagonist's father is a 'holy father' yet he's married with children. So can't be Catholic . . . I think it's just an non-existent denomination based on Catholicism. Whether they intended this, I have no clue.
I'm halfway through the fandisc, which is mostly happy and fluffy with chibis and such, and lacking in the horror. I like the lack of a need to always be prepared for something terrible. The mini-games are fun.
Oh, and all of the pairings are reversible, which I really like. Equality! Or something. Or more H-scenes. Hmmmmm. Both? I'll go with both.
I'm off to play more.
LJ, why is the apostrophe in my lj cut turned into quotations even though I have it in html? Okay, never mind, it's fixed now.
(And I don't like Blank Space that much. I don't hate it either. Meh. Just that line. And it was topically applicable to the post!)
I no longer can tolerate horror movies like I used to be able to. It's really depressing to me. I'm not talking about gore-fests, either, I'm talking your standard horror film. Lily and I watched Oculus on Halloween, and that movie isn't particularly gory. But both of us had some trouble with it. We agreed if we'd watched it five years ago there would've been no problem.
Lily jokingly said something along the lines of "Maybe we've gained more empathy for our fellow human beings," and maybe so. Maybe it's the loss of some of the immortal feeling of teenager-hood, so the violence seems more permanent. I can still handle a fair amount, mind. (Although I don't like extremely gory things, I think they're gratuitous and more disgusting than necessary.)
Sooooo, this is all fascinating and I'm sure I could expound and elaborate and weave even more tenuous theories about it, but that wasn't what I wanted to do here. I wanted to preface the next bit with, essentially, "I'm a bigger wimp than I used to be." *cry*
I've been lately playing 18+ boy's love games from Japan. One of them had an English patch, but the rest I've been struggling through with my half-assed Japanese. I often will take the trouble to translate the choices, but the rest of it? Yeah, I pick out words I know and then use the pictures (especially expressions), tone of voice, and what little context I have to fill in limited blanks. To say I do not understand all of it would be a huge understatement. To say I understand 10% of it is probably fair. Oh, and I understand the sex scenes, because they're quite straightforward, snort, a bad pun just came into my head but I'm leaving it alone. So maybe I understand 15% of any given game. More or less depending on whether I do translate any of it and how many playthroughs I give it. I'll pick up certain repeated vocabulary but I don't think it'll stay in my head.
The game I have been playing most recently has, among other things, taught me the kanji for "to kill, to murder". It also drove me to find a walkthrough in Japanese, which I don't usually bother with since unless they're really nicely laid out I have to then decipher them. But the bad endings, they were SO BAD and I became frustrated. Gah. So technically boy's love games are visual novels, and also technically they'd be categorized as romance, since the goal is, although storytelling is not irrelevant, the goal is to set up two characters with each other. And avoid terribad things happening to the protagonist. But mostly setting up two characters with each other. And obviously, in an 18+ game, get your H-scene(s). This is your reward. If I spoke Japanese, the story would be more important, but since I don't, I obviously don't get a lot out of the story. I get something out of it. In the current game, I was trying pretty hard to guess who the bad guy really was. I was totally right. It was the voice actor that really gave it away. Or more like, the peculiar inflection of the voice actor, he was disguising his voice.
The name of the game is Shingakkou -noli me tangere-, which means, literally, Seminary -don't touch me-. Some subtlety is lost there, clearly, although the second part is Latin, not Japanese. It is . . . a horror romance game. I'd put horror first, I think. You can choose to play with gore turned on or turned off, but I am not a person who takes a challenge like that lightly. I pride myself on being able to handle things, and I also thought, "well, it's just animated anyway" (←idiot). I wonder if turning the gore off would turn off the sounds as well as images, because the sounds are almost worst. Like, squishy blood sounds after someone is stabbed. Not that I'll find out, because I won't turn gore off.
The story, which I found out both by playing and by reading some English summaries on the internet when searching for a walkthrough, takes place in England or America (not sure which) in the thirties or forties. The protagonist, Michael, and his twin brother go to a boarding seminary (although they're teenagers, so I presume it's both a regular school and a seminary). When they come home for Christmas, they find their house in flames and their mother, father, and little sister all dead. Their father wrote a symbol on the wall in his blood, and it turns out to be the symbol for a secret society in their school. Their father was a minister, and I think he went to the same school. So then Michael tries to find out how the secret society is related to the death of his family. Oh, and he's also lost his faith in God for letting his family die (this I did not pick up from playing the game-this I found in summaries on the Internet). The head of the cult/society goes by Lucifer and he is a Bad Guy.
So I have no clue exactly how the secret society is directly related to the deaths of his family, even though I've played to the end several times. I have seen several bad ends more times than I really needed to (seriously), and all five happy endings so far. I try to get all the endings if possible, which one could say is because I'm a completionist or because I want porn, you pick. It's probably really both. Honesty is not always flattering. Anyway, I really liked one of the love interests, so I clearly went with his path first, and I did find the happy ending to be worth playing through the game. Another review I read said it would be, and I agree. It made me all fuzzy. (Although the fifth 'happy ending' involved me sobbing like a baby for some time before and during the end.)
However, the game . . . first of all, I was up until 4 am playing it, which is something I haven't done in an extremely long time, but I just couldn't stop (partly because I was just getting bad endings and was really frustrated . . .), and the second notable thing is that although I wouldn't say it gave me nightmares (things don't give me nightmares), it certainly fucked with my head. It does cheat with some jump scares-but they are, all in all, quite effective. It is seriously trippy. I have not seen insane laughter used so effectively in some time. I mean, it was really creeping me out. I don't get creeped out (although I guess, as I started out with, I may be more susceptible in my oooold age, haha). There's this one point where this bubbling ooze in the floor grows a face and starts talking (in his father's voice). That is the kind of crack that goes on.
One aspect reminds me somewhat of one of the tactics in Event Horizon. (That film is one on a short list of movies that scared me.) My dad watched the special features after we watched it, and although I don't usually care for special features, I watched at least part of them. There are these flashes of really disturbing images that don't stay on the screen long enough for you to really realize what they are, but somewhere in the back of your brain gets it. The special features showed these parts in slow motion, and the images were indeed disturbing, and I think knowing with my conscious brain what they were was worse than my previous ignorance, although it was creepy both ways. This game did similar things with flashing of disturbing images. Very effective.
The score is also good. Some of the music reminds me a little of the score of The Exorcist. (Which I actually really like, which is part of why one of my ringtones is the theme, although my father is probably right that I shouldn't tell my mother I assigned it to her, as she'll probably take it the wrong way and not believe that I honestly like the song.)
The treatment of Christianity is, as far as I can tell, not terribly accurate. It's probably good I can't understand it all or I might find it problematic. I don't know if they refer to all ministers in Japan with the honorific 'holy father' but I doubt it. *shrugs* They could, I guess. But the thing is that the protagonist's father is a 'holy father' yet he's married with children. So can't be Catholic . . . I think it's just an non-existent denomination based on Catholicism. Whether they intended this, I have no clue.
I'm halfway through the fandisc, which is mostly happy and fluffy with chibis and such, and lacking in the horror. I like the lack of a need to always be prepared for something terrible. The mini-games are fun.
Oh, and all of the pairings are reversible, which I really like. Equality! Or something. Or more H-scenes. Hmmmmm. Both? I'll go with both.
I'm off to play more.
LJ, why is the apostrophe in my lj cut turned into quotations even though I have it in html? Okay, never mind, it's fixed now.