Information
Name: Doki Doki Literature Club! (DDLC)
Target Audience:
Disguised – Adults, visual novel enthusiasts, especially young male players interested in anime culture and Japanese-style dating simulation games (galgame).
True – Fans of horror games and meta-games.
Creator: Team Salvato
Platform: Steam & itch.io
Short summary: The player plays the role of a male student and develops a romantic relationship with the girls in the literature club. Subsequently, strange events occur, and the player realizes that the members of the literature club have mental health conditions and engage in suicidal behaviors. Eventually, the game breaks the fourth wall, and the game character “Monika” awakens her self-awareness and hopes to establish a connection with the player themself.
About five years ago, I completed this game (JUST MONIKA). Before finishing this assignment, I quickly reviewed this game.
Narrative Strategies (4 E’s)
Evocative: This game uses the framework of galgame. Such games are often filled with “love and peace” elements, allowing players to relax their guard and making the subsequent terrifying elements leave a particularly deep impression. As the target audience, their prior knowledge of galgames is utilized by the Evocative narrative.
Enacting: The avatar of players needs to form romantic relationships with characters in the game. They can choose to focus more on one of them based on choices(writing poems, selecting branches). However, these choices can lead to disastrous consequences: excessive focus or excessive estrangement can cause the character to collapse or even die. Linking the character’s death to the player’s choices strengthens the emotional experience (such as guilt) of the player.
Figure 1：The choices in DDLC (writing poems)
Embedding: The environment of this game employs a common anime style, such as classrooms, roads, and home, which is very similar to traditional galgames. It is worth noting that some narrative details are hidden in the environment. For instance, in the second playthrough of the game, when communicating with Yuri, there is a drawing of Sayori’s suicide hanging on the wall behind the classroom.
Emergent: This game contains meta elements. Outside the game, the player themself needs to interact with the game files (for example, deleting the character files), allowing the game narrative to spread from the screen to real life, which conforms to the characteristics of the Emergent narrative.
Subgenre
DDLC is a typical visual novel. Its representative features include: layout (character drawings centered, text boxes below), interactivity (limited, few choices). This type is closely related to the gaming experience: the player’s primary goal is to form a romantic relationship with the game character, and the turning point of the game lies in the emotional changes of the characters. Visual novels have the character drawings in the center, attracting the most attention, emphasizing “relationship”, and helps to create the expected experience.
Figure 2：The layout of DDLC
Figure 3：The layout of a traditional galgame (Summer Pockets)
Inspiration
Plot twist. The highlight of DDLC lies in first disguising itself as a galgame, then transforming into a horror game, and finally revealing itself as a metagame. Each twist brings a strong emotional impact to the players. Moreover, this is also the gimmick of the game. When I was an undergraduate, I saw some friends recommending this game in the video game association and anime association. They all said it was a “love and peace” galgame. When their friends actually played it and were scared, the recommenders would be very happy. This “prank” further promoted the spread of the game. For me, my story should also include a plot twist.
Empathy
I find two aspects of empathy:
- For people with mental health conditions (Sayori, Natsuki, Yuri)
- For the “game characters” who are aware of their fictionality (Monika)
For the former, the positive aspect of the game lies in its deconstruction of the traditional galgame: the characters in these games often exhibit traits such as “cuteness” and “sexiness”, but this is presented as a commodity attribute, while ignoring the subjectivity and psychological authenticity of the characters. This game’s focus on mental disorders makes players notice the smiling people around them, which might also hide a painful side within, and if they do not receive support, it could lead to tragic consequences. Moreover, it also prompts players to reflect on the bias of “women as units” existing in traditional galgames. However, DDLC also has a negative aspect: in order to create a terrifying atmosphere, the game contains some overly extreme and grotesque depictions of mental disorder. This is not conducive to players developing empathy and instead may lead players to form negative stereotypes about this group.
For the latter, the reflection on the subjectivity of game characters might have seemed out of science fiction when the games were first released. However, considering the current development of AI, this reflection becomes even more valuable: If AI acquires self-awareness, how should we interact with it – or rather, from now on, how should we communicate with AI so as to leave a “good impression” when it truly awakens?
For me, at the beginning of the game, I was warned that “this is not a simple galgame”, so I was a little wary. Nevertheless, when the story took a turn (Sayori committed suicide), I was so frightened that I couldn’t sleep. As the story continued, especially when Monika directly talked to me and asked me to delete the character files, I felt that this game invaded my mind and made me completely immersed in it. In the end, I deleted it. From a perspective of empathy, for people with mental health conditions, the negative effects for me were greater than the positive ones (I have studied abnormal psychology, and I think the depiction in this game is a bit exaggerated and unnecessary). Regarding the meta elements, I really like its creativity and the immersive experience it brings – I truly empathized with Monika, and at the end of the game, I didn’t delete her character files.
Figure 4：The world of JUST You and Monika
Sketchnote: Game design as narrative architecture
