OMORI

Also wrt to the romanticization of depression, a ton of that felt very undercut by the game's need to be an RPG that lets the player explore and do sidequests and stuff. Sunny can get a job and do it just fine despite being a hikikomori who's barely interacted with people for years. He's basically locked himself inside after the apparent suicide of his sister has access to kitchen knives (where the hell are his parents? are they not worried at all about their clearly very depressed child having access to things he could do self harm or commit suicide with?) and there aren't really consequences when he stabs Aubrey once or that they get into a physical altercation inside of a church during a service (where the hell are the police? Is there any kind of authority in this town?). It makes it hard to feel like he's being crushed by reality when it seems like he really isn't. That could be really interesting, showing him as someone who desperately tries to maintain a happy face even while he's extremely depressed but that's clearly not the case given that he's a hikikomori, so he's clearly not trying to put on a fake happy face for other people.

also, the rosy picture of youth in the real world sections plays into the general thinness of the world. I think, or at least would expect, that it's going for showing the headspace as an extremely rosy and nostalgic view of Sunny's past, but the more we learn about their lives before Mari's death it generally feels like yeah, it actually was that idyllic and happy. First, this destroys any verisimilitude the game could have for me, but it also means that it doesn't really make any kind of comment on nostalgia. The real world sections are a bit darker in places but are also extremely cute and twee, which (aside from further destroying any chance I had at relating to the story) undercuts the darker segments from actually seeming that dark. The town is such a cartoonishly quaint and perfect piece of suburbia that it makes any attempts at darkness or heaviness much weaker tonally, and like I said, a lot of the time we play as Sunny we don't really see actual repercussions of how his depression and grief are affecting him. Like, imagine if in Yume Nikki [ゆめにっき] Madotsuki could leave her room and go on cute happy quaint adventures with her friends; it would really hamper the actual content and point of it trying to explore the dark areas of her mind.

This feeling just makes the world-building all seem incredibly underbaked. We don't really get a ton of actual, in depth characterization of the main characters, especially before Mari's death and as a result, there isn't a very rich 'before' picture to compare with the 'after' picture of the real world setting. This is why I feel that the responses to Mari's death feel so exaggerated; we don't have the opportunity to see its repercussions in all of the small ways that it would affect them, so in order to communicate the effects the narrative has to show it with relatively exaggerated responses. The fact that most of the real world sections of the narrative are pretty much solely about Mari's death and its repercussions also hinders the chances to see its effects in a more subtle way. Mother 3, LISA: The Painful, and Echo all have the experience of death at a young age as a major part of their stories, but for them all the majority of the narrative is about something else entirely, which gives them a lot more space to explore things.

dzhakh my #1 shooter

I'm 17 btw