Snoot Game

Snoot Game's an odd case, because it feels like it's split literally in half, both in tone and in quality. On one half, you have a genuinely really touching, and emotional story on your hands that a lot of people remember and speak about this visual novel very fondly for.

But on the other half...you have the crass, cringe-worthy, and downright infuriating beginning of it that served as the punchline and selling point for this whole game: what if 4chan made a visual novel off the back of a LGBT furry high school drama that they themselves were relentlessly mocking?

And the results are pretty much exactly how you expect: The beginning of the story pretty much is just played for laughs, with constant attempts at 4chan-style humor that just come off as extremely cringeworthy. The main character, Anon, is the most flanderized 4chan caricature you think of, acting like a raging asshole to everyone around him even when they are going out of their way to be nice and accommodating to him, having literal alarm bells go off in his head whenever he even gets near a girl despite simultaneously complaining that he won't ever have a girlfriend, and having literally no hobbies outside of baiting people on 4chan (which still somehow exists in this universe where humans are effectively a minority in favor of dinosaur people).

A lot of the characters originating from Goodbye Volcano High come off as just being caricatures being played off for a cheap joke, especially Trish and Fang, where the former's whole personality is reduced to just being a Tumblr caricature. And with Fang (who is non-binary in the story) the writers decided to pull the worst goddamn trick in the book and write a scene where they get unrealistically obscenely pissy at the main character for making the unfathomable mistake of using the wrong pronouns on their first meeting, and then on top of that they wrote out a bloody r/thathappened-tier scene where "it was supposed to be a big moment where she stopped an evil bigot and the whole class would clap, but in the end nobody cared. Anon wins lmao" (Because if there's one thing 4channers are known for, it's making up a person that doesn't exist in their heads, getting extremely mad at them, and then waging war against someone just minding their own business who happens to look similar to that person.)

That was the point where I just quit the game out of disgust, wrote it off as atrociously bad, my only 1/10, and dared a friend of mine (MisterSynthesizer) to play through the worst game ever made so I could watch his reaction. But after he got far enough in, around the point where Anon goes to Fang's house, the game dramatically changed in quality for the better. The cheap jokes stop, and instead the writing is being played far more genuine and serious. The shitty caricatures dropped away and Anon actually becomes a lot more of a respectable person, with the 4chan elements painting him more as a charming dweeb than the raging, cringy asshole of before. The relationship between him and Fang felt really natural, and I felt a lot more invested in the supporting cast now that our vessel in which to experience them wasn't so tainted. Even Trish was fleshed out more as well, and I actually started to dislike them not because they were le bad Tumblr user, but because they were using Fang and making them codependent on herself. Fang ended up questioning her identity by the end of the story due to how much of it originated from her friendship with Trish that went down the toilet due to high school drama, and while I feared the worst, it didn't feel like a case of "curing the gays" at all; it felt quite respectful in its execution, all things considered. The ending we got, Ending 3, ended up being quite bittersweet and yet realistic; Anon had to enroll in the military and leave Fang (now Lucy) behind; when he got back 5 years later, they reunited and got married, but it was clear that Lucy wasn't able to get the weight of her high school mistakes off her shoulders, abandoning most of her high school ties including music and her former friends, and putting all her emotional eggs into the one basket of Anon as a result. It was a good ending, and it legitimately pulled at my heartstrings watching it play out.

But this loops back around to the main problem: it's clear that the dev team here CAN write a really effective story, so why didn't they do that from the very beginning? It seems like either whoever was writing off the starting premise of the visual novel took their foot off the pedal in favor of someone else who wrote the rest of the game that was actually good, or the team legitimately got a lot more invested in their own work as time went on, but they never went back and cleaned up that beginning. I understand that at its core, it was made by 4channers for 4channers, but they could've still maintained that while making it far more approachable outside of that niche audience had they cooled it with the caricatures, made Anon more of that sort realistic dweeb who's more reluctantly social with the rest of the cast and makes 4chan more of a light influence rather than their entire personality but from the very beginning, and kept the 4chan humor more to in-jokes that still could hold fine enough as simple dialogue on their own.

If you could edit the game like a proper novel and stitch only the good parts together, I think you'd actually be able to get something pretty good out of this; because while the second half could genuinely be as high as an 8/10, which is high praise coming from me, the beginning is bad enough that it's absolutely a sizable filter to a lot of folks who'd otherwise like this, as they'd have to sweep an incredible amount of garbage under the rug to get to that good stuff.