rionaleonhart: okami: amaterasu is startled. (NOT SO FAST)
Nobody ever told me Die Hard was so relevant to my interests! How have I been allowed to go this long without seeing this film?

We watched Die Hard on Christmas Day. I sat down expecting a badass, confident action hero, and instead I got a guy who's cornered and terrified and falling apart, increasingly bloodied and in pain. It was... well, like Christmas.


Tem and I finished playing Raging Loop a couple of weeks ago. It is perhaps the stupidest game I've ever experienced.

We mentioned how stupid it was to Rei, who asked, 'Stupider than AI: The Somnium Files?'

'Yes,' Tem and I replied in unison, without hesitation. AI: The Somnium Files includes a scene in which your eyeball lures terrorists into dancing in Minecraft in order to get them abducted by aliens. But Raging Loop is stupider.

It feels like Raging Loop fell into our world from a parallel universe, or was written by aliens who've researched humans thoroughly but haven't quite managed to grasp everything. Both the actions and the reasoning of the characters are incomprehensible. Haruaki leaps to absurd conclusions on the flimsiest evidence, and everyone goes 'ah, that makes sense' when he explains it, and he is always correct.

We both started yelling at the screen in disbelief when Haruaki started going, 'Ah, yes, obviously there's not actually anything supernatural going on here; it's all just human activity.' YOU ARE CAUGHT IN A TIME LOOP. You've been able to gather all this evidence of human involvement BECAUSE YOU ARE CAUGHT IN A TIME LOOP.

There were aspects of this visual novel I enjoyed! I love the bit where trying out two options, both of which get you killed, unlocks the ability to throw a tantrum because you keep getting killed, which also gets you killed. I liked Mocchi and Kiyonosuke 'let me help you hit on my crush; here's my business card' Nosato and Chiemi; Chiemi's dynamic with Haruaki ended up being fascinatingly screwed up. I enjoyed this magnificent exchange:

'Is this what a fight between adult women looks like?'
'Pretty sure adult women fight by slapping each other with their tits.'

(Also a great line: 'After she killed me sixty-three times, it finally started to get to me.')

But the plot is just nonsense. I've enjoyed plenty of stories where the plot is over-the-top and ridiculous, and I love a well-executed stupid twist, but the plot of Raging Loop flat-out does not make sense.

It's entirely possible that Mocchi is my favourite character because he's supposed to be a weird person, so the fact that everything in this game is SO WEIRD bothers me less when he's involved.
rionaleonhart: okami: amaterasu is startled. (NOT SO FAST)
Having been forced to play Silent Hill 3, I'm making Tem play a game I can watch in retaliation. We're working our way through Raging Loop!

Raging Loop is an odd visual novel. It feels a bit like it was written by a very sophisticated neural network, or by extraterrestrials who don't entirely understand how human beings think and interact. Everyone's behaviour is just slightly off.

At one point the protagonist spends ages thinking, 'But why would this person run away from the village? Is she trying to escape a crime she committed? Did someone betray her? Did she see something terrible? There must be a reason.' He does not, at any point, consider whether it might be because the village is plagued by werewolves that are murdering people on a nightly basis.


ExpandRaging Loop: spoilers up to the first ending with credits. )


I'm very confused. I don't expect the rest of the game to confuse me any less, but I don't imagine I'll be bored, at least.