My Thoughts on Yaoi

Actually the title of this post should read “My Thoughts on Yaoi Christine Love’s new Visual Novel ‘don’t take it personally babe it just ain’t your story’ Which Everyone is Talking About Lately and Which Contains Some Non-Graphically Depicted Elements of Yaoi.”

This is just another one of those short-experience indy games with a story focus that hit the internet and made a big splash. I’m drawn to these lately because someone says “it takes about an hour to play” and, like… I have an hour.  I’m drawn to a lot of other experiences that don’t take an hour, but, an hour is about right as I get older and busier.  For more explanation of what don’t take it personally… is about, I’ll link to Rock Paper Shotgun’s review with pictures and explanations, to avoid repeating content already on other blogs.  That’s for if you need context.  If you need more context, play the game (I’d say plan for an hour and a half, but I was multitasking) and then come back.

Just some random spoilery thoughts below, in bullet-point format rather than a proper essay.

• I am the only person on the internet that liked this better than Digital, I guess. Not that I disliked Digital, but I didn’t find it as remarkable for some reason.
• The art style works well in the context. The art is inconsistent – feels like the work of multiple artists I guess – I just thought the character full-body pictures were stronger anatomy-wise than the cut-scene drawings were.  None of them were bad, but the full-body pictures were stronger. I have no idea how art gets created for this kind of game. I assume some of it is stock art and some of it was personal commissions, or maybe it was personal commissions from multiple artists (that’s implied by the game’s credits now that I think about it).
• I’m a horrible person whenever playing a story-focused game.  Sometimes that includes, say, Mass Effect.  I guess I’m among the rare few that sort of likes when my avatar puts me in a situation that is emotionally uncomfortable.  This (I tweeted yesterday) makes me kind of want to learn Ren’py and create a game where that is the entire point. Like maybe you play as the CEO of an evil corrupt chemical company and “moral choices” involve being bad or worse with no middle ground. (The chances of my actually doing this given the other unfinished projects on my stack is quite small. Someday I will just post about my unfinished projects, though I’d prefer to write a post called “I finshed this project!” … I digress.)
• Having said that, though, about being a horrible person in these games, I’m also a very results-focused person.  (A moral choice that illustrates my being a horrible person but still results-focused is, for example, the one in Zaheed’s loyalty mission in ME2.  No spoilers except to say, no, I did not even really pause to think.  Then I got Renegade points, and cackled.)  At an infamous point don’t take it personally asks you if you’d like to look at some softcore porn.  You can click on the in-game link to see the picture, but then it is password-protected.  Judging from other reviews many people realized they could look up the passwords on the internet in the RL, but it didn’t occur to me to do this.  I just thought “oh, this probably isn’t necessary to progress through the game then” and just moved on.
• I have seen a lot of posts on the internet to the effect of “this game had my last name in it!”  This game had both of mine; my maiden name was present also. Though that, I believe, is a coincidence, where it comes to my current surname, I may be coming to the paranoid conclusion that the game may be mining this data somehow.  If so, genius.