Once you pick your favorite through a charming “pick-the-word” minigame, the cogs of romance begin to turn swiftly, before suddenly delving into a nightmare world of trauma and horror which eventually - in classic VN fashion - leaks out and bursts the seams of the fourth-wall itself. the protagonist of 95% of all slice-of-life anime - who joins a literature club populated by four doe-eyed anime archetypes, each primed to swoon at your leisure. You play as a nondescript Japanese high-schooler - a.k.a. ![]() In short, Doki Doki is a self-effacing satire of treacly dating sims, and the fantasy fulfillment that they traffic in. It’s a success story on a level far beyond what followers of the VN scene expect even from break-away hits, and its success has been a surprise to VN developers and to creator Dan Salvato himself. Doki Doki is a brief excursion into a twisted version of the typical school-set romance and since its release last October, it has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times. That’s precisely because of the rules that it breaks. It received coverage from sites that wouldn’t normally spare a second thought for a visual novel, and became one of 2017’s talking points. You probably haven’t heard of Muv-Luv but chances are you’re at least vaguely aware of Doki Doki. ![]() For many VN aficionados, there’s a single game that sucked them into the strange, static world of text boxes and sun-dappled imagery, but the journey past entry-level fare like Phoenix Wright and Danganronpa can be rather harrowing, especially due to the prevalence of extreme eroge in the space. Muv-Luv’s sales reflect a commercial reality on Steam and in the West: though many gamers know what visual novel are, the market for most of them remains extremely slim, especially for the exotica brought over from Japan. This is the story of Doki Doki Literature Club. Meanwhile, a newcomer to the genre, that broke many of the rules that epics like Muv-Luv follow, was reaching millions of people. Very few sites reported the news, and understandably so: according to SteamSpy, this hyper-niche game with its adoring fanbase has sold just shy of 10,000 copies on Steam, roughly half of its predecessor. ![]() But in January, the censored non-18+ version of the game disappeared from the Steam storefront without explanation, with members of the development team apparently scrambling to get it back up, using the discussion board to document their progress, or lack thereof. It’s currently the highest-rated title on the Visual Novel Database, barely eclipsing the better-known Steins Gate. What if your favorite game got removed from Steam, but nobody seemed to notice? That’s what happened to Muv-Luv Alternative, a nigh-hundred-hour visual novel from Japanese developers Age that some have called the magnum opus of the genre.
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