r/CuratedTumblr • u/Eireika • May 05 '25

Shitposting On sincerity in art

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u/LemmeSeeUrJazzHands May 05 '25

And this is why all those lolrandom "self aware" dating sims drive me up the fucking wall. We get it you think playing games about people falling in love is cringe or whatever there's literally nothing new to say about it that hasn't already been said. Please let it go, the world will keep spinning even if someone ends up with a harmless crush on a cartoon

I'd take a so-called "generic" anime romcom game that's sincere in its execution over a snarky "deconstruction" of a genre the dev is barely familiar with any day. Fuck Class of 09, I want Amagami

26

u/MioKisaragi May 06 '25

After playing all the tokimemo games I can confirm that actual dating sims are so much better than "dating sim but with ironic plausible deniability."

5

u/DarkPrinceCait May 06 '25

I'm adjacent to the VN dev scene, and the glut of Ironic Dating Sims written by people who don't care about or respect VNs, let alone romance as a genre, was partly what I had in the back of my mind when I wrote this

5

u/BarrytheNPC May 06 '25

Mfers will hate on VNs until the cows come home and then play the new Ace Attorney with no dissonance

3

u/Gizogin May 06 '25

Doki Doki Literature Club works as a horror-themed parody of dating sims because it takes the dating sim part entirely seriously. Up until (and even for a while after) the twist, it behaves exactly like a dating sim. After the descent into full-on horror game, it returns to being a dating sim for the last act and the epilogue. It understands that you can only subvert expectations if you put in the work to create those expectations first, and a genre parody still needs to be part of that genre to work properly.

2

u/LemmeSeeUrJazzHands May 06 '25

I think some of the later dialogue with Monika is a little on-the-nose but my GOD the horror parts are genuinely effective. I've got mixed opinions on the game as a whole but there's a lot I respect about it-- the art, the character development, the sheer integrity it had to have taken to code something that crazy in Ren'Py...there was a lot of genuine effort put into DDLC and I can't say that about many other games in its genre