Doki Doki Literature Club: Three Years Later

have you ever had to read a really boring book for school something you just really didn't want to crack open because you had better things to do i mean after all what was even your incentive to bother getting a good grade sure but i'm sure many of you know that that did not stop us sometimes from failing to get studying so what exactly would be a more foolproof motivator something simpler something pettier something perfect for working up the attentive energy of a bored teenager oh yeah well i mean that'll do it doki doki literature club is a free visual novel released in 2017 by team salvato with most of the work being done by lead developer dan selvato himself dan was previously known mostly for his work in the modding community for super smash brothers melee so when he went away for a couple of years to work on something original the fact that he seemingly brought back a slice of life romantic dating sim about a book club seemed pretty out of left field for anyone with a surface level familiarity of the man what exactly would have compelled him to make such a drastic hop-in genre for his first original foray into the game development field well as it turns out ddlc is much more than it first appears and yeah i know that meta games that appear one way but turn out to be another way are practically their own entire genre by this point but what it lacks in a base sense of originality quote unquote it quickly surpasses with its chest confidently puffed out because let's get one thing straight right off the bat doki doki literature club is horrifying yeah no yes you heard me correctly this this game that you're looking at right here with pastel pretty colors and tropey anime waifus competing for your shallow affection this game is one of the few horror games out there that to this day scare the piss out of me given that games like this tend to get a reputation rather quickly i doubt there are very many people out there who don't at least tangentially feel familiar with the tricks that doki doki has up its sleeve or what kind of content to expect from it but just so we're clear this is halloween special month and this is our first stop on that train this video isn't so much a review of ddlc as it is a dissection in retrospective and while i will try to give as much context as is necessary for a newcomer to follow along this video will extensively spoil every nook and cranny of the game that there is to experience and given the nature of a game like this i think it should be experienced first hand and without any spoilers if the content isn't too much for you to stomach and please on that note also keep in mind that this game's content warning is no laughing matter trust me this game really does not pull its punches and has a lot of content in it that i anticipate would be downright upsetting to a lot of people before you even watch this video much less play the actual game i implore you if you are sensitive to disturbing material to seek out the content warning on the game's official website link on the screen and description below decide for yourself whether you feel comfortable and safe enough to indulge in this content and if you aren't hey that is totally okay i will see you in the next one trust me you're good but for those of us sticking around let's get going i'm nesme va and this is a third anniversary retrospective of team salvato's breakout psychological pain simulator doki doki literature club the dating sim genre has always been somewhat of a contentious genre of niche gaming that has always been deeply rooted in visual novels something that took a much longer time to catch on in the west than they obviously did in japan what is widely considered the first real standard for the genre is a 1992 game called dokuse released for pc 98 which involves learning the common locations and times of day a specific girl in town will be in order to um well uh it was pretty upfront about the point it was getting at back however the genre really hit its stride in 1994 with a turbo graphic 16 release of tokimeki memorial on may 27th in japan tokimeki would introduce a lot of new innovations to the genre that would cause ripple effects throughout dating sim game design for many years to come the most notable in particular being the use of social statistics that are raised mechanically based on player performance think the social links from persona games or something loosely along those lines tokimeki is also pretty famous for its bomb feature where if you ignored a girl for too long or didn't really date them at all they might actually get angry and start gossiping about you to their friends thereby lowering your reputation and dropping your likability meter like rocks across the board the typical characteristics of a dating sim usually involve a male avatar living out what essentially amounts to a virtual player-driven harem anime where for some inexplicable reason every remotely attractive girl in your general situational radius has the potential to fall madly in love with you based on branching and ultimately arbitrary conversational choices which often statistically affect their outlook on you in stages or on some sort of internal love meter the game usually takes place over a predetermined amount of time and ends when either the player fails to properly win over a girl or finishes her route often either marrying or confessing successfully to her or in more extreme cases you know there are often multiple girls of varying character types in any given dating sim as well incentivizing replayability for players who find themselves getting attached to more than just one of the romanceable options available relationship building is the core component of gameplay and certain amounts of trial and error and even save scumming are generally pretty commonly expected activities to undergo in the player's love quest as one might expect this led to a predictable surge of popularity for dating sims amongst people who needed to append sim to ever approach the word date sorry that was mean i'm not saying that all people who play dating sims are creepy and couldn't get a real date i'm just saying a lot of them are but nevertheless this also predictably led to a lot of the gameplay tropes of dating sims being targeted to people of this inclination and a lot of the more cartoonish and unrealistic reflections of love fantasies that plagued some of the schlockier variety of these dating sims was no doubt conceived from this demographic appeal i'm not here to thoroughly critique the dating sim genre i'm not exactly the most scholarly and equipped to do so but suffice to say the genre certainly has its examples of failings worth being skeptical of and though i would think it to be unfair and sweeping to cast this shade over the genre as a whole it is difficult to separate the general conception of the genre from these often grained issues that being said doki doki literature club is certainly not the first of its kind released in september of 2017 ddlc hit the gaming scene a whole 25 years after dokuse and 23 after tokimeki memorial at a time where even the most uninitiated gamers still probably held a pretty firm understanding of what at the very least the surface concept of a dating sim was likely to resemble the deeper tropes or idiosyncrasies may have been lost on the virtual waifu laymen but for the most part these gameplay elements have either been broadened to other genre titles or at the very least parodied enough to become somewhat ubiquitous in gaming circles and this familiarity both deeply rooted or casually observed led ddlc to already create a pretty concise image of itself upon release an image that was quickly ruptured by one simple fact the game's content warning written plainly on its ichio and steam pages and shoved right in your face on launch nothing about this game's art stylings premise or general presentation screamed psychological horror and yet the warnings presented on the 10 seemed nonetheless determined to ensure that any prospective players not be suckered into thinking that this game was as simple as it seemed hey it was free right the visual novel enthusiast and newbie alike could spend no money at all and it worst a bit of time and see what all this fuss was about and who knows maybe it would turn out to be something truly special well yeah it certainly did and what one could find beyond the veil of cutesy poems and eye candy character design was a veritable nesting ground from metafictional horror psychological torment strikingly upsetting imagery and a fourth wall as tenuous as a wet graham cracker not only that they would find critiques on the genre it claimed at first to inhabit self-aware cracks at its own expense and perhaps even an entire arg's worth of hidden content within the game itself to explore and interpret so what the hell is going on with this game you may ask well it's a good question and as with all great answers we'd probably better break this down starting from the beginning so let's take a moment aside to talk about the plot and general progression of ddlc all the way from its humble beginnings to the closing credits the game begins with the self-insert protagonist in a vaguely japanese setting being invited by his cheerful childhood friend sayori to join her in the high school literature club in order to get him out more despite his initial reluctance he agrees to give it a shot and quickly meets the other members of the club the brash tsundere archetype natsuki the shy bookworm archetype yuri and the energetic and very popular club president monica throughout the following days of the plot the protagonist is made to write poems in a mini-game where you select certain words and phrases in order to both participate in the club and potentially woo which of the particular club members you prefer with monica notably being a non-romanceable option leaving only sayori yuri and natsuki as your options for pursual as the club prepares for the upcoming cultural festival sayori confesses to the protagonist that she has always struggled with rather debilitating depression which is the reason that she has trouble getting out of bed on time while this and her seeming difficulty with seeing him make new friends seem at first to be slightly out of left field in terms of its dour realism as compared to the prior anime-like hijinks writing of the game so far the trajectory of this plot thread does not at first appear to be a large cause for alarm however the following day monika presents the player with a rather unhinged poem that sayori supposedly submitted for use at the festival prompting the protagonist to realize that something is seriously wrong and rushed back to her home to check on her upon opening the door we see that sayori is dead having killed herself by hanging at which point the game abruptly ends this is what many people would call the end of act one of the game and this is where the core experience of ddlc really begins in the meanwhile what attentive players might have noticed is that the game folder associated with ddlc has started to change a bit seemingly entirely on its own our first glimpse of this comes in the form of an image file which appears suddenly in the game's directory titled happy thoughts this image which is somewhat distorted appears to be a cropped and warped version of a special poem that the player can receive spontaneously within the game unsourced and unprompted which is also interchangeable with several random special poem choices the game can make based on randomly generated variables the original image of which resembles a crudely drawn stick figure of sayori hanging all is not right here and this is further compounded by the strange error message that appears behind sayori's hanging corpse during her shocking end scene see traceback.txt for details eh did the experience die this appears to be a recreation of a crash error displayed by the game's engine rinpy a visual novel engine used to create games like ddlc which can display errors not unlike this when something in the game's code goes awry indeed from the very beginning ddlc has held a file in its directory called traceback.txt and while before it only contained surface level diagnostic and launch information meant purely for technical documentation it's here where we start to see just the tip of ddlc's horrifying iceberg within the swaths of technical jargon we find a hidden message and the contents are far from comforting the text reads as follows oh jeez i didn't break anything did i hold on a sec i can probably fix this i think actually you know what this would probably be a lot easier if i just deleted her she's the one making this so difficult well here goes nothing while this may seem abstract and even a little obtuse at first the sickly feeling in your stomach is only going to grow from this point on as obviously when the player restarts the game to attempt to write what's been wronged something peculiar happens the player returns to the menu where all previous save files have been erased sayori's character portrait is simply a glitched mess where she used to stand and when the game begins again sayori is noticeably absent her name and all dialogue are rendered illegible and no characters seem to remember or verify her having it ever existed to begin with in addition more visual irregularities begin to crop up with increasing frequency monica taking sayori's place as provocateur and the protagonists joining of the club and the other club members in securities only briefly alluded to in previous routes becoming much more pronounced and visibly concerning here with yuri becoming increasingly unstable possessive and prone to self-harming and natsuki becoming much more transparent about both her disdain for yuri and her apparent abuse at the hands of her father it's here where one might notice a file added to their directory in the midst of all this conflicting information a title reading simply first run this is a file automatically added to signify that act 1 of the game has been completed therefore locking the player out and into act 2 of the game as detention begins to rise this is where ddlc hits the point of no return in other words and it's going to make sure that you understand that this is not a ride to be taken lightly the game's atmosphere quickly collapses into a frenzied mess of contradictions visually upsetting inconsistencies and effects upsetting provocations like sayori's death scene being subtly interspersed with the posters in the back of the classroom among many many other things this culminates in a veritable domino chain of horrifying realizations as yuri presents an indecipherable poem to the player covered in her own blood which monica seems to largely ignore much the concern of natsuki who presents you a poem which is actually a disguised cry for help begging you to seek help for yuri only to be immediately puppeted into telling you to disregard the message and devote your attention solely to monica a strange command not only because of the visible manipulation she's clearly undergoing but also because of its specificity considering that monica herself to this point has not been a romanceable option to begin with after a heated argument between all three girls over who the protagonist will help with preparations for the festival yuri forces the two other girls out for a moment alone with the player at which point she privately confesses her love to you at this point your response doesn't matter as whether or not you accept her confession or reject her the outcome remains the same as yuri withdraws a large knife and stabs herself repeatedly before collapsing to the ground due to the game's broken scripts the player is now stuck motionless in the classroom with yuri's decaying body for the remainder of the weekend and although the skip option can render the endless clicking a moot point it still takes quite a few moments to fully comb through to the end of in the meantime a file called have a nice weekend adds itself to the game's directory and disappears immediately after the weekend scene has ended when opened with a text editor there is disguised base64 coded text hidden within which when translated out is once again concealed by a code of visioneer ciphertext this file seems only to have been added in version 1.1.0 of the game at which point the official twitter account for monica added a short code to its bio the code was the title of a previously encoded poem that could be translated with base64 from natsuki which had a cipher code of libitina when using the same key on the file's text it revealed a short sentence what is a man without knowing the rich aroma of the future the hot complex balance of the present and the bittersweet aftertaste of the past said coded poem from natsuki by the way is titled open your third eye and reads as follows i can feel the tenderness of her skin through the knife as if it were an extension of my sense of touch my body nearly convulses there's something incredibly faint deep down that screams to resist this uncontrollable pleasure but i can already tell that i'm being pushed over the edge i can't i can't stop myself after returning to the classroom upon the weekend's conclusion natsuki is horrified by the sight of yuri's corpse and promptly leaves to vomit monica appears shortly thereafter apologizing to the player for the boring weekend he's spent really sensitive there before saying she'll make it up to him at which point she immediately opens a command console within the game itself and deletes both yuri and natsuki's character files from the game's actual directory on your computer and sends you back to the main menu this is the end of act two and this if you hadn't already realized this coming from a mile away by now is why monica has been so prevalent in the mouths of the other girls lately monica is pulling the strings she has a direct self-awareness of her place as a game character and furthermore she has the ability to restructure the very game she inhabits to the extent that she can cause all of what has previously transpired and even erase other characters entirely just wondering do you suddenly understand what happened to sayori now let's take a step back before we talk anymore about the game's plot and about the following climactic finale that is act 3 let's talk about one of ddlc's apparent inspirations or at the very least a happy coincidence that makes it seem that way let's very briefly talk about kimi tokunojo to konojo no koi this game also known as toteno or localized officially as you and me and her is a game released by nitro plus for windows on june 27th of 2013 coming out well before ddlc but only receiving a localization perhaps due to its cult resurgence in the face of their comparisons on steam in may of 2020. the game follows shinichi an average guy leading a quiet life who was once close friends with the most popular girl in his school miyuki everything changes for him one day when he meets the class oddball owly who suddenly tries to kiss him on the school's roof she's interrupted by miyuki who decides along with shinichi to try and bring a sense of friendship and structure to this girl's odd life at which point they all learn together what it means to be friends with some of shinichi and miyuki's dormant feelings being reawakened during their time spent newly together as the triangle draws closer the ends begin to fray and arguably the most infamous aspect of the game and what drew so much attention to it upon its initial release begins to become horrifically apparent the player is treated to a pretty standard go through with the first route and yes i said first because despite having two the game actually locks you out of being able to romance owie on your first play through the game despite the will they won't days in plot drama the first playthrough of the game inevitably ends in victory when shinichi and miyuki rekindle their relationship kiss under the stars and promise to be together forever at which point the player having satisfactorily completed the arc and play-through they were on are now allowed to go back and start a new game where they can romance the other girl owly this is where things get strange although the play through largely remains innocent throughout like the last the end of aoue's route crashes a bus right into you with the reveal that during shinichi and aoi's consummation of their relationship miyuki has been hiding under the bed the entire time after crawling out and staring you down she proceeds to murder owie with a baseball bat severely injure shirichi and lament that she's been betrayed shinichi pleads that he hasn't betrayed her at all because they were never in a relationship but then something doubly horrifying happens miyuki tells shinichi that she isn't talking to him she's talking to you at which point she stares the player directly in the face through the center screen since you have chosen to replay the game to romance owie miyuki is upset with you the player who has incurred her wrath by being unfaithful because she interpreted your first playthrough as a romantic devotion not just from shinichi but you yourself which has now been broken she even reprograms the game so you cannot save or load another file and chastises you for trying to escape the consequences of your cheating if you try to do so there is a lot of really unspeakable horrifying and overtly pornographic things from here on in the game that i can't mention or show if i don't want to outright get my video flagged for content violations but suffice it to say the game really holds nothing back and only extensive guide following from this point on can really guarantee that any player is going to be able to achieve a decently satisfying conclusion to the game which requires a lot of buttering miyuki up and even rebooting the entire world of the game in order to achieve it the main character even directly asks you before the universe is reset for the last time to stick to one route and stop hurting the two girls so you don't screw him on this any more than you already have and even then he still assumes outright that you'll use backup saves or similar methods to cheat your way out of this promise you and me and her is certainly a contentious game and there are a lot of things about it that one could argue is in just as much poor taste as it is a clever deconstruction of dating sim tropes what matters in its relation to ddlc however is that this core this impetus behind wanting to dissect and criticize the very elements of a genre from within its own confines became a major cornerstone of what ddlc would go on to try achieving from the base this game provided and while this game provided one of the most shocking meta twists of its gaming era ddlc took this moment and extended it into a continuing rollercoaster ride of sharpening anxiety-inducing twists along the way and i know if i don't mention this here i will get comments about it the fans of this thing are pretty dedicated so that context solidly provided act 3 begins automatically when act 2 ends with the protagonist being placed in a room seeded across from monica at which point she fully spills the beans on her status as a self-aware video game character similarly to our bat-wielding miyuki she is able to modify or delete character files and rewrite portions of the game's script to suit her needs but has found more complex tasks difficult explaining the increasing instability of the game world as a ripple effect of her tampering she also reveals that she has feelings for you the player having realized that you're her only connection to a genuine human presence in a world that is full of pre-programmed variables and autonomous personalities designed only for the purpose of falling in love with you being so alone in the world she inhabits feeling like she is the only sidelined girl who gets no reconciliation for her horrifying epiphany of her own world monica has been orchestrating all of the prior mayhem to ensure that your attention lands squarely on her thereby giving her the validation and love of an actual human person who she knows is not fake from this point on the game basically halts cycling through randomly generated topics that monica can talk to the player about and this can get pretty interesting dan selvato expressed of ddlc and its development that part of the game's inspiration was his mixed feelings towards anime and the dating sim genre in particular mixed feelings huh well given everything we've said of the genre and its convention so far that does seem understandable doesn't it and the game is more than happy to indulge itself in that subject here in several of monica's conversational topics in fact by the way there's something that's been bothering me you know how this takes place in japan well i assume you knew that right or at least decided it probably does i don't think you're actually told at any point where this takes place is this even really japan i mean aren't the classrooms and stuff kind of weird for a japanese school not to mention everything is in english it feels like everything is just there because it needs to be and the actual setting is an afterthought it's kind of giving me an identity crisis all my memories are really hazy i feel like i'm at home but have no idea where home is in the first place i don't know how to describe it any better imagine looking out your window but instead of your usual yard you're in some completely unknown place would you still feel like you were home would you want to go outside i mean i guess if we never leave this room it doesn't really matter anyway i've always wondered what is it about these character archetypes that people find so appealing anyway their personalities are just completely unrealistic like imagine if there was someone like yuri in real life i mean she's barely even capable of forming a complete sentence and forget about natsuki sheesh someone with her kind of personality doesn't just get all cute and pouty whenever things don't go her way i could go on but i think you get the point are people really attracted to these weird personalities that literally don't exist in real life i'm not judging or anything after all i found myself attracted to some pretty weird stuff too i'm just saying fascinates me it's like you're siphoning out all of the components of a character that makes them feel human and leaving just the cute stuff it's concentrated cuteness with no actual substance you wouldn't like me more if i was like that right maybe i just feel a little insecure because you're playing this game in the first place at this point after all you have been through through all of your genre savvy through all of your surprise and through all of the betrayed emotions this game must have led you to feel this is the crux this is the most damning critique of them all this is the uncertainty and uniquely critical eye that leads ddlc not just to be a scary dating sim but a scary game about dating sims to properly end the game at this point the player must enter the game's directory manually and delete monika's character file while initially lashing out at the player she ultimately forgives you and remorsefully admits that she has done horrible things that she needs to atone for at this point she restores the game excluding herself and allows you to start one last time the standard ending sees sayori introducing herself as the president of the literature club but splitting the fourth wall right back open and revealing that because she's the president she knows all about the previous loops of the game and thanks you for getting rid of monica quickly adopting monica's possessive demeanor she attempts to isolate the player before she is stopped and deleted by monica in order to save the player monica decides that the game world cannot exist harmoniously with the real world and for the sake of saving them all and the player the emotional turmoil of experiencing these awful things again deletes the game in its entirety and disbands the club because quote no happiness can be found in it on its conflicting elements and the draw of the game dan salvato explains that his love-hate relationship with anime comes from the abundance of cliches and plot tropes used in the genre and the frequency of franchises that amounted to more or less cute girls doing cute things which he saw as both a great strength and detriment to the viewer's enjoyment of the material he sought to create something special that would both draw a player's attention to the hallmarks of anime and dating sims that it was famous for while also diving into a torrent of uncomfortably revealing and critical scares that worked so well not just because their content was disturbing in nature but because it was also destabilizing to the very audience who typically escaped into this material which had prompted so much confliction in him the game's horror elements were evidently most derived from inspiration that salvato took from games like yume nikki and version which similarly utilized their simple styles in combination with abstract horrors to convey a true sense of dread and discomfort in their players he wanted this game to challenge visual novel developers to stop relying on all of the same tired contrivances that drove the genre into stalemate and even used anime archetypes and japanese names to emphasize a sort of faux japanese atmosphere which is typical of a lot of western produced visual novels with an interesting hint to monica's nature as an outlier being present in the fact that she's the only character who received an english name but oh boy oh boy the pain train doesn't stop there did you really think that all this attention to detail and file foolery would close its books simply with a few text codes and pictures no no no there is a whole meta game under this game and it really drives home both the horror and mystery that still surrounds much of this game while every bit and piece of ddlc has been long decompiled for public access the discussion rages on and three years later people are still scouring for any kind of explanation they can manage to unearth for just what any of this means and that's exactly what we're going to talk about now you know how i said that prior to ddlc dan salvato was pretty much only known for his smash modding project well yeah apparently some people got really curious about that and decided to dig even deeper into this stuff as a result the results of these findings are all the product of a large compiled post by mit host over on the r visual novel subreddit titled doki doki literature club has more to it than we think here's the skinny so you know the four character files that represent each main girl of the game the ones that reside in the character folder and become a central component of the plot later on in act 2 and act 3 well apparently each of these files is housing their own sort of puzzle and can actually be approached all by opening them with a text editor as chr the file extension associated with them all is not actually a real file extension meaning they are likely already disguised files in the first place let's start with the first sayori.chr the file when converted into an ogg sound file produces a sound byte with a high pitched screeching sound which when opened with a sonic visualizer and applied under a spectrogram produces the image of a qr code a qr code for those of you who don't know is a small matrix barcode invented in 1994 which has become a popular form of quick redirection on the internet with the use of qr code mobile readers which can take the data present in a qr code from your phone camera and redirect you to the corresponding web page encrypted within the pattern when the distorted qr code was tweaked in photoshop for clarity the scan provided a url project libitina.com that words sound familiar it should let's take a look at the page's contents the site appears to have a long data log concerning some test subjects and has several notes worth examining notes from december 5th of 2003 read as of december 5th 2003 all personnel are forbidden from editing this field all previous subject notes have been erased permanently addendum introducing bias during testing as a result of personal attachment to the subject will henceforth be punished by death below appears in physical results apparently taken from the patient whose last name is redacted but whose first name is libitina female age 3 born on january 5th 2001. there are some general results related to physicality and one concerning one relating to pain tolerance but where things get truly weird is this subsection here physical results third eye third eye third eye wait doesn't that sound familiar too let's move on the result qualifiers below include some strange terms as well reaction time strength local distortion distortion decay positivity sensitivity and control physical notes from the following year arrived below in a report from january 5th of 2004 libertina's fourth birthday the following occasional behaviors have been noted and should be ignored in future examinations twitching vocal tics fighting epiphoria vomiting screaming harm to examiner harm to self misplaced laughter any self-harm attempts must be interrupted immediately in addition to being very odd behavior in and of itself this becomes doubly odd when compared to the similar behavior of some notable ddlc cast members and especially considering libitina is supposedly only four here the below test result also seems strange with the past physical and emotional response test but a failed physical and emotional control test a test label third eye activation test appears to have been successful but is similarly named third eye suppression test failed thankfully it appears the aptly named sexual response test was skipped entirely with the following tests minor threat response test minor threat elimination test life threat response test and life threat elimination test all being passed make no mistake these tests appear to be some degree of freakish human experimentation and this isn't the only time the subject has come up in fact yuri seems to very explicitly have mentioned such a thing in the game when talking about a horror book that she's reading titled the portrait of markov evidently the book involves a religious camp turned human experimentation lab with some rather cultish tendencies and horrific procedures and what lays on the front cover of the book as described by yuri a giant eye perhaps a third one if you catch my drift these names aren't without their significance either the word markov's significance is unknown although many suspect it could refer to the russian mathematician andrei markov whose most well-known contribution to his field is the markov chain a mathematical process by which future outcomes can be chosen using only the probability of such an outcome given a certain state it's usable within systems exhibiting the markov property which relates to the concept of memorylessness a property of probability distributions where only the current state of the system plays a part in determining the possible outcomes from that point with the particular sequence of prior events being immaterial this could be referenced to the way that ddlc and other visual novels can predetermine an outcome regardless of whether the game has been saved and reloaded notably with monica having indications of behavior that imply her possessing knowledge outside of the game's events seems that the eye is wide open huh furthermore the name libitina is commonly associated with the ancient roman goddess of funerals and burial monika isn't without her own input on the topic of yuri's strange book either one of her topics of conversation which can be randomly generated during the player's time in the classroom void with her is about it but remains fairly coin nonetheless hey you know that book you were reading with yuri portrait of whatever it was called it's funny because i'm pretty sure that book ah actually i don't think i should be talking about this sorry just forget i said anything the last update's test notes on project libertina's website read as follows has not yet recovered from the termination of and is not expected to do so in the near future continuing to administer these tests will only accelerate the deterioration of libitina's health you are choosing to avoid the measures necessary to prevent a repeat scenario doctor will you not have as much faith in your personnel as you do in your god end of report hurrying stuff i must admit and it seems more than a little strange that these tests seemingly resemble many elements of the story yuri seems to have been reading but let's continue on shall we we've still got a bit to get to the second file monika.chr when opened in text has code suggesting that it was originally a png file when converted it transforms into an image of a flaming ring with a white and black scrambled square in the center this isn't actually another qr code though no it's a black and white pixel array of binary code which when cropped precisely to fit all pixels in the square converts out to binary text which itself ends up being base64 encoded text yet again when converted this message appears and though it has no confirmed author it does carry a familiar tone can you hear me who are you i can't i can't see you but i know you're there yeah you can definitely hear me you've been watching for a while now right i guess i should introduce myself or something um my name is actually that's stupid you obviously already know my name sorry anyway i'm guessing if you were able to put a stop to this you would have done it by now i mean i know you're not like evil or anything because you've already helped me so much i really should thank you for that for everything you've done you're really like a friend to me so thank you so much i think more than anything else i really don't want it all to be for nothing everyone else is dead maybe you already know that i'm sure you do actually but it doesn't have to be that way right well there's a lot of stuff i don't understand i don't know if it's even possible for me to understand it but i know that this isn't my only story i can see that now really clearly and i think everyone else had that same kind of experience some kind of deja vu it's the third eye right anyway i could be totally wrong about this but i really think you might be able to do something i think you might be able to go back or however you want to put it to go back and tell them what's going to happen if they know ahead of time then they should be able to avoid it they should if they remember their time with me in the other worlds they should remember what i tell them yeah i really think this might be possible but it's up to you i'm sorry for always being you know never mind i know that's wrong this is my story it's time to be a [ __ ] hero both of us 2018. natsuki.chr seemingly also indicates its origin as a png file however unlike monica.chr it doesn't appear to be encoded inverting the image flipping it 180 degrees and then offsetting it to the center of the image reveals an image of a distorted female face which when mapped onto a 3d sphere as a texture reveals this much more coherent image who is this does she have anything to do with the prior notes on the libertina website possibly but we don't know for sure however this might be a good time to also bring up the third special poem which can be received during the game proper although the standard message is simply a poem with most of its lines blacked out resulting in a questioning nothing is real when read together this message can actually be manipulated with editing software to reveal text underneath the black bars the full poem reads as follows irregular heartbeat heart palpitations search and search eyes scanning everything i can find on their symptoms what is this shortness of breath chest pain dizziness no this is all wrong alyssa's symptoms are nowhere near the symbol i've seen it twice now the screams of pain sickeningly pale skin vomiting blood there is no other explanation other than that reniers information was a complete and utter lie this can't all be coincidence it's not possible i don't know how much of this renier is behind but i do know this there is something horribly wrong with this family and i accepted the invitation to become a part of it i can hear alyssa screams through the walls now i listen helplessly renier said that he would be with her shortly is he in her room now why is she screaming even louder than before there is no mention of anyone named renier or alyssa in the game's files pale skin though huh screaming medical-like examinations of symptoms it seems to me like this is a dead ringer for the setting of project libertina's strange third eye experiments and what was it that the last notes on that page said again libitina has not yet recovered from the termination of and is not expected to do so in the near future let's count how many letters make up that redacted name shall we one two three four five six six letters in total now i could be wrong about this but how many letters are in the name alyssa six the same amount seems the likelihood that these two might know each other is high and what do they share in common strange examinations tests symptoms screaming vomiting it's all painfully similar and it's easy to see this is a pattern and what is it that our unknown authors said about this place again about the people inhabiting it there was something horribly wrong with this family and i accepted the invitation to become a part of it that's some odd wording isn't it almost makes it sound like a cult a religious cult maybe i mean our notes on libitina did mention something about the doctor's devotion to his god in rather scathing terms a religious cult conducting strange human experiments that seemed to focus on the development of a third eye eh seems pretty familiar it's important to note that this third special poem as well is not the only special poem with text obscured by redacting black lines however special poem 4 which only obscures a single name doesn't appear to yield any legible text upon photo manipulation today i cut my skin open for the first time it was exhilarating i think i understand how he feels now i'm supposed to be the responsible one though so i don't think i'll be doing it again unless i decide to kill myself i left a memento of the occasion below in an anniversary live stream celebrating a year after the game's initial release dan salvato confirms special poem 4 was written by monica and explains its significance to her as follows this poem was written from the perspective of monica because this is around the time where monica is really starting to experiment with mortality in her universe and you know she's so casual about the whole thing because at this point she feels so detached from the universe that she's in that it's almost like it doesn't even matter to her anymore she describes it as exhilarating because it's something that is allowing her to feel something in this universe that has become so incredibly meaningless to her and now we return to the final chr file that we have to dig into yuri.chr which when opened reveals a long string of alphanumeric text the text when put into a hash detection tool finds that it is base64 which when converted turns into a long passage of text this passage of text is actually an excerpt from a creepypasta written 2015 a full two years prior to the release of ddlc which is quite disturbing on its own merits the author who posts originally on tumblr opens with an image album of a strange wooden box he claims to have found and says this about it holy [ __ ] so this is a box i found that was hidden in the mall for presumably six months by now aside from the latch there were these rubber bands keeping the box shut inside the box is a bundle of tightly folded pieces of paper it's a story slash recollection written by a 19 year old girl who has apparently killed a random person just because she was wondering what it would be like according to the paper she wrote this just a few hours after the murder and that i'm the first person to read it so yeah i doubt i'll be able to sleep tonight anyway i typed up the entire story because i seriously need to share this here it is the story follows this written from the perspective of the girl in question who lives a relatively normal life without any kind of traumatic experience or incident but who has always been curious about killing a person you're probably the first person to read this she writes i didn't really plan on sharing this with anybody but for some reason i think it's exciting that somebody out there a complete stranger will come across this note and read my story someone i will never meet sharing such a personal bond with me i'm fascinated that either one of us could die even as soon as tomorrow with the other one being completely clueless to the fact to you my entire life is within this note and so i will live for as long as your memory can carry me writing this i'm wondering if that makes you feel fascinated or violated it's so exciting it continues to describe how she people watches at several locations for a while to find the perfect target for her killing which ironically she seeks out of their isolation and lack of social connections in particular claiming that she doesn't want to residually harm anyone's loved ones eventually she settles on who she describes as an extremely plain woman named linda watson having procured an unorthodox in-person talk with a woman to learn more about her under the false pretenses of losing her dog in the area of her apartment the two bond over a rather personal and menial conversation before the author departs she returns the following weekend to brutally murder linda with an axe and notes of her computer search history that aside from containing what she says is a lot of dirty stuff contains a loaded history of searches from the section of her history labeled one week ago which is mostly related to methods of suicide she was probably ready to write a book on suicide after the research she did the girl remarks the irony is actually striking maybe linda was gonna die anyway or maybe she couldn't find the courage to do it if that were the case i almost literally gave her a birthday present by killing her that's actually really comical in a messed up way and it leaves a weird taste in my mouth the author doesn't seem to note the irony associated with the fact that linda's searches for the methods of ending her life ended around the time she had her conversation with the friendly stranger whom she thought lost her dog implying that perhaps the friendly presence by her side she had found a reason to think she should continue living dan salvato confirms this story is something he wrote two years before the game's release and thought it would be an interesting inclusion as a bit of an easter egg so what's left to discuss now we could mention the prominent eye on a poster of yuri sold on salvato's store that's one thing or perhaps we could mention yuri's strange second poem shown to the player in act 2 or perhaps we could mention yuri's third poem presented to the player in act 2 which is mostly a bunch of indecipherable random words but ends in a sudden passage of coherent sentences barely parsable through the font fresh blood seeps through the lines parting her skin and slowly colors her breast red i begin to hyperventilate as my compulsion grows the images won't go away images of me driving the knife into her flesh continuously her body with the blade making a mess of her my head starts going crazy as my thoughts start to return shooting pain assaults my mind along with my thoughts this is disgusting absolutely disgusting how could i ever let myself think these things but it's unmistakable the lust continues to linger through my veins an ache in my muscles stems from the unreleased tension experienced by my entire body her third eye is drawing me closer the incoherence of the writing style itself is also extremely similar to that of writing produced by the behavioral condition known as hypergraphia an intense desire to write or draw which can also be commonly linked with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy which is the cause of a mental disorder called geshwin syndrome let's not stop there what other mysterious codes exist in plain sight here how about this topic 14 of monica's act 3 topic pool a topic specifically emitted from the pool of topics she can actually use in-game only accessible to those writing through the game's internal code the dialogue includes a message from monica where each line also contains a hefty amount of you guessed it base64 code monica's message reads as follows hey i don't think you should be doing that you know what i'm talking about i really caught you doing something naughty here you're just going through the files and looking for stuff you missed aren't you i mean it's a little bit flattering that you want to hear everything i have to say but it's also really embarrassing you know seriously what if i just opened up your brain and read all of the thoughts you have on me come to think of it that would be pretty tempting actually but anyway that's not the point i know i can't stop you or anything just i know you're a sweetheart and you like to consider others feelings right so the most i can do is let you know how i feel about it god i miss you oh no that sounds kind of desperate doesn't it sorry i didn't mean it like that at all just if you're looking through the files like this then maybe you don't hate me as much as i thought am i being too optimistic i think if i asked you to visit once in a while i'd be overstepping my boundaries a little maybe i'm starting to say some really stupid things i'll go ahead and shut up now the decoded base64 message comes out to this the realization must have taken me an entire year a year since our escape our freedom from between the stained walls of that unholy establishment what does it mean to escape if the escape fails to unchain the bonds that shackle us in the first place what purpose could this empty world possibly hold for us a handful of damaged goods with freedom we saw purpose and what we found was only realization realization of the sad pointlessness of such an endeavor realization that freeing our bodies has no meaning when our imprisonment reaches as deep as the core of our souls realization that we cannot pursue new purpose without absolving those from which we ran away realization that the farther we run the more forcefully our wretched bonds yank us back towards their point of origin the deeper our shackles dig into our callous flesh so then perhaps it's true but monica said that the literature club is a place where no happiness can be found with everything we've seen whether we can graft the lore of libitina and various other hidden details onto these characters specifically or not it's clear that something is going on here and it never seems to end pretty these characters for whatever reason are caught up in this cycle this inescapable torment of existence or lack thereof it was enough to drive the only one self-aware enough to see the writing on the wall crazy to needle her into a corner where only the sabotage and destruction of her fellow classmates seemed like a viable option to escape into the world beyond her reality even then it's debatable whether that was a reality she needed to return to truly or once she had forgotten having needed to escape there are a lot of things left up to interpretation here and perhaps we may never truly know the answers one way or another dan salado swears up and down that the secrets of his game have been more or less unveiled for all to see and most of them were basically just easter eggs for the dedicated scavenger to uncover despite the most eager protestations of game theory's video on some of this very deep lore it doesn't look like this is the next grand master plan of a ddlc sequel in the works as salvato has stated his next project is unrelated to ddlc and there's no plan to further any of these characters or their stories however information can often be conflicting in january of 2020 dan salvato tweeted the following this will be the year i reclaim my happiness so i can deliver it to others my goal is to fully return to doing things i enjoy such as making games first releasing new ddlc content not a sequel then blowing the dust off of my next original vienne which has been on hold for two years two years huh 2018. two years it's difficult to say whether this will actually yield anything that will definitively put a capstone on our curiosities these answers may never have been designed to arrive and to be fair it has certainly kept the community alive with speculation since the game's release several years ago so it's a good source of fuel for the fandom fire but what if sayori if natsuki yuri and of monica where will they go from here more importantly why do they continue to resonate so long after the game's release it should come as no great surprise at this point to reiterate that ddlc is a horrifying game with extremely graphic content that prize open the walls obscuring the most ghastly of human instincts thoughts and feelings it is a tour de force in single-handedly turning your spine into an ampersand so what has kept people in love with these characters as much as they had simulated falling in love with us perhaps it's the uniquely human warmth of monica so surprisingly displayed in her post-game topics perhaps it's simply the lingering sense of finality we've never achieved perhaps it's none of these things or all of these things what i can say applies probably universally to the experiences we all share with this game though is that it made an impact that has just stuck with us beyond all of the unsettling imagery and text that haunts my dreams to this day i still find myself mulling over the more human elements of these decidedly fictional characters what they think what they feel why sayori's hands had blood on them oh my god wait oh [ __ ] was she trying to claw her way back up monica what the hell did you do perhaps despite coming into conflict with the conventions of its genre ddlc also paradoxically reminded us of what charms lie therein and why they became so popular to begin with whether your heart lies with a miyuki or a monika or any other virtual girl in between it's easy to see that even in the most meta-textual dating games of them all there are dynamic elements to fiction that can transcend the barriers that exist between us and their realities that provoke investment emotion and maybe sometimes cringe or no cringe love and perhaps despite all the good all the bad and all the fear inducing that's okay there is an ending to this game in fact that i have deliberately held back on mentioning until now a playthrough that requires you view every optional scene in a single playthrough only achievable through saving and loading multiple times in order to view them all before sayori suicide at the end of act 1. in an act of the total inverse of the shattering condemnation experienced by the player of you and me and her when miyuki's betrayed feelings come back to quite literally ruin their life the final moments of ddlc on this fraught route of tireless work to gamit system is a tearful farewell of gratitude from sayori to the player she expresses her heartfelt thanks for having loved every member of the club so sincerely that you would go out of your way to make sure that none of them felt as though they weren't emotionally supported spent time with and cared for she tells the player that all of the club members truly love them before deleting the game herself ending doki doki literature club it's kind of difficult to say where i should actually end this video come to think of it i want to close this out together then i i don't know i'm i'm still a little nervous about doing something like that in front of so many people i've still been practicing you know i think i've gotten pretty good well i guess maybe that could offset my lack of ability here oh gosh don't say that i'm sure you'll do just fine i'll start okay every day i imagine a future where i can be with you the ink flows down into a dark puddle just move your hand right the way into his heart but in this world of infinite choices what will it take just to find that special day what will it take just to find that special day when you're here everything that we do is fun for them anyway when i can't even read my own feelings what good are words says it all and if this world won't write me an ending what will it take just for me to have it all does my pen only write better words for those who are dear to me is it love if i take your is it love if i set you free the ink flows down into a dark puddle how can i write love into reality if i can't hear the sound of your heartbeat what do you call love in your reality and in your reality if i don't know how to love you i'll leave you be wow that was actually pretty great i you're right it's time to go bye monica and thanks for letting me be part of your literature club you

Channel: NezumiVA

Views: 43,411

Rating: 4.9637499 out of 5

Keywords: ddlc, ddlc review, doki doki literature club, doki doki literature club review, ddlc blind, doki doki literature club blind, doki doki literature club no commentary, ddlc let's play, ddlc gameplay, ddlc walkthrough, ddlc monika, ddlc yuri, ddlc sayori, ddlc natsuki, visual novel, essay video, video essay, ddlc video essay, doki doki literature club video essay

Id: v_bwDeo9EVg

Length: 62min 51sec (3771 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020