Game Theory: Monika Has ESCAPED! (Doki Doki Literature Club Plus)

hello internet welcome to game theory where today this is it friends after seven years of research planning pouring over every detail of this franchise nearly 50 episodes exploring every scrap of story ever put out into this universe i think i've got it i think i've done it i have an answer to any question you could possibly ask me what's in the box who's orange guy what is mangle's gender i even legitimately think that i have a timeline all figured out this will be without exaggeration my final fnaf theory so strap in loyal theorists it's been a long ride but this is the moment that you've all been waiting for the climax of our journey today we solve everything about five nights at freddy's once and for all no it's my turn there is no one else there is just monika just monica just just monica just monica's just monica just monitored just monsters just monica roll intro [Applause] [Music] do hello internet welcome to get get get get monika theory where there's just monica hit that subscribe button to make monica happy please speaking of have you ever had the feeling that you exist in a virtual simulation of a school oh wait that's like school for most people in the post-pandemic times anyway for many of you school might still be virtual but our back to school merch is very very real like our brand new big idea backpack complete with cushioned laptop compartment usb charging port even a built-in zipper lock so you can keep whatever you want safe in there everything from your valuables to your secret hidden lore speaking of bags why not fill that big bag with a smaller bag specifically for your pencils and art supplies i'm talking about our stylish game theory pencil case yuri must have slipped that one in there there's also the game theory three in one enamel keychain links are down below get em before the universe resets if it wasn't obvious today's episode has us diving back into the world of doki doki literature club with team salvato recently releasing a new version of the game doki doki literature club plus or as i like to call it the ddlc dlc complete with new mechanics a new look and a brand new layer of mysteries to solve so if it's been a minute or several million minutes since you last thought about the game when it first came out back in uh man 2017 let me quickly refresh your memory ddlc is a game that on the surface looks like any normal cutesy visual novel dating sim you're the newest member of the high school literature club where you build relationships with four girls who are all definitely most assuredly 18 years old nothing creepy to see here folks there's the bubbly sayori bookish yuri aggressive natsuki and club leader monica over the course of your first few days in the club you come to learn all about their unique personalities their likes and dislikes like natsuki's love of manga and cooking and sayori's need to make others happy as your relationships deepen the girls start opening up to you about their problems like natsuki's father not feeding her or yuri's shirt being too tight for her chest her words not mine poem by poem you start wooing the girl of your choosing but not all is as it seems as you go through the game things start to go off the rails characters become erratic their behavior starts to get more and more extreme with many of their worst tendencies getting multiplied exponentially then sayori takes her own life and everything changes you reload the game only to find the code glitched beyond repair she's gone even removed from the game's files and no amount of saving and restarting can bring her back one by one the other characters fall away until you're left alone with just monica let's be honest she was always the right choice all along you know why would you choose to go with any of these other girls monica reveals that she'd somehow seen the truth that she'd known this was a game all along because she'd been granted a higher level of access to the game's code her tampering with sliders in the background caused the other girls to die just so she could be the one left with you everyone always asking who the best girl is no one ever asking how the best girl is so how do you stop her well by beating her at her own game you have to go into the files for the game and delete her character file a technique that she's been using against all the others since the start now that alone would have been a pretty incredible game experience a psychological horror title disguised as a visual novel where you have to alter the game's files to win but what put doki doki over the top was that the story didn't end there in a series of two episodes we did after the initial game's release we dug deeper into the game's files finding clues hidden throughout the various poems and dialogue we discovered files that could be converted to different formats like pdfs and text files we ran codes through base64 converters ciphers binary decryptors we were inverting image files wrapping them around cones we even found a qr code that was hidden inside an audio file that qr code led us to a website hinting at something called project libitina an experiment that was trying to train people to open their third eye which we come to learn turns them into killing machines and if that seems a bit random and disconnected it's the exact story that's hinted at in doki doki's main game when you speak to yuri about the book that she's been reading the portrait of markov those videos are still up by the way if you're interested in checking them out in more detail but now they're all age-gated just goes to show how much youtube has changed in the past four years anyway it was monica's character file that was the most interesting hiding a note for us that suggested they all might come from a different game entirely and that monica rather than being the villain would actually be the hero of any new sequel to come out of the series i know that this isn't my only story and i think everyone else has had the same kind of experience some kind of deja vu 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 knew ahead of time they should be able to avoid it if they remember their time with me in the other worlds i should remember what i tell them this is my story it's time to be an effing hero 2018. she's trying to save the rest of the girls from whatever fate awaits in project libertina with the last point of our message saying 2018 and then nothing happened 2018 came and went and so did 2019 in 2020 but now we have ddlc plus which well isn't the game that we were expecting for the past three years but does have a lot more in it stuff that confirms some of what we've theorized about gives us a way to peek into the terrifying alternate world of project libertina and suggests that monica may have just been able to escape so let's stop reminiscing about the past and jump into the game shall we what does the plus add to the original game well when you open up the game you're welcomed by a desktop yup this is the big new addition here friends at first i was underwhelmed i mean it's been over three years but i also understand why it's here the original game was so popular that they wanted to bring it to the mainstream market i.e consoles but you can't just open a game file and delete entities on a console like you can on a pc shout out to the pc master rooms so this in-game desktop seems to be the best way to allow for the original file altering experience but dear theorists there's also so much more here so much more the first feature that stands out on the desktop of ddlc plus are the side stories these unlock as you complete poems for specific characters throughout the main game of ddlc but again something is a bit off don't get me wrong they're similar enough to the original game visual novels watching the girls we know and what seems to be a prequel to the events of ddlc we watch as they form the literature club develop friendships but there are a few things that stand out first we the player aren't in the game anymore we just watch the stories unfold with no interaction or choice they're just that they're visual novels secondly monica isn't acting in the way that we're used to instead she seems to be normal she isn't the confident leader that we're used to instead she's insecure shy even a little neurotic and she's definitely not acknowledging anything outside of the world that she exists in what's also intriguing is that when you enter the side story menu you're met with this line of text the side stories are stories of friendship that are unrelated to the events of the main game it's weird right why would it be so important for these to be kept separate from the main story especially when it seems like they're meant to be a prequel there's something more than meets the eye going on here more than meets the third eye am i right that's it's a third eye project lubitina joke no nobody okay moving on elsewhere on the desktop we have access to emails and files written by employees of a company named metaverse enterprise the files however seem to be locked trying to open them only yields the message unable to open unknown error please try again later digging deeper through the desktop system you find a nested series of empty file folders each one numbered from zero to five huh suspicious there is one file that you can open tower keys and this is where the metagame truly begins in this file we're given a clue 240 clock time two two one immediately this starts to give us our code navigate through the folders two two then one to find a file hidden at the end in this case project plan and then you adjust the time on your device to 240 in order for that to open remember how it said please try again later yeah they weren't kidding it pays to read your error messages now most aren't that easy those three number codes plus a time are hidden in every nook and cranny of this game like when you unlock the file track 6 name ideas it gives you explicitly the code 0-3-0 but you don't have a time you have to go to the song library after completing the main game and the song matches the name of a song with his name ideas let's teamwork that track has a length of 158 and that right there is your time code so reset your system time and the file opens do it enough times and you'll unlock all the files these combined with emails sent from the metaverse project team that unlock as you play the game start to reveal the bigger story and the more you unlock the deeper and darker this rabbit hole goes the story focuses on a group of people working for metaverse enterprises row ravi lib ive and paula who based on information in multiple files seems to be maintaining a side project in order to save their jobs in the file ddlc.text we learn their team name quote i want a cool team name something like team salvation team salvation or how about team selvato seems like our real world game makers may have just actually become a part of the game's lore but the funny thing is it seems like all of us might have wound up as part of the game's lore you see throughout all of these emails we get hints that the universe this design team lives in which also happens to be our universe may actually be a simulation from that same ddlc dock quote learn through the existential crises of others how to cope with your own simulated universe and again from a different file this time called project plan create human readable version of fabric benchmark results suggesting we live in a simulated universe so it seems like the team's plan is to create a series of simulated worlds with characters that they can watch to learn what people do when they're in a simulation in order to identify whether or not they themselves live in a simulation they call the simulations they're creating vms or virtual machines and the description for the first of these vm1 should sound a bit familiar quote a small scale simulation with literature assets for easy data collection four entities characters and a small physical space it's our doki doki crew which means that we were right monica is an ai technically all the girls are but we also learn how monica got her powers in that same project plan file it explicitly talks about observing the effects of elevated access knowledge of simulation what this tells us is that basically the team salvato crew gave one of their simulated characters monika the knowledge that she's in a simulation to see what she does with it what motivates her what it does to her psyche however what good is an experiment without a control group remember all those odd things i said about the side stories in the game how there's no player character how it's not connected to the main story how monica seems normal well that is our control group another iteration of the vm1 simulation where monica doesn't discover her powers there are a couple of emails and text files that help us prove this the first meeting notes 2.text mentions the following clone vm1 same elevated access but prevent the entity from discovering it the entity obviously being monika meeting notes 3 also confirms the side stories to be the control group stating quote snapshots slightly earlier in time compare end control sim to start a vm1 which lines up perfectly with the side stories ending with the creation of the literature club before the start of the main game in ddlc and if that wasn't enough evidence for you rhea another member of the team outright tells us in the email side stories quote again just to clarify all the recordings labeled side stories are part of the controlled simulation right and again in the same email we once again get a reference to the unreality of their own world scrolling down a bit further so if i'm keeping track we have what like five different universes in total with three or four of them created and then destroyed by monica of course it's funny because i keep wanting to speculate on which one is the real universe but in reality they all are as real as ours is anyway but what about the player why are we not a part of that control group the absence of a player seems odd even to the team quote from the email character discrepancy having run the control simulation for a while it's evident that a certain character is missing from any mention or appearance this makes me speculate that monica's meddling is less clumsy than we think because she would have had to manufacture this character herself as a way of forcing interaction between her and the user once you get this email you unlock a concept drawing in the gallery for none other than the player character monica created the player character note i'm not saying the player just the character that the player controls this is why we aren't playing the side stories with her elevated access hidden monika doesn't create a player character she doesn't need it she isn't aware of everything that's going on and so she doesn't need to interact with any sort of user speaking of monika we learn in this new content where a name comes from once you unlock the email let's move on we get ourselves a fuller picture quote we need to have a meeting about shifting our focus a little bit we've reset vm1 how many times now we've obviously gotten spoiled by the ease of access that vm1 offers us but it's just unrealistic for someone in real life to be granted a level of elevation even close to monitor kernel access monitor kernel access money car but what's interesting is that after so many resets and experiments they've come to realize that the permissions they've granted monika are too high she doesn't just suspect that she's in a simulation she knows and can manipulate it that level of knowledge just doesn't happen unless you meet lawrence fishburne and swallow a red pill it's at this point that the metaverse team starts to shift their focus over to vm2 project libertina yup that is still very much a thing here in all its dark psychological horror glory and we're gonna talk about that later but i'm still not done with what vm1 and the literature club have to teach us or should i say monica isn't done with us you see we just talked about how monica created the player character or at least the placeholder forum in order to interact with us the user but why would she want to do that well she wants to save her friends she told us as much in that hidden message from her character file everyone else is dead but i know that this isn't my only story i can see that now really clearly if they know ahead of time then they should be able to avoid it plus our theory that monica shares memories with the monika from the other game or to use this new game's terminology the other virtual machine vm2 is confirmed in an email from ddlc plus has anyone evaluated the side effects that might be caused by sharing a memory pool between multiple vms rather than allocating them separately i'm looking at some of the files vm1 is generating and i'm finding some information that definitely shouldn't be there my best guess is that memory being freed from vm2 isn't getting zeroed out which technically gives vm1 access to it so monica is able to see into vm2 seeing the horrors that befall her friends over in the project libertina simulation and she wants to help them but how do you do that when you're trapped in a video game well you break out of the game ladies and gentlemen i believe that monica is pulling a william afton glitch trap move and has hijacked someone's body to do it but she's not focused on us she's using a member of team salvato senior engineer i've laster that whole speech of hers that we found hidden in her character file 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 it's time to be a hero both of us that's not to us it's to him i've how do i know let's look a bit closer at ive ive is an interesting character throughout the files that the new game gives us we've seen a few emails from him as well as seeing him mentioned in a few meeting notes his writing style is casual he uses phrases like omg and types things like hahaha other team salvato members mentioned that ive makes meetings go on for too long he also seems to be obsessed with interacting with the vm1 simulation obsessed with making it into a game quote from meeting notes 2 playable equals observable form not a game stay focused dive which leads ive to write the note track six name ideas where he calls it operation not a game so that all gives us an idea of his personality and his writing style which is why i believe he's the writer of the file that talks about turning vm1 into a video game notice all the extra punctuation the want for things to be fun and cool and of course the signature hahaha but what does any of this have to do with monika well it seems like a random tangent except when you look at meeting notes 3. obviously meeting notes 3 comes after 1 and 2 so comes later in the timeline but it has a few things that felt odd to me quote fifth entity in vm1 not part of original genetic model not present in data dumps very bizarre ive is less talkative today meeting ending on time 12 55 omg obviously the mention of the time is another clue to the file puzzles but the fact that they ended on time because ive was less talkative was a detail that grabbed my attention people of course have off days so maybe it was nothing but it feels out of character plus that other line about there being a fifth entity within the system that's never been present feels weird we know it's not the player character that monika created because team salvato is all aware of his presence inside the simulation so who then is it and the i've weirdness continues the first email that you unlock but the one that comes last in the timeline if you actually look at the dates is an email from ive with the subject line have a nice weekend it reads i'm on leave the rest of the week contact ravi if you need to schedule server time but i expect my jobs to run for a few days since we've collected so much data this week how about we arrange a meeting to discuss the results when i return i've laster senior engineer as it's the first email you get it's easy to overlook a lot of people don't really think all that much of it we don't really know ive at this point but as we learn more and more about him from earlier in earlier emails in the timeline his tone has changed here wanting to be in a meeting about results straight to the point no abbreviations or hahahas his tone feels off but i couldn't quite figure it out until i looked at the subject heading have a nice weekend why does that sound so familiar where have i seen that before in this franchise oh yeah in the original ddlc during act two when you spend the weekend after yuri uh made swiss cheese out of her own stomach you find a file in the games folder called you guessed it have a nice weekend exactly the same as the email subject from ive even down to the exclamation point that file by the way is a text string encoded first in base64 and also by a vigenere cipher with the key libitina again the simulation's crossing over sharing memory with monica as the one who's able to access it all this to me could only mean one thing monica has pulled a william afton she's managed to swap her consciousness with ive think about it we know monica has a very sensible mature writing style based on her poems so it would make sense that she wrote it trying to blend in as well as why ive might suddenly be so quiet in a meeting monica doesn't want to draw attention to herself it also explains that mysterious fifth entity in the last snapshot of vm1 which nobody can explain it's ive he's trapped in the game thanks to his own hubris he wanted so desperately for his experiment to be fun to make it into a game and when he saw that monica had made a character for him to assume he started playing only to experience the horrors that we did but his fate was much worse than ours monica's note hidden in her character file i believe is directed specifically at ive thanking him for all the help that he's given her so far talking to him about how they need to work together to save everyone else but by work together she means using his body to exit the simulation and help her friends over in vm2 from the outside in other words monica has escaped and if that weren't enough there's yet another entity that we have to be on the lookout for one coming from the other side project libitina an entity named marla but more on her and the horrific experiments that are happening over on vm2 next time and don't forget you can still grab that new game theory backpack pencil case or keychain just click on the links below this video and become the obsession of all your friends virtually or physically though hopefully not too obsessed looking at you yuri so until next time remember it's all just monica just monica just monica see you next time [Music] [Music] i

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 3,978,641

Keywords: doki doki literature club plus, doki doki literature club, ddlc plus, doki doki literature club song, doki doki literature club plus side stories, ddlc plus ending, new doki doki game, new doki doki literature club content, doki doki literature club plus endings, doki doki literature club plus gameplay, ddlc plus gameplay, ddlc plus all side stories, game theory, game theorists, matpat, project libitina, ddlc+, sayori and monika side story

Id: iFonEHwC65Q

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021

Reddit Comments

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[u/DiabloGraves]

Hmm. One thing about the memory leaks discussed at 15:35: I think Matt's resulting interpretation is plausible, but I'm not entirely convinced that they're necessarily connected. Remember the original GT videos about how Yuri and Libitina were connected? I think the actual explanation there is not so much that Yuri IS Libitina as much as the VM2's errant data was being accessed by her character file.

Much like an errant memory pointer accidentally pointing to the wrong data (something sometimes utilized in speedrunning, of which Dan himself has a few records, though I don't think the game he's been running lately uses them), Yuri's data in VM1 may be picking up bits and pieces of what's happening in VM2, resulting in her interest in things that match up from that simulation. By comparison: in the Side Stories (where there's no memory leak), she's interested in *fantasy*, not *horror*, and none of the weird, spooky glitches happen there. Sure, it could be that all of those glitches happen just from Monika's bad coding practices, but it fits better if you consider that a lot of them may be VM2's nightmarish world literally leaking into VM1.

It's a bit of a fine distinction, but essentially it's not these four characters that are originally from another game: some of their memories and fundamental reference points for observing reality are, which could certainly make Monika *think* that she might be from somewhere else. From her perspective, the difference would be difficult to discern since she would be seeing things from inside the memory-corrupted VM1... and really, once you're a digital entity whose existence is malleable, that gets into Ship-of-Theseus-style musings where you might wonder how much of them in VM1 is still the original, simple universe that MES designed for early observation and testing, and how much of them have become something else...

Anyways, there's probably more I could say about this but it'll probably start getting into stuff Matt wants to discuss in the next video, so I'll leave it for that.

[u/AdmiralMuffincrust]

Now, I love a good William Aftonning as much as the next guy, but I think we're overlooking a much more reasonable and realistic scenario.

While I do believe that monika probably escaped from the simulation, she's more likely hiding out somewhere on Ives account on the VM. From there, she could easily have sent mail from his account. Plus, if this meeting is online through Zoom or MS Teams, or some such app, Monika could pretty easily control things there too by switching Ives microphone off or something similar.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Monika escaping to the 'real world', but it's a little over the top in my opinion.

Anyhow, that's all for now, Just Monika!

[u/blueberripie89]

Here's my take,

For some reason, the theory of Ive Laster being under control by Monika doesnt sit right with me. What if Monika somehow found a way to threaten him, not like blackmailing or some sort. But he was mesmerized, because by deleting Monika's file, she makes him feel sorry for her and she makes a message like it's all her fault so she deleted the game .If Ive like mentions it to this workmates about what Monika is doing to him or what he felt, no one would listen because they think he's messed up in the head or something like the mail where Paula Miner mentioned about "We're engineers, not philosophers." in one of the emails that was from Paula Miner

He has no choice but to do what Monika forces him to do what she wants to do. It explains the speech patterns, I mean sure that the last email "have a nice weekend" wasn't in his tone of speech, because he might not have felt good about himself.

There might be a point in time like Ive being mentally exhausted just like in meeting notes 3.txt, it mentioned about Ive being less talkative in their meeting. Since he's always overtime in their usual meetings.

I have a feeling that Paula resembles Monika, since she's the manager of the group, she acts like a leader and is always on track of her tasks. Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Paula mention about being a vegetarian because she values life and Monika is a vegetarian too with the same reason during the last act of the game?

Also I have a feeling that Paula friendzoned Ive because the tone of message of the file 14.txt sounds like she only sees him as a friend ("14 million years of friendship"? "Been friends since college"?) which might be a factor why Ive was so connected to Monika. She somehow managed to make her personality just like Paula. What Paula wrote as her closing at the end of the 14.txt file she wrote "With Everlasting Love, Paula" It was the same closing that Monika wrote at the last letter in the end of the game "With Everlasting Love, Monika" in the end of the game.

Also why would Paula write a letter "14.txt" that's like so touchy out of nowhere, unless something happened between the two that might have changed the way they look at each other.

It wouldn't make sense that Monika would just posess someone random, unless its someone who is easily persuaded.

[u/NeoMegaRyuMKII]

I do wonder if there may be more significance to the character/developer Lib, considering that this character's name starts the same as Libitina.

[u/Catvanbrian]

Does anyone know the soundtrack titles for the video? Especially the ones where matpat goes into detail into the lore.

[u/sharpy_sharp]

this intro was my favorite intro

[u/AdmiralMuffincrust]

Just had a thought. What if the 2018 reference in Monika's character file message is in itself a time code for 8:18 PM? Just a thought.

[u/TheBlueNanami]

So... I have a little theory that might not be true... but I'll leave it here just in case.

Ive wanted to turn VM1 into a game even though he wasn't "allowed" to, right? Well... why then would we be able to play the game 4 years ago? Is it something that was not planned? A kind of retcon? Or did Ive/Monika possessing Ive eventually release the game to the general public, she was talking through the description page of the game so... it could be her trying to... I don't know, be heard by people, get help or something?

Anyway I'm sure I'm forgetting facts and it's true that there are mails that go with dates after the release of the game in real life, but it was a little idea that came to my head about it haha.