Scary Monsters and Pretty Girls

Gish 2's official website was recently updated with something of an intro. Although it's not clear who's the creature that's doing the talking, it sure seem like something out of a Lovecraft novel. From what can be seen so far, comparing Gish 2, which looks dark and adult-like, to Gish 1, which seems cute and cuddly, is like comparing Silent Hill to Serious Sam (um how does that work out anyway?). Also, after having recently completed Nitro+'s Saya no Uta, I have reasons to believe that the creature on the frontpage is a distant relatives of Saya's.

Which brings us to the topic of this post (yes, it's actually not about Gish 2). Last night, staying up till 3am or so, I finally finished a extremely short but thought-provoking work called Saya no Uta (Song of Saya) from Nitro+, a Japanese eroge game maker known for works like Demonbane and my personal favorite, Phantom of Inferno.

Although fairly short (took about 4-5 hours for first play through), the game's theme is extremely dark, a trait that runs through most of Nitro+'s games. With the amount of violence and gore, you'd almost mistaken it for a Silent Hill visual novel, if not for the occasional H scenes and cute Japanese girls mixed in.

Without spoiling TOO much story, basically you're a college student (med student at that) who miraculously survived a terrible terrible car accident. As a side effect, the world now appears to the poor guy as flesh and gore and blood and intestine and everything describable by the word disgusting. Formal friends are now simply babbling balls of meat, and normal food is now barely edible (take a wild guess at what he ends up eating later). However, while in the hospital, the protagonist meets a strange girl named Saya, who is looking for her father. The strange thing is that Saya is the only person who appears normal...and so the life of a half-crazy man and a "loli" begins.

Let's stop for a moment and think, if the poor guy see normal things as balls of flesh and tentacle, yet Saya appears normal to him in the game, then what is Saya really? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. The game, filled with worried friends, hot doctor with a dark past, and lots of killing and tentacle incidents, is not something for the weak of heart (unless you've already been trained by the American media), and none of the three endings are what one would call "Happy Ending," unless you consider the destruction and assimilation of human civilization a good end (which seems to be the case for a lot of Saya players I see posting online).

One of the main questions posed by the game is, "is falling in love a barrier for human reproduction/survival?" And this question is fully explored in the game through poor Saya.

This is less of a review than just some of my impressions/ramblings after playing the game, for those of you who are interested, there's currently a group working on translating the game to English.

*I would include some screenshots, but crappy computers in China doesn't seem to like the idea.