A Shallow Promise of Love
By: Priya Sridhar
Tags: Gaming, Storytelling, Narrative, Videogames, Features

A Shallow Promise of Love

Doki Doki Literature Club deconstructs the romance genre and leaves players with a shocking experience Priya Sridhar Follow Jul 6 · 9 min read

Many have turned to video games for leisure and a needed break from reality during the pandemic. It’s been a time of consuming old favorites and new games. It’s also been a time of re-releases: older games returning to the stage with a facelift and additional content. One game that returned to us is Doki Doki Literature Club.

Doki Doki Literature Club started as a free game, theorized to be a preview and hint at a bigger project from the creators. After a 2017 release, it went viral in 2018. It’s a game that proves you shouldn’t take its cutesy graphics and premise at face value. Team Salvato and Serenity Forge recently released Doki Doki Literature Plus on June 30th, providing players with side stories, improved graphics, new music, and art.

This piece explores Doki Doki Literature Club and how it challenges the expectations associated with visual romance novels.

A Simple Premise

Doki Doki Literature Club at first appears to be a standard visual novel. The player character, whom you can name, finds a childhood friend begging him to join her school club. This character is not interested in poetry, but he can’t resist the promise of cupcakes, or a bunch of girls asking for an hour of his time. He can bond with all of them, except for the club leader Monika. In fact, if you try to make friends with Monika or pursue her romantically, the game mandates that it’s not an option. Monika is visibly annoyed about it.

The conflict seems straightforward: you have to decide which of the remaining three girls you wish to romance.

Sayori is nice and familiar. Natsuki is abrasive but has a good heart to go with her cupcake-baking specialty. Yuri is remarkably shy about her literature passions, as well as nervous about how guys have a habit of ogling her. They all have good intentions and reaffirm their friendship, with Monika serving as a big sister to them. The updated version also acknowledges that a Literature Club has to have some books and discussions, so it’s nice to hear Monika have the opportunity to talk on these topics.

Natsuki warns the player character to not judge a book by its cover. Sometimes, even a simple manga can have a story that changes your life or improves your day. While they made the comment more on the literature, their statement can imply to the player that the characters have covers of their own that lie. Their personalities, quirks, and individual stories contain something deeper within.

Doki Doki Literature Club spoilers ahead.

I haven’t played many visual novels that have strong romance, but I know there are cliches and tropes that exist within the genre. While this game certainly presents itself as one with romance, it’s more of an exploration and discussion about these romance cliches. They will become tools with the developers of Doki Doki Literature Club transitioning this romance visual novel into a whole different genre.

If you decide to pursue this game, you’ll notice that there are warnings that the game has unsuitable themes for children and those easily disturbed. This game, despite its romance premise and visuals, is a psychological horror game, and it’s one that always catches many by surprise.

Things take a turn when Sayori has a confession to make: she has undiagnosed depression.

Most days she struggles to get out of bed and only does so when they know the player character will walk with her to school. She believes she loves the character since he’s the one positive presence in her life. You have to decide whether to love Sayori back. Regardless of what decision you make, the results may make you shed a tear, but at least one of the outcomes will carry a hopeful note about the future.

No matter the decision you made the other day with Sayori, the next day she is absent. She never made it to the school festival. You discover she hung herself in her bedroom; the game crashing on that image. When you reload the game, someone or something has erased Sayori. Monika continues to sneak you furtive looks, Yuri and Natsuki are more abrasive in their interactions with you, and you find their home lives are worsening.

It’s a very jarring experience. No one would ever expect that a game with cutesy music and stock visuals would take such a turn in terms of storytelling. Unfortunately, it only gets worse from there.

Source: Multiplayer.it

Deconstructing the Romance Genre

Most visual novels that focus on romance are prioritizing entertainment for the reader. They may replicate dating sims within the school, with a stock player character with no personality or depth. They allow the player to insert themselves into the story and impose their personality upon the narrative.

However, in this case we see the player character at the start of Doki Doki shows some depth and character. We see him asking about poetry and showing kindness to the girls from the start of the game. Even though he doesn’t want to be in the club, he gives it a shot for Sayori’s sake, because he doesn’t want her to be sad. It’s this same fondness for her that drives him to put some effort into the club, and to find out what’s bothering her. He’s not a bad guy, nor is he a character void of any motivations.

Another interesting point about this game is that most of the love interests are teenagers while you can change your player character’s age. Dan Salvato confirmed that they are all eighteen, but Natsuki looks like she could be thirteen while Monika has to be the reasonable person. It becomes more clear during the game that here are teenagers who are in vulnerable places in their lives, struggling with depression, self-harm, and abusive parents. Natsuki’s words of not judging a book by its cover become more present through them. People are more than what they appear on the surface, character designs and all.

You are not driving the story, which is something we see little in interactive visual novels. With its stock designs and backgrounds, the world is shown to us as limited and intentional. There is a point where the atmosphere almost seems to stifle the characters long before Monika takes over the story. Players can find more behind these repeated images and backgrounds that we see on the screen, but the player can only find that out if they keep clicking “Continue.”

Monika breaks the fourth wall by realizing she can influence and control the game. She will do all she can to erase the other characters and even you. They aren’t real, using that reason to justify her actions. Yet she understands that her reasoning is flawed when you use your influence on the game by erasing her save file. Everyone is returned to the game, even Sayori. She will even hint to you that there is a way you can help Sayori find another path that doesn’t lead to her tragic end.

Monika confesses in the end she wants more than this limited world where she can’t even create new backgrounds. She has fallen for you — the person behind the screen — while admitting she doesn’t truly know who you are. No matter how much she can control her friends or what background is on display, she can’t control you. You are beyond her reach unless you choose to keep playing. Her interactions are limited to talking to you, confining you to a single room, and locking the game.

To drive the message further, Monika points out that being aware you exist simply to serve another player’s amusement is jarring, and cruel. She isn’t even allowed to have her own arc or journey while remaining aware that her friends could have happy endings with the player character.

Her existential crisis fuels her desire to control the game and to seek something beyond the limited visuals. Yet she fails because you have access to the same files that she does. Pressing delete undoes her reign and brings a semblance of normal.

Source: Steam.

Your Love Isn’t Real

You can’t love any of the characters because as the player, you’re not inputting anything meaningful into the relationship.

Yes, you can certainly try your hardest to be nice to all the girls, and that nets you the best ending possible, but that’s when Sayori realizes the story is over and we should delete the game. Her reasoning is that the girls’ lives, however short and not real they are, have been changed and everyone is happy now. The only thing to do is close the chapter on that book, and thank the player with a new song, as well as a note from the creator about their intentions.

Some players go beyond playing for the bad ending or the adventure. They’re continuing to play to achieve something better. You do best in the game when you are reaching out to help everyone. Even then, Doki Doki Literature Club is still a story.

Having Monika self-aware and eventually making Sayori aware that this is just a story will wreck their worldview and motivate them to take contrary actions. From what the trailer and release material has shown, the endings don’t change in the expanded edition. Instead, we’ll be getting more background music, side stories, and images. So there doesn’t seem to be a way to close Pandora’s box once Monika and Sayori know the truth of their own existence.

In the end, you are limited as well, thanks to the game. The best that you can do is make the girls happy, and show that you care about them even if you don’t completely understand their situation, or feel helpless. Much like the player character, if you have him declare he loves Sayori, you do what you can to improve their lives.

Some fans developed mods where you could achieve happy endings, or even worse ones, to reach that sense of completion. Even so, the game truly ends when you have done all you can to be kind to the characters. That means braving Sayori’s suicide at least once, Yuri self-harming herself, as well as Monika ruining her friends’ lives for the sake of winning your love. Some players assert that the pain is worth it to help the girls with their problems.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a game that you can’t judge by its cover. It uses the premise of a dating sim and its cliches. Then the story uses these cliches against the player character. We see one of the characters try to romance you and win you over, to the point of sabotaging and controlling the game to get there. This twist helped the developing team transition into another genre during the game, leaving players with a gaming experience they will never forget.

The updated Doki Doki Literature Club Plus promises the same story, but this time with additional side stories that will leave you more invested in the lives of these characters.