Houkago no Futekikakusha: Review

Dark and/or depressing stories have always been a topic of interest to me. Many of my favorite stories have been pretty dark, and over time I started to look for darker and darker stories when trying to find something I was interested in. I originally found Houkago no Futekikakusha because of a recommendation from a friend, but at the time I was busy with another VN and didn’t quite have the time to fit it into my schedule so it just got added to my ever expanding wishlist on VNDB. For whatever reason most of the VNs I was reading prior to this one were generally comedy based and didn’t really explore too much on the darker side of things, which is originally why I picked it up. I craved for a darker setting; a story that wouldn’t pull it’s punches, and you could argue that is exactly what I got, even if the punches were a fair bit above my weight class.

Summary(Medium Spoilers included): As the game starts you’re greeted with a narration from Yuugao, one of the protagonist’s childhood friends along with her twin sister Asagao. The next half hour or so of reading is mostly just an exposition dump disguised as Yuugao writing in her diary. She introduces Itsuka(the protagonist) along with all the other heroines and the rest of the class during this time, as well as give a bit of information on the setting and a few of the more important characters. Even though it’s just giving out a ton of information, the fact that it’s filtered through Yuugao’s lens provides a huge amount of development to her character, which is a really important element. Eventually the class decides to take a commemorative photo for Haruka, the new transfer student(and main heroine).

In the middle of taking the photo however, a black mark appears on Yuugao’s forehead and the atmosphere immediately flips gears and suddenly becomes more somber. The background music is nothing but a lone piano playing its sad tone and all of the classmates begin to say goodbye to Yuugao as she apologizes for all of the trouble she’s caused up until this point. Now it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the mark means that Yuugao is going to die, but when the time comes and the mark actually activates, it becomes apparent that the situation is far worse than it appeared. That mark on her forehead; it gives her superpowers. cool right? not so much. As she gains her powers, Yuugao loses control of her body. She still feels everything and can speak, but her body is about to go on a rampage and kill everyone in it’s path.

This is where Itsuka comes in. He has similar superpowers but is able to control them, meaning he is the only person who can save her from this horrible fate. After an interesting fight scene where Yuugao instructs Itsuka about her attacks and tries to help him win, Itsuka eventually subdues her body. Normally, this would be the end of the scene; Yuugao would later wake up to find herself in control of her body or something happy like that. That’s not the case here though. Remember how I said this game doesn’t pull its punches? well here comes the first one. With superhuman powers comes superhuman regeneration. If you can put two and two together, that means that Yuugao is not free from her curse yet, she’s just been temporarily liberated. The only way to truly end it is to destroy her brain, thus disabling her ability to regenerate. Itsuka knows this, and what follows is a traumatizing scene where Itsuka repeatedly slams his fists into Yuugao’s skull, all the while she is screaming in pain and telling him that she enjoyed the life that she was able to live with him. Itsuka finishes it off with one final crushing blow that contains all of his strength, and then screams in pain himself as he realizes that he has just killed his childhood friend. Tokiwa Itsuka is now a murderer.

That fact alone should be enough to keep most people from playing this game, but Yuugao is just the start. Combined between all the routes, Itsuka kills each of his original classmates, including his teacher, and each of the heroines in turn tries to help him cope with the stress of being a murderer before he eventually is forced to kill them too.

General Thoughts: If it wasn’t already obvious, I can’t recommend this game to most people; but if you read all of that and are still interested then be my guest. The game is by no means bad, even if it does suffer from some fairly sizable flaws. The biggest downfall I found was that each of the side heroine’s routes was basically the same scenario just with different characters. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I think they did a really good job with the emotions of the characters. Some lash out, knowing that they will die soon anyways; others try to end it early, and the whole time Itsuka’s emotions are all over the place as he struggles just to keep his sanity in the midst of this horrible scenario. Overall, I can look back and say that I enjoyed it, even though the story did a few things that I specifically never wanted to experience.

Story: As a whole, the story was decent. It does have a true route that builds off of each of the character routes, and it at the very least serves its purpose of keeping the reader interested, but it doesn’t do much more than that. Aside from the horrifying murder scenes, there’s not much to talk about here.

Characters: The cast as a whole does a great job here. Every character that’s on the screen for more than a few lines has a sprite and a voice. Many of the scenes would not have worked well if the characters were not well developed, but in all cases they were able to at least get the effect intended with the scene. My personal favorite character was Yuugao, partially because I like her voice a lot, but I can’t think of any characters that I didn’t like in this game.

Art: As you can see from the CGs, the art is pretty good. I wouldn’t really consider it a selling point of the game(especially because you picked the WRONG game if you came for cute characters), but its good enough to convey every emotion from all the characters and you can’t really ask for much else here.

Music: The music plays a pretty big role here, and does a phenomenal job too. Many of the songs are just a single piano, but each song sets the perfect atmosphere for the scene. Though not every song is an amazing listen by itself, as a whole I thought the music was very well done. There are even a few songs that stick really well in my memory and help me to remember some of the more emotional scenes.

System: For the most part, it’s just a standard VN system. No cool Gesture recognition or anything fancy like that; just the usual right click menu and all the standard functions that come with it. There were some cool special effects (mostly with the superpowers and/or blood), but those are all but standard in most recent Visual Novels. It’s not really a complaint, but the default font did take a bit of getting used to. Other than that there aren’t really any problems.

Concluding Thoughts: I came to Houkago no Futekikakusha looking for a dark and depressing story but I left with more than that. In the end it was actually one of the first stories to satisfy my lust for darkness, and the next VN I played I hoped was back to the usual light comedy and character based story for once. When I think about it, it actually comes off a bit like Dark Souls; I can’t really recommend it to most people, but if you just so happen to be a masochist and can actually make it to the end then it might be one of the best stories you’ve ever experienced.

Bonus CG: