Subarashiki Hibi
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Subarashiki Hibi ~Furenzoku Sonzai~ (2010) is a Japanese visual novel that turns out a horror mystery which goes deep into the main character’s mind.
Despite its flaws, it’s my favorite Japanese VN ever, among the maybe two dozen I’ve played. Expect heavy spoilers below.
Playing Subarashiki Hibi. The first “choice” in this game was pretty interesting. The group is playing Ousama game and the heroine has drawn the Ousama stick and coerced into asking someone to kiss her. So the options are “Stick 1”, “Stick 2”, and “Stick 3”. Of course you have no idea who is who, but each leads to route for different heroine in the first chapter. That chapter has no other choices, and then the next chapter comes with rapid fire of choices but all of them are meaningless.
This game is great. Constantly exceeds my expectations.
This just gets better and better. Now the third part with the boy protagonist Mamiya. I think the twist will be that Mamiya and Yuki are somehow “switched”. Because the interactions between the two are weird and limited, and some of their actions overlap, like being at Zakuro’s suicide site. Just now he wakes for the first time at his real home, and it’s clear it’s the same building where Yuki lives, maybe even the same room (do both views show a bed?). Maybe with some stretching they could even be the same person. And all the chapters could be showing the same events. In reality, I think what will happen is there will be some twist but it won’t be that believable and won’t explain everything nicely, but the reader will nevertheless have a great experience. The impossibility of piecing the story together just makes you want to read more, so incomprehensibility is actually good for business, at least in this kind of fiction that will likely be only read once.
Couldn’t sleep last night thinking about Subarashiki Hibi. I think I figured out the mystery, then today spent several hours replaying the previous chapter to see if everything fit. Took notes worth two sides of an A4 paper. Really fun.
Playing Subarashiki Hibi for the whole day. What an amazing game. It’s a bit long-winded at times, but most VNs are. I think I’m past the middle, just reached Zakuro’s POV chapter. I wrote some theories on paper earlier and they seem to fit very well so far, but there are also many new unanswered questions now. Not sure if I could figure out them on my own at this point. I’ve been waiting for these other POVs. I have little idea what the others could be though. Maybe if they are not that long, there could be Takushi’s imouto, and maybe the bully Yuuki Tomosane, who probably is not what he seems. Kimika also would work, but I feel like her story is already told well enough by Takushi and Zakuro.
The osanajimi twins are also a mystery. At first I thought they were imagined too. But the people in the base seemed to see them, albeit as something else. And apparently there is someone who Takushi “refuses to acknowledge”. I wonder if this bunch of characters overlaps in some way. Like Tsukasa is the imouto and Kagami is the “dead” brother.
Again playing Subarashiki Hibi for the whole day. Finished Zakuro’s chapter and started Tomosane’s. The game just keeps getting better, continuously adding new stuff and locking together pieces of the puzzle. It manages that amazing feat when the story leads you along some theory, proves it wrong or only partly correct, and then proceeds to lead you to another theory, repeatedly. It gives the clues to arrive to “wrong” solution, but in the end the clues don’t become false, it’s just that you were not shown the whole picture. I know this pattern abstractly somehow, but I’m not sure if I can name any work that does it, at least not as well as this. The trilogy by Cixin Liu maybe? What I described is a kind of mystery trope/technique, but that trilogy did kind of a scifi version of it where instead of revealing something previously meticulously hidden, it changes the status quo by the same amount by the power of speculative fiction.
Playing Subarashiki Hibi for the whole day. Cleared Tomosane’s and Hasaki’s chapters. It’s still great, but the exposition is a bit too blunt. I liked the mystery feeling of the earlier chapters, but now it’s like the author wants to spell out every little thing that’s already obvious. Also, looking at a walkthrough, it seems like the rest will be mostly from Tomosane’s viewpoint, probably going for the final happy ending and tying up all loose ends.
I think Mamiya’s POV chapter was by far the best — also Kimika best girl and better together with Mamiya than with Zakuro. I would like to see some conclusion and alternative events from his perspective, but that said I don’t really know what it should be. It seems like Mamiya is now being portrayed as a complete villain so I suspect it indeed will be mainly Tomosane from now on.
I found Mamiya Takuji quite a deep character. His villainity arises from him being so weak and assaulted by the madness. Towards the end he’s so out of his mind that it’s mostly Kimika running the show. Yet he manages to protect Hasaki from harm in the basement. The horror in that chapter was great — it might actually be the first time in my life I truly enjoyed a horror story. The voice actor is amazing, I can still hear Mamiya’s screams in my head. Tomosane’s VA is also really good, but I kind of tired listening to it for a whole chapter. Takuji-Kimika romance was the best so far, a bit similar to Nekoko from Yume Miru Kusuri. It didn’t even have sex, the “good end” route that is.
I very rarely enjoy sex scenes in VNs, and this game is not a big exception, but I do feel like there is more “story” to each sex act in there. There are rapes, hallucinations, bullying, drugs, etc. Tying with the horror aspect, I think the scenes I most “enjoyed” were those most disturbing — The bullies making Mamiya cross-dress, the orgy at the basement including the rape of Kagami, and Kimika’s forced public masturbation. Also not shown on screen but Nishimura finally having sex and bleeding out was so poetic. Mamiya had “healed him with elixir”, actually poured strong drugs in his stab wound to make him not feel any pain. When Mamiya wakes to see his dead body and Kimika asks if he should be “resurrected”, Mamiya says there is no need as Nishimura’s only desire was to have sex. Now that the need was fulfilled, there was no need for him to “move” any more. Hmm, I guess the whole end of the Mamiya chapter was kind of catharsis for me, seeing all the bullies suffer and the main characters kill themselves too. I much like that kind of complicated emotional end over a happy one. That’s why I’d like to see more of Mamiya rather than Tomosane.
The trippy parts of Mamiya’s chapter were also awesome. In particular I remember the voice of a physics teacher playing into his delusions. Riruru was also so out-there — that scene where a multitude of her copies fight each other like grasshoppers, making a bizarre sound. As with other characters Ayana also makes appearances, but I liked best the ones with Mamiya. She talks about a hypothetical Mamiya forced to live a perfectly happy life for eternity, driving him mad. Also she planted the idea of the “death was hidden from us”, which Mamiya preaches at the school. That preach scene, first seen in Yuki’s POV, sent shivers down my spine. I think I have seen the screenshot of that Mamiya on /a/ before — I want to search for some threads after I finish the game.
I still don’t understand what Ayana is. I was surprised when Hasaki could see her, the most obvious explanation so far had been that she was a hallucination of Mamiya. Maybe like the other hallucinations she is based on some real person from the past. Maybe she is just some kind of devil or manifestation of “the curse”.
Finished Subarashiki Hibi. It was downhill after Zakuro’s chapter, and frankly I skipped large portions of it. Explaining too much obvious things and the it was all so vanilla VN stuff that you wonder if it was even written by the same people. The stuff around the middle was so good, but I wouldn’t recommend myself play this ever again because the rest of it is so long.
I went afterwards to read some reviews on VNDB, and wow, I was surprised. The reviews by that “community” seemed even worse than MAL. Like people complaining about rape, homophobia, gay sex, and sex scenes in general. People saying the work was “philosophical” or masterpiece. People who quit during the first introductory chapter.
I had somehow imagined that the site was made of guys from /jp/, reading obscure untranslated VNs. But I guess these days lots of VNs have official translations on Steam or something. I even saw user lists made up of entirely western VNs, eww. I think you need to realize eroge are made for twisted men and are not a form of high art. That precisely becomes the value of the work as they don’t have to take it that seriously. If you get so upset by fiction, go live a real life or something, damn.
Okay, at least 4chan /a/ and /jp/ have more correct opinions of the game. I just need to remember to stay away from normal people on the internet. There was also this really good music track in the game which I had to search on YouTube (Denpa Relay no Shousha), but I made the mistake of reading the comments and it almost ruined it.
