Your friend and mine, Aoba Seragaki: let's talk about DRAMAtical Murder
As someone who has been on Tumblr since the early 2010s, I'm no stranger to Aoba Seragaki’s face. In fact, I often say that I spent most of my life being terrorized by him. However, even after I got into nitro+chiral, I didn't really have an interest in playing DMMD, so I ended up leaving it for last.
I had always seen people talking about how it's a “traumatizing” game to play, and I wondered if it got that reputation for being a bunch of teenagers’ first experience with an eroge(one made by nitro+, at that), or if it was going to be something like a BL version of Gore Screaming Show—I was a bit disappointed to discover that it was the former. Like, I'm sorry, but this one is literally cute. It isn't scary at all! I spent all that time afraid for nothing! Ahem.
It's certainly the most visually pleasing game they've ever put out. A very pretty UI, colorful character designs and backgrounds—everything looks so good, it's eye candy to the max. The soundtrack isn't my absolute favorite, but it's pretty damn good. I'm not much of a Goatbed fan, but all the songs fit the game so well, it's really nice.
The story is set in the island of Midorijima, a once-peaceful place now encroached by Toue, a mega corporation that seems intent on punishing all the residents they didn't manage to drive out. While his friends are going around having gang fights or playing a popular fighting game called Rhyme, Aoba prefers to work his part-time job and steer clear from trouble, but a string of disappearances and a series of mysterious e-mails have him face against Toue—and his own past, which he doesn’t seem to remember very well… You know, since I first saw a picture of him on my dashboard at 12 years old, I had always assumed that Aoba was about 16, so discovering his actual age was a huge surprise. A 23-year-old guy who lives with his grandma—from that moment on, I welcomed him into my heart with open arms and started to consider him my dear friend.
There's 4(+1) routes, and you can see your affection points as dots in the menu. It’s a pretty simple and linear VN, but the scrap segments were super fun and creative—I enjoyed them a lot, especially Noiz’s.
I like Koujaku but his route was my least favorite, mostly because I was still expecting another kind of game, so getting that was kind of disappointing. First route growing pains I guess.
Noiz was a huge surprise for me. I couldn't believe that such an ugly guy(sorry…!) had such a good route. Kind of eye-opening. It was all so cute and romantic, I was in awe.
Mink’s route was the first time where I felt that the game was delivering what I first expected from it. Those h-scene were insane.Because of the way I’d see people talking about Clear, I always assumed he was a really scary person. He was, without a doubt, the character I was most curious about. I wondered what on earth would happen when he took his mask off… and it turns out that what happened was my favorite scene in the entire VN. It was so beautiful — he was so beautiful! My favorite route and my favorite character by far and large—nothing quite like crying during an h-scene… Now I'm wondering if his bad end is the reason for his reputation, but as I said: it's literally cute.
I was going in blind so I kind of thought the game was over at this point, and then I realized who the last route was. That certainly explained the rest of the rumours I heard. Not even counting the robot doggy, that was an insane story, but a very sweet route overall. I liked it (and Ren) a lot more than I expected. It also had the dumbest title drop in the whole world.
I didn't dislike this VN at all(should be pretty obvious considering my website), but I couldn't quite love it. It's a weird feeling, like everyone else was able to get a lot more out of it than me. Maybe I don't have enough love to see it…oh well. I'll probably get around to re:connect one of these days.