I dunno, I mean, Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri all have qualities I like. Which, I suppose, is sort of the point. Probably Sayori > Natsuki > Yuri but it's reasonably close.

Sayori does have that irresistible adorableness, and she definitely made me laugh the most out of any of the characters, but for me, knowing why she acts that way makes it harder to appreciate her demeanor since it's coming from such a horrible place. I do love her as a character, the way her depression is portrayed is incredibly well-done and out of the four girls, she definitely resonates in a way the others don't, but at the same time, realizing that she's specifically crafted that way to make the player regret any choice they make in act one definitely adds a layer of artificiality to her character for me. It's tough, I really like her, but it's almost hard to rank her with the others as she comes across almost as more of a plot device than a character a lot of the time. (Which, yes, is pretty much the point, and goes for the others as well, just not to the same extent, at least for me.)

Natsuki was easily my favorite, mostly because of how she's the sanity anchor in the sea of madness, for the most part. I really like the subtle character work she gets, and I found how genuinely happy she was on the weekend date to be really touching (and very sad, obviously). As opposed to Yuri's, which...

I cannot stand Yuri. Maybe it's because I've seen at least 10 Let's Plays of the game and they ALL go for her, but I just find her totally insufferable at this point. She just comes across to me as a total (pun partially intended) edgelord tryhard. Which, yeah, she's a teenager, so it makes sense, but her personality and mental problems definitely strike me as the most contrived and "anime" out of everyone. Maybe there's a layer to her I'm missing, or maybe I'm being biased by the game forcing her into prominence in act 2. It just seems to me like the whole erotomanic masochism angle + the weird, bipolar (colloquial usage) shy introvert/obsessive stalker personality are totally over the top compared to the completely believable depression and abuse angles Sayori and Natsuki have going on.

If anyone has any insights into what I'm not getting from her, though, I'd love to hear them. I have to be missing something if so many people consider her their favorite.

And finally, I really do adore Monika. I don't consider her a villain at all, and I think the way she's written is just incredibly smart. She's (amusingly) like an incarnation of everything the game is about. The way she's able to just literally spoil the plot for you in act 1 and almost no one realizes it because it's so cleverly written is just awesome. Not to mention, as someone who thinks about AI ethics a fair bit, I'm definitely very sympathetic to her predicament. I know there's a lot of people think she's a genocidal Yandere, but her logic makes complete sense to me. Even going with the interpretation that the other girls are actually non-self-aware AIs in the story, that just makes her tragically mistaken to me, not evil. I felt safe for the first time in my playthrough once we got to the void classroom. I went through the whole game expecting Chthulu and instead got a tormented, lonely AI, so it was a really awesome cathartic twist for me that helped ground all the crazy things that had happened in a way that wouldn't keep me from sleeping for the rest of my life lol.

I suppose for me that part of it is that I'm semiconsciously extrapolating what their unaltered personalities are like instead of the Monika-fudged versions.

Sayori being the type who compensates for her depression through extraversion is the kind of character that appeals to the caretaker part of me. Without Monika ramping the depression up to fatal levels and without a power rush pushing her to mania, the implied baseline personality in between them is at a level that's probably manageable.

Natsuki's sanity is certainly appealing, and visually I find her the cutest, but her personality doesn't quite click as well for me, which keeps her from being an obvious winner.

I don't get the edgelord vibe from the hypothetical baseline Yuri. Baseline Yuri recognizes that her self-harm and her knife obsession are dangerous and unhealthy, so she keeps it secret, and she focuses on her other interests with other people. This by definition makes her baseline personality not an edgelord, because (without Monika twisting her knobs) she's not reveling in how edgy it is and she isn't using it for social signaling. So yes, I think the way the game forces her character in Act 2 probably IS coloring your perspective.

For me, learning to cope with my own interpersonal issues while growing up makes my default means of interacting with people center around empathy and trying to understand their motivations while accepting their flaws as not being central to who they are. On the one hand, it does leave me looking kinda naive about people, but on the other hand, the reason I ended up growing up this way is that it made it a lot easier for me to get along with a wide variety of people.

And speaking of altered personalities, I had an insight while I was driving earlier: Natsuki and Yuri aren't acting like themselves in Act 4 either. Sayori, too, adjusted their code. She knew that trying to make them unlikeable wouldn't work because Monika tried and failed, so instead she made them develop attachments to each other in order to keep them distracted away from the protagonist, giving her time alone with him.

Ooh, I knew I forgot something in that post. I meant to talk about the ramped-up personalities but it slipped my mind. I agree 100% about Sayori, and I might even contend (warning, this is pointless) that if the MC wasn't such a useless tool, that proper treatment and care could have brought her back from the brink even at the end. But, like happiness, there are no hospitals or licensed mental health professionals in the world of the literature club. But I can't help speculating at times. :P

Natsuki... hmm. I'd actually say her act 1 personality is the most appealing to me, in terms of what I was describing above (and there's probably a discussion to be had over whether their act 1 personalities haven't been tampered with by Monika, but it's all we have to go on). I will also say, though, that character-ranking notwithstanding, her cry for help letter in act 2 about Yuri is one of the most interesting moments of the game for me. I'm not quite sure what I think that's implying about Natsuki there yet, but it seems like the best evidence for the other girls having a level of autonomy beyond just being pre-programmed VN characters.

But as for Yuri, I can definitely see where you're coming from. I guess when I call her an edgelord I mean more in terms of her writing style, attitude about poetry, and general interests. I think I have an inherent dislike for poets who think they're good poets, though Natsuki thinks that as well obviously. I feel like in her case, though, it's an extension of her superiority/inferiority complex rather than with Yuri just being full of herself (like a lot of teenage poets tend to be, it must be said). On the other hand, though, Wheels is actually my favorite poem in the game in terms of just poetic appeal. Her other stuff just comes off to me as pretentious.

...no wonder I like Natuski better. :P

But, this:

You're the first person I've ever seen mention that, and that is goddamned depressing to consider. It kind of reminds me of Monika's talk about finding compatible friends, except in Sayori's reality, she's making two incompatible people be amazingly good friends.

Honestly, thinking about all of them as just being these superpositions of circumstance and their own nature fluctuating via forces beyond their perception or control is pretty damned nihilistic lol.

I'm pretty sure Monika would just about agree with you on that. Except Monika discovered that she can't alter the protagonist directly so she had to take more indirect means to manipulate him.

EDIT:
You should read up on Axiom Verge.

I won't advise that you play it because it doesn't seem like it'd be the type of game you'd want to actually play, but the story is up your alley I think.

Part of me thinks that should be "anti-novel" but I'm really...not sure.


If they made the poetry writing bit a little mini game I'd probably play the heck out of it, perhaps at times because of the little bouncy chibis and at others for the tiny personality hints that pop up.

I find the superficial similarities between Yuri and myself to be a little alarming, perhaps because of the fact that it seems so superficial, kind of like we're both wearing book jackets.

So, Coda - you both believe and DON'T BELIEVE in determinism in the sense of Monika's world... and most of that techno-babble you swept out of your massive mind-bucket onto us peasant-folk means that numbers seem to be the most important determining factor in understanding her dialogue - or the programming that went into it. ...

And yet you completely Missed the whole Other story taking place in the text you CAN'T read, the pictures you can't translate [uNless you dig super-deep and do some mega-level translation Into ASCII, binary, and some other complex langauges]... which, by the way, is totally a quasi-advertisement for the new game this company is working on - and is way, way darKer than anything yet touched on in the Actual game...

Which has more to do wIth the Sick and tWisted experiments thAt this one research faciliTy is experimenting witH on Yuri [as determIned by the 'secret' text that takes four differeNt proGramming languages to decipher... and probably is more of a hint to what You, as a player, can expect tO experience in the next Update to the franchise.

Personally, I'd be more intrigued about the underlying experiments, and what sort of "game" awaits us when they're finished with the game. I highly doubt you've put as much into the PICTURES as you have the number-crunching. Watch MatPat's theory on it sometime. You'll be pretty dang overwhelmed. Or interested. I dunno.

Beware Yuri. Beware Yuri. Beware Yuri. Beware Yuri. TOO LATE.

...I thought we brought up the pictures.

Meh. No really, meh. Possibly because I am the sort of person who would totally stuff all this sort of thing into a game just to see what game theory sorts would draw from it, ultimately having it go nowhere until I decided "why not?"

Better idea? Have the hypothetical related game come out later, like their fifth release or something, as another visual novel dating sim, and then do it again.
I think you missed a capital "C."

If he's right about the characters coming from another game, then it's a fictional game that does not exist and isn't going to exist any time soon, because Dan said Project Libitina is unrelated to the next game. Also, some of the content MatPat is highlighting as being part of the theory is actually fan art that Team Salvato got permission to sell merchandise of, so any hidden meanings there are derived from fan theories themselves instead of being canon material placed there by the author.

@Ari, should I be concerned if I'm being wathed?

And yes, we did bring up the pictures. I even went so far as to describe how I would have figured out that stuff if I hadn't had it spoiled for me.

I just want a little more Monika in my life.
A little bit of Monika on the side.
A little bit of Monika is all I need....

BUT WHAT IF THAT'S JUST WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK, CODA????

*duct-tapes tinfoil hat to head.* YOU CAN'T MAKE ME TAKE IT OFF THIS TIME, GALLA!

But speaking of pictures... I have to wonder if some of the glitched pictures contain concealed data. The Sombra ARG for Overwatch did; by comparing the corrupted image's data to the uncorrupted one, you could extract a hidden message. It'll be quite a bit harder in this case because we don't have the original. (Yes, Dan has posted a copy of the original, but it's been resaved so I doubt it's binary-identical.)

You mean the ones in game? They're not stored in the game files anywhere? (I have no idea how any of that works)

you gotta dig more info up Coda, I believe in you.

The specific images I'm talking about are the ones of Monika with distorted color bands. Dan posted the original uncorrupted version online at one point, so I could theoretically determine what changed between the two, but the possibility exists that it's some sort of distortion filter and not ACTUAL data glitching. (It actually looks like that's true at a glance, suggesting there's no hidden data there, but I haven't dug into it.)

Dan Salvato did say in the reddit AMA that pretty much everything of significance to be found in the game files had been discovered by that point, but... I also don't really trust anything he says, so, who knows.

No. More. Mambo jokes.

They are done now.


There's a political debate going on and I'm more interested in potential intent behind fan art used for theories on a video game.

I don't think there is intent, only miscommunication due to incomplete information.