longer.blue

I just finished Blue Pictures of a Day Dream, a game I had an on-off relationship with all year. When I play games – or consume any other type of media, really – I tend to build relationships with a handful of works that left an impression on me. What I mean by relationship is that I have always strongly linked various media to specific periods of my life. Just like Romeo and Juliet was written by Shakespeare during the English Classic Period and has been strongly linked with it, in a similar way Pokémon LeafGreen is a certified classic of my primary school days. What works leave impressions on me, or what I mean by impression, is frankly sometimes random. More often than not, however, it is works that I personally value highly and that happen to overlap with certain periods of my life. Now, this is probably something everybody does. It boils down to nothing more than the act of memories being made. I think I simply tend to romanticise certain areas more than others. I remember a time I absolutely hated going to school, but also had a rough time at home. The only real flashes of equilibrium back then were my trips to and from school, when I just slipped on my headphones, walked, and dissociated. There was a particular song back then I was obsessed with. It was a cover by Yamai of a song called suki de suki de, which I unearthed from the depths of a playlist of my favourite YouTuber back then. It was also the very first Japanese song I had ever listened to (I used to actively disregard and look down on Japanese music back then). I still remember those brief periods of peace of mind vividly, and the song is always playing in the background. Of all the different and numerous factors that kickstarted my academic career, it was probably this song that had the most influence on me. When I started university, I was nothing more than a fragile bundle of insecurities. I happened to play a lot of Nintendo Switch games in 2017, which was the year it was released. I played Breath of the Wild and Fire Emblem: Three Houses back then. I made new friends, and my whole worldview changed multiple times, which thematically layered itself with those games. When I think of early university, I think of those games. I have a surprisingly long-running and deep history with visual novels. One of my dreams when I started learning Japanese – even before university – was being able to read a visual novel in Japanese one day. That dream formed at a time when translations of even the more popular visual novels were extremely uncommon, unlike nowadays. I didn’t even fully realise that dream had been fulfilled when I read Higurashi no Naku Koro ni together with one of the most valuable people in my life, in one of the most personal social experiences I had ever had. I grew up in an environment where peer pressure was rigid and bullying was common. There wasn’t really space for deviation unless you were prepared to end up crying on the floor with a teacher looking down on you and doing absolutely nothing to stop it. As a result, I was ashamed of my nerdy, Japanophile hobbies and inclinations for most of my life. Even deep into my university life, and even up until today, I was never really fully able to shake off this mindset. However, those experiences of nerding out over a hyper-niche thing while performing slave labour at an underpaid job together nuked it more than anything. When thinking of Rennweg 22, I will never not think about Higurashi. At the tail end of a very special boat tour throughout Japan in 2023, I decided to get into Heaven Burns Red one day, after I had been dead sea-sick for about 32 hours. I quickly got into it due to an actual writer writing the prose – Maeda Jun – who my younger self admired a lot back when I watched anime like Angel Beats, Clannad, Kanon, Little Busters and even Air. I remember one week in January 2014, when I severely struggled with my mental health. I decided to rewatch Clannad After Story, because to this day it is probably the one piece of fiction that emotionally devastated me the most. Sometimes life is rough and you need something that makes you ugly-cry so hard that your brain fluid drips out of your nose. I beat chapters 4.1 and 4.2 of Heaven Burns Red in winter of 2023 and, aside from being phenomenal, it hit me at a time when university really started to strain me heavily. I started to have second thoughts regarding my direction in life, I had performance anxiety, and above all, I started to think I might not have what it takes to even finish my undergrad. Not only did these feelings align uncannily with the story, they alleviated at least the part of me that had started to regret my path in life. I started to appreciate again how magical it was to be able to read Maeda’s prose in its rawest, purest form and how far our (very parasocial) relationship had come. I first watched Kanon (2006) sometime in 2011–12 with German subs, not understanding a lick of Japanese. Ten years later and I was able to appreciate the raw artistry. It was a very powerful and transformative experience. In 2024, I finally achieved a big milestone in my life, and I did it quite literally by reading The House in Fata Morgana. There will probably never come a day in my life when I don’t think about Michel, Giselle and Morgana first when I try to remember anything relating to my academic career. Now 2025 is coming to a close. It will also be the third year in a row a visual novel is decidedly my personal game of the year. It also makes me sad, in a way. Visual novels are a dying medium: not interactive enough to satisfy gamers and not book-like enough to be approachable. They have always been niche, but they also frequently took risks and crafted stories that no game dared to, and books didn’t have the audio-visual layer to mimic the experience. They more often than not contain themes that no moderately popular video game would dare to touch at the risk of hurting sales figures and alienating audiences. The market is getting more rigid and people have less and less money to spend. This hurts niche products more than anything, as they have never been massively profitable to begin with. I believe Heaven Burns Red to be an exceptionally written game DESPITE being a gacha game, for example. I disagree with HBR being a gacha game, but even more so do I understand why it has to be one. Everybody has a different idea of what makes good art or bad art, which is very welcome and makes life interesting. For me, exceptional art has always been works that are both emotionally and intellectually challenging. I was always drawn to stories that made me think and also made me ugly-cry. This brings this whole tangent back to Blue Pictures of a Day Dream, which, luckily, ticks both boxes. This year was a rather introspective time for me, and I didn’t really get into the proper headspace to sit down and immerse myself in something that requires a modicum of attention span. I finally did it, though, and with it I can finally lay my Switch 1 to rest. I do think that the structure of the visual novel is a little confused. While it was never bad and it is a very well-made piece throughout, the sub-stories felt a little detached from the main meat of the story, even though I appreciate what their narrative function is. They also make the visual novel very back-heavy, as all three sub-stories are mandatory to unlock the main chapter 0. I was surprised that the story is very chronologically linear, because it didn’t seem like it for most of it. The final chapter, however, was even more layered and complex than I expected and was an amazing read overall. I envy the writer for the sheer richness of ideas that went into the script. Even though I felt a few of those ideas turned out a bit undercooked, a lot of them went the full distance and I loved it. It made me angry, it made me sad, I felt frustration one minute and then I ugly-cried the next. If nothing else, it stimulated me in a way that made me write this long-ass text in one go at two o’clock in the morning on a work day. Hats off to Laplacian, and thank you for creating. Disclaimer: This text was written during visual novel post-nut clarity.