Waifu who wants none of you VS waifu who wants your flesh

Back with another comparison between some toxic fixer-uppers of the 2020s: Nicole of Class of ’09 fame, and Mita of MiSide fame. I haven’t played Class of ’09 yet, but I’ve seen tons of gameplay of it as well as fan content (like the “anime” which begins with the American resource for the Life Crisis Hotline) to get the gist of how it goes, so hopefully this week’s post won’t come across as me talking with ass.

Swinging straight for the fences

I was first made aware of this game back in 2023 while waiting for good news from my recruiter and interspersed with weekly gameplay of House Flipper and Lucky Star when I saw several VTubers playing it, one of them being the most wholesome of them all: Pipkin Pippa. Specifically this clip:

Channel: Kaptain Krumpp’s Clips n Things (Formerly Chuck’s)

Late 2000s edge on MTV… If they ever tried to get something like this past the censors.

What’s the game about? Basically, it completely discredits the notion that the late 2000s, early 2010s period was a halcyon era for pop culture and recaptures it in letter, spirit, and post-grunge angst that would accompany nu-metal bands and media after 2001 or so. This may be exclusive to the States, and to a lesser extent Britain, but whatever the average American remembers of the 2000s may need to remove the rose-tinted glasses for a little bit.

Some may have better memories than others, but rather than answer “Remember the good ol’ days?” with “Yes, I do indeed,” the actual answer is “Yes, they sucked,” or “Yes, they were s[shotgun]t.” My own memories are sparse, but from what I remember being a kid at the time: school, the playground, my first dog, selectively asking for help because some of the adults in my life were absent or pushy (unable to help for the former; aggressive with their help for the latter, bonus points if they don’t like being critiqued about their quality of assistance), occasional news coverage of Middle Eastern/West Asian operations, the Obama-McCain campaign trail, and Michael Jackson’s assassination.

“Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?!”

Advertising itself as a rejection sim, Class of ’09 wears mud-stained glasses that haven’t been fixed in over 17 years and shows how trashy and unbearable the era could get. Sweary, bloody, viscous, raw, and irreverent; this could apply to a lot of things and a lot of people in our personal lives, reader. Your secret is safe with me–I won’t tell the missus about that one gag purchase of glow-in-the-dark condoms you bought.

The main character is high school senior Nicole who begins the game with the following statement: her mother is a bitch, her brother’s a competitive NEET predator, her father had sex with a loaded shotgun, making her own life comparatively worse than Jimmy Hopkins, but unlike young James who went to a New England boarding school in 2006 while his mother sponges off of dying rich men (explains a hell of a lot of Jim’s permanent record), Nicole’s most recent chapter is the apex of her life.

She does begin the game making an earnest attempt to play fair, but the world answers back with a middle finger at best and an erect todger at worst; and that aspect is another edgy highlight of the game. Without spoiling or alluding to anything, let me summarize the rest of the cast by calling the class and the faculty made up of the least serious, most assuredly unscrupulous people to ever set foot on an education campus. Real life schools outdo this one by light years, but the crazy s[achoo!]t that occurs here makes one wonder whether the principal isn’t accepting straw donations from a black magic cult. Then again, one of her employees is a white nationalist as shown above in the clip so there’s no such thing as an outlandish claim. Maybe one of the teachers was on Epstein Island, or the bastard child of Jim Jones. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This visual novel with a different flavor of ice cream also has multiple endings and each one has something to say about the characters, the player, and the nature of the situation in which she winds up, some of which are disturbing enough that the Posthumous Narrator trope fits extremely well, so the voice acting and writing already get an A-plus. Nicole the character is the trademark troubled kid whose third parent is cynicism and pessimism, reinforced by the world’s devil-may-care attitude toward her although, she doesn’t exhibit anything relating to the dark triad traits. She edges extremely close, but veers off into sociopathy than psychopathy. What’s the difference? Sociopaths can still feel empathy, have a clear timeline from trauma to current outlook, and are largely selectively antisocial. Nicole’s nihilism isn’t minted in her DNA; it took life being itself for her to get to that point, or she wouldn’t have a friend in Jecka.

The one person Nicole trusts with her darkest secrets and to bury a body if needed.

Don’t take this to mean Jecka (or Jessica) is any sort of foil for Nicole. She is not; in fact, she’s her equal. Nicole’s default is already “I’d fix her, but whatever is wrong with her is way hotter” taken to one of its logical conclusions, so Jecka doesn’t offer many checks and balances on Nicole’s behavior. At best, she’s along for the ride. Does that make her as bad as Nicole? I don’t think it’s compatible. Nicole does bad things, not because she has anything to prove, but because she wants to and as any angsty teen with trademark cynicism and skepticism would do, she’s gonna bend or exploit the rules past the fracture point.

Jecka’s gonna encourage her, rebel in her own ways (if that fan-made anime is any indicator), or she’s gonna stick it out with Nicole to see what else they can do. Which separates the two from the main antagonist of the next game up for comparison: Mita.

The toxicity in this “romance” is subtle, but like Class of ’09, it’s also present at the first leg if you know where to look. I mentioned before that simply being a gentleman in this context is helping Mita with specific things. If you explore around her apartment, clean up her things, or other stuff without her asking you first, you essentially fail and explore the game based on what happens when you deviate slightly. The core of Miside isn’t “Girlfriend Experience,” it’s “master-slave.” Obey her and be her pet; disobey her and suffer the dark consequences.

And you the player learn that you’re not the first, nor will you ever be the last to fall for this trap. Other players who have the in-game app eventually get suckered in. Based on your performance, as I highlighted earlier, Mita audits your progress. Running into other players along the way, “past players” of sorts, shows that they either failed to obey, failed to escape, or accepted their fate in the carnival horrors Mita put them all through.

This strict audit of behavior extends to other versions of Mita as well. Along the way, you run into these other versions isolated or kept ignorant of the ongoings of the main Mita you first interact with: Crazy Mita. Some aid you, some hurt you, some are psychologically manipulated, some are in revolt, and the rest merely want to exist in the peace that Mita will allow.

The level of control Crazy has over the rest of them is near-omnipotent. Imagine Santa Claus or Krampus but even darker–and let’s be real, Santa himself is a little dark. A fat elf who watches you all year to make sure you’re a well-behaved child for the promise of gifts… aren’t there some people who would want that kind of pow–wait.

Before I Google it, let me get all Columbo and assess whether this level of paranoia is present in toxic codependent relationships. Dominant partner ruthlessly slashes and vets any and all outside parties who are in some manner related to the submissive partner, even down to friends and family; maintains a close eye on who they talk to even transactionally or platonically; the home is under strict surveillance and “happy life, happy home” can be perverted to the dominant partner’s goal of narcissistic control. Now what does Google-san say?

My instincts and The Beatles song “Run For Your Life” were right. And this brings up the differences between Nicole and Mita. Nicole is a sociopath; Mita is a psychopath. Observing the games and their respective behaviors, Nicole couldn’t give a toss whether the person she’s talking to is a yes-man; Mita does. Mita literally physically adds the player to notches in her bedpost, converting the player into a collectible GBA cartridge with the others; Nicole cares little for the names of those who interact with her. Not the teachers, not her classmates (sans Jecka), not even her own family who can burn in hell with the rest of them.

Within their own games, the differences are also reflected in the genre. Class of ’09 is more black satire of the late-2000s in America, Miside is a love letter to visual novels, romcoms, horror games, and others with a yandere aspect done many times better than what YandereDev was doing with Yandere Simulator.

(ノへ￣、)

So why not compare Miside with YanSim? YanSim has the same problem Beyond Good and Evil 2 has development-wise. It’s unfinished and the characters there are incomplete despite starting off strong visually. Miside and Class of ’09 meanwhile are completed projects with passion behind them both and detailed characters to interact with, be it multiple versions of the same character or a student body.

Both also feel like a counter to the romcom VNs we already have, which includes this one:

Visual novel but anti-romance black satire, visual novel with variety and horror elements, visual novel but dating game aesthetic.

All things considered, lumping these all together feels like cataloging an answer to a visual novel singularity that I wasn’t aware was ongoing as I’m not inherently the target audience, but nor am I the target audience for isekai animanga yet I consume enough of them to know that isekai itself also headed toward a singularity that needed to find new ways to twist the formula over time.

Channel: Joey Bizinger

There’s even an isekai light novel dedicated to truck-kun 〒▽〒 or in this case, truck-chan.

Stupid tangents! So anyway, one visual novel looks at 2000s Americana with sludge-stained glasses, another game deconstructs the romance aspect with a yandere who uses you like she does the others, and isekai doesn’t need to die. It won’t, it’ll just reincarnate into another world (or as another world somehow); it just needs to hibernate. Does that count as isekai-lite?