💾 Archived View for yujiri.xyz › writing › mc-revenge › self-critique.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:22:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

MC's Revenge

MC's Revenge creator self-critique

I'm not happy with how I handled Monika's dialogue and death in the endings where they kill her. In the reddit post I said to Monika fans who were offended by Rainclouds and New Eyes that I didn't think this would offend them because the best ending is the one where you forgive Monika. What a stupid thing I said! This mod treats Monika worse than those two. Rainclouds and New Eyes only cover the canonical Act 1-2, so criticizing them for villifying Monika isn't fair, but MCR covers Monika being confronted by her victims with awareness and if Sayori wasn't saved, she still doesn't hesitate to try to murder them as well and has to be killed. I could've given her more credit than that. I knew I had to include bad endings, but it would've been really interesting if you could make Monika repent and she actually demonstrated a sincere intention to reform, but MC and the others wouldn't hear it if Sayori wasn't saved and killed her anyway. Maybe they could kill her before Monika had a chance to restore Sayori, or I could've contrived a reason why she couldn't to make their lack of forgiveness understandable.

I kind of wish I'd explored just how horrible the implication is that even if they all survive and don't have the nightmare problem, they're stuck in a world with only the 5 of them. That's a horrific fate. It's not obvious how this could've been handled well, since if it were true, suicide would be an *extremely* reasonable decision. Or more accurately, the moral course of action would be for the player to not leave them permanently, and try to give them something approaching a meaningful life as friends/advisors. If it were real and they could communicate with the player (which the President should be able to through dialog options or text files), this wouldn't actually be degenerate like Monika's plan for Act 3. (The "you would be crippling Player's real-world life" argument I contrived for Return To The Portrait is BS and I knew it when I wrote it, but I had to come up with something to justify Monika's actions in DDLC.) So it's a nontrivial problem, but I wish I'd tried to deal with this.

In the Good (not Perfect) ending, I didn't handle Sayori's reaction to the epiphany very well. It makes sense that she reacted a lot less than in either the normal or premature endings to DDLC because here she knew about it beforehand, but it still could've been way better. I should've had her describe how it felt and give some perspective on what it was like for Monika.

The Evil ending is also kinda stupid. No doubt MC's too quick to accept it, and the suggestion that they see being in the space room with the two of them forever as a desirable fate is insane, way worse than how #2 applies to the other endings. Also, it's kind of a plothole that if you tell them you're going to reset the game if they won't let the others stay, they just give up on stopping you instead of making some attempt to negotiate.