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viridiave · 6 months

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A little love post to HORROR JRPGs

Content Warning:

So I'm gonna be talking a lot about some pre-Undertale era RPG Maker Horror games, and this post is gonna contain both spoilers and the discussion of the following:

Blood and Gore

Psychological horror

Child abuse

Sexual assault

Suicide

Violence

Fictional minors being put into very messed up situations, because that's just the kinds of games these are

Other upsetting themes

Hetalia (because I can imagine that all of us have very complex feelings about this fucking franchise. It existing feels like it needs a warning)

This post is a nostalgia trip and exists purely because uh. I have literally no one else to talk to about these games, and please just click away if any of the above makes you uncomfortable in any way. Some of this stuff can't exactly be handwaved as just being products of their time.

I'll draw smthn real quick later just to make up for it I promise

I'm like days late to Halloween but I just wanted to write this after getting a bout of nostalgia lmao

I absolutely fucking love Horror JRPGs - the freeware ones, even though I haven't touched one in a LONG time. I'm talking about the pre-Undertale era freeware games by the way, and in the first place I don't think I can consider Undertale a horror game but that's a topic for another day. OneShot also doesn't count aksjak OneShot gives me existential dread and a nonzero amount of guilt sure, but never terror

But let's dial that back a bit.

To begin with. 'Vir, you're a fucking coward, you run upstairs when you see that someone on TV has a gun. You can't stand watching horror movies. How the FUCK did this happen'

Weirdly, you can thank Hetalia for that. Specifically, the freeware Hetalia fangames that used to circulate on DeviantArt - that shit led me down this rabbit hole. And I guess it made sense, most Hetalia fangames are a coin toss between a horror game and a fantasy JRPG with countries getting isekai'd. I also played the fuck out of those.

For a bit of background, I love video games, but neither me nor my family ever really had that much spending power to buy game consoles, so my selection was pretty limited. Before I turned 18, I remember that we owned a GameBoy, a GameBoy Advance, a PSP, and one of those Fun-Sized Nintendo consoles with built-in games. We never bought cartridges either. I got my first DS from my dad on my birthday when I turned 18, and that's all the consoles that my family has ever owned. Still kinda jealous of my friends who have Switches, but eh - one day.

I just played a lot of Harvest Moon growing up, that's been my object of interest in my elementary days. The most of a horror game that I've been exposed to was watching my friends play Five Nights At Freddy's back in 5th grade.

Then high school happened, and I got new friends and shit - and was introduced to both more conventional horror games and Hetalia. Which is. A really weird combination when I think about it now, but everyone who was alive and kicking around in the early 2010's would know what HetaOni is, and you can see how that slope led to me playing freeware horror games. I'll always be grateful to these games, seeing as I never had easy access to mainstream experiences growing up.

I think I played HetaOni exactly once, on my first laptop. I played most Hetalia fangames exactly once, but they all just stayed on my old hard drive. None of them really had anything interesting going on gameplay-wise, I mean it's RPGMaker and these were people who just really wanted to make Hetalia fangames, but I remember some of them just sticking with me. I'd play them while I was away on trips to my grandmother's house, then watch let's plays on YouTube when I wasn't otherwise occupied with schoolwork. Really when I say Let's Plays I only mean KyoKoon64's - and that's how I was actually introduced to horror JRPGs.

CLOÉ'S REQUIEM

There's been a couple of times where they played some of the more recognizable horror JRPGs on their channel, but the first one I REALLY saw a playthrough on was one called Cloé's Requiem. I don't know what exactly it was about this specific game that stuck with me, and at the time I didn't know that this had like. More warnings than you would usually find on a horror JRPG. Calling it now, please look up said warnings before you try ANYTHING with this game - I can't promise quality and nuance, but I can promise great moments. Those moments stuck with me to this day, SOMEHOW, even after encountering games with better story and gameplay experiences… it's about a cursed 12 year-old boy trying to free a cursed 13 year-old girl, never getting a shot at the normal life he wanted and playing the violin because he can't do much else.

I think this game changed my life. Not in like, any grand manner mind you - but I feel like it's the game that best represented this time of my life as a weird high school outsider who obsesses over games that nobody's ever heard about. I was introduced to a lot of things through this game, it's just this whole volley of firsts that I wouldn't trade for anything else. Baby's first horror game, first jumpscare I ever consented to, first taste of games containing disturbing themes of sexual assault and gore, first trips to Pixiv and NicoNicoDouga - just all the fucking firsts. I wouldn't call it a great game, but it IS important to me.

When I think about it now, it's a game about curses. Michel D'Alembert is a talented violinist at 12, and his alcoholic father milks the shit out of this talent because they're not exactly what you would call well-off. His twin brother Pierre is a pianist, is nowhere near as talented as his brother, and hides his misery over this situation under a big-little brother façade. Cloé Ardennes is a pianist too, she's wealthy, talented, and still plays with her stuffed animals. She is cursed with an insane father who rapes her, and a mother who hates her. Charlotte is a young maid with nothing and tries her best, only to be killed because she happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Unsurprisingly things fall apart for everybody very quickly.

Pierre's frustrations with his spoiled, lazy brother boiled over, and he curses Michel out in a heated moment. This drives Michel to murder their Charlotte by accident, and she becomes his curse - he runs out of the house, kills cats, and finds himself in the dilapidated mansion that Cloé inhabits. Cloé by this point is already dead, and so is her dad, her parents, and the maids. Cloé's father may be her curse but she is the curse of this mansion, and it transforms into something hostile until Michel comes along and saves her from the shadow of her father. Michel plays her a requiem, and resolves to go home to confront his crimes - and back to Pierre, who regrets everything he's done. Watching the sun rise with a disappearing Cloé in the True Ending will likely be the last peaceful moment he will ever have in his life.

That's like. Not everything that happens in this game, but this post is already so goddamn long and I still have a lot of other stuff I want to talk about. But the gist of it to me nowadays is that these children are cursed with loveless lives and the whims of the adults that have power over them. In the end, their lives are all ruined. Cloé and Charlotte are dead, and we have no idea what becomes of Michel and Pierre when word gets out that Michel killed a maid and assaulted several others in the house in a fit of emotional instability. In every other ending, Michel is killed and Cloé remains an evil spirit, so really this is the best that anyone ever gets out of this experience.

I remember watching a playthrough of Con Amore on YouTube, but I understood none of it because it was in Japanese, and the game itself was untranslated at the time. It follows the cats Noir and Blanc and basically serves as an addendum to the base game - honestly it made me feel sorry for Charlotte, who was nowhere near as psychotic as Michel thought she was. There's also light novels, but international shipping is expensive and I don't know Japanese so. I'll just never figure out what happens to everyone after the game ends I guess

One of these days, I'll buy the remake on Steam - which exists, and I can't say I recommend it if everything I just listed bothers you in any way. But I can't shake the attachment I feel towards this game no matter how many years it's been, nor how uncomfortable its themes are, so you know - maybe one day. I'll go back to it.

So - following that, I got pretty curious about the other games in this genre of freeware horror. Ib is the one that everyone knows the best, both Markiplier and Pewdiepie played it so you KNOW it gets press, but even in Japan this game was a hell of a hit. To me, it's a simple game that I can finish in an hour, but man what an hour it can be.

If you were to play this game right now after seeing how much press it gets (which I think you should, it's on the Switch now! Go get it!), you MIGHT be a little disappointed. It's nowhere near as gory or disturbing as Cloe's Requiem for one and you know - a bunch of blood and guts and ghosts on the walls does not a good horror game make, but make your choices accordingly. Nah - instead this game's staying power lies in its atmosphere. Like how many games can you say take place inside of an art gallery where most of the pieces try to fucking murder you? I mean there's probably a lot, but something about Ib's almost ambient sense of dread and exploration just kind of sticks in people's brains. Everything's a little scarier when the shapes are so close to being discernable but aren't, and I guess that's the appeal and horror behind Guertena's gallery.

Ib herself is a mute protagonist, pretty typical, but she's also NINE, and the game will let you know that no matter how unfazed she gets or how precocious she can be, she is a child all the same - and children break very easily. I personally love how the game barely has to say anything about how shaken she actually is about her situation, because it will show you how - she has nightmares that you can't escape, she sees herself getting hanged, Garry will need to shake her out of her shock when she sees a picture of her parents in the gallery that should not exist. She loses all of her will to live when she loses Garry to insanity. And speaking of Garry…

There's one standout room in this game and it's the Doll Room. 10/10 would NOT recommend it to anyone who suffers from anxiety because WOW I did not think the RPG Maker 2000 engine could ever have been capable of that. Nobody blames Garry if this room fucks him up. I mean come on the dude has to literally rip open the stomachs of dolls to find a paint ball. Those sound effects make it sound like the dolls are made of skin and flesh and all the while the giant fucking doll is creeping out of the goddamn painting while some of the most anxiety-inducing background noise is playing -

Yeah no I don't know why I ever said you'd be disappointed by this game. Or maybe you still would, this is a low-res game made in 2012. But my god does it TRY to scare you in the best ways it can.

One of the best moments in this game I think is the one where Mary and Ib are alone together, and the conversation gets increasingly unhinged with Mary asking Ib questions non-stop with no background noise other than their steps. At this point, they're separated from Garry, and they're trying to find a way back to each other. Garry meanwhile is slowly piecing together the truth about Mary and how dangerous it is for Ib to remain alone with her, all the while still trying to figure out how to get back to both of them.

The section after that is in the Sketchbook which honestly? The vibes of this place are impeccable. Somehow it's fitting that one of the tensest areas in a game about a fine arts gallery is the place made entirely out of childlike scribbles.

Overall, I'd say the experience is well worth an hour or two - I'd recommend it happily over Cloé's Requiem, if only so you can have a taste of what Horror JRPGs were like before Omori came along. Yes I know that Omori isn't Japanese but it's very much in the same vein as these games.

OTHER GAMES

Those were the safe two that planted my feet firmly into the Horror JRPG fandom, but there's a lot of other titles out there, so let's go - lightning round!

Ao Oni is the ubiquitous one, like chances are you've at least HEARD of it in passing at some point in your life. Like this shit made it to the big screen in Japan, that's how much of a deal it was. I've never played the original myself, but it's partly because its formula of stuck in a mansion with a horror that chases you around is present in pretty much every Horror JRPG after its release in 2007. If you want some classic fun with the big blue demon though then you can't go wrong with the freeware version.

Mad Father and The Witch's House are part of what I like to call the Big 3 of JRPGs starring preteen girls experiencing the Horrors™, mostly because back in the mid-2010's I couldn't go three posts without seeing them all together. Mad Father is the only other one of said Big 3 that I've touched, because I was too coward to touch The Witch's House and Ellen's whole deal remains a mystery to me to this day. I think Mad Father got a remake a couple of years ago, so you can check that out if you want, but keep in mind that these two games in particular might not stoke the same kind of magical staying power that Ib somehow retained years after its release, and I know those two rely on jumpscares a lot more than Ib does.

I'll eat my fedora right here by the way, because one of my cardinal sins of being a Horror JRPG fan is that I've never played Yume Nikki. As far as these freeware games go, this is probably one of the more avant-garde ones - it's artsy, atmospheric, and a game best experienced by getting lost in the strange environments it provides. Out of every game on this post, this is the one I'd describe as the most Earthbound-esque, with its horror lying mostly in the surrealist ambience of just… wandering around in Madotsuki's mind. The end is just as quiet as the beginning, but is no less chilling to watch happen. Then you fuck around a little bit on Youtube and you find out what's actually going on, and uh - yeah that checks out, cosmic horror sounds par for the course at this point.

Yume Nikki and OFF are two of the games I think of when I hear about Horror JRPGs being talked about alongside Undertale - and nope, I haven't played OFF either. That's my other Horror JRPG sin. I was a picky teenager, but I've grown now and wow I need to find a time to play these games in peace. OFF actually isn't even Japanese, it was developed by Mortis Ghost and released in French back in 2008, making both pretty old and already pretty weird in the library. The reason I bring up OFF is because it's one of the older examples I know of that also incorporate Earthbound's precision 4th-wall breaks, and that it's a game about judgment and interrogates the player (more you than the Batter you play as, serving more as a vehicle that the game uses to ask questions through) about the choices they make in the game. OneShot is probably the one game in this genre of indie RPG that I know so far that employs this metaphysical idea of the player existing in the game in any kind of charitable fashion (aside from again, Earthbound and to some extent Mother 3), so between it, OFF, and Undertale they're what I'd refer to as the Interface Screw-RPG Trio.

Some other titles that I like are between the same devs, even some that I haven't really played to completion. Cloé's Requiem for example was made by Buriki Clock, and they've made other titles like Fantasy Maiden's Off Hideout and Trauma Traum - the latter I can't play because it doesn't have an English translation rip. Miwashiba is another dev which I think people who have a taste for light lolita goth-pastel colors would like, because my god the character designs in both Alice Mare and LiEat are peak. Don't even get me started on the fashion of 1BitHeart because everything in that game has such an impeccable aesthetic. I think I saw something at one point about 1BitHeart that like. Might count as a shared joke between Xenoblade fans, but I'd be hard-pressed to give context because again… packed schedule, who dis?

Just to talk about Alice Mare a little more, I've actually played this one - it sports a heavily storybook-inspired cast with some unique tastes on the tales. Most of my actual experiences with Alice Mare were from the English Light Novel, which I do still have! I really recommend it to people who have a couple of hours to spare on some light, relatively bloodless horror. Most of these games have Light Novels, come to think of it - hell Ib even has whole audio dramas, one of which was fanmade in English, and from what I remember of it the voice acting for Mary was PEAK.

One last dev I want to talk about is Segawa. I've saved them for last because their brand of horror is reserved mainly for one game, but their other games Farethere City and Tower of Hanoi are no slouches either. I don't know much about Tower of Hanoi (or if it even has an English translation right now), but Farethere City is a pretty cute experience as far as pseudo-horror games go from what I've heard, which is probably good for us because their other standout game is anything but cute.

END ROLL

Ah, End Roll. The last of the Horror JRPGs I've played before school kicked me even harder in the shins and I had barely any time for it. Out of all the games I mentioned on this list, this is the one with the most staying power in my brain - and also the one that influenced me the most.

So, I don't talk a lot about my original works. Nobody asks, so I don't overshare. But some of the prevalent overarching themes of my personal mythos are those of guilt, self-love, and the burdens of love. All of these themes were lifted directly from End Roll - which is to say, End Roll actually only deals in guilt, my brain just ran buckwild with trying to wrap itself around the logistics behind InfoRuss. One of my main protagonists, Rosso, is a dead-ringer expy of Russell - the same goes for Blanco with the Informant. One of the only ways I can describe Rosso and Blanco's relationship is 'selfcest as a metaphor for the painful coexistence of self-love and self-loathing', and how this relationship reached this point was largely thanks to the Informant and his role in Russell's dream.

I don't really know why I've come to associate the idea of self-love with guilt, because that's like. Not what the game is trying to do. The game's express purpose is to tell you the story of a boy who comes to love his victims and self-destructs under the crushing guilt that he carries from killing them. By some weird hand, I've fixated on the Informant and his determination in seeing that mission of the game through - AND his secret boss fight. Actually, I should. Go ahead and describe the build-up to his secret boss fight

You can only access it if you've purchased the optional villa, and if I recall correctly you can only fight him on the last day of the dream. The locked shed next to the villa is revealed to be a library of some kind called the Graveyard of Books and like - sure enough, there's books of every kind just torn apart and scattered about everywhere. The reason for all of this is because of the Informant's jealousy. He is created specifically so he can provide Russell with the necessary information to complete the Happy Dream Experiment, and in this regard he thinks Russell doesn't need anyone other source of information than him. So he does away with the useless other books, except for the strategy guides because that's the only kind of book Russell likes - and thus, the only kind of book that the Informant likes. Notes are scattered in the hallway leading up into his boss room, with the last one sticking out in my mind to this day:

'He thinks he's the most important thing to you.'

Which. I don't know why that line is so important to me. Whether it be because it awakened something weird in me, or because I myself was dealing with my self-loathing in a VERY complicated manner at the time, that line has gone on to dictate the way that I write about my characters even to this day.

It's such a visceral depiction of self-inflicted brutality. Russell Seager is a 14 year-old serial killer who grew up loveless and abused, and has no shortage of things that make every waking moment of his life fucked up. He killed people - some who just happened to be wherever he was at the time, some willingly by his hand - could not feel guilt about any of it, and when he lost Yumi to his drunken father while his nymphomaniac mother watched he snapped and killed both his tormentors. He then turned himself in to the police, a teen on death row. Happy Dream is him discovering guilt through dream versions of the people he killed. Happy Dream is what allows him to manifest the newfound emotions he felt through interacting with the kinds of people that his victims COULD have been. The world he creates morphs into the self-inflicted hell that is his guilt.

Russell has no happy ending, his guilt won't allow him that. Everything around him becomes a reminder of the lives he's destroyed, and how much of a living hell his own life was. Through feeling happiness and love from these fabricated visages of the people he killed, he learned guilt. It's such a weird exercise in sympathy, knowing that you're playing as this remorseless kid going through rehabilitation through extreme means. It either doesn't work, and he's deemed a failure - or it does, and he commits suicide either by confessing his crimes to one of his victims and stabbing himself to death with a syringe, or he stays in the deteriorating dream, never to wake up again.

At some point it honestly just turns into misery porn, if you look at it from a certain angle - this game is set on having Russell die no matter what. I couldn't tell you what EXACTLY it is about this experience was so impactful that it would go on to influence the way I want to spend my life - that is, I want to make games exploring these kinds of themes. Guilt. Sins. If loveless lives can be redeemed and made better. By the time the last day in the game rolls around, it's just a matter of giving Russell closure over his miserable life and choosing for him what his last freedom is going to be.

I think one of the reasons I like thinking about the Informant with regards to Russell is the scene that happens if you choose to go through with the first True Ending. Russell never really much liked the Informant, and the feeling is mutual. Russell is cold to him, and the Informant takes every opportunity he can to rub all of Russell's sins in his face - and that's his job, he represents the fundamental, uncomfortable truths of Happy Dream. If Russell chooses not to leave the dream, he is resigned to its destruction and waits for the inevitable along with the other denizens of Nameless Town. But if Russell chooses to get out of the dream, the Informant returns to Russell in tears, happy that he can finally be back to being a part of him - to this game, it's the ultimate acceptance. Russell then goes on to confess his crimes and the reality of the dream to one of the citizens, and he wakes up when they kill him in tearful retribution by his request.

He grabs the syringe next to his bed, and stabs himself to death, unable to handle the guilt. That's how the game always ends for me. The Informant succeeded, Happy Dream succeeded - and Russell chose to die as person who could finally feel remorse.

It's a regretful story with themes that really shouldn't be replicated in any fashion in real life, but somehow I found it fascinating in the way it explores the facets of the self. It makes me want to ask more questions and explore that angle of self-reflection to the furthest extremes that I can conceivably reach, and I guess that's one of the many reasons why I respect it so much.

SO… WHAT NOW.

Nah, that's kind of it. Like, OF COURSE this isn't all I have to say about the games that I mentioned, but wow this post is so long and I was just pining for the days of a couple of years ago. These games were present for the most transformative years of my life, and uh - whether or not that was actually a good thing remains to be seen, but I'll always be grateful for their presence in the void that I call my gaming experiences.

Horror JRPGs will always have a special place in my heart for how they tell their stories. Nowadays, I've developed more of a taste for fantastical RPGs that prefer to hide their horror in the margins of the narrative, fridging the terror for when the player wants to step back a bit and think about the implications of certain events in the greater world. Undertale, OneShot, and the Octopath Traveler games all tick that box for me - and all of those games are ones I hold dear. Like I'll probably ramble about OneShot some other day, because that's the other game that really changed my life in a way I felt like I can never come back from - but there's just a lot of special things to be said about these neat little self-contained, 6-hour freeware games. For now I'll close this long-ass post out. Happy late Halloween I guess - the M&Ms in our fridge have never tasted better.

#rpg maker horror #rpg maker #horror rpg #ib rpg #cloe's requiem #end roll rpg #ao oni #mad father #the witch's house #OFF rpg #yume nikki #alice mare #farethere city #cw horror #seriously please read the content warnings

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