I owe Love-de-lic many things. I often attempt to prove my endless enthusiasm for certain pieces of art by describing them as "life changing" or "the best thing evar", but when I describe the body of works that Love-de-lic/skip/Vanpool/Punchline/Audio Inc./Onion Games have crafted over the years, I do not think describing them as "life changing" is an over exaggeration in the slightest.
When I was younger, and was just beginning to explore the larger category of games that laid behind the mountain of Nintendo games that had entertained me growing up, I became very fascinated by the PS2 game "Chulip". I had never seen quite a game. It was a strategy life simulator thats primary focus was helping and learning about the citizens of the town you had just moved into. It also had a penchant for being very punishing to the player if they were unable to discern very cryptic hints or puzzles in a manner of seconds.
As this was one of the first "weird" games I had ever went out of my way to play (as opposed to watching a playthrough on youtube) I spent most of the experience pouring over strategy guides and forum posts, so that I did not have to go through any of the heartbreak this game was very capable of doing to you. The game was so unforgiving, the western release of the game supplied a strategy guide and checklist in the manual. I theorize this was an attempt to prevent impatient Americans from turning off the PS2 the moment a strangled muppet in a trash can beats you within an inch of your life, and sends you to the Game Over screen. All for even entertaining the idea of pressing the X button in it's general vicinity.
That being said, despite me carefully slicing the strategy element of the game out of the picture entirely, I was quite moved by just the act of playing Chulip. Even in the case of knowing exactly what to do, making your way to the win goal demanded quite a bit of patience from the player. Hit boxes were tiny, in both the window of execution and their size on the screen. Every character in the town operated entirely on a personalized schedule, and only about 3/4 a way into the game do you gain the ability to manipulate time in any meaningful way (in the form of an alarm clock that lets you wake up before 10 AM.)
What stood out to me at the time was how incredibly heartfelt and thoughtful almost every line of dialogue was, if not extremely bizarre. Yoshiro Kimura became an idol in my heart before I even learned his name. Back before even the concept of Moon RPG had entered my mind. The game would constantly throw new plotlines and scenarios at you. One moment you'd be one second away from losing it because you had just lost 3 hours of progress over accidentally grabbing a gigantic turd out of the bushes in the local graveyard, and then the next you'd be holding back tears learning the strict but kind animated lion (who is also a stone fountain) (who also runs a bath house) had a meaningful but short-lived high school romance that ended in dramatic tragedy.
(Chulip is probably where my neuroticism about well written dialogue began...every time I play a game now I'm weirdly judging it on a scale in my brain of "how authentic is this dialogue". If the broken, glitchy, lazy translation Natsume did of this game was able to touch my soul on such a deep level, then that taught me intent was more important to me than prose. A part of me wonders if this emotion is misguided, but I continue to be endlessly engaged by weird poorly localized games and annoyed by canned doujin dialogue or meme references in indie/triple a titles. Maybe I'll get over it one day. ANYWAYS.)
I had always thought of myself at that point as a gamer with eclectic taste. I probably felt that way because I was raised on artsy flash games and freeware and experimental art projects and Yume Nikki fangames. But Chulip was a turning point for me in what kind of games I knew I liked, and what I desperately wanted to make myself. I realized that a game didn't necessarily had to be "fun" to be "good". I had learned this lesson many times before, with torture simulators from famous indie devs like cactus and NAGORO, but this was my first time experiencing something like that on a larger scale. It was my first time directly interacting with a narrative that rewarded me for my suffering beyond "wow that was really hard! but i did it."
Well, thanks for reading my Chulip review. Let's talk about L.O.L.: Lack of Love now.
As my hunger for Strange and Quirky games increased, I quickly cited every game under the perview of Love-de-Lic and it's staff under my mental backlog. For most of my time alive on this Earth, I had operated with a shitty laptop from 2007 that could barely run Photoshop without lagging or crashing at random intervals. This was a time where I could go on Am*zon and purchase Chulip for $15 in plastic with the manual, and now you'd be lucky to find it anywhere on any online shop for under $150.
I did not have the ability to run emulators. My personal white whale my entire life had been Rule of Rose, a game that had cost $200 even before weirdos started jacking up the price of old games for literally no reason. Quite honestly, I had given up on ever getting to play this specific video game. There were two gigantic walls that stood in the way of me playing every cool game I ever saw in a tumblr gif in the year 2012:
1) My computer couldn't run PS1 or PS2 emulators, let anything as insane and obscure as a Dreamcast or a Sega saturn.
2) These games were often in Japanese, and I was exceedingly incapable of reading Japanese.
Now here we are, in 2024 and I have a pretty decent computer that can run most video games on medium graphics (while its GPU fans scream at the top of its lungs), and an elementary schoolers understanding of the Japanese language (I can play gacha games and watch Nintama without subtitles.) I can play anything. I could download anything. Hell, I could boot up Tokimeki Memorial 2 right now and get this 2024 GOTY thing over with. But I haven't. Because playing video games takes a lot of time, and translating something slowly in my head while pausing to check a kanji in jisho every 3 lines of dialogue takes even longer.
(That being said, I used this newfound ability of mine to play through Boku no Natsuyasumi 1 on the PS1 earlier in 2023, because I was getting very impatient about the fan translation that is currently being worked on. That game rules. I still need to play 2. Thank you Hilltop.)
L.O.L. Lack of Love always stood out to me, for no other reason, than I thought its box art looked cool. Oh, and it had a soundtrack and scenario by god-like-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. These two things interested me deeply. Like, there's no way it just wasn't the coolest game ever made. It had a white box! It was on the Dreamcast! You know what else was on the Dreamcast?? Shenmue??? D2??? I HAD to play it. Someday. Somewhere. Somehow.
One day, my friend and colleague PiCKYchannel decided to stream it. She had been working through the entire Love-de-Lic catalogue, much like I had been planning to this year. Usually I steered clear of streams with games I planned to play in the future, but I adored Picky's streams deeply and I thought I might as well take a peek at what clearly had to secretly be the magnum opus of Love-de-lic's catalog.
Well. It certaintly went against my expectations. Whatever I was visualizing Lack of Love being all these years, it wasn't anything like this. It was dark and moody, silent and atmospheric, a complete lack of familiarity in it's characters and landscape, and most strikingly of all, there was no dialogue (my previously mentioned favorite element of Love-de-Lic games.)
I immediately thought "looks kind of boring" and launched L.O.L. back into the hell pit that exists in everyone's brain of 'yeah. i'll play that one day'.
I told myself for about a year I would get around to it sometime. That I'm sure a wonderful game waited for me beneath the murky alien graphics and piss mechanic.
But I admittedly was nowhere as excited about playing it as I had been Moon RPG or UFO.
Well, I don't know what changed one day, but I decided to sit down and finally properly play all of it from beginning to end. A lot of this impulse probably came from Spotify continuously recommending me the game's soundtrack in weekly music summaries. As I became more and more invested in producing my sci-fi visual novel eroge, I found myself drawn to listening to ambient, lyricless tracks as I wrote certain scenes in my story. L.O.L.s very much suited the abandoned mysterious feeling of being on a planet completely different than your own.
The premise of the game is that you start from birth, as a strange little elephant-like creature, and hatch out of an egg. There is a mild lingering element of horror in this opening cutscene, as a gigantic fish swims side to side and begins eating all of your brethren. You can either sit there politely until you reach the top of the surface, or bust out early and swim to escape. This is where the game begins.
Love-de-Lic's main approach to game design style is plopping your character into a giant open world, and leaving it up to the player to explore their surroundings in which to advance the narrative through their own means. L.O.L. takes this idea to the next level, with there being absolutely zero dialogue or guidance for what is required of you, except for 4 buttons.
Greet, Attack, Sleep and Pee.
People like to describe Moon RPG and Chulip as obtuse to the point of cruelty. While I detailed earlier that I had played all of Chulip with a guide, as repentance, I really forced myself to sit down and play Moon RPG with absolutely no help whatsoever. I was able to successfully collect all the love and save every monster, but was ultimately defeated by a single step you had to do in the very beginning of the game.
(Showing a postcard you received to the King specifically at night time. Yoshida comments there's nothing remarkable about every single one of your postcards EXCEPT the Kings, so I failed to show him that one to receive the necessary hints required to advance to the next area. Doing this unlocks the entire main plotline of the game. Whoops!)
So with this confidence in tow, I gave L.O.L. a good ol college try. I was hoping to experience the game guideless, as I had gotten so much mileage out of banging my head against instance of confusion in Moon.
But...well...in the first level, after an hour of walking in circles, I found myself failing to collect a single necessary item or figure out how to properly engage with any part of the world. I wouldn't say this was necessarily the game design's fault, but it did give me proper context in how the world expected me to interact with its environment.
I found out very quickly I was initially stuck, because I refused to fight or kill anything.
A large part of L.O.L.s tension is that you have a hunger meter that is constantly ticking down at all moments of the game. If you truly desired to be a pacifist, you could stick to rummaging for berries and roots that grow out of the ground. But that wasn't always an option. You were very often encouraged to murder other animals on the map to stay alive. This relationship made perfect sense, as the entire game was very focused on the circle of life, taking energy from other beings to live on, and the constant act of dying and rebirth.
I would always do my best to not murder any animals I helped, or even animals in the same species that I had helped. But despite my desperate efforts...there were multiple moments in the game where I solved a puzzle, recieved a reward from the creature, and then immediately had to tear out their throat out so I could continue playing the game. The little stories that spawned from these tiny interactions I think summed up why I ended up feeling so attached to the game, even if ultimately I stepped away not taking much from it's main narrative.
The gameplay never deviates too far from what it gives you in the beginning. It's a game that's trusting you to use your instincts and observational skills to advance forward. There's the faint scent of a plot as you move along from area to area, particularly the L.O.L. robot colonizing the planet and destroying the little ecosystems you've been exploring, but the story never went as far as I wish it did. Though maybe that's the point...a mundane existence being suddenly interrupted by calamity. It doesn't need to be any more complex than that.
That's not saying it failed to establish its tone. My mind keeps wandering back to the uneasiness I felt the first time the gigantic robot set its timer down in the dirt, which proceeded to play a 12 minute and 4 second song, which the game then forces you to listen to the entirety of, because of course it would, and it's awesome, and Ryuichi Sakamoto worked very hard on it, and you probably bought this game because of Ryuichi Sakamoto in the first place, so you might as well wander around in your little playpen listening to it until the game decides to let you advance the next level.
The calm, boring nature of the gameplay loop almost put me in a hypnotic trance...a lot of it truly is wandering around, mashing one of your four buttons up against things that look interactable, collecting your little prize orb, and then evolving in a designated area, granting you more access to the level.
My favorite part of the game ended up being the ant cave, which funnily enough, Yoshiro Kimura designed himself. He hadn't even been on the original team for L.O.L., but reached out to Love-de-Lic for work and was asked to design that specific area. I mentioned earlier my favorite part of the game were the miniature stories that happened between your little guy and the other little guys, and the ant cave was absolutely overflowing with them.
A very specific, and favorite element of older games of mine is for lack of a better term, the slow burn of the story progression.
There have been a considerable amount of games I've played (Clock Tower: Ghost Head, ...iru!, Silent Hill 4, to name a few) where for a good stretch of the game I begin to think to myself "so is anything else going to happen in this game." Lots of exciting plot stuff and exposition is handed to you right in the beginning, and you're left to deal with repetitive copy pasted game design in the middle. Just when you think you can't take any more of it, the game rewards with an insane climatic cutscene, or a delightfully creative final boss, and it miracuously turns the 4/10 you've been crafting in your brain into an 8/10...!
L.O.L. did not do this.
It did try however. I was very intrigued by the sudden tone shift and change of enviroment for the final level of the game, that perfectly matched that eerie feeling you felt every time you ran into the robot. While I found the final run to be a bit of a letdown, I wouldn't say it was a bad ending by any means.
I liked L.O.L. Lack of Love. I'm going to continue listening to the soundtrack on repeat. I cannot confidently recommend this game to most people, even weird game lovers, but it undeniably has a heart to it that's made me continuously think about it for a week straight since playing it. So, I consider it very special. Maybe even good. Thanks for reading.