You and Me and Her: A Love Story (

2013

) ½

The concept of a horror story disguised as a romantic visual novel did not simply spring into existence fully formed with Doki Doki Literature Club [2017]. Indeed, the genre's antecedents go back to at least School Days [2005], a fairly typical dating sim that made the unusual decision to include sequences of graphic murder and suicide if the player got the “bad endings.” These bad endings were so popular that when the game was adapted into an anime they chose the most disturbing of them, where one of the game's two rival lovers disembowels the other in a fit of jealous rage, as the cannon ending! A rather dark turn of events for a show that starts as a harmless rom-com.

Today's game, You and Me and Her: A Love Story, represents the next logical evolution in this queer little sub-genre of dating sims/horror stories, by making the whole thing self-aware. However, those that are looking specifically for a straight horror story will probably be more than a little disappointed, especially if they have already played the more openly horrific Doki Doki Literature Club [2017]. The first 80% of You and Me and Her: A Love Story is exactly what the subtitle implies: A straightforward love story where the player character is stuck in a love triangle with two girls; over-achieving childhood friend Miyuki and space-case Aoi who is operating under the delusion (?) that the world is a visuals novel. Indeed, if you picked this game up only out of interest in seeing a disturbing horror tale full of lurid violence you will probably get bored with it well before anything remotely horrific happens.

That's not to say that the love story on display here is totally charmless. Sure, the premise is utterly forgettable the characters are decently written and given a modest amount of depth and roundness that makes them endearing. Of course, if you're the sort who plays a lot of visual novels, then there's very little in the way of a unique element to get you interested. Indeed, You and Me and Her is a good deal more linear than most visual novel romance stories on the market, as, with only one significant exception, every decision you make in the first playthrough will be completely pointless, influencing nothing in the story aside from the few lines of dialog immediately afterward. Sometimes you'll only be given a single option because doing anything otherwise would sabotage the story the developers are trying to tell, which is arguably worse than giving the player a choice that doesn't matter. At this point, the only thing left to keep the die-hard visual novel gamer interested long enough to get to the scary stuff is the promise of some cartoon pornography at the end where all the participants cum two or three times minimum.

Part of the problem is our protagonist: Shinichi, who is, in no uncertain terms, a completely useless dolt with about as much emotional fortitude as a strand of wet spaghetti. The main narrative thrust of the game is getting the poor drip to get off his ass and actually make the smallest possible effort to pursue one of the two girls that are all but throwing themselves at him. Seriously, in one scene Aoi casually mentions how she'd be down to take it up the ass, which only elicits a lame “you shouldn't talk about stuff like that” from Shinichi. Miyuki is at least a bit more reserved, only asking Shinichi to help her practice kissing for her upcoming role in the school play (apparently, Miyuki is a KHHV). Shinichi meets this suggestion with outright indignation, taking Miyuki's obvious come-on at face value and resenting her for toying with his emotions. News flash Einstein, “let's practice kissing” means she's into you but just doesn't have the balls to say it. I understand that Shinichi is supposed to be a high school boy, and consequently a bit of an emotional and intellectual idiot, but you don't have to be Casanova to understand what these girls are into you. For one accustom to playing games where the protagonist is cooler than me, it is quite a change of pace to be put into the shoes of a character that even my high school self would have bullied remorselessly.

Tellingly, during the Miyuki route, the game hinges around Shinichi's trip to the old batting cages he used to go to with Miyuki as a kid. Throughout the game, Shinichi has steadfastly refuses to even take a single swing in the cages. He holds off until the very end of the route when he's on the verge of losing any chance of getting with Miyuki when he finally goes back to the batting cages to knock one right of the park. He strikes out, but following this moment he's suddenly galvanized to action and resolved to actually make a pass at the girl he likes. Fans of FLCL will probably get what's going on here, but for everyone else, this probably only makes sense when you realize that there's a Japanese idiom that goes something to the effect of “nothing can happen if you don't swing the bat.” As far as character arcs go, it's perfectly consistent, but the problem is we're stuck playing a spineless little nobody for the bulk of the run, which is frustrating, to say the least.

During the entire first play-through of the game, you will only have one choice of any real significance. Towards the end, Aoi warns you that you're heading for a bad ending, and the only way to prevent it is to patch the game so that Miyuki is madly in love with you. Indeed, true to form if you don't patch the game you'll eventually wind up a loser five years later, making minimum wage and still pining over Miyuki, who is now a famous actress. Patching the game will ensure that you'll wind up kissing Miyuki on the school roof, and promising her your eternal love before screwing her brains out. However, after you patch the game things will begin to get a little bit weird on your second play-through, especially if you're trying for the Aoi route.

The first thing you'll probably notice is that there are a lot more decisions to make, and they actually have some bearing on the plot. However, it seems like no matter what you do you'll eventually wind up with Miyuki and the game's ending will play out exactly as before. The only difference is that Miyuki tells you to “fuck me again” a very queer thing for a virgin to say, and the first hint the game gives you that Miyuki might be aware of your previous playthroughs.

If you persist and make all the right decisions for the Aoi route things get stranger still. For starters, Aoi starts to cheat on you with Haru the game's obligatory trap, leading to a scene that begins to press very heavily on the fourth wall as Shinichi excitedly watches Aoi being fucked from the shadows, eagerly masturbating all the while, presumably taking on the same role as the player in all the previous sex scenes. After that Shinichi joins in directly and also forces Haru to join in as well. While this was an unexpected twist, the wheels really start to come off when you find out that Miyuki has been hiding under the bed this entire time and is more than a little peeved with you. You see Miyuki still remembers the past playthrough where you wound up with her, and correctly believes that the player swore to be with her forever. So she kills Shinichi's cat, bashes Aoi's head in, drugs you, and takes you prisoner.

At some point Miyuki has realized that she's a character in a video game, worse still she's a character in a video game that only has one possible happy ending thanks to the patch that Aoi applied during the first playthrough. The only way that she can get a happy ending is to wind up with Shinichi, and she's doing her damnedest to ensure that happens every time you play the game. This explains why it was so damn difficult to get the Aoi route properly, as at every turn Miyuki is sabotaging your romance with the weird pink-haired chick. She's doing her level best to always funnel the player into her desired ending. Moreover, at some point, Miyuki realized that she can manipulate the game to a certain extent, so when you wake up in captivity after she knocks you out with a baseball bat you'll find the UI completely reworked. You can only play through scenes that Miyuki has carefully curated. Somehow in those chosen scenes, you'll need to find a way to escape this endless nightmare.

Going into You and Me and Her expecting everything to go to shit is a frustrating experience because the game is unusually committed to its premise of being a straightforward love story. You'll have to play the game for hours with only occasional hints dropped about the horror lurking in the future. However, if you've accidentally bought the game blind, and think you're just getting another example of upbeat cartoon pornography then the resulting mindfuck awaiting you at the end of Aoi's path will likely hit like a ton of bricks.

Of particular interest though is the way that the game starts to expand the difference between Shinichi and the player himself. After being in captivity for a while Miyuki actually starts to address the player directly, saying that she doesn't particularly care about Shinichi, she wants to be with YOU. Even going so far as to try to have sex with the player without using Shinichi as an intermediary (which basically turns into a mutual masturbation session). As someone who was already a bit alienated from our wimpy and indecisive protagonist, this sequence turned Shinichi into a complete nonentity.

While this is all very interesting, the game stumbles when it tries to make the player feel morally responsible for driving Miyuki insane. Sure it was technically our choice to patch the game, but it's not like we're dealing with a story that has multiple branching paths here, it's much closer to an Alabaman family tree. There is only one real way to go through the plot of You and Me and Her, and the player is about as culpable for the events of that plot as somebody reading a book or watching a movie. Seriously this was somewhat novel when Spec-Ops: The Line [2012] did it, but at least in that game, there was a larger moral message beyond scolding the player for their desire to play a video game. Here there seems to be a deliberate attempt to shame me for playing through a story I had almost no control over the course of. If anybody should be ashamed it should be the developers.

While I can't read Japanese, and consequently can't say too much about the quality of the translation, it certainly seems like some scenes have been overtly fucked with by the translator. I find it highly unlikely that the original Japanese version in 2013 had its characters throwing around North American slang terms like “woke.” Especially since that particular term doesn't seem to have been in circulation in America in 2013, much less Japan. Even more annoying is the way that the character of Akebono constantly shouts out “Death to Normies” because he can't get a girlfriend and the audience needs to understand that he's an incel. It never rises to the level of obnoxiousness that some American localizations achieve, but it does raise the question: How the hell do professional translators like this stay in business when the product they offer is demonstrably inferior to the random fan-subs online. Is this industry secretly a front for drug smugglers or something? If it is can they just drop the pretense and just pay fan translators for their translations? I'd certainly prefer it to the current practice of trying to correct a story's politics with the translation.

For purposes of this review, I played through the uncensored version on JAST rather than the censored version on steam. In retrospect, I wish that I had gotten the censored version because I was not really that interested in the H-scenes and in the uncensored version they go on for ages. It doesn't help that the protagonist cums a minimum of twice each time he screws a girl. I believe some dialog is also censored in the steam release. It is amusing that the uncensored H-scenes all have a small message in the corner that says “for use outside of Japan only.” I understand that they have to say that because of Japanese laws regarding images of genitalia, but it's funny to imagine that the game makers are in denial about their interest in cartoon pornography. “Us Japanese people have no interest in this hentai crap, we just make it for export.”