(this diary entry will have spoilers for saya no uta! T_T)

i'm pretty new to the realm of visual novels. shocking, i know, since my site is themed around them - but hear me out. i spent a long time without a pc, and i never really had a good place to read them. i've been really into some visual novels in the past, mainly your really basic ones like danganronpa and ddlc, and some more "niche" free ones, like your turn to die and even the boyfriend to death games, but that was about the extent of my experience with them until the end of last year. and since then, even though i'm still new to it, i really fell in love with the medium.

and that brings us to saya no uta. saya no uta was the first visual novel i played on my new pc, and honestly, my expectations were high. it was sold to me as the "gateway drug" for visual novels (similar to how i refer to death note as the most common gateway drug for anime). however, i knew absolutely nothing about it. i knew vaguely who saya was, but not the flesh monster part. and i am so, so happy i was unspoiled for the entire experience.

reading saya no uta was akin to the feeling i got when i was 11 and my friend showed me a liveleak video. like jesus christ this is horrifying and this is only going to get worse from here, but i can't bring myself to look away, and oh shit is that a gun? that's what reading saya no uta was like to me.

i was really, really shocked by how much i loved the whole experience. it's a short visual novel anyway, only taking about 8 hours, but i think i played the bulk of it in one sitting. i just couldn't pull myself away. if there's one thing saya no uta universally gets right, it's the pacing. none of it is wasted, and it's incredibly tight.

i do have some minor criticisms. mainly, i think the h scenes were uneccessary. now, im not against h scenes, this isn't a matter of moral outrage. i just think that they didn't seem to fit the story or pacing, like they were suddenly added in last minute to fill a quota or something. which makes sense, because they probably were.

however, the most fascinating part of saya no uta to me isn't the gore or breakneck pacing - it's the moral problem presented within. i'm not going to pretend like this is a concept that's never been done before, or that it's particularly novel in any way. but the way it introduced the concept of perception vs reality really, really resonated with me for some reason. it's why, even nearly 8 months later, this game is still stuck in my head. fuminori is a piece of shit, nobody is arguing against that. however, we just view him that way because of our own perceptions - and fuminori behaves the way he does, because his perception of the world is fundamentally different from our own. likewise, saya did terrible things, but she never acted maliciously, because she was basing her morals off of her own limited perception of the world. that's something we all do, we all have our biases and we all view the world according to our own perception. and those personal perceptions influence how we act. was fuminori really at fault for everything he did, considering that he viewed the world around him as such an evil place? was saya really at fault for everything she did, considering that she had little to base her own morals on?

it's like that one thought experiment saying that you can't be sure that you see the same red as everyone else. how can you prove that your red is the same as my red? you can't, because we're always stuck in our own brains. maybe what you see as "red" is fundamentally different than how everyone else sees the color red, and there is no way you could ever know. it's a seemingly simple premise, but the way saya no uta presents it has haunted me. i think that saya and fuminori are bad people, but i only think that because i have my own perception of the world completely separate from theirs.

in that way, saya no uta has cemented itself as a story that will forever be one of my favorites. i don't care if people think it's overrated or whatever, i think it's incredibly special.

also, ryoko best girl. slayyyy