The Worst Ending of All Time
The Epilogue of YU-NO warrants special treatment. Sorlie calls it “one of the most exhilarating and incredible experiences you will ever have while playing a video game”—a scathing indictment of video games. I admit I was not so exhilarated with Takuya’s pet-like wife Sayless who looks identical to his mom or Takuya perving over his kid when she is twelve (!) or Takuya taking the side of the theocratic dictatorship that enslaves him and kills his wife or Takuya failing to save the day while other actually interesting characters (plus Yu-no) suffer and die to stop Ryuuzouji’s evil plot to destroy the universe. I guess that shows I am one of those “sensitive gamers” whom Sorlie cautions might be weirded out by the cerebral power of the badly plotted incest porn isekai. (To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand YU-NO…)
In gameplay, the roughly ten-hour Epilogue is a step backward, reducing navigation from point-and-click openness with branching story paths and occasional puzzles to what YU-NO is supposed to have outgrown: a harshly linear sequence of repetitious choice selections navigated by menu. Exhaust each menu option until Takuya decides to do something again.
The decline in writing is also severe. After the player gathers all seven jewels, following Koudai’s directions traps Takuya without the Reflector in a hostile, dying alien world whose inhabitants speak perfect Japanese (which Takuya notes as surprising). Until the Epilogue, YU-NO stays laser-focused on a small group of characters contained to Sakaimachi. Despite the grand scope and gestures at ponderous sci-fi concepts, the ADMS portion remains intimate as well, in nudity and sexual content, yes, but in characterization too, in the player’s attachment to the world.
Then the Epilogue chucks every redeeming aspect of YU-NO’s writing and design into the incinerator to spin ten hours of goofy fantasy melodrama in a new setting, Dela Grante, with such memorable features as the lizard whose adult form happens to exactly look like a winged naked woman. Despite killing this critter, Kun-kun the nogard, in a weird scene that features prolonged rambling about the ethics of eating animals, Kanno restraints himself from having Takuya engage in bestiality. So props to Kanno for that one. You will be shocked to read that, by this point, I no longer experienced any identification with the player character—a bad sign for a video game.
