So let’s get our hands up in the guts of this thing. After activating a device under Triangle Mountain per Koudai’s will, Takuya is warped to Dela Grante, the land of the “Celestial race” Koudai believes revolutionized Japan at 400-year intervals (they somehow established the Tokugawa shogunate, I guess). There, in an Edenic grassland at the edge of a vast desert, Takuya meets a mute, creepily childlike psychic woman named Sayless who is physically identical to his mother. Then they meet a soldier, Illia, who slays a generic cartoonish monster that attacks Sayless. Illia dies—oh, how sad—so that Takuya and Sayless can move into her house, but no monster will ever appear again for the remainder of YU-NO. Takuya and Sayless have a kid, drum roll please—Yu-no!
Almost as vapid as her daughter, Sayless is mute eye candy for the player’s presumed mommy complex—outside of a surprisingly boring sequence in which she almost dies in the desert before Takuya rescues her. Yes, Sayless is psychic, but she won’t bother you with her powers too often, so you won’t have to listen to her. Yu-no grows up rapidly. By the reckoning Takuya uses, and by Yu-no’s appearance, she is the equivalent of twelve when she is four years old. This is why I have referred to her has “twelve” above. Then soldiers arrive, call Sayless an infidel, and attempt to bring her back to the Imperial Capital that she fled to avoid dying in the rite of the priestess. Sayless kills herself. (Her role in the story is not “person” so much as “tragic uterus.”) Then the soldiers knock Takuya unconscious and leave.
Yu-no and her father venture into the alien Rafaelo desert to find the God Emperor who rules Dela Grante and avenge Sayless. Eventually, Takuya and Yu-no find a cemetery for the past priestesses, where imperial soldiers find them, abduct Yu-no (the shot is sure to emphasize this literal child’s ass), and send Takuya to a prison camp where he works in a quarry with other enslaved workers overseen by a sadistic official identified as “Chief” and, by Takuya, as “Porky.” Porky delivers an evil chuckle frequently, often multiple times per sentence, in case you didn’t notice the sadistic slave overseer and torturer with a scar over his face is the bad guy. Eventually, Takuya finds Yu-no’s pet, Kun-kun, rescuing the saccharine, tiny dragon from the enslaved laborers.
After prolonged torture—a rare effective scene—Takuya rescues a rebel leader named Amanda. Kun-kun grows up, metamorphosed into a busty naked anime girl with wings, and Takuya and Amanda ride her (not like that) to escape the slave camp as an earthquake kills Porky and all the other prisoners. There are earthquakes because the world is ending. Then Kun-kun dies, Takuya takes advantage of Amanda to impregnate her with his future lover Kanna, and the two reach the Imperial Capital where Takuya reunites with Eriko and the now taller, buxom, wide-hipped Yu-no. With a deeper voice, Yu-no speaks and acts like an adult.
Fleeing into the sewer to escape soldiers, Takuya somehow waltzes into an unguarded dungeon where Ryuuzouji is imprisoned. Takuya decides, hey, I might as well free Ryuuzouji from this prison anyone can just walk into. Then Takuya also just walks into the God Emperor’s castle, where he just walks into the God Emperor’s ritual lair and deactivates the God Emperor’s brainwashing device—and spends an interminable period of time babbling about how the computer in front of him is a computer. Freed from the God Emperor’s power, Yu-no reverts to being a child, at least psychologically and in her squeaky voice, as Takuya remarks multiple times (before fucking her). Some freedom, particularly as Yu-no exactly carries out the God Emperor’s will anyway. A real all-star cast is popping up, as though Kanno remembered the characters the story was about. For now Takuya reunites with the Ayumi from the Prologue, who, in a reveal so stupid it drives men to madness like a Lovecraft monster, turns out to be the God Emperor.
