Naturally, Takuya fails to be a hero at every opportunity. He literally sides with the theocratic dictatorship that drives Sayless to suicide. Takuya also cluelessly frees Ryuuzouji from prison because, while the player is well aware Ryuuzouji is a serial killer with Niarb powers, Takuya, as explained in the “Auto Diverge Mapping System” section, is allergic to learning. Not only does Takuya decide the dictatorship’s propaganda, slavery, torture, and interning of dissidents and driving his wife to suicide are not so bad, when you really think about it, since as Ayumi assures him, the pure-hearted public cannot be controlled otherwise, and hey, being a murderous dictator is how you get shit done—not only does he have sex with his own daughter—but Takuya does not even save the day. He is not even the hero of this isekai incest porn fantasy. It is Yu-no, not her father, who sacrifices her body for the ghost (?) of Grantia to possess during the rite of the priestess to stop the universes from colliding (which the characters take seriously enough to assure me makes sense). It is Amanda who suffers whippings and mutilation and humiliation to fight the God Emperor—whom she rapidly forgives, apparently—and who, traumatized from her pain and grieving her sister, Takuya impregnates and then more or less forgets about after, for all he knows, Ryuuzouji kills her. And Takuya does not defeat Ryuuzouji.
The fight against Ryuuzouji, the climax of the whole adventure, is another wearisome sequence of selecting menu options while Takuya does nothing. Instead, Eriko finally appears out of nowhere to blast Ryuuzouji with a deus ex machina super-powerful soul-destroying handgun. (At least Brent Halligan genuinely defeats his evil druids.) Ryuuzouji reveals his true form to be—drum roll—a cartoon skeleton ghost you might kill in Dragon Quest and then forget about. (Nagaoka did previously perform character design work for the 1992 Dragon Quest: Dai no Daibouken anime.) Then—pew, pew! Eriko finishes him off in two shots without a big fight, either physical or philosophical. Ryuuzouji is not genuinely defeated, of course, despite Eriko’s claim to the contrary. The player has already been shown, repeatedly, that an indefinite number of evil alien monsters exist on the indefinite number of timelines. But Kanno cannot be bothered with trifling details like the central premise of his story.
Takuya makes two contributions to the epic finale. The first is being foolish enough to free Ryuuzouji, thereby indirectly causing Ayumi’s death, Kanna’s painful life on Earth, and the rite to go as badly as it does. The second is impregnating Sayless with Yu-no—and of course having the hots for his daughter. Koudai’s goal for Takuya is purely mechanistic: Takuya is there to beget Yu-no. The hero only matters whatsoever for his boner. Enthralling stuff. But it checks out that Takuya is good for one thing and one thing only. Kanno does not seem to recognize how debasing this is. Mixing in the obnoxious Yu-no, your (initially and maybe always?) underage daughter who flirts with you and tries to show you her panties and other such things, and the reveal that the whole sixty or eighty hours or so have been building to fucking her—the reveal, I cannot emphasize enough, that the title is Fuck Your Daughter Quest—makes the Epilogue not only disappointing in terms of the emotional letdown but just gross.
I felt ashamed that I had spoken positive words about YU-NO to friends and family, believing the story threads and promised character development would go somewhere besides incest and borderline ancient aliens conspiracy. Remembering those occasions, I still cringe. And my positive responses were already relatively tempered by the sleazy presentation. I would be humiliated to, with full knowledge, praise sappy incest porn as “exhilarating and incredible” and the height of art. How people can lavish praise on YU-NO and live with themselves I choose not to dwell on. After all, some people are murderers, but they still sleep soundly at night.
Like Ayumi after the protesters pelt her with eggs outside of Geo Technics, I am the one with egg on my face: I let myself get invested in a trashy ’90s porn game, denying all the evidence of its silliness and vacuity along the way, and was left feeling stupid I had believed in it at all. There is no worse response art can elicit.
