At risk of a tangent, I wish to address a possible mischaracterization of one of my chief criticisms. A story depicting incest does not scandalize me. Nor does incest-themed pornography and fiction—I am “terminally online,” after all, and have watched several anime. In terms of a moment-to-moment description of its most lurid moments, YU-NO falls well short of the nastiest story I have encountered in video games or otherwise. Like, don’t condescend to me. But no other story in any medium has produced the degree of revulsion in me that YU-NO achieved—YU-NO, the first and only video game to make me physically ill multiple times (for reasons other than motion sickness). Perhaps, despite my bile and eye-rolling and, during my own playthrough, desperate reaching to justify carrying on or sympathizing with Takuya, that YU-NO leaves me nauseous, leaves my heart racing, is testament to its ability to, through music and artwork and how much the sheer tsunami of bullshit wears one down, invest players in its world. Pity that the investment is used for this.
Rather than subject you to a catalogue of every depraved piece of media I can recall, let us hop to a single perhaps relevant example: the extreme incest fetish eroge Snow Daze, released by OutbreakGames in 2018. In Snow Daze, the player controls a boy, Jason, trapped in a house with his mother and three sisters during a blizzard. Jason uses hypnosis to gradually brainwash his mother and three sisters to, depending on the ending, transform them into a harem and impregnate each. The scenarios in Snow Daze are less consensual and more extreme than anything in YU-NO. The summary suggests a particularly revolting horror story. However, Snow Daze is pure pornography, material existing only as masturbation fuel with no effort at characterization, plotting, art, and so on not subservient to the taboo fantasy its players are there to get off to.
Even when certain material seems strange or gross to me, I do not judge people for what sexual fantasies appeal to them. I also discourage no one from criticizing or despising Snow Daze or wondering what such material might say about the culture that it exists in. However, it seems strange to take extreme taboo smut “seriously” in the same way that we would a more (for lack of a better word) artistic narrative. The opening text of Snow Daze attempts to establish an ironic distance from the alarming content: “This game is a perverted fantasy where evil can win and do lewd things to good people. You bring that into real life it’s on you.” From the brevity of the narrative and the depth (or shallowness) of the writing and presentation, the story and the characters of Snow Daze, despite being more blatantly offensive, carry less weight than those in a more elevated, sophisticated epic like YU-NO. There is no attempt at philosophizing, no buildup longer than a movie where the player sees the siblings grow up from infancy: it is just straight to porn. It is the difference between Sephiroth (spoilers) murdering an unnamed Shinra guard and Sephiroth murdering Aerith. (The day I wake up to discover gaming circles clamoring over Snow Daze as a beautiful, revolutionary masterpiece that inspired so much of their own work, my attitude toward it as harmless filth may change somewhat.)
In this way, some quickie extreme porn is less egregious than YU-NO, the tens-of-hours-long “incest is wincest” half-assed time travel porn whose praises fans sing like the titular infantile bimbo “chants” about wanting to be her father’s bride.
Had I had stopped even fifty hours in, or if the credits abruptly rolled the moment Takuya landed in Dela Grante, I would have an overall positive impression of YU-NO. I would say the sleaziness is just a sign of its 1990s culture and appreciate the ways in which it transcends these limitations. That slow transition from the Prologue to the Epilogue features a soothing atmosphere, scintillating music, gorgeous and erotic pixel art, moments of horror and tension, and lots of hot women and even more bare breasts (for each woman has two)—therein lies the appeal. Or so I would assume if reviewers praised the vibes instead of the story. Are such people just too embarrassed to admit they like porn?
I would like to understand how those who did complete the Epilogue could discuss (much less recommend) YU-NO without even mentioning that it’s the tale of how fucking your own daughter you raise from infancy in-game saves the day. So too do I wonder how someone could be emotionally invested in a story and not leave such an ending at least disappointed—Sorlie even claims that the “emotional depth of the characters” makes “the result of their fates all the more intense,” the deep, intense emotions of the fate of sugary-sweet parental incest.
Were the objectionable content and padding stripped out of YU-NO, the story would still not be a masterpiece. The story would be fine, on par with a minor, uneven anime. Scientists have experimentally proven this hypothesis with the 2019 YU-NO anime that does remove the incest and much of the sex (though, incredibly, adds a subplot involving homosexual rape). The anime is thoroughly adequate and nothing more, though its cheap, inferior art direction and pitiful attempts at reconstructing a few of the game CGs results in a worse moment-to-moment presentation that further undercuts the weak story. (The anime Takuya is not obsessed with fucking his mom. Kanno would be insulted.) Without the objectionable content and padding, the ADMS gameplay would be what it is: interesting as a concept but undercooked because hundreds of vulgar jokes are more important than addressing the premise of the sci-fi scenario, which is nothing but a pretense.
There are a few stand-out moments scattered between hours of slog, such as the showdown with Ryuuzouji in the storehouse or the horror under Triangle Mountain, but even so this hypothetical YU-NO would be far from a revolutionary masterpiece. It would be, at most, what YU-NO is more than anything: a long adventure game with great graphics and a memorable world-hopping gimmick. It would be influential, perhaps, for its production values and structural complexity. But the rest of what the actual YU-NO is drags this adventure from decent to gross. And while it is true that pedophilia is as commonplace in old Japanese computer games as racism is in old(er) European literature, this no more means that I should excuse YU-NO than Robinson Crusoe’s important place in the development of the English novel and sometimes impressive prose means I cannot recognize its comprehensive white supremacy.