Prologue: Before ADMS
YU-NO’s Prologue alone took me about four hours to complete. It uses a menu-based interface typical for Japanese adventure games of the time, much like earlier titles Kanno and Umemoto worked on, such as DESIRE. The gameplay is equally typical, with a single ending and no story-altering choices. The player navigates a menu to select every option repeatedly, while almost nothing happens, until a flag is triggered and the software allows the story to continue its glacial crawl.
In the Prologue, over the course of two days, the player becomes acquainted with Arima Takuya, a failing student at Sakaimachi Academy and terrifying sex offender, though Kanno (and Sorlie, for that matter) seems to believe this sundowning teenager is intelligent. In addition to his stunts like public stripping or having sex inside the school history lab, Takuya is so horny that his peers know him as “the walking libido.” Two months before the Prologue, Takuya’s heinous father, “the old bastard” Arima Koudai, a hypermasculine blowhard and academic historian, dies in a landslide. In response, to conceal his pain, Takuya withdraws from the kendo club and many of his previous relationships.
Takuya’s ordinary goofy porn world life shatters when he receives a package. Not the porn he ordered (for this is porn world), it is a mysterious device called the Reflector and a letter from the allegedly dead Koudai telling Takuya to travel to Triangle Mountain, a local coastal landmark with undeciphered ancient inscriptions. There Takuya encounters, passed out on the ground, a naked woman—whom we do not yet know is Yu-no. Before he can get help, Yu-no sits up, makes out with her dad, and vanishes into thin air. I found this moment amusing, interesting, even, dare I say it, somewhat cute as a setup. If only I had known. Next Ryuuzouji, the headmaster of Sakaimachi Academy and former colleague of Koudai and a third researcher named Imagawa, holds Takuya up at gunpoint, demanding the Reflector. Then—a flash of white light transports Takuya three days back in time, and the logo appears in a highly stylish opening. One of the more elaborate porn setups I’ve heard of.
Despite a hilarious amount of padding, particularly in the interminable dinner scene (let’s hear Takuya chewing some more to really sell that he is eating dinner), the Prologue excellently sets up all the main characters and driving mysteries of the story:
1. Who is the naked disappearing woman?
2. What is Triangle Mountain?
3. Where did the Reflector come from?
4. Why is Ryuuzouji prepared to kill over the Reflector?
5. Is Koudai alive, and if so, where is he?
6. Why did Koudai send Takuya the Reflector?
By feigning conventional, dull eroge gameplay and scenarios, YU-NO subverts expectations when it segues into an epic-scale sci-fi time travel thriller. Paralleling the explosion of Takuya’s former life, the Prologue’s harshly linear menu-based navigation, suggesting a game like Kanno’s earlier work, explodes into a whole world to explore with a point-and-click interface that allows the player to thoroughly examine every environment—and every woman’s body—for Takuya’s commentary.
So begins the “Auto Diverge Mapping System” (ADMS) section, purportedly mind-blowing in 1996. The ADMS segment constitutes the vast majority of YU-NO. My playthrough totaled more than eighty hours, and of these, the Prologue constituted about four and the Epilogue about ten. With more efficiency, YU-NO could probably be completed in more like fifty or sixty hours and even fewer if the player does not bother to listen to the voice acting. I will elaborate on the ADMS and how shallow it is in the “Auto Diverge Mapping System” segment below.