Towards The End Sky

In my experience, VN dark fantasy either emphasizes an endless path to despair or a path through despair to hope for the future.  Nitroplus tends to focus on the former, as is seen in Tokyo Necro and Muramasa, where the majority of paths and their endings are unrelievedly dark from beginning to end.   Indeed, there is this belief in a lot of Japanese makers that the dark needs to continue right through the epilogue.  When there is an exception, it often comes with a backlash.  

One particular scenario that annoys me to this day is the Ein route vs the anime of Phantom of Inferno.  In the original Ein route, the ending has Ein smiling and happy for the first time in her life, whereas the anime has the protagonist murdered during their trip to Mongolia.  This contrast seriously pissed me off, because Ein's path was essentially the 'good ending' of the game, the only path where there was some level of salvation, and the anime makers ruined it out of a desire to turn it into some kind of twisted moral lesson.

Anyway, one thing I find ironic is that there is far more dark fantasy on the otome-ge side of things than there is on the male-oriented side of things.  I'm sometimes stunned at how deep into the darkness the otome genre goes, with levels of emotional brutality (both toward the characters and toward the reader) that are frightening.  I mean, I like yandere heroines, but yandere heroes are freakin' scary.

Dark Fantasy in male-oriented JVNs hit its peak in the mid-2000's, and most of the games were focused on extreme stuff similar to Maggots Baits, even if it went in a different direction.  At present, the only real (non-nukige) dark fantasy company still operating is Clock-up, since Nitroplus hasn't put anything new out in half a decade.

Edit: Incidentally, to this day I have extremely mixed feelings about Maggot Baits.  It had excellent action and if you cut out the H, the story was great.   However, if you include the H, it all becomes disgusting smut.  

Well obviously dark fantasy is what people usually call as edgy, and in light novel it's usually the one that has revenge story. Obviously this type story would be too bleak for some people, although obviously it would be very engaging to follow until the end in order to see whether the casts can earn their happy ending or not in the bleak setting. Of course though, the writer should try their best to balancing the character development and breather in the midst of dark story, because after all almost nobody would want the story become bleak from the beginning to the end so much it make the story become not engaging at all.

Oh yes, it's quite interesting most of translated otome has dark story, which is quite ironic compared to the male oriented VNs that have much lighter stories. Speaking of otome, actually what we saw in light novel with the genre 'Reincarnated as Villainess' is really misrepresent otome game, because most of the story in the light novel are mostly have kingdom setting with the villainess is not really prominent in otome VNs, and the reason why the author use otome game is probably because the author only understand otome is the counterpart of usual VNs where the female can date more than one handsome characters (To further make the counterpart with isekai harem novel) with the author can only refer shoujo manga when it come to make the in-universe otome VN. That aside, most otome VNs are only available on console, so it's too bad if you want to play those and only have PC or laptop.

Forgot to mention usually dark fantasy VNs have some rape, which make sense as the way to instill the bleakness into the reader. For the prominent example, besides Maggot Bait there's euphoria with it has nice song along with surprisingly nice story beneath the disturbing sex scenes. Obviously the story should be the main draw, although obviously most people would prefer to avoid the rape altogether. Speaking of rape, there's Mugen Renkan with the female MC will suffer a lot of rape, which in hindsight make it closer to the otome when one think hard about it. Of course there's more than rape in Mugen Renkan, because it tell the story about the immortal female MC who did her best to find happiness in her immortality.

That's all for what I can write in regard of this topic.

Edited August 21 by littleshogun