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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.