This post was fact checked by real Transgender patriots 👍
Author: Dr. Dysphoria
First published 2023/09/13
Hello boys, girls and NOTHING in between—sorry enbies, you’ll have to sit this one out… it’s probably for the best, anyway—this is your site administrator beef2929 here to proudly introduce SKULLFUCKERS dot wordpress dot com’s first ever collaborative article, about the very recently translated Gerokasu. Since I played the Japanese version myself in March, I’ll pop in sporadically to give my own thoughts and try to elucidate some of the context behind this truly bizarre game, and I’ll do so in Red Text (you know, like in that other game!) Without any further ado, please give a warm welcome to today’s guest author, Dr. Dysphoria!
I've tried several times over the years to review the works of celebrated visual novel writer Ryuukishi07. And several times, I've failed to condense my thoughts into anything approaching conciseness and coherence.
The thing about Ryuukishi07's visual novels—of which the most popular and well-known are the Higurashi and Umineko sagas—is that they sometimes give you brief glimpses of greatness. There are moments in those long and ponderous stories when the stars align to cast light on his creative horror concepts, when a cloying character's latest overwrought monologue manages to hit a chord, and for a moment, you can almost understand why this man has legions of fans clamoring for his works to be studied as serious literature.
The operative word being "almost," because, as suddenly and unexpectedly as they begin, these moments inevitably collapse into nonsense, and the author's irritating rambling resumes for the next 20 hours or so of your unfortunate experience. Characters over-explain their every action and then repeat themselves constantly, screaming at each other for no apparent reason about every detail of their thought processes in dialogue simplistic enough for a small child to feel patronized by, and the narrative pulls out twist after tedious twist with a smug tone, as if the writer truly believes he's blowing your mind with every new idea he just came up with on the spot. It's grating and redundant, and I've suffered through something like 200k words of it out of the increasingly misguided belief that if so many people have found so much to love in these stories, they must get good at some point. They must be leading up to an epic finale that makes it all worth it . . . right?
Wait, you’ve read Higurashi, Umineko and Higanbana, right? I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but that’s over 2.3 million words of Ryuukishi07.
Oh shit. Oh fuck. Did I miss a zero there when I looked up the word counts? Man that's way too many words. Why did I do that to myself.
Anyway, I'm sure there will be some people reading this post who either live in blessed ignorance of Ryu07—or love him based on his best moments and might have forgotten some of the worst ones. So for a brief example of the kind of shit I'm talking about, please enjoy this screenshot from one of the many verbose supernatural fight scenes of Umineko:
Click here for another example of Umineko's writing in the perfect format.
In isolation, this is one of my favourite parts of the Umineko script, because it reminds me of my favourite wrestling promo, in which Scott Steiner leads the audience along a winding path to the calculation of his 141 and ⅔ chance of winning at Sacrifice. But imagine if instead of two minutes, Steiner did that bit for like two hours, and you were expected to genuinely take it seriously as part of a murder mystery story. That's a taste of what it's like to read Umineko.
It's possible that my judgement of Ryuuishi07's works, of course, is biased by my inability to understand Japanese. I can try to be charitable and grant him the possibility that some of the fault lies with the translators, and that his originals may very well come across more prosaic and less childish. But even if that were the case—even if every phrase from Ryu07's pen were as poetic as those of Milton or Shakespeare—his two most popular works are still just too goddamn long. They reiterate on the same themes, the same characters arguing over the same Philosophy 101 concepts, forever. So when I heard that a fan translation had just been released for a Ryuukishi07 game that even some of his fans are calling bad, I was intrigued. How much worse can it possibly be? And apparently it's a way shorter time commitment than his other ones? I gotta check this out and see what people are talking about.
And surprisingly, Gensou Rougoku no Kaleidoscope is actually pretty fun at first. I enjoy a lot of "death game" style visual novels, like the Danganronpa and Zero Escape series, and this one has a similar concept, with four friends locked in a mysterious dungeon and forced to choose which one of them to sacrifice to save the rest. Unlike many of Ryu07's other games, which would typically start with a long slice-of-life segment before the darker elements of the plot begin to surface, this one doesn't waste any time—its upbeat and colourful opening video is immediately followed by the girls waking up in the dungeon and getting instructions from an unseen mastermind about what to do to survive. (There's also a second opening video about 10-15 minutes after the first one, which is very funny—like the sort of thing you'd expect from a VN with a genre-switch halfway through, but this one doesn't actually have that and just speedruns straight to it.) The player is tasked with assigning the four girls the roles of one "condemned" whose status as a sacrifice is up for debate, two "judges" who determine her fate, and one "joker" who can be sacrificed instead if the judges declare the initial condemned to be innocent. The characters' prior relationships are established through flashbacks that contrast the ongoing life-or-death arguments, and you need to play through each of the possible combinations and see each girl sacrificed multiple times over before progressing to the true ending. It's a solid structure and surprisingly fast-paced, and I really enjoyed the majority of its runtime.
Sure, Gerokasu has plenty of cheesy dialogue from characters who are constantly on the brink of losing their shit and screaming at each other at all times—would it be a Ryu07 game without that? But in this atmosphere, that kind of thing felt a lot more like campy fun to me than it did when it's part of a longer and more self-serious story. And as I read through each short route, and started to pick up hints surrounding mysteries like the identity of the mysterious caged figure bearing silent witness to the girls' torture, I was actually getting a little bit invested in the narrative. But it was inevitable that this kaleidoscope would reveal its true colours along the way, and the closer I got to the game's conclusion, the more my enjoyment gave way to discomfort and eventual shock.
Much of Gerokasu centers around the simplistic, gender essentialist stereotype that teenage girls are all horrible to each other, in a way unique to them and completely incomprehensible to boys. They may pretend to be best friends, but they're really all two-faced bitches who hold petty grudges and talk behind each other's backs. Boys, on the other hand, might physically assault each other, but at least they're direct and honest about it, since they're nothing but dumb cavemen without the emotional complexity necessary to be as duplicitous as girls. I'm not exaggerating—that's the very clear and straightforward message that this game states unambiguously and repeatedly throughout the story.
Doc is not fucking with you, this really is the core belief of Gerokasu. The titular kaleidoscope is a metaphor for the indecipherable yet beautiful swirling chaos that is a girl’s emotions, while the abbreviation gerokasu, literally meaning dregs of vomit, gets dropped repeatedly when the characters discuss the resentment and spite lying dormant in the hearts of girls everywhere. What makes this all even funnier is that this is all meant to demonstrate how hard it is to live as a woman.
Gerokasu is an overtly political game. In an expository scene Doc will get to shortly, the mastermind behind this death game disparages men on the internet who think women are living life on “easy mode”. This is an argument that I imagine you’re all familiar with, one that has ingrained itself in English-speaking MGTOW, incel and ‘red pill’ communities and has since spread to Japanese message boards and Twitter through 男女論 discourse—discourse that was especially popular around the time this game was being made. The people making these arguments are trying to paint women as heartless, manipulative gold diggers who torment nice guys with their superior status in the sexual marketplace and most decidedly do not give a shit about elementary school bullying and high school cliques. This fatal misunderstanding of the subject matter is what cements Gerokasu as a legendary swing-and-a-miss: Ryuukishi07’s Measured Response to self-styled anti-feminists around the globe is an attempt to convince them that women are actually way crueler than they think. The road to this game’s ruin is paved by ignorance and confusion, as the game conflates the discourse-addicts who think women have it too easy with the otaku boys convinced girls are pure angels who can do no wrong and… well… you’ll see.
As a side note, the grudges these girls are holding are hilarious. Throughout the course of the game, you hear four different stories about why one girl has always secretly hated one of the others ever since elementary school, and every single one of the stories involves one person promising to do something for another, and then forgetting or having something else come up, leaving the other to wait sadly outside in the rain all evening. A child standing outside in the rain is apparently the most heartbreaking thing Ryu07 can possibly imagine, and he milks it for all it's worth. And the funniest part is that the more you read, the clearer it becomes that all of these tragic backstories took place on the same day, with one single rainstorm drenching four kids who were all all waiting for each other in different parts of town, sparking a lifelong grudge in every case.
But sad wet children aside, there's a second, related message that this game also states directly and unambiguously toward the end, and that message is that trans people shouldn't exist. And in order to explain the details of this game's transphobia, I'll have to give a fair amount of dumb as hell plot summary, so bear with me here. The flashbacks throughout the game establish that for a brief period during their childhood, the main girls' group of four friends had a fifth member: a young transfer student named Sora. Sora was assigned male at birth, but expressed a desire to instead live as a girl. Then Sora died and got reincarnated as a cat and then died again and then met God and said "can I be reincarnated as a human girl this time" and God said this:
This bit goes on for a while with some justification about how "the sex distribution of souls should be strictly predetermined," because if people could just decide to be reincarnated as a different sex whenever they want, they would keep changing back and forth all the time "as it goes in and out of style," and this would be bad and that's why Sora isn't allowed to be a girl. But Sora is like pleeeeeeeeaaaaaaase I really want to be a girl just like my best friends and God is like okay maybe but first get in this cage and watch them scream at each other and kill each other twelve times so you can see how bad it is to be a girl actually.
I could not believe this twist when it happened. I had actually gone into this game knowing the basic fact that some people had criticized it for transphobia, and so partway through it, I came up with the idea "hahaha what if the transphobic part is that this death game is some kind of example to teach a trans girl a lesson about how she shouldn't transition" as a joke. And I was right. What the fuck. And in the end of the game, Sora gets blamed for causing the whole chain reaction of kids in the rain getting mad at each other due to not understanding girls' feelings, and concludes that wanting to be a girl was "blasphemy" and a "sin"—those are the exact words the English translation uses—and being reborn as a boy (or actually, as it turns out, a male cat) is best because men and women are inherently different and should stay in their own roles forever like God made them.
I don't even really know what to say about that. I'm not like, personally offended that some hack writer thinks that—God knows I've heard way worse, and some from writers I used to actually like—but I am just shocked and baffled at the concept of him writing that transphobic screed into a visual novel that starts with high school girls waking up in a mysterious death game dungeon. The real culprit of the death game was the hateful ideology we learned along the way, or something. I don't know. That's all I've got. Over to you, Skullfuckers.
So… yeah, what the fuck, right? I’m usually pretty forgiving when it comes to stuff like this—I expect my favourite authors to be ossans with ossan takes—but it’s hard to afford Gerokasu the same lenience when it’s an entire game about online gender politics with a child’s understanding of the topic. Here, Ryuukishi’s caricature of the anti-feminist escalates to the realm of fantasy. If these men think women have it so easy, they must also dream of becoming women, right? Allow me to teach them why this is wrong. My honest initial impression after reading Gerokasu was that Ryuukishi had no idea transgender people even existed in real life, as ‘becoming a woman’ is discussed exclusively in the hypothetical, as something achievable only through reincarnation. I think I was being overly charitable; Ryuukishi is clearly familiar with the concept, as you can see here. In truth, I think he just didn’t really care who ended up as collateral in his rhetorical debate against this elementary schooler who doesn’t exist. The Intellectual Rapist must go on.
Little fuss was made about Gerokasu when it was released in Japanese, presumably because 07th Expansion’s reputation in Japan doesn’t revolve around being a crusader for trans rights. The recent English fan-translation on the other hand has been met with much dismay and commotion across social media. In the wake of all this, I’ve seen one question pop up again and again: does Ryuukishi sincerely believe all this? After all, just because the character speaking is literally God doesn’t mean his views are meant to be definitive. While the game certainly doesn’t question them and ends with Sora enjoying his new life as a boy cat getting jerked off in the onsen (yes, seriously), I obviously can’t read Ryuukishi’s mind and tell you his personal beliefs. But we can at least get a sense of them by taking a peek at his comments in the game’s artbook and on its official site.
The first detail of note is that Ryuukishi seems to have had a blast working on Gerokasu. A myth that has been spreading on social media, owing to an unfortunate mistranslation in a DualShockers article, posits that Ryuukishi came up with this game while drunk and thus must not really care about it. In reality, Ryuukishi seems overjoyed to have gotten the opportunity to work on a game concept he’s always wanted to try, and to have it illustrated by an accomplished artist like Hinoue Itaru no less. Ryuukishi also offers an alternate solution to Sora’s gender identity crisis: letting an adult woman personally shatter his pure view of girls. The ideal solution for educational purposes and for Ryuukishi purposes. Say what you will about this game and the man behind it, but I have to say I think his state-mandated onee-san plan has potential.
Okay, I've been dragged back from the dark room where I was lying on the floor tormented by Beef's reminder of the cat handjob scene that my mind simply refused to understand and commit to memory the first time around in order to provide some manner of conclusion. One thing I do want to reiterate is that until the hard turn into transphobia, Gerokasu is actually really fun? The gameplay loop of selecting which version of the death game you want to see next and learning more and more about the characters in a non-linear fashion through each iteration of their demise is genuinely good, and it's concise and well-paced and doesn't overstay its welcome. This is like Ryu07's best game and his worst game at the same time, and it's a unique experience I might genuinely recommend if you enjoy a good weird short VN like I do.
Streaming this game to my friends over Discord was genuinely some of the most fun I've had with a visual novel in recent memory. Gerokasu is a fucking hilarious game, sometimes intentionally, often not. The entire call was crying laughing by the time we hit the scene where Christian God appears from the Heavens to lecture a dead cat about how there are only two genders. 10/10 experience.
Finally, on the SKULLFUCKERS Good GPS, Bad GPS scale, reading Gerokasu is like firing up your GPS for what you expect to be a long and boring drive, only for it to send you on an alternate route full of surprising twists and turns and fun roadside attractions, and you're having a great time until you arrive at your destination and realize it's a clinic for conversion therapy run exclusively by shrill, screaming children.