VN Talk: Raging Loop

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2019

I debated whether it was a good idea playing Raging Loop back to back with Gnosia given that they're both visual novels built around the Werewolf party game, but beyond that initial conceit, they're quite different experiences. Unlike Gnosia, where you play each game yourself, Raging Loop weaves a single game tightly into the narrative so most of the choices are made by the protagonist with the player only making decisions at key points.

Raging Loop integrates the mechanics of the Werewolf game into a fictional religion practiced by a small village in rural Japan. The people of Yasumizu believe that when the evening mist comes, a number of their fellow villagers are replaced by wolves, and the wolves will kill villagers at a rate of one a night until all the wolves are hung. Aiding the villagers are various guardian spirits who will bless one of the human villagers with guardian specific abilities such as protecting one villager a night from the wolves, or being able to look into a specific villager once per night to see if they are human or wolf. It's very much the Werewolf game.

Though, in a nice twist, making choices that are sensible in Werewolf might not be in Raging Loop because there is no "team win" condition. The story can't continue if the protagonist dies, which can make for some selfish plays.

Our "hero" in this adventure is unsurprisingly an outsider, Haruaki Fusaishi, who gets lost in the mountains at night while trying to get over his break-up, when a convenience store clerk directs him to the village of Yasumizu. From there, he gets tangled up in the local tradition when the mists come, and to his surprise he finds himself looping back in time to his motorcycle ride through the mountains every time he dies. (Fortunately the player can just jump to the last decision point even though from a story perspective Haruaki has to go aaaaaaaaaalll the way back.)

Haruaki doesn't know exactly what's going on, but figures that getting involved in the game is the best way to figure out what's happening to him and stop the loop.

He's a rather unusual protagonist in that he's not a particularly nice or heroic character. Haruaki is capable of doing the right thing, but generally only does so if he cares about the person he's doing the act for (which eventually becomes most of the people in Yasumizu) and he does some pretty awful things throughout the story while trying to figure out his situation, because more than anything else, he wants to get out of the loop while keeping himself alive. You can see this best when he takes on the wolf role.

There are three primary timelines in the story; one where he does not directly participate in the game, one where he participates as a human, and one where he is a wolf. The wolf is the third timeline he experiences and since winning the game as a human didn't end the loop, he tries winning as a wolf, which means murder. He has no idea whether winning as a wolf will stop the loop or just give him more information, so killing people could mean a permanent death for them. Even allowing for experimentation, and giving him the benefit of a doubt (that he assumes they'll resurrect with another loop) when he kills people it's not just a quick shot/stab and they're dead. He goes about desecrating the corpse until it barely looks human, which is far more than he needs to do in order to keep up his act as a wolf.

Haruaki is something of a chameleon, shifting his morals depending on his role and involvement in the game, and to some degree who his current love interest is, as he gets a different gal on each timeline (though he eventually ends up with Chiemi on the true route). Nobody really knows him given that he's a stranger to the village and even though he introduces himself early on as a graduate student, his knowledge of forensics suggest something more. One villager even asks if he's a detective, but he's actually a mystery author; the other kind of occupation which would wallow deep into murder methods.

Haruaki's sense of narrative comes in handy in deconstructing the local legend that started the tradition and questioning why the game works the way it does. For instance, why are the vengeful wolves who have risen from the dead restricted to killing only one person a night? According to legend they're on the outs with the mountain god, so why would they play by his rules?

He comes to realize, in the face of actual supernatural events (including his own looping), that the game itself is a manmade construction; hence the arbitrary rules. The legend is a real local legend and the tradition of hanging fellow villagers as wolves was a real tradition, but the full on murder game version is a "recent" development (less than a hundred years old).

I like what the game did with the origin of both the tradition and the murder game by tying it into how religion can evolve for political/cultural purposes of control (like how pagan traditions became part of mainstream Christianity in the form of Christmas trees and Easter bunnies). In this case, the greater village of Kamifujiyoshi sends its undesireables to live in Yasumizu, but because it fears the potential for trouble should Yasumizu's inhabitants bite back, it has historically controlled them through the legend and the tradition of hanging wolves, which causes the people of Yasumizu to suspect and kill their own, thus preventing them from ever focusing on their true oppressor.

What's less clear is why Kamifujiyoshi later escalated the tradition to a level where it appears to be supernatural. It is a ridiculous amount of work to put on the game, and while it's mostly possible with current technology, it's also wildly impractical for dubious benefit. Yasumizu only consists of eleven residents at the time the present day game begins, which includes elderly and high schoolers. That's hardly a number to be feared when the larger village likely numbers in the hundreds.

The game also doesn't go into what would happen if the wolves won. While the odds are against the wolves winning in a game with equally savvy players, they could still win and that would leave a maximum of three remaining villagers (since the wolf villagers will kill any remaining humans upon winning). Is that to any benefit to Kamifujiyoshi?

Once we realize the game is a human construct, it calls into question some of the happenings throughout the game. For instance, we know the wolves are actually villagers given the role of "wolf" rather than being replaced by wolves. They're drugged and told an alternate version of the legend that claims all the other villagers are already dead and the wolves are doing them a favor by killing them and sending them back where they belong.

While it's understandable the wolves would remember the telling as a dream, I don't find it believable the degree to which the wolves fall into the role of butchering friends and family. The only wolves who wonder what the hell is wrong with their fellow wolves are outsiders like Haruaki and the reporter, Hisako. Everyone else brings out the guns and the knives and murders like it's the easiest thing in the world.

Are they just that fanatical about their religion that they can accept killing is the right thing to do? They don't show a hint of distress during the daytime deliberations that would suggest they've been traumatized by what they've done. Even Chiemi, who is looping just like Haruaki, and has seen both the wolf and non-wolf sides of the story, still goes on a murder spree when she's a wolf.

So now that we know the game is not supernatural, why is Haruaki looping?

The answer is that someone is using the game to get everyone in Yasumizu killed in order to fuel a ritual that will ruin Japan, and this part of the story doesn't quite hold together as well. Basically Ritsuko, sort of a village holy woman, follows a god that appears to have been displaced by the better known national pantheon of Japan, and her ancestors subsequently rammed their deity into the local religion so it would have a place to exist, however awkward.

As the last of her line, Ritsuko carries the accumulated grudges of her ancestors and wants to avenge her god's displacement. She planted the seeds needed for its resurgence in the various villagers and to reclaim that power and resurrect her god they all need to die, so she planned the loop to happen during the game, with the hope of eventually getting all the villagers killed in a single run (which happens thanks to Haruaki when he's in the wolf timeline).

Each time she dies, the loop begins again, giving her another chance to achieve the result she desires, but someone else is trying to stop her and ends up using Haruaki as the instrument to do so. Realizing that the loop is tied to Ritsuko rather than Haruaki was a nifty reveal, as well as explaining why he sometimes seems to loop in some endings without an obvious death.

But I just had trouble following this part of the plot and understanding how her god (and whether it actually is a god) fit in the larger backstory about how the present day religion came to be. Ritsuko's god is not the only supernatural entity to play a role in the story either, so it's not like the game writer is incapable of mixing the supernatural with the mundane. Haru's almost forgotten badger god (the original god of the mountain before humans displaced it with the current religion) fits perfectly into the space it's given, which is likewise substantial.

It doesn't help that the defeat of Ritsuko's god in the true end is entirely a deus ex machina that goes unexplained unless you read the optional epilogue stories. That doesn't change that our protagonist completely lucked out of a situation he could not have handled himself, but at least it's possible to know what happened.

Though Raging Loop's big picture flounders at the end, it does small details well. There's a lot of kanji play in this game, involving reordering the kanji that make up names, taking apart kanji into its components and rearranging them, or using alternate readings of kanji, and all of it is translated into an easy to follow format that doesn't require Japanese fluency.

And for a game with a lot of gruesome murders, there are a number of silly moments to break the tension (some of which can only be seen on New Game+ unfortunately). The fact the convenience store at the start of the game has any number of tools that Haruaki needs (even, at one point, a bulletproof vest) is a running gag. And it's hard not to laugh when Haruaki is being tormented by a sheep, especially when it's his fault for pissing off said sheep.

Which brings me to the last thing I want to talk about.

Mitsuki, whose psychic avatar is the sheep, is the one preserving Haruaki's memories each loop. She's not a villager, and in fact is Haruaki's ex. But even though I love Mitsuki as a character (she's tough, genderqueer, and smart enough to dump Haruaki), the game doesn't do that great a job with her, and it's largely because the game intentionally hides knowledge that the player should have as Haruaki.

She's the first person he meets in the game where she's disguised as the convenience store clerk. In New Game+ we get extra mental dialogue from both of them that shows he recognizes her, but he's still pissed about the breakup so he pretends she's a stranger, and she reciprocates. The NG+ version of the scene is hilarious, and shows just how well they know each other after years of dating, but the original one removes all mention of the fact Haruaki knows her even though we get all his other internal thoughts about her attitude.

I can understand not wanting to derail the horror/mystery setup by having snarky comments about his ex in one of the very first scenes, but by selectively choosing what Haruaki shares with the player it makes her sudden cooperation in the finale strange. (Which is another way Raging Loop drops the ball towards the end.) We never see the conversation when Haruaki asks Mitsuki to help him save the villagers, not even in NG+, so when she showed up the first time out of her shop clothes and Haruaki started talking like he knew her, it took me a moment to figure out that she was the much talked about ex. If I hadn't played Raging Loop regularly until I finished I might not have made that connection at all.

Though Mitsuki's role is small, it's a critical one, and I think there could have been a middle ground between the ignoring each other circus and leaving the player in the dark.