I live in New York, meaning I can go buy a good slice of pizza at any time. But there's just some days where I wake up and think, "God, I wanna eat some garbage", and I order Domino's. Similarly, I have a bunch of visual novels on my backlog, but there's just some days where I wake up and think, "God, I wanna play a game for insane people".
sweet pool is a game that was the first localization project of JAST BLUE back when it formed— a subsection of JAST USA dedicated solely to localizing BL games by Nitro+Chiral. When you look at the big picture, DRAMAtical Murder felt like it should have been JAST BLUE's first localization and not their third considering the sheer popularity of DMMD in its hayday and sweet pool's only moderately sized fanbase prior to localization... but it wasn't, and completely rational people are still angry about this to this day.
Back to my opening paragraph. Why did I want to play sweet pool? Other than the fact that I'm just desperate to read any game available in English, the things I knew about this game prior to playing were hyperbolic claims about the content of the game. "Oh, the protag literally shits out meat babies at school." and "There's a long scene of this guy licking this other guy's rotted out eyeball." and the like.
After buying the game with Steam wallet money, buying the extra R18 patch from JAST with money I could never get back, completing the game under 8.7 hours, and forcing my way through earning the glitched achievements, I could finally verify these claims and make a rational observation:
sweet pool is a weird as hell game with a weird plot and weird gore and weird music and weird everything. It is a game designed for masochists who want to 100% every game they own on Steam and fujoshi on Tumblr who reblog Hello Kitty holding bloody knives and My Melody covered in blood and guts.
These are positives. This is a game for insane people and I loved it.
The Good — Music
I have to super commend the CG art of sweet pool, which were both plentiful and frequently had good juxtaposition between pretty anime boy(s) and gore, as well as its overall dreary art palette which made moments with bright red blood and gore pop even more. It really helps you get into the story and fits the mood super well. 10/10, some great stuff.
What actually pulled me in the most, though, was the music. sweet pool has a couple chill, everyday life songs, some of them are the kind of music that makes you look over your shoulder, some of them start out normal and then become more and more disjointed as they go along, and then some of them are just cacophonies of noise that hurt my skull.
At one point there was a song with a fucking slide whistle and like 10 other instruments just playing whatever they wanted while the text onscreen talked about how the protag could not stop giving birth and there were fetuses all over his floor. I felt like I was having heat flashes. It was the best.
Some of my favorites include:
I think I would also praise the UI design here, since it is pretty atmospheric/helps with setting the mood, but they use Papyrus font everywhere and it kinda makes me wanna die a little bit.
Also the menu image quality is usually strangely crunchy?? I did not lower the quality on this image in any way.
The Good — Story
Okay, so the actual story. sweet pool is about your average guy named Youji who's returned to school after a year long hiatus due to health complications. We quickly learn that Youji is not really your average guy because pretty soon he starts getting randomly horny and then excreting little flesh monsters from his ass. And then just kinda leaving them there for the school janitor to clean up. If he does it at home he just leaves 'em on the floor for a while.
I'm oversimplifying things, but this is basically the plot. Youji needs to figure out what's wrong with him while getting around other obstacles, whether it's his classmates or himself, and there's fun demonic religion mumbo jumbo that's tightly woven together with this conflict to make for a fun backdrop. I don't really want to say more because I don't want to spoil a game that isn't very expensive or very long to begin with, this should be something everyone's played at least once.
Keeping out of spoiler territory, I really like sweet pool's story for the sole reason that it's just weird. It's not anything revolutionary, and there are even still a couple of lingering questions I have, but a game doesn't have to be peak fiction for me to like it. It's entertaining as hell to watch all of this madness unfold in real time, and sometimes that's all you really need. Despite previously mentioned lingering questions, I still feel like this is still a complete experience that I've thought about fondly, rather than something like DMMD which felt rushed and paced horribly after a certain point.
Something that I think helps sweet pool feel well put together is the fact it isn't like most BL games where you're given an array of guys to choose to date— there's only three other guys Youji's age ingame, but the main story focuses on Youji's romance with only one of them, Tetsuo, with the other two characters being considered bad or alternate endings. So rather than splitting off into separate character routes where writing and pacing quality can dip, you just get one main story that's consistently fun.
The Goodish? But not really? But maybe? — The R18
If you read my DMMD review, you know that I criticized DMMD for really not good R18 scenes. In a game based around romance, making me pay extra for R18 scenes only for them to be comically short and to have the camera conveniently only show The Goods for two lines before panning away is kind of a cop out. In this scenario, they are either expecting that the consumer is in love with these men or that the consumer wants to see these men bang. The least you can do is let us see Aoba getting his back blown out.
sweet pool sort of does this, and by sort of does this I mean they do the exact same thing. Not very long R18 scenes, the camera keeps panning away from the action, I paid 5 dollars for this thanks you guys. But honestly... I kind of really like it like this in the case of sweet pool.
DMMD R18 scenes feel like scenes that are designed for what R18 is intended for. Putting it lightly, they are probably expecting you to get your rocks off to these scenes for all the 60 seconds they last. But sweet pool is weird and creepy and gross, and a lot of the sex scenes are weird and creepy and gross. I almost feel like the intent with them is to be more artsy than to be jerk off material. I could be wrong about this of course, this is just my personal outlook on these scenes.
The only part I feel conflicted on is a good portion of these scenes are unfortunately non-con which I'm not a fan of, but also I wish they went even creepier and grosser. Some might say you can't have one without having the other, but the consensual Tesuo/Youji R18 scene where they merge together in one gigantic flesh cocoon was pretty satisfying to me. Let's get more of those.
I was not hyperbolizing, that was a realass scene.
I will say that the non-con in this game is a step up from other eroge non-con scenes. Because sweet pool is gross and miserable, these scenes are gross and miserable, and they don't have the protagonist suddenly falling in love with their assaulter/descending into lust-driven madness mid-scene. For a lot of the game, sexual content is always around scenes where Youji gives birth to little demonspawns or feels scared, so I almost feel like assault scenes are intrinsically linked to Youji's fear of giving birth/being impregnated and not knowing what's happening to him. I'm trying to say I don't really think this game romanticizes sexual assault, though probably does use it as a bit of a shock factor still.
It's weird. I like it and I'm still conflicted on it just a bit. That's sweet pool, baby!
The Bad — Achievements
The process for getting all the achievements is a real doozey, and really only a problem if you're a disgusting vn achievement hunter like I am. So here's how I did it.
1. Play the game with the R18 patch. 100% it. Unlock 3 achievements. The rest (9) are bugged out with the patch on and you cannot get them using the patch.
2. Uninstall the patch. Uninstalling the patch means you now lose all of your saves. Go cry for a couple minutes.
3. Play the game without the patch. 100% it. Make sure you enable the skip movie function and the skip unread text function or you will die. Unlock the remaining 9 achievements.
Writing this down, you might think "That doesn't sound so bad". If this was a kinetic vn, one where you don't make any choices, then I would say yeah, it's not so bad. But there's a bunch of choices to make to get each ending, and a lot of those choices are unique to a particular ending. So this is hell basically.
Oddly enough, playing DMMD with the R18 patch did not cause any achievements to glitch out, despite warnings that this would happen. So maybe by 2021 they figured out how to do R18 patches without killing the achievements. I'll have to test this out for whenever I decide to play their other releases (as of right now, Togainu no Chi is the only other release they have).
Overall Thoughts
I just had a lot of fun with this. It didn't go crazy deep, but it did really entertain me. If you like creepy psychological horror and gore, then this game is for you! If you're unsettled easily, this game definitely isn't for you, but maybe still play it anyways. It's fun to indulge in insane people games.
Again, this is a short game and it's not super expensive, so it's pretty accessible. Go give it a try. Give JAST BLUE enough money to finish their Lamento localization.
Final Score:
sweet pool: 8/10 Saya no Uta but for girls and this is a compliment
Comments
Post a Comment