A can of refreshing, healthy Yabaley's tomato juice. Drink responsibly!
I shall not say anymore about it other than this: leave your preconceptions at the door, abandon your cynicism, ignore the cultural osmosis and let yourself be swept by this experience.
Enjoy a videogame.
Cheers!
#YouandMeandHer
I really wish I had someone telling me this after I read "Wonderful Everyday"... But yes, #YouandMeandHer is a romance eroge about romance eroge, a love story about loving fictional heroines and fictional heroines that yearn to be real through love.
It's about YOU and HER and HER.
Your love for that 2D girl is a genuine human response and the melancholy you may experience when the story comes to a close shall stay with you as a bittersweet memory. More so in this case because you cannot redo your choices - not normally, at least.
#YouandMeandHer
You aren't *glitched* for having these feelings, you don't need a *patch* and you aren't escaping Reality. You are engaging with the fiction at your own pace, discovering yourself through it and feeling strongly towards a fictional character, as a result. That's just being human!
#YouandMeandHer
#YouandMeandHer is about the emotional connection we form with fictional characters, how we project our feelings onto them and how they reflect back on us, and how that fact does not make what we feel any less REAL.
CG of Aoi shedding tears as she is bathed in the warmth of sunset.
What you need to understand is this visual novel has never, even once lied to you: it IS a love story between YOU, the player, and your chosen heroine. It's not a horror, a comedy, a satire, a parody or a Post-Modern deconstruction, it's VALIDATION!
#YouandMeandHer
No, the reason why #YouandMeandHer hits as hard as it does, despite how *quaint* it may seem retroactively, is because it's AUTHENTIC. It does not come from a place of snark or disdain for its own medium like so many, much lazier *self-aware* works do.
And also the best example of said niche. The reason for that isn't its scary twists, its genre-bending turns, its trope subversions or even its admittedly very fun, clever use of H-Scenes as both meta-commentary and plot device.
#YouandMeandHer
I have a newfound appreciation for how shallow "Doki Doki Literature Club" is compared to this title and you'll have to forgive me if I do not go into more detail about this statement. #YouandMeandHer is simultaneously the unintentional blueprint for this very specific kind of meta-textual VN...
It does not stop there, though. It just keeps going, and going, and going, far above and beyond the scope of any of its piddling imitators, circling around itself, deconstructing and reconstructing, until it boils down to a FINAL CHOICE that will permanently alter your game files.
#YouandMeandHer
That is when everything goes off the rails. The universe resets, my event CGs are taken away, no more saving/loading, your own choices are used against you and, yes, you guessed it, SOMEONE traps your self-insert character with THEM in order to get to YOU!
#YouandMeandHer
Aoi: "The event CGs will heal me up" She says that in her own event CG lying atop Main Guy.
The Change occurs slowly, at first, when the game nonchalantly ignored my choices and contrived ways to push me down Miyuki's route, the Childhood Friend. After many attempts and not-so inconspicuous sabotages, I finally managed to romance Aoi, God's cutest antenna.
#YouandMeandHer
Yuutarou (tears of blood streaking down his face): "You're a normie, aren't you? you ARE! You're a goddamn NORMIE!"
Alas, this will only make the breakdown more painful as I become emotionally invested in them but that is a problem for Future Madhog!
In the meantime, have a screenshot of Yuutarou crying tears of blood because he's not getting any action.
#YouandMeandHer
That is all to say, "You and Me and Her" could have easily been one of the best romantic visual novels I have ever read based solely on how good, well-written the characters are when they quickly evolved into much more complete versions of their assigned archetypes.
#YouandMeandHer
But it's all for the narrative and thematic benefit of its characters, their intertwining relationships, their friendship and heartaches as they navigate a bunch of complicated emotions. The *transceiver* girl's meta-quirks could be just as easily read as a response to trauma.
#YouandMeandHer
Yes, there are inexplicable magically realistic elements and fourth-wall breaking shenanigans pretty much constantly, including a "Play Within a Play" trope wherein the game itself is also a game of the same name that exists within the text.
#YouandMeandHer
This is clearly done in order to conceal the eventual hard-shift towards Horror that will inevitably occur but, in the moment, it acts as the ideal setting for a shockingly self-restrained high school romance.
#YouandMeandHer
School rooftop. Sunset. Aoi is standing atop a radio platform while attempting to establish a connection with God through her cellphone, raised towards the sky.
A view of the town in the morning. Hand-drawn street, houses, phone line poles and a beautiful blue sky.
The game's world is bathed in the warm hues of sunset as it warmly blankets its characters (and you) in gorgeous, hand-drawn backgrounds. The atmosphere is familiar and understated, akin to a memory of a happier time. Really, it looks great at any hour of the day!
#YouandMeandHer
However, what you might find surprising, given this introduction, is how understated, nuanced and grounded the general tone appears to be. The scenario described is certainly goofy, purposefully self-flagellating, and yet there is a subversion in the manner by which it is all framed.
#YouandMeandHer
Aoi Mukou: "Aoi will get naked and the international watermark will appear."
In just about twenty minutes, several genre-specific clichés have been introduced and irreverently ripped asunder as the game winks at the camera with all the subtlety of a jackhammer to your face. You are being constantly reminded that you are, indeed, playing a videogame.
#YouandMeandHer
Yuutarou Akebono: "Arriving just in the nick of time! Akebono Yuutarou, captain of the Boys and Dreams Club!"
Then the Childhood Friend shows up with a baseball bat to break things off while awkwardly, off-handedly confessing her feelings for Main Guy in a Tsundere-like fashion. Then the Comic Relief Best Friend makes a boastful entrance and spoils the mood.
#YouandMeandHer
Which is an actual staircase leading to *The Centre of the Universe* - the school's rooftop. There he meets a pink-haired girl who claims to be *a transceiver to God*, declares herself a romantic option as she falls onto the protagonist to unlock the event CG.
#YouandMeandHer
#YouandMeandHer does not waste any time in establishing its meta-textual inclinations. As soon as you boot it up, you are thrown right into the prologue wherein the main guy is monologuing about how 'there are no branching paths in life' as he climbs the metaphorical staircase of Fate.
Mysterious pink-haired girl, very close to your face: "Wanna... get zappy?"
Choice: - Get zappy - Don't get zappy
Having established all of that, I shall attempt to disentangle myself entirely from the meta-knowledge and judge the work on its own merits, ideas and (expected) twists. Please, join me in this definitely-a-romance-and-not-a-self-aware-horror story.
#YouandMeandHer
"Doki Doki Literature Club +" cover art.
Engaging with it in earnest is a difficult proposition. Even if I pretended not to notice all the foreshadowing and the fourth-wall breaking, I still 100% realize what kind of novel this is... because "Doki Doki Literature Club" and its annoying tropes would not exist without it.
#YouandMeandHer
I find myself in a similar, compromising position as I began reading Nitroplus' "You and Me and Her: A Love Story." An influential 2013's visual novel that (unfortunately) is responsible for starting a trend, which became a saturated practice, which retroactively made it *quaint.*
#YouandMeandHer
"Undertale" felt special when it came out, then it became an influence and, finally, a standard. It's still an important game but it will most likely hit differently than it did in 2015 were you to play it for the first time in the current year.
#YouandMeandHer
Generally speaking, we tend to focus too much on the impact of the art rather than the meaning of the art itself or its historical context and that, inevitably, creates a scenario wherein the original work ends up feeling quaint.
#YouandMeandHer
Everyone will have already talked about it, discussed it, praised it, despised it, rejected it, stolen from it, and so forth. By the time you finally get to it, the clamor, the noise, the many things that it inspired, might have created unfair preconceptions about it.
#YouandMeandHer
To give you a far more prescient example: playing "Undertale" for the first time in the month it came out, over ten years ago, will always be a wildly different experience than playing it in the aftermath of its ascension to a massive, pop-cultural artefact.
#YouandMeandHer
