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warning: this visual novel contains sex, rape, violence, blood, torture and incest. this review describes such scenes in (some) detail.
if you'd like to know, no, i don't like romanticized versions of incest in fiction, or support media =/= reality bullshit, i'm not a proshipper, i don't think people should be allowed to post publicly about their fantasies about children having sex. i just enjoy reading fucked up shit sometimes.
review also available on my neocities website (not readable on mobile)
entitled kikokugai, or the cyber slayer, written by gen urobuchi (worked on titles like madoka magica, psycho pass, and fate series), who famously writes sad and depressing stories, and plublished by nitroplus, this novel is about revenge, crime, cyber warriors and martial arts. kong taoluo, martial arts master and former assassin in a high ranking society, returns to shanghai, after being assumed dead and being betrayed by the syndicate and his best friend. after finding out his sister was murdered, he sets out on murdering those who wronged his sibling.
it sounds really cool right? but i'll be honest with you - not really. however, i did find it entertaining, because let's be real, cyber punk shanghai with martial arts and transhumanism sounds pretty cool. but the story gets pretty ridiculous:
(tw: rape, torture)
the story starts out with a woman being raped. yeah, it starts just like that.
it's not an extremely long scene, but it's unavoidable and literally the start of the story. i'm not kidding, when you open the first release version
of the visual novel you get blasted with a sex scene in the face.
later you know that this woman is actually a robot. for a second you think - "oh, ok. it's very weird that someone
programmed a robot to simulate a woman being raped, but, ok."
then, you find out that this robot, actually has one of the 5 pieces of kong ruili's soul, the protagonist's sister, who was brutally murdered while being gang raped.
and these robots where made to recreate ruili's last moment's everyday, where they are constantly raped by their owners.
it doesnt end there: after killing 4 out 5 of ruili's murderers, the one left is liu haojun,
ruili's ex-husband and kong taoluo's ex-best friend. and he tells us why he killed ruili:
because she wanted to! he says ruili asked for this, because she didn't really love liu haojun, she was actually in love with her brother.
so, she thought that she was worthless and didn't deserve to live because of this, so she asked liu haojun to rape her and kill her, to separate her soul into
different robots so she could relive her last moments of torture everyday.
then kong taoluo and liu haojun fight each other to death while ruili gathers the last piece of her soul, and becomes her "old self" again. (but she's a robot now) in the end, shows that
kong taoluo died, but ruili got to him in time and moved his conciousness into hers, so they live together in a incestuous heaven inside her mind/brain/cpu.
should you read kikokugai?
sincerely?, no, not really. if you're really interested, and can stomatch the ridiculous plot and the rape, maybe go for it. i'd only recommend it to people who are already into visual novels
and would like to read something new. (although this story is so niche that only visual novel nerds will end up reading it) story starts really good and interesting, has a good momentum and interestingly written fight scenes, but the setting is extremely bleak and depressing that only few
can stomach. the story drags a little towards the middle but picks up once you get to liu haojun. the soundtrack is really good tho.
why do i like kikokugai so much?
i have to be honest, it was just incredibly entertaining. read this one a while a go and it just stuck with me. i love reading stories that are bleak and depressing, and this does just that. it's bleak, traumatic, depressing, and i really love it. you can really feel and understand the pain of the protagonist - he lost everything, his friends, the society he lived in, his own family. it's painful, sincerely, i'd do the same for my sister too if i was in the same place. even if she was in love with me and that's weird as fuck. other than that, the characters are really captivating, specially ruili, to see her growing up extremely fast right in front of your eyes, to be able to become herself again, just so she can leave her trauma behind. i really loved the setting too.
it's a captivating story, but unfortunately, i think the main reason why i think i could be better is just the fact that liu haojun blamed his own wife for her death, that she asked for this, which to me, i really like to believe that he's just lying. but glad that after this gen urobuchi started hating women a little less.
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