Fast Karate Game of the Year 2017 #10: Butterfly Soup
It would be lame if I said I didnât âgetâ the meme-y-ness of this game, a not-quite-old-enough person acting willfully out of touch, but itâs true. Butterfly Soup is a nostalgia piece for a high school experience ten+ years (and other factors besides) removed from my own. I only recognize half the jokes because I see people a decade younger than me reblog them on tumblr.Â
I believe they are called âââshitpostingâââÂ
That being said, as may end up becoming a theme this year (i havenât exactly finalized the listđŹdespite it already being 2018đŹ), I have a soft spot for stories about sucky jerks who canât help how much they suck and are jerks, because these stories, piquant or banal, inevitably boil down to a failure to communicate, which is a vector of frustration and release that I identify with perhaps too deeply.Â
It always puts me out when people say âwhy didnât person X say Y, that wouldâve solved the whole movie!â and itâs almost like⊠wow??? human beings canât talk to each other so good and i can think of a thousand, million, trillion moments in my life where my inability to say something has stymied my personal life in ways that enraged and depressed me, where i would do literally anything to say the words i couldnât say except, yet, paradoxically, unearth a way to somehow say them??? so i find the (beinâ real, almost always from nerds) compulsion to have every character parse their emotions like a hyper-logical Feelings Bot often very baffling (except in cases of shows like Lost, where characters really shouldâve talked less about their feelings and more about the startling plot revelations they discovered but didnât think warranted telling anyone about (or just died)). There is a pain of emotional distance coupled with physical proximity, I think most people probably understand that, at least on a gut-check level. Or maybe not. Maybe nobody but me gives up on talking because they know they donât have the capacity to express what they actually mean.
But I donât think thatâs true; otherwise, Butterfly Soup wouldnât exist.
With at least three Sucky Jerks Who Suck And Are Jerks And Canât Communicate among the main cast, Butterfly Soup has an extremely high SJ-WS&AJ&CC quotient. I truly believe the Sucky Jerk Who Sucks is a transcendent archetype, and, if youâll forgive me for spoiling you, Butterfly Soup has a part where all the Sucky Jerks Who Suck And Canât Communicate come together to assist the Suckiest Jerk Who Sucks And Canât Communicate The Most to help them reconcile and achieve social communion and I suppose thatâs truly heartwarming. I suspect itâs at least as heartwarming as the end of a Pixar movie, but I donât watch those.
Itâs cute and clever, sweet and short, which is most of what I like about visual novels, when I end up liking them. I played three quarters of it in a single morning over the span of two cups of coffee, then I walked the dog and ignored the podcast babbling in my ears while I thought about how when Min said she uses the family bathroom because they donât care if youâre a boy or a girl, thatâs the saddest a game has made me in a long, long time.
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