Yu-No: A Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound Of The World (1997): My Thoughts
Date: 2025-2-08
Fundamentally I think it’s impossible to talk about Yu-No in any real way without addressing that it’s an eroge. And to be clear it’s not just like, pervy, it’s actively, fully, one-thousand percent porn. Being able to roll with (or actively enjoy? Hey who am I to judge) that aspect is a table-stakes thing for Yu-No, and one that, going into playing it, I didn’t know I would so easily be able to roll with, to be honest.
I’m sure someone incredibly smart has said something incredibly smart and insightful about how it’s often the art that surprises us the most and pushes our own taste and understanding of that taste the most that we end up liking the most, but that’s certainly true for me in a lot of ways. I came to Yu-No through Gunbuster. What I mean by that really is that I came at it from a couple angles:
1) References to it kept popping up in the JP stuff I’ve been stumbling through in reading through/watching/exploring Gainax after being blown away a couple months back by my revisiting Gunbuster for the first time as an adult. This game seems to have dropped like a bombshell into the nerd scene of mid-late 90s Japan in a way that continues to make ripples today. This is a game that is probably amongst your favorite Japanese game developer’s/mangaka’s most formative influences, and so I felt like I almost owed it to myself to experience it.
2) Visual novels have been a genre that have been a complete undiscovered country for me in the past. I tried 13 Sentinels and hated it. I’ve tried Ace Attorney and hated it. I do really like Snatcher, but apart from that I’m really out in the cold dark on the entire genre. So, a game as beloved and influential as this one seemed like a good place to give this the old college try.
3) As a fun, stupid, silly sort of hobby thing, I’ve been taking advantage of the fact that I have a family member stationed in Japan who can ship things at reasonable prices to assemble a PC-98. This is, admittedly, very silly, and it’s been an enormous pain in my butt, but a pain that has been pretty fun in the way a lot of tinker-y hobbies are. Why? I think because in all of the games I’ve ever played ever, there is something about the overall general broad style of what games on the PC98 looked like that most appeals to me. Put another way, PC98 games are I think the best looking video games ever, based on my taste.
So now we arrive at Yu-No.
Other reviewers here have pointed out the obvious: we play as a fella who sucks in a lot of ways, but in ways that I think are just very banal “dudes suck” kinda ways. I want to put this right here and say that I was never scandalized by anything in this game, really. It’s very standard retrograde 1990s stuff, with the layer on top being that it’s a porn game, so it’s very much appealing to a certain sensibility. I think on the whole like, there are interesting discussions to be had about these things, and I don’t think people who are scandalized by any content are like “wrong” per se, but for whatever reason it didn’t bother me in the way a lot of non-porn fan service does. Is it an expectation thing? I don’t know. But I think there’s something to knowing right off the bat that you’re playing a porn game that just accepts that you’re gonna see underwear in every. Single. CG. It just like, that’s how it is, so I just kinda shrug at it. Also, this isn’t the time or place for this sort of thing in any depth but like, not all (or even most) of the explicitly porn-y stuff is even objectionable, really. It’s porn. “Whom amongst us” etc etc
With all of that said, I do want to talk about mechanics a bit, because again, I don’t have a lot of context or understanding of this genre. I’ll say outright that I would have been utterly and completely miserable and lost without a guide. A very, very, specific, hand-holding, “do exactly this” guide. I want to be clear when I say that I had no intention of ever engaging in the mechanics of this game without instruction, because to be completely honest, as soon as I got to the in-game diegetic save states I genuinely did not know what their use would be. I’m not genre savvy or patient enough to have experienced this game to 100% map/ending completion like I did all on my own. So my experience, like with most games I play these days, is a Cheaters Experience.
Seven paragraphs into writing and I’ll now say outright that I was so blown away and enraptured by Yu-No that I could barely put it down. The bulk of my play time came while my wife was out of town for a workshop so I marathoned it in a way I haven’t marathoned a game in ages. Hunched over at the PC98 drinking barley tea and only getting up to get more water or snacks, mildly neglecting everything else in my life but the barest minimum chores and pet stuff—I was completely engrossed. Completely and fully taken in. And sitting here even now, I both love and am surprised by that. I had no idea I even could be taken in by a game like this. A porn game. A porn game visual novel! But I wanted to know everything. I wanted to understand the plots, I wanted to unravel the mystery, I wanted to complete the paths! And surprise after surprise and moment after moment kept piling up because this game does. Not. Stop. Throwing curveballs at you.
It’s something that would be harmful, I think, to a first-timer’s playing of this game, but the fact that you play the prologue in dialogue tree format and then THE ENTIRE WAY YOU INTERFACE WITH THE GAME CHANGES after the prologue was jaw dropping to me. And then, once you get all of the endings and start in on the last part, YOU PLAY AN ENTIRE GAME IN AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION. Seriously probably 5+ or more hours of gameplay spent in a completely different world with mostly different characters. I was gobsmacked; my brain was turned to absolute jelly.
A couple quick things from my notes that I want to shout out as quick hits:
- The first time I went into the cafe I literally said, “wow” out loud to myself at both the art and the FM Synth version of Gymnopedie No. 1. Probably a literal top 5 video gaming memory for me now.
- There is some incredibly effective spooky stuff in this game. There’s a section—right before a sex scene even—where you hide in a locker and hear footsteps coming and the way the footsteps sound is genuinely unsettling and spooky. Same with sneaking around and into the mansion, and the first time you see, in shadow, the hanging body of Ryuu-Sensei’s mom? Absolutely buck wild stuff.
- Timecop Eriko just absolutely rocks. Cannot say enough cool stuff about her.
There is a lot I have here in my notebook about fate, disaffection, discovery, history, the Lost Decade and all of the other influences and connections and everything that kept coming up as well, but it’s not the sort of thing I would get a lot out of typing into this review. It made me feel a certain type of nostalgia that made my whole body hurt with longing to not live in 2025 anymore; I want to live in Sakimichi and I want to be 20 again and spend all night at a 24 hour diner chain smoking clove cigarettes and drinking bottomless coffee with someone else who has played this game and loves it as much as me.
