Sutekina kanojo no tsukurikata

cw for abuse, sexual assault, mental illness and basically anything else you can think of 👍 yikes! tldr it's BAD like don't even read this

Suteki na Kanojo no Tsukurikata (AKA "How To Build A Great Girlfriend") is a game I often (unfortunately) think back to with increasing disgust. I knew somewhat what I was getting into: The game is openly advertised as a "yandere yuri visual novel", it had received mixed reviews claiming the game was too uneven in the second half, and looking on the steam page will bombard you with a wall of negative reviews from Chinese players screaming "this is not yuri! this is not pure love!" I think this last response was what made me most curious about the game. Yuri is a genre often perceived as all too safe and nonthreatening-- The subject of mental illness or the idea that one of leads might not be a virgin is incredibly threatening to it's usually straight, male audience. I wanted something with a little more bite. The first half, while not terribly deep, does a decent job of setting up some serious, real-life themes with the heavy feeling that something is about to snap. The second half? It takes everything the story had, and flushes it down the shitter.

PART 1: I'M SORRY I'M SO EMO.... XP

The story opens up quite boldly with our college aged self-proclaimed "emo girl", Sumire, suicide baiting random people on twitter. We establish right off the bat that Sumire is a self-loathing, terminally online cringelord with severe untreated mental illness. It's refreshingly realistic. She's edgy, she's anxiety-ridden, and she's somebody you've certainly met before. Sumire is somebody who has clearly experienced immense trauma and is coping in some very unhealthy ways. It's cringe inducingly endearing when she rambles on harmlessly about otaku nonesense, but of course there's the issue of boundaries: Nazuna.

Nazuna is the second half of the pair, and she's a dream girl in every sense. Smart, beautiful, and unbearably kind. She offers to study with Sumire, and our resident edgelord, incapable of being normal about anything, begins to grow a bit of an obsession.

srry for bad image quality i took these on mai phone at 2am! XDXDXD

While Sumire gets all sorts of juicy details, Nazuna remains mostly flat. She's a little sheltered on the account of her family being a bit controlling and she has some painful memories about a dog in her childhood, but besides that she's just very...nice. It's not awful, but it's not interesting, and there were times where I began to wonder why she'd let a freak like Sumire hang around at all.

There is also the character of Doctor, a mystery person whom Sumire texts whenever she's in a bind. Her conversations with Doc usually touch on her depression, sexuality, or just general social incapability. These talks surprised me with their honesty. But just under the surface, something is brewing.

It is genuinely interesting to watch Nazuna and Sumire's relationship evolve. At first, it's just a one-sided puppy crush for a benevolent senpai. A few drinks later, it's a promise to lean on each other when things get hard. It's touching. It's flirty. But as the boundaries erode, Sumire zeroes in on her perceived one source of support with an increasingly unhealthy ferocity. Nazuna is too timid to say no, and Sumire is too sick to stop.

It'd say that this point in the game was my favorite. Sumire pretty clearly exhibits signs of BPD-- A mental disorder many of my dear friends struggle with, making it a topic that hits close to home. Sumire, in desperate want of fulfillment, begins to isolate and manipulate Nazuna in increasingly more methodical ways. She's desperate to satisfy the emptiness within her. I've watched these same patterns in real life and experienced them first hand. The failure to establish proper boundaries (and get therapy dear god) is the first step to the couple's downfall. The set up was all there! Something dark, something immeasurably fucked up was right around the corner.... But little did I know, it was also something unbelievably stupid.

PART 2: I CAN'T EVEN JOKE ABOUT IT MAN, LIKE, WHAT THE FUCK IT THIS

At almost exactly the midway point, the story absolutely shits itself.

Sumire goes full mindbreak and kidnaps Nazuna, beating her, berating her, assaulting her in every way possible. The descriptions feel like an 8th grader who prides themselves in watching beheadings on uncurated YouTube going off about a snuff themed webcomic they're making. It's just the schlockiest edge you've ever read, I'm stewing just thinking about it. The characters act out of character from here on out and the story becomes boring with how offensive it's apparently trying to be. Twists are revealed, but none of them are delivered well and most of them don't really matter. Can you tell I'm over it? I'm over it. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

The odd thing about this chunk of the game is... how little there is to talk about. There's nothing to be said about the characters, because they've all been stripped of any recognizable traits. Not much in the story department now, due to the story being reduced to actual torture porn. The art is even disappointing-- Most the H scenes are haphazardly strewn about this section, their quality noticeably worse than the purely romantic scenes in first half. I don't even really know what to say at this point. Maybe, "I don't think this game is bad purely for the content it contains, but for the fact that it squandered all of it's potential in a near disrespectful fashion for the sake of rushed shock horror"?

There is one mildly interesting thing about the second half: The true ending. There are a number of endings to obtain, all of them completely awful H scenes (we'll get into that) followed by an abrupt credits roll. The true ending, however, has the smallest glimmer of something there. In the true ending (the only good ending), Sumire has abused Nazuna so hard the girl is nothing but bruised skin and bones. She runs into the street asking why she isn't satisfied even after all that and bumps into another girl. Then, she makes a realization: It doesn't have to be Nazuna. It can be anybody. She asks the girl's name, and the cycle starts again. This ending isn't exactly well done but it at least means something. It's not enough to save the rest of the game. But, I mean...It's something...I guess....¯\_(ツ)_/¯

AN ASIDE: WOMEN LOVING WOMEN AS LOVED BY MEN

This is the part that'll go more into depth about the sexual content, so just scroll really fast if you that's not your thing.

At the start of this ramble, I mentioned the steam reviews. It turns out the game was review bombed by Chinese players due to the reveal that Sumire was not a virgin, meaning this wasn't a "pure love" (I mean, it's not a pure love for other reasons but hey whatever). There's a very fierce protectiveness in yuri over the "purity" of the characters, the idea that purity somehow gives the woman value. The women CAN have sex with each other, but that's "not real". The wonderful aspect of yuri-- according to it's straight, male audience-- is that you can get the luxury of watching girls go down on each other without anything "tainted" in the delusion that they can be yours as well. Does that make sense? If Sumire is not a "true virgin" (she is revealed to have been assaulted by a group of men), then she is worthless if she were to have sex with you (assuming that you are a straight man, and also assuming Sumire suddenly stops being a lesbian). It's a very fucked up idea that is heavy within otaku circles, so seeing in Sumire's talks with the Doc that she was actually curious about sex in a normal fashion was actually a breath of fresh air.

Just kidding, it's awful!

Pushing aside that every single H scene in this game is rape and DOUBLY pushing aside the embarrassingly shoved-in shock horror kinks, the sex is written in an oddly male fashion. There are a surprising number of scenes that are POV shots, and the methods of pleasure are usually very... not lesbian. I was reminded time and time again that this mess was written for men, by men. Apparently, pleasure is just impossible to achieve without some kind of phallic object involved. I suppose this is a good a time as any to confess that this was sadly not the first nor last time I've suffered through an H scene with a creative use for screwdrivers :((( Besides that, the scenes just look ugly. Yeah, I'm tired of talking about this too.

ANOTHER ASIDE: WHY IS MY LAPTOP ON FIRE??!

This game kept overheating my computer. I have no clue why. I searched the forums and found it was a common problem.The game doesn't have any crazy effects-- It at most employs Live2D for it's sprites, a system that shouldn't be too harsh on my epic gamer setup, but apparently the devs just let their visual novel run at 200 FRAMES A SECOND by default and called it a day. Oh, and once you install the R-18 patch, you can't uninstall it unless you delete the whole damn game. That's normally not the case with visual novels... Yeah, I dunno what to say here.

The most attractive part of this whole mess is the art! The sprites for Nazuna and Sumire are very fashionable and well-drawn, and the Live2D isn't intrusive for them at all (except for the part where it made my laptop nearly explode). The romantic CGs are similarly gorgeous. The H-scenes, though... I've already talked about that enough. Awful. Oh, as a quick note, my sister informed me of a fashion style called Jirai Kei. It's a style that is characterized by cutesy, girly looks with a dark edge and is often tied to the image of being really mentally ill. That's the fashion of the game, and I'd say it's the ONE good decision the creators made.

The localization was just fine. There was a few typos but nothing obtrusive. The flavor of the translation is noticeably full of zoomer humor, which is both funny and cringe worthy. Sumire's repeated exclamations of "But I'm an EMO!!! X((" were a real kicker (despite nobody seriously using the word emo to describe themselves nowadays lol)

ENDING TIME: I AM BOBO THE FOOL

I really wanted to like this. I wanted to be the Dark Yuri Champion. I trekked on, bravely and nobly for my cause. Unfortunately, I made a grave mistake in forgetting that this was written by a man for men and thus I should really get my hopes down-- no, I should just euthanize my hopes peacefully while it's still safe. A realistically twisted story about how untreated mental illness affects relationships was thrown under the bus for mindless, eye-rolling drivel to meet a deadline. Whats sad about this is that I can't imagine the writer enjoying any bit of this. The torture porn was soulless, which is an odd thing to say, but it was so empty it ceased to elicit any reaction from me. The team is a small one with little to no prior experience. I can only assume they were given a tight deadline with a checkbox of H scenes to cover before being handed approximately 2 dollars to work with. Man, that's just sad. Nothing more to say except that there's better art out there and you deserve to experience things made with meaning and care 👍