Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll (LMR) is a visual novel Y8 game in development for over five years from the same studio, Friv5Online Games, that is responsible for the iconic Endless Summer. So, if we take it for granted that a visual novel is first and foremost an interesting book, then I have two options. Or Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll - it's just an ambitious, but in fact immensely protracted, full of clichés, absurdities, illogicalities and student graphomania. Or it's exactly the same book, which is closer to the finale, especially with repeated passages to other endings, it still starts to seem better and grows into something more. Let's figure it out.
Why is this book full of clichés? Judge for yourself. The action takes place in a Japanese school, where there are many pretty girls in short skirts, between which our main character, a high school student, is torn. Unrequitedly in love with us, ready for self-sacrifice and even, it seems, for suicide - is there? Yes, her name is Himitsu, and she looks like Sayori from the Doki Doki Literature Club in places! A cold and proud ex, who can still hurt us and with whom the hero is still in love? Available - her name is Katherine.
Shy nerd? And how - meet Kagome. And, finally, the bright, broken girl Eli bursts onto the stage, the queen of the school, a representative of the golden youth and part-time vocalist of a rock band, ready to punch her in the face if something happens. She looks like Alisa Dvachevskaya from Endless Summer in places.
Then clichés of a different kind are added to the anime stamps - from a spy thriller involving the KGB, the CIA, Japanese intelligence, fourth-generation ballistic missiles and long-legged blond scouts. If in "Endless Summer" there was nostalgia for the Soviet past, then why here? According to the "cranberries" about the USSR and vulgar spy novels? I did not notice any other significant signs of the synth-pop 80s. In any case, the mixture of anime, kagebe, graphomania and existential throwing of the protagonist looks pretty ridiculous.
Yes, about graphomania and throwing. The protagonist of Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll is outright hostile, to say the least. Unlike Semyon from "BL" , who was generally neutral and served more as a mask (so it was easy to put ourselves in his place), here we see a more elaborate image endowed with its own character, but it is inconvenient to associate oneself with him, and indeed don't want too much. Nikolai Anokhin, the son of Soviet emigrant engineers, has been living in Japan since childhood, but he never got rid of the primordially Russian soul-searching, self-flagellation, constant reflection, as well as drunkenness and Oblomovism, which are elevated to the absolute here.
Nikolai lives alone, on the money left over from his parents, who apparently died in a car accident. We are constantly shown how he sleeps, how girls prepare food for him in the morning, how he then lazily goes to school, where he doesn’t really want to study. He also often visits a bar and a nightclub, where he regularly drinks. But to make some important decision, to choose who he loves and who is truly dear to him, is too difficult for Nikolai. Instead, he constantly indulges not even in reasoning, but in empty rantings full of clever quotes, names and other ostentatious erudition.
Hegel , Yesenin, Hemingway, Hitchcock; phone calls “as if coming from a black hole, beyond the event horizon of which not a single sound can escape”; lanterns "dimming their light so as not to wake tired residents"; Nikolai's personal "existential vessels" that survived another "storm"; vulgar literary clichés in the spirit of “on the other side of the ocean of suffering”, “soul wounded by suffering”, “muddy haze of gray everyday life” ... And next to all this - anecdotes about Rzhevsky and recognition that the person, they say, is stupid, did not read The Brothers Karamazov (Himitsu was reading and she's cool).
I understand that “BL” also suffered from graphomania, and there one could find descriptions in the spirit of “A fleeting vision, like a reflection on glasses on a rainy autumn evening, which makes you turn around and peer into the darkness for a long time, looking for something flashed there at the edge of the field of view.” But in the epic-sized LMR , all this verbal and intellectual mishmash begins to frankly tire after a couple of hours. And in "BL" there were no 430,000 words, which only stretch the passage.
Even being on the verge of starvation, Nikolai recalls old films and quotes from there. After an important call, he wonders: “I wonder if they care that we actually fly hundreds of kilometers per second on a piece of stone through the void of space?” And when he learns that his girlfriend may have been kidnapped or something else serious has happened, he either gets drunk or goes shopping.
The “endless autumn” of reflection and verbiage is clearly visible to others, who perfectly see that Nikolai behaves like a schizophrenic. He quarreled with one because he directly admitted: “I love the other” , but he said to his beloved that no, the quarrel was not because of her. And he immediately received a capacious answer: “You can hang this pseudo-philosophical crap on her, not on me!”
And the inability to make a choice begins to infuriate not only us, the readers, but also the characters. One of the rare friends is already yelling and running into a fight: “Can you clearly tell me whether you are with her or not?” But instead of a fight, we see only hysteria and involuntary insults against everyone, including the seemingly beloved girl. And it would be better to finally give someone in the face, do something sharp, serious, irrevocable. Or slept with one of the girls. After all, our hero runs from sex for a long time like from fire, which looks completely illogical. Like all his behavior - at least for a man of his age.
And here is a very important point. All this “pseudo-philosophical crap”, reflection and words about “my existential vessel”; throwing from the inability to make a choice; hysterical hand-wringing and the subsequent descent into the abyss of alcoholism, dostoevism and self-denial we see in the performance, let me remind you, of an 18-year-old high school student.
Not only do teenagers not speak like that and don’t think in such a pseudo-intellectual language, but they don’t behave like that. And what was it worth just changing an 18-year-old student for a 25-30-year-old teacher (if you really want to stay within the boundaries of a Japanese school)? After all, it immediately gives a different color and makes you believe in the hero much more. I can understand the self-companion, the indecision, and the associated drinking—I have experienced this myself, agonizing over the choice between the two. But I was far from 18 - a different experience and burden, seven years of marriage, children, finally. And in any case, I did not try to find answers in endless quotes from Hegel or reflections on the cosmos - it was simply not up to words.
That is, it can be taken as an artistic device - the screenwriter deliberately exaggerates all this verbiage and reflection in order to show us what they can bring to. But then he did not guess with the circumstances and the main character himself - you do not believe them.
In fact, it is still possible to understand Nikolai to some extent. Often he behaves so illogically simply because the circumstances of this story develop illogically, the girls who are engaged in verbal and moral masturbation in the same way behave illogically - yesterday they were still lying in bed and smiling, and in the morning they leave strange farewell notes; they themselves admit that they betrayed, and then they are surprised that they are offended, and so on. All this adds up to a long round dance of 10-12 hours of general verbiage, absurd deeds and self-digging, which not everyone is able to withstand.
However, there is a reason to endure. And in such anime visual novels, he is well known - this is an opportunity to read not one, but several stories, determine the development of events with your decisions and get different, good or bad, endings with all the girls. True, it cannot be said that everything is perfect with this in Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll .
The consequences of some decisions are not at all obvious - a couple of phrases / locations change. Some endings, it seemed to me, are not very logically connected with our choice. Sometimes it is surprising that we are offered to choose where to go with a girl - to a bar or to a park, to a movie or to take a walk, but they do not give us the opportunity to decide whether to agree to work for the KGB or not, to forgive a character or not to forgive.
But still, in other "routes", that is, in the branches of the story that lead to other endings with other girls, such a choice may appear. And in general, the authors came up with stories and endings that are really different according to the scenario, which can surprise and even shock.
In addition, some of the "routes" are written more interesting than others - there empty thoughts, albeit not completely, but recede, exposing non-trivial thoughts and real feelings. Not to mention the well-written characters. Yes, some turned out better, some worse, but the fact that a lot of work has been done is a fact.
If smart quotes are so loved in Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll , then I will allow myself to quote the philosopher Alexander Sekatsky , who at the "Closed Screening" said the following about Andrey Zvyagintsev 's film "Exile":
This film is too beautiful, emphatically smart, containing a whole bunch of claims, most of which are not justified ... And the potential slogan under which it was filmed is: "Make me existential." And they will do it for you. We were told: “Here, look, you will see a smart movie.” And everything is really mixed in it, but in the end nothing is presented or confirmed.
That's about the same with Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. It's a beautiful (graphics and music confirms this), a big Y8 game with pretensions that wants to make us smart and existential - and it certainly became an event in the Russian visual novel genre. But its writer, in my opinion, made a number of mistakes. Firstly, I have not decided on the audience: for schoolchildren and those close to them there are too many buzzwords and not enough fan service, sex, but for older people who are familiar with good literature, all these pseudo-intellectual exercises seem naive and unconvincing. Secondly, I could not cope with my own ambitions, thoughts and desires, which, of course, have accumulated a lot over so many years of development - the Y8 game turned out to be very uneven. And thirdly, he began to compensate for all this with a huge number of words, mixed everything that was possible and impossible. Although we all remember very well - the main thing is not the quantity, but the quality. It would be possible to do everything more capaciously, accurately and non-trivially.
Pros: there are interesting branches, stories, decisions and endings; well-written characters; high-quality picture and atmospheric music.
Cons: a lot of graphomania and soul-searching with or without; the image of the main character is annoying; actions, situations and motives often seem illogical; an abundance of stamps in the script; the lack of options where they would be appropriate.
