High School Love Overdrive: Yandere Simulator
Anime and manga terminology is quick to go around the world.
It seems like the West is quick to grasp onto them and make a trend within and outside the otaku community. A few years ago, the word yandere was buzzing on everyone’s social media feed, taking root from animes like Future Diary and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. The yandere trope was incredibly popular due to the characters' quirks, charms, and fatal flaws. In the middle of this yandere craze, a video game was born: Yandere Simulator.
Yandere is a Japanese word that represents a lovesick character, to the point they get obsessive and violent over their love interest. Based on this, in 2015, a developer known as YandereDev created Yandere Simulator, an indie game, after his idea was encouraged on 4chan. This PC game follows Ayano Aishi, also known as Yandere-chan, at her high school.
The player is in charge of her, and her task is relatively simple: keep the girls at her school away from confessing their love to her adored senpai. There are many means to keep these nuisances at bay, like ruining their reputation, kidnapping them and keeping them trapped in a basement, or simply murdering them. Yandere-chan has to make sure that no one catches her while getting rid of her competition, so the lunatic character has to keep an innocent facade.
This game gathered a lot of fans, but as it embraces gory themes and is generally a strange game, it got banned from Twitch in 2016. Even more controversy followed, as fans on Twitter called out YandereDev for being predatory and manipulative, and Yandere Simulator, compared to its competition, was considered to be a fairly low-quality game, with poor bug fixes and coding that needs improvement.
Regardless of its flaws, fans still enjoy the bright and girly, pink-hued graphics, heavily inspired by shoujo anime. Yandere Simulator has likeable characters, influenced by modern gyaru culture, and one-of-a-kind features like Yandere Vision. The murder methods are intricate, and the Japanese school setting is fairly realistic. Yandere Simulator is still a demo, accessible for free online.
About the Author:
Mizuki Khoury
Born in Montreal, based in Tokyo. Sabukaru’s senior writer and works as an artist under Exit Number Five.
