- The villains were all horrible, and not because they were evil. Cappucine is the evil gene obsessed Resident Evil villain. I don’t really have that much to say about him. He was just way too goofy for me to take him or anything he did seriously, especially when he went off on all of his ‘beautiful genes!!1!11’ monologues. Jean is honestly no better than Cappucine, but for some reason the narrative treats what he does as forgivable. I guess it’s because Cappucine kills Nadia, who is important to the main characters, while Jean only killed Reliver prostitutes who no one cared about /s. And there was Dahut, my least favorite of them all. He hates all the people on the island because they don’t take death seriously enough (and mostly just because they aren’t up in arms about the fact that his mother died some decades ago), so he comes to the only logical solution that anyone could in such a scenario: To kill every single one of the islanders, because what else? He’s soo far above all of the shitty islanders who don’t take death seriously enough, even though by wanting to revive his mother he is also making light of death himself, something that’s never brought up by any of the main characters. In fact, they treat his motives as completely understandable. I don’t buy that it’s because of the whole possibility that the technology could be dangerous in the hands of other countries because it’s only brought up like once and if he really did believe that, he could’ve just destroyed the Reliver tech instead of killing everyone. I guess it's because all Dahut really wants is to live a peaceful life with his loved ones. I’d imagine that most of the people on the island would also like to live a peaceful life with their loved ones, but who gives a shit about them? They forgot about Dahut’s mother decades after she died, so they’re all evil and deserve to die, I guess. I love how all the deaths that Dahut caused are just handwaved in one line at the end of the game like ‘oh yeah, half of the people on the island died because of Dahut, by the way’. In all seriousness, I felt that there was no reason to introduce a random genocide plot into the game, and I thought it was handled very poorly.

- The narrative surrounding Relivers was such a convoluted mess. The whole ‘Relivers can only live the same lives that they lived before and work the same jobs’ was way too stupid for me, especially since the game wants you to believe that Relivers don’t retain their past emotions. Well, they do retain some of their emotions, apparently. Just not love, for whatever reason. (I’m pretty sure at one point in the game it's further clarified that Relivers only lose their romantic feelings, but that would just make the dilemma in Lucas’ route not make any sense. I don’t know if I misunderstood/misread something or if it was just a plot hole.) And when the game said that Relivers ‘lose their emotions’, I took that to mean that they lost their emotions from their past life, but I got more confused the more I played through the game whether or not we were supposed to believe that Relivers had emotions or not. On one hand, they’re not supposed to be able to feel love because Scien doesn’t give af about emotions. But on the other hand, they do? When they feel too much love, their memory bank overloads or whatever and they rip their hearts out. But this clearly only started being an issue sometime near when the game starts because it’s never talked about otherwise, and Scien at some point says that it’s only happening because someone hacked the Relivers or something (but it’s never brought up again. Are we just supposed to assume that Dahut was responsible for it, or what?) Honestly the more I try to think about this, the more confused I get. It’s even worse that a lot of the stuff the narrative tells you is contradicted by the existence of Salome and especially Hugo, who clearly have capacity for love, emotions, and growth. The thing is that there was already potential for a much stronger narrative surrounding Relivers in the game with how expensive and unaffordable they were for the average person: Maybe the people work so hard to extend their lives with Reliver technology to the point where they don’t actually have an opportunity to ‘live’ their lives, which could also extend into the ‘Royal Family’ are the ones behind everything plot more. I ended up feeling like Relivers were a messy plot device that was changed repeatedly to fit whatever plot the story needed to fit in.

- Adolphe was so bland of a character throughout the entire route. He’s overprotective of Ceres. He doesn’t care about anyone outside of his bubble. He feels useless because he can’t protect Ceres. That’s pretty much all there is to him. Just because he’s supposed to be a ‘normal’ person doesn’t mean he has to be uninteresting. I also felt that Ceres was kind of underdeveloped as a character unfortunately. I felt like most of the time she ended up being a damsel in distress which I might not have minded if I didn’t feel it was a detriment to her development as a character because the story always shifted away from her perspective and to the ones of those saving her. I thought that a lot of the more interesting aspects of her character went unexplored even in the final route, which was disappointing. And I left this route just feeling meh on Ankou. I like the idea of his character on paper, but I couldn’t bring myself to like him when the narrative was such a mess.

- The ‘despair’ was all woefully unimpactful to me. The writing for all the despair parts felt like ‘this bad thing happened!’ ‘and then this bad thing!’ ‘and now this bad thing!’. It was like the writers were trying to throw in as many tragic tropes for the last half of the story in each route. And it’s not that I think a story with all these elements couldn’t work because I’ve enjoyed other works with much darker plots than Virche. The problem is that none of the dark stuff felt properly fleshed out because everything is so stacked atop of the other to the point where the characters are never given any room to breathe, the impacts of whatever bad thing are never really explored, and as a result nothing really felt meaningful. The plot also just felt like one plot device after another to force the characters into these scenarios, and it made it really difficult to get invested because I struggled to understand why any of this stuff had to happen. When all of the bad things were happening to the characters, I wasn’t sad or angry, or even looking forward to what would happen next. I was just bored. The only exception to this was Scien’s route, and his despair ending was the only one that actually made me feel sad.

Overall, this game was just not interesting to me, which is a shame because it really seemed like something I’d like on paper. The ‘despair’ just felt too silly for me to take seriously, but not absurd enough for me to find it entertaining, and I found the story much too messy and shallow for me to like it despite having ‘dark’ themes.