Just played the Gretel route from Taisho Alice last night, and… 😱
(SPOILERS for Gretel’s route, obviously)
I probably am just contributing to yet another one of those traumatised-by-Gretel posts out there, but anyway, just wanted to get some thoughts out after playing his route.
Needless to say, I found his route really disturbing. Straight off the bat, you find yourself ‘kidnapped’, and you even see a large cage inside the house. I mean, even in that infamous route from Amnesia (not naming the character to avoid spoiling people who haven’t played it yet), you don’t get locked up from the start of the route, and the LI sorts of acts sweet towards you at first and only gets more and more unhinged as his route progresses.
I really felt uncomfortable with the way he keeps the MC tied up, constantly humiliates her and even sexually harasses her despite calling her his ‘sister’, and he only formally got rid of that ‘sister’ label at the end of his route, meaning that he was cool with sexually harassing someone he saw as his sister throughout his entire route 😱 I refused to pick any of the positive options throughout his route because I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and only did so when I replayed it using a walkthrough to get the good ending.
I really think Gretel’s route can single-handedly give the game an M rating, though the game is surprisingly only rated Teen (but I think it’s rated 15+ in some countries). I only played Red Riding Hood and Gretel’s routes so far, so I have no idea how much mature content the other routes contain. Gretel’s route contains not just sexual content, but also extreme violence, and even an attempt by Gretel to burn some bullies alive, and there’s also an implication that Gretel suffers from a mental health disorder and his candies are supposed to be a representation of his medication. And the MC even stupidly tries to burn herself alive at the end of it all, blaming herself for it? 🤦🏻♀️ I think the dumbest thing of all is the MC wanting to be with him despite all of that in the happy ending.
I grew up playing lighthearted, sweet and fluffy otome - usually freeware otome that I find on the Lemmasoft Forums - and I rarely play these sort of commercial Japanese otome games, so I wasn’t used to otome that contained so much angst, dark and horror themes, themes of a traumatic past, abuse/bullying, and other heavy topics. Not to say I haven’t - some games I have played do contain serious topics (Sweet Fuse, Amnesia etc), but I definitely do not recall playing games that feature the LI trying to burn people alive or actual sexual content.
Anyway, why do these game devs seriously think that otome game fans like yanderes? I can get over tsunderes, but yanderes who kidnap you and tie you up, humiliate you and murder anyone who hurts you are a huge yikes to me. I’m never going to see the story of Hansel and Gretel the same way ever again.
Unrelated to the post, but I kept thinking of Gretel as the boy from Hansel and Gretel at first, since the whole genderbent thing is kind of weird and confusing. (But I think I figured out somewhere along the way is that the idea is that the entire world takes place in ‘mirror world’, so all the characters are opposite genders, and have opposite personalities. Hence the ‘Taisho (対称)’ part of the title.
