Hioki is an incompetent, shiftless salaryman, stuck grinding in a thankless job at his company. He has a crush on coworker Chitose, but keeps his feelings to himself. But soon he will have a chance encounter with several women that will change his life… for the worse.

「In this CD-ROM, Justice, Love, Friendship… are nowhere to be found.

In its place, Madness, Delusion, Depression, Weirdness and Inferiority…

this is the nature of this software」 – Excerpt from the game’s package.

In a strange coincidence, I seem to have ended up writing about two VNs in a row whose main accomplishment seems to be to serve as a prototype for a more famous game down the line. The difference here being that due to the language barrier, most people are likely not familiar with the game For Elise would eventually inspire – Sayonara Wo Oshiete.

Sayonara Wo Oshiete is considered the company Craftworks seminal work. It’s considered one of the big names in the “denpa” genre, which literally translates to “electromagnetic waves” due to the work in which is originated form but more accurately describes “madness” themed stories where the protagonist tends to be an unreliable narrator and distinguishing fantasy and reality becomes increasingly difficult as the plot progresses. The one game which VN aficionados may be aware of is Subahibi (Wonderful Everyday), which is another of the genre’s most famous works.

For Elise is Craftworks’s first game but information on the web is surprising scarce. Craftworks themselves has erased all of their other games from their official website and many Japanese storefronts don’t seem to list it. Due to its pedigree and a very misleading VNDB description (which makes it sound that the story is about a protagonist who develops some kind of evil Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde serial killer split personality – that doesn’t happen), I came into this game with some expectations that weren’t quite met.

First off, this really isn’t a “denpa” game at all – the protagonist does have unsettling delusional dreams at the end of each day, but none of the whole “second guessing what really happened” element that characterizes the genre. Most of the events in the game actually just happen to be very mundane daily life stuff.

So, what is this game about, really?

The one thing that comes to mind when discussing the feeling of this game is a long-standing criticism by the distractors of the genre that “dating sims” are simple power fantasies where a bevy of beautiful, pure-hearted women throw themselves at the player character undeservingly (as his only general personality trait is “being nice”)

While I believe it is unlikely that the writers were attempting to “deconstruct” such ideas on purpose, it certainly feels that way – with a player character whose personality traits are being incompetent, unambitious and emotionally unstable they might have hit a bit slightly too close to home and created the world’s most realistic dead-end job salaryman relationship story.

While I question anyone who bought the game expecting a fluffy, heartwarming romances given the excerpt, it’s also interesting to note how a majority of the heroines traits seem to be tailored specifically to be extremely socially unacceptable to what the average Japanese player would expect of the genre, in fact likely shifting all the way to complete unlikability as they participate in actions like engaging in one-night stands despite having boyfriends or partaking in emotional manipulation and revenge sex to induce jealousy in others – you probably won’t see merchandise of these ladies anytime soon, I wager.

If there’s one word to describe the atmosphere of the game, it’s “unsettling”. At the end of every day, a disembodied head of a sleeping woman appears and as the days progress, her eyes slowly open. The game is extremely effective at making the player dread the minute that you just know everything is going to come tumbling down and that’s its strongest point, as quite a bit of the game is actually just fairly mundane job and relationship related scenes if it wasn’t for the foreboding sense of doom the game instills upon you.

In a stunning development, most of the game’s soundtrack are variations on Beethoven’s famous piece, the one that shares the title of the game. Is it appropriate? Maybe. Historians aren’t certain who the “Elise” in “For Elise” refers to as Fire Emblem Fates had not been released yet, but a popular theory posits that it was a woman he proposed to who went on to marry a nobleman, thus making Beethoven the only musician who was also a Gamer.

As a very old game, For Elise uses the ancient Japanese adventure game system where you have to move to places and examine/talk exhausting all choices before it allows you to move on. This will likely be a culture shock for most players who were blessed enough to not have been born in the era where it was the norm (unless you happen to be a fan of Kojima’s early adventure games or Yu-NO.) The game is mercifully short overall so it never gets too grating but it definitely feels like padding and the pacing’s not really the strongest.

And in another bit of an amusing coincidence, there are two paths in the game that is entirely determined by a single choice you make at the start of the game just like in Angel Halo. The difference is that in this game, the path changes the middle portions of the game and the ending remains the same (it makes sense in context).

The art is a bit of a mixed bag in this thing – they’re distinctive, but also come off as somewhat amateurish at times. A lot of the CGs have offputting content although that is likely the point but I doubt many people are going to start saving them to start a gallery and post on social media.

The background images in the game are digitized photos, a very common technique for low budget works and I believe they’re from the Matsudo city in Chiba Prefecture, so if you’re the sort of person who really likes visiting media-recreated places in real life then more power to you. I do wonder how this old granny here feels about being forever immortalized in this background though.

So, what do I think of this game overall? It’s definitely a very “for historical purposes” sort of work where you likely need to go into it with a very specific intention of wanting to understand its influence on future works. But if nothing else, where else are you going to hear some rocking remixes of classical Beethoven music?