Trigger Warning: Rape, violence, emotional abuse and manipulation, and various other manner of disturbing or gruesome depictions. Euphoria itself is practically one big trigger in and of itself. This game should NOT be played by any except by the most desensitized and depraved of hentai fans. By playing this game, you risk seeing some seriously scarring material that could cause severe psychological damage, and should NOT be played by anyone under 18, and even if you are above that age, proceed with EXTREME CAUTION!

Euphoria was a game that almost leaves me at a literal loss for words. In a way, it may be one of, if not, the most impressive games I have ever played, and I can at least say that it is one of my favorites. At the same time, I don’t feel as though I can recommend it, at least not to most. The reason why my reviews are often so long winded is simply because I have used my writing as a way of communicating my feelings as thoroughly as possible. The point is to paint a clear picture of not only whatever I was reviewing was like on a surface level, but also on an emotional and spiritual level. My favorite works of art are always those that speak directly to the soul and that put artistic vision before everything else. Of course, they also need to be well made but that is pretty much a given.

If one may not have guessed, I have a very unconventional view of the world around me. I like to even consider myself a modern day philosopher. As such, I naturally am drawn to the unknown and the obscure as opposed to the commonly accepted. Of course, this is not always the case, as my top three favorite games are Earthbound, Undertale, and NieR Automata, but those are simply examples of when true genius got the recognition that it deserved, as opposed to others that relished in obscurity or were misunderstood by those that played them.

Euphoria is the type of game that will never have any hope of main stream recognition, and its creators knew this going into it. At its surface, Euphoria seems to be a twisted and depraved guro hentai novel made to cater to absolute sadists, and that is far from an inaccurate assumption. Euphoria is also a very profound, interesting, and touching experience; though what type of touching it does may depend on the person. Most importantly, Euphoria is a good game not “in spite” of its horrific content, but BECAUSE of it! Are there flaws with Euphoria? Yes, there are flaws out of every orifice with Euphoria both figuratively and literally. There were moments that were tedious and annoying, and there were moments where I experienced the same absolute turmoil as when I played Starless: Nymphomaniac’s Paradise.

It really speaks to Euphoria’s credit when I still enjoyed this game as strongly as I did despite, or possibly even because of how I felt that way. The reason why is because, unlike in Starless, Euphoria’s depravity actually means something, and there is a payoff in the end. Of course, how others will interpret or react to Euphoria is something I cannot predict, but I can guarantee you will likely never see anything else like this.

The White Camber (Story)

I have already written an extensive impressions piece based only on the first hour or so of Euphoria, and I noticed many subtle and ingenious details that made it such an intense intro. Our story stars Takatou Keisuke, a high school student who wakes up in the middle of a mysterious facility with white walls all over the place. He soon finds that five of his classmates and his English teacher, all female, have also been dumped in the middle of this facility. To save time, I will simply copypasta my description of the characters over from my impressions piece.

Of the students present, we have Hokari Kanae, Keisuki’s designated childhood friend who looks up to him in the highest regard, Makabe Rika, the childlike and pure student that is the most vulnerable to the incoming horrors, Andou Miyako, a class representative and excelling student who can be slightly naggy but is never considered too annoying by the other students, Byakuya Rinne, the emotionless and uncaring head of the disciplinary committee, and Manaka Nemu, our game’s designated sadistic cunt who can basically be described as /b/ in the form of an anime girl. There’s also the English teacher Aoi Natsuki who is selfless and prioritizes the student’s safety, but also is overly laid back. A mysterious voice then tells them over and intercom that they have to participate in a game.

The rules are that, in order for everyone to be let out of the facility, Keisuke will need to perform a designated sexual act on one of the girls in a specified manner, and do this five times. Upon hearing this, one of the girls vocally objects to the absurdity of the conditions, which causes the lights to go out and to turn back on with said girl strapped to an electric chair. She is then brutally electrocuted in a very graphic and frightening display, perhaps the most discomforting I have seen in any game.

The remaining rules given are that anyone who refuses to participate in the game dies. Furthermore, Keisuke gets to choose which of the girls he does it with. If the girl refuses, she dies, and if Keisuke refuses, EVERYONE dies. To further complicate things, Keisuke is a sadist and he gets aroused by hurting others. However, he still possesses a moral conscience and knows what the consequences of his actions will be, and he legitimately cares for his peers. Unfortunately, Nemu finds out and wants Keisuke to let go of all inhibitions and fuck everything and everyone up. She then tries to blackmail Keisuke into following her orders with the threat of revealing his secret. Of course, whether he does or not is up to you. The choices are yours and yours alone.

While this is certainly an intense premise that is already bound to contain a lot of emotional intensity and strain, there is only so much that one can be shown just from the main setup. There were so many intense twists and turns that kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the experience. Euphoria did not simply glue my eyes to the screen; it broke through the barriers of cyber space to surgically cement my face to the source code and I didn’t even call an ambulance until I was finished with the game… and also because I couldn’t but that’s beside the point. In terms of emotional depth and intensity, I don’t think I’ve played anything that tops this.

I would say that I would have never predicted that I’d say that about a hentai game, but I’m pretty open minded and don’t think that porn is the devil and that so I might have imagined it. However, I did not expect it to be one like Euphoria, and this game far exceeded my expectations. I will have more to say about Euphoria even after I have completed this review. I have thought of creating a series meant to examine the more subtle and thematic aspects of games, but this game pretty much ensured that series will become a thing. You know how whenever you see anything that comes across as seriously stupid and offensive, how you notice worse and worse implications the more you think about it? Euphoria is the exact opposite, the more that I think about this game, the better it becomes.

Our character cast is amazing and there is not a single character that was not well written. I was about to say that they were all very likable, but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate. One can make a case that almost every main character in this game is a horrible person, with the exception of Miyako since she has so little screen time. However, what is really impressive is how Euphoria makes you care about every one of these characters regardless, and some that do even the most heinous and evil shit end up being redeemed later on in the game. Every character has a compelling personality that makes you want to know more about them, and they are never annoying except for when you are supposed to find them annoying.

At first, almost every character seemed like a typical anime archetype. Keisuke as Standard McDefault harem protagonist, Kanae as standard childhood friend, Rika as standard loli, Miyako as standard naggy tsundere, Natsuki as standard teacher, Rinne as standard stoic, and Nemu as deplorable cunt. While I would normally follow this up with “but as the game goes on, these characters develop and become more complex” but that’s not accurate here. The reason why is because the characters ALWAYS felt complex aside from maybe the first fifteen minutes. I remember seeing Miyako and thinking “she’s going to be the annoying one isn’t she?” only to horribly regret that feeling just a few moments later.

And no, it wasn’t simply because Miyako got brutally electrocuted that I felt that way. In Starless, Mitarai was relentlessly tortured both physically and sexually in an amateurish attempt to elicit sympathy for her, but it had no effect because Mitarai had no personality other than “victim” and “repressed slut,” and if I wanted that shit I’d scroll through my Twitter feed. Miyako, however, has more development from the few brief lines she is in than Mitarai had in the entirety of Starless’s overly padded out and tedious script.

Keisuke needing to simultaneously resist his monstrous sexual urges to hurt his friends while needing to embrace them in order to escape the facility presents a disturbing moral dilemma. Visual novel protagonists tend to be interchangeable socially awkward losers that the player (always assumed to be male) is supposed to project themselves on to, but this almost never works from a story telling standpoint because the protagonist still has a shit ton of his own dialogue. This causes a majority of eroge dating sims to be a case of “generic faceless loser number 274 gets to know multiple girls who may or may not have superior personalities but will definitely have superior designs.” I specifically criticized Starless ((yes I’m going to be bringing this up a lot throughout this review as Euphoria is basically the antithesis of Starless) for not realizing that the target audience for a game like itself will not relate to Sawatari.

That was very likely because Starless was a game written for submissive straight males (EXTREMELY… submissive males). I may not fit the “male” or “straight” part, but I do fit the “submissive” and the “sexually attracted to women” parts (especially the latter) and that was still not enough to save it for me. Euphoria, in the words of one of its own creators is “a game for sadists.” This means that it makes sense for Euphoria to star a literal sadist that the target audience will most likely relate to. Of course, one may assume that means it should be even harder to relate for anyone else, but god damn it Clock Up did so anyway. In just about any other work of fiction, Keisuke would have been written as an irredeemable monster with no humanity. Instead, Keisuke’s sadism is written more so as a disorder than him just being a prick.

Keisuke’s violent sexual urges manifest themselves similar to how a drug or alcohol addiction would manifest, and forcing Keisuke into a situation where he HAS to embrace these inner urges is the moral equivalent of forcing vodka down the throat of a recovering alcoholic. Yet, no one seems to have ever told Keisuke that sexual arousal and pleasure does not equate to consent, and he is instead lead to feel a sense of recurring guilt for what he has done and for the fact that the other class mates don’t think he enjoys it. He is lead to feel this way by himself, but also by Nemu, who engages in a common tactic of domestic abusers known as “Gaslighting.”

Gaslighting is when an abuser tries to manipulate the victim into questioning their sanity and believing there is something wrong with them. Nemu also takes advantage of Keisuke’s lack of clarity by threatening to out him as a sadist to his friends, which he believes will have a harmful effect. This brings up an interesting moral dilemma as to what does and does not qualify as rape. Keisuke is the one who chooses the “keyhole” each turn, and he could decide to repeatedly choose the same target five times in a row. In fact, you actually HAVE to do that in order to see each of the girl’s routes.

I am unsure if I can think of any greater irony than the fact that so many lesser works try really hard to make their characters relatable to average player yet completely miss the mark because of how boring they are, yet here we have Euphoria with a protagonist intended to only relate to a tiny niche of the population that the rest of us looks at with fear and disdain. I am not a sadist in any way, nor am I even dominant. In fact, I am highly empathetic and compassionate, much more so than the average human being. I have grown to despise those who do nothing but cause others pain for their own personal enjoyment, and how disgusting it is that these horrible people exist. Yet, not only do I relate to Keisuke, I don’t know if I’ve ever related to any fictional character more than him!

Whoever wrote the script for this game knew there was a big difference between making a character relatable trait wise, and making them feel relatable on an emotional and pathological level. Keisuke is battling his own mind in order to prevent himself from hurting those around him, including a precious childhood friend who he views as innocent and pure. He has deep feelings of self loathing for what he was born as, and thinks that Kanae will hate him just as much if she finds out.

There is so much debate lately about how games should be more progressive and inclusive. There needs to be more women, there needs to be more people of color, more gay people, more trans people, more body types, more of this, more of that, etc. While I am all in favor of more polyamorous trans lesbian catgirls in games, I feel like people are missing the point of why it would be good to have them. Games have always had a lot of female characters, they were just rare on GOOD female characters, and the same goes for all the other stuff. What is important are characters that connect with us, that relate to us, and that inspire us. Including a trans female NPC who says two lines in the entire game is not inspiring or relatable.

Yet, how many games are there that portray such strong portrayals of the mentally ill, and write them in a way that so many of us can relate to? While western developers are creating “progressive” lesbian eroge with rape induced conversion therapy and getting praised for it, Japan has created a dignified and three dimensional portrayal of a mentally ill person… IN IT’S SADIST RAPE PORN!!!!! This just blows my fucking mind! What is even more ironic is how if most of these “progressives” were to look at something like Euphoria, they would not notice this. They would claim that it is vile and sickening, and that the only people who could enjoy it deserve to be locked up. Hell they already say that about Japanese games that aren’t even pornographic.

And yes, I am saying this as a trans lesbian feminist. Even though a majority of us do not share Keisuke’s specific struggle, a large portion of the LGBT community has simultaneously been demonized as predatory and sick, while we received abuse and manipulation that lead to us developing unusual sexual tastes as a coping mechanism for the resulting trauma. We then had our bizarre sexuality used against us by far right propagandists and TERFs who use them as justification for the abuse that gave them to us. This leads to other members of the community to turn on us and say “hey, we aren’t all like that, ignore those freaks” just so they can save face. If you were ever wondering why I had such a strong focus on sex positivity, aside from the obvious, well there’s your answer.

Political commentary aside, I could go into detail about the rest of the characters as well. I could talk about how fascinating it is how only Rika is the one that responds like she’s seriously being abused, and how that unintentionally drags out Keisuke’s sadistic side even further. I could also talk about how Rinne actually wants Keisuke to abuse her out of a desire to be punished that doesn’t even stem from anything sexual. Every character in this game has a very fascinating personality that makes you want to know more about them right from the start. Each route, despite telling the same events and occurring not so differently from each other, does make every character extremely compelling and unique.

Paradise Comes At a Prince (Negatives)

There is one exception to this rule though, and that is Nemu’s route. Nemu is the closest that Euphoria has to a prominent villain, so they go out of their way to make Nemu as detestable and unlikable as possible, and they succeeded. The problem is that Nemu is detestable not just because she’s a soulless monster, but also because she has no personality other than that for the majority of the game. Yes, there is a twist at the end that justifies everything Nemu did in context and does show there is far more depth to her character, but that doesn’t change just how repetitive and tedious it makes her route though. Pretty much every conversation with her in the research facility occurs as follows:

Nemu: I want you. Unleash your inner desires.

Keisuke: I’m not like you!

Nemu: Trololol yes you are.

Keisuke: I said no I’m not!

Nemu: Search you feelings; you know it to be true.

Keisuke: Shut up you dumb slut!

Nemu: Hey, that hurt my feelings!

Keisuke: Oh, I’m sorry.

Nemu: Haha I tricked you, I was only pretending to be hurt to make you mad.

Keisuke: FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This shtick gets repetitive and tiresome rather quickly. There are a few slight hints provided that Nemu may have more to her personality, but when every other character is fleshed our spectacularly from the get go, it makes Nemu’s route seem comparatively less engaging. That is until after the white lab portion, where it becomes engaging for all the wrong reasons.

Euphoria is mostly known by its OVA adaptation that only cover the lab portion, which makes up less than half the plot of the game. As a result, a lot of people assumed Euphoria was just a notably fucked up fetish hentai without much more to it, when the original visual novel provided a lot more storytelling depth. It also lead the player to believe the most disturbing scenes were in the lab.

WARNING: Disturbing and graphic content is about to be described, so if you are going to keep reading, keep the brain bleach on hand!

Yes, there were some gruesome sex scenes involved in the facility portions such as one of the girls having to swallow Keisuke’s feces, and another being raped on a live stream uncensored while being forced to pretend she is enjoying it (made all the more disturbing due to how realistically the comment section is portrayed), but that’s nothing compared to what happens in the second half of Nemu’s route. If the idea of two girls being tied up, having tubes that connect their mouths to the other’s colon, and being force fed laxatives that results into them being forced to swallow each other’s shit, vomiting it back it back out, and needing to swallow said vomit back in does not sound arousing to… oh fuck this shit you get the point.

That’s not the only sick scene either. I also got to see someone being mind broken into believing they are a literal dog, a woman with most of her body buried in concrete and set up on the wall of the boy’s bathroom to be used as a literal human urinal, one needing to clean dirty underwear with her mouth. I’d say that I’m about to puke, but these scenes were so disgusting that it made me anorexic… fuck it, I’m going to puke anyway, I don’t need my small intestine right?

DISTURBING CONTENT OVER!

If one is going by how sick the content is alone, Euphoria is possibly WORSE than Starless. Yes I have repeatedly stated that Euphoria is written far better, but that can only go so far. When I posted my review of Starless on GameFAQs, I gave it a 1 out of 10 both times. The first time it was because I I felt it was irredeemable garbage that could destroy someone’s mind, but I still gave it the same score the second time because, even though I came to see it as nothing more than a badly written fetish novel, I cannot look past the type of psychological damage it can cause. Even though Starless was made with remote effort and competence, that does not change the fact that it will do serious harm to a vast majority of people and that I cannot recommend such a game to anyone knowing it has that risk.

Despite the fact that I enjoyed Euphoria, that does not change the fact that I know a sizable number of people are far more easily disturbed than I am, and if anyone suffered that kind of mental trauma from my recommendation then I would feel more ashamed than Hillary Clinton’s PR advisors. As such, I included that section a few paragraphs ago to help any potential readers decide for themselves if it’s worth it. Chances are if you choose not to read those two paragraphs, you cannot handle this game! Of course, I can only say whether or not it is good, and thank god I don’t give out scores any more.

Anyway, I have covered the writing in regards to the story and characters, but what about the writing during the sex scenes? Well, the writing is great if you like six straight lines of transcribed sound effects. I reviewed School Idol QT Cool a while back and had a similar criticism towards how it wrote its sex dialogue. Seeing as how both games are localized by MangaGamer, it makes me wonder whether this has something to do with how they localize the titles or if this is prevalent in a lot of Japanese eroge. Visual novels have a LOT of text in them, so it would make sense that someone would get the idea to cut out a few lines and replace them with written sound effects, especially when someone thought it was appropriate to include an Undertale reference. I know that wasn’t in the original Japanese script, this game was released in 2011! (Addendum: One of the translators has told me that this specific line was merely a coincidence and that Undertale wasn’t even out when the game was finished being translated)

Of course, there is no way to know for sure whether or not this was the case, but there is a problem with an overabundance of onomatopoeia is that it is entirely redundant in a SOUND based medium. The original term for visual novels was “sound novel” but apparently the term got copyrighted or something. It definitely makes more sense than visual novel since most images are still and there is little animation. Unless the sex scenes are fully animated, there is no good reason to skimp out on the “novel” part, especially when it does nothing but repeat the sound effects that are clearly audible to any listener. Yes, onomatopoeia can be appropriate when used to compliment actual description, but never to substitute it.

Brutality (Sex Scenes)

Another issue with the sex scenes is that there are simply too many of them. Yes I know that Euphoria is an eroge and there are going to be sex scenes. The problem is that Euphoria is also trying to tell a serious story, and when you have so many of them interrupting the player, they are far more likely to start skipping through them. In Starless, I was pretty quick to start skipping the sex scenes given that they often seemed to last over an hour each, therefore I may very well have skipped past half the game but I didn’t care. In Euphoria, I read through each sex scene until Rinne’s route where I started skipping clicking through them. Unlike in Starless, it wasn’t necessary to fast forward through Euphoria’s sex scenes because it only takes about ten to twenty minutes to read through a scene so clicking sufficed.

Not every sex scene in Euphoria is as brutal as the aforementioned nightmare fetish fuel, but a vast majority of them are rape scenes. I don’t personally consider this too significant considering that a majority of the sex scenes were not that interesting to me, but it does set a precedent for WHY they were uninteresting. The white facility segment alone has eight sex scenes per route, those being the five main ones, two “bonus rounds,” and one consensual scene taking place in the VIP room before the fifth “unlocking.” Yes, there are consensual sex scenes in Euphoria, surprisingly enough, and they are played out to be tender and romantic moments. The problem is that they not only happen at the most ill fitting times (I highly doubt anyone would have consensual sex with their rapist the same day as their rape), but they also feel artificial and only there to meet some sort of quota.

I am not saying that a heavily story driven game cannot have a lot of sex scenes by any means; they just need to blend in with the story’s natural flow. I only played about an hour of Space Pirate Sara, but I did reach the first sex scene and was impressed by how well they managed to have a sex scene actually contribute to the plot and serve as a crucial moment. The actual storyline is nothing too impressive (although still fairly decent on its own) but it is still notable as the only eroge I played thus far that actually made good use of its sex scenes instead of shoehorning them into the plot to disrupt the game’s pacing. The point of playing an eroge should be to induce sexual arousal, not to just have something going on in the background while you fap. Granted, I am likely coming from a biased perspective due to it being far more difficult for me to maintain or even reach an orgasm due to my anti depressants, but I still can’t help but feel that the sex scenes should be a bit more spread out or at least weaved into the storyline better. Yes, Euphoria is a hentai novel, but it IS one with a serious story, so there is no reason that every scene should not be given equal consideration.

On a more positive note, Euphoria allows options to filter out gore and scat in the illustrations, which makes a lot of the more disgusting scenes a bit easier to handle. The descriptions are still there and it does not filter out urine so it isn’t fully accommodating, but it was still a wise decision since if there was any game that needed it, it was Euphoria. It also includes the option to turn off various sex sound effects such as those obnoxious slurping and sucking sounds during fellatio, which was a god send to me because I just flat out hate those sounds and prefer to let my imagination fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, some of those sounds still play as part of the voice overs; can’t win em all it seems.

On the subject of voice acting, it was amazing! I especially found the voice over captivating in the intro with how well the feelings of shock and fear were captured. It is hard for me to speak on the rest since I do not know Japanese and tend to tune out Japanese VA most of the time, but I can say the cast definitely put their all into this one. The artwork is also impeccably well drawn with each girl having a distinct appearance that does not seem too unrealistic but also not too bland. The images used in the sex scenes were often what kept me from skipping the ones I actually decided to read through so that’s also a plus. Lastly, the music is brilliant arranged and composed. Every song in the game evokes a strong emotion, whether it is fear, sadness, or peace. The only issue being that Euphoria is yet another visual novel that does not have enough songs to not sound repetitive after a while. I can’t fault the game too much for that since I have yet to see a lengthy visual novel avert this flaw, but I do hope I find one eventually.

Conclusion

It is firmly established that video games are capable of being art and whether or not hentai (or pornagraphy in general) can be is still being debated (mostly ironically). However, Euphoria cannot serve as an example of art in either of those categories. It cannot be an example of either a video game or a hentai being “art” because Euphoria is something beyond art. Euphoria is the single most impressive game I have ever played simply because, while video games have invoked almost any emotion that I am capable of conceiving, no other game has made me feel everything that a human being could be made to feel. I have been taken from the depths of profound despair to absolute happiness while playing Euphoria. Certain scenes have evoked feelings I did not think I was capable of in reaction to events that should have never been able to provoke them.

I have seen the game’s “Brute Ending” that results in Keisuke embracing his sadistic urges and becoming a brutal overlord that keeps his former friends as literal sex objects with no free will. I felt shocked and appalled, but also satisfied because this game made me empathize with Keisuke so much that I felt happy for him even when he achieved his horrific sexual fantasies. My mind was also blown when I saw what the twist ending of this game was. It was something that, if in any other game, would have likely come across as pretentious or tryhard, but in Euphoria, it just added so much more to what was already a deep game.

The more I think about this game, the better it gets. Every little detail just adds so much more, and even the few flaws this game has probably contribute to something. There are so many recurring themes to observe and to examine that this 5000 plus word review is not even scratching the surface of it. I’m glad I did that piece on the intro, because I’m never going to have the perspective of knowing nothing about this game again, and I’m glad I got to put down my thoughts while I had them. This game is simply… incredible.

No, I’m not going to try and say where it ranks among my favorite games simply because this game is a beast all on its own. I cannot even begin to fully comprehend this game the same way I have other games, and I don’t view it the same way. As I said, Euphoria is beyond art, and putting it up next to art would be an apples and Trump vodka comparison. I can’t say whether it is objectively a good or a bad game; it simply is an extraordinary experience on its own merits. The only thing I can accurately compare Euphoria to is life itself. There isn’t a right way to perceive it, as it will affect everyone differently. It may put you through turmoil, sheer horror, and depression at points, but it’s still beautiful in the end.

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If you are interested in playing this game for yourself, the trial version can be downloaded here, and the full version can be purchased here (download), here (physical) and here (physical with a wallScroll).

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