Okay Geek Farm
Quick Thoughts: Don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story
Alex Tretrop
When I finished playing through Christine Love’s newest and free indie title Don’t take it personally babe, it just aint your story, I felt deeply affected and moved by the whole experience. While this isn’t review because it isn’t exactly a game, but more more of a visual novel, I just felt like I should write about the fascinating experience of watching the game and story unfold.
Don’t take it personally babe
Don’t take it personally takes an intriguing look on the concepts of love, sexuality and the development of relationships in a high school-esque environment. The concept is that you’re a new teacher, coming off of your second divorce, into a high school that is connected with the Amie System. While it’s essentially a future imagination of Facebook, the game introduces, and indeed hinges on, the ability to read all the mesages, both public and private of your students without their knowledge. While it requires some abstract thinking as to the development of this social network, it provides you with an appropriately disturbing interaction with your students. You watch, in an almost omnipresent way, their relationships form, others deteriorate, reform again and so on. Love succeeds in making this feel extremely wrong in an ubelieveably effective way as you really shouldn’t be reading in on personal experiences as intimate as some or as heartbreaking as others, yet the game forces you to, showing you a really cool take on the dangers of social networking and reprecussions of saying things on the internet.
Keeping relationships and lesbians
All in all though, the game is about relationships and the exploration of concepts that aren’t generally found in games. The game explores gay couples, lesbian relationships, friendships, rivalries, you name it. You grow to care for the characters, even though perhaps you shouldn’t, through the constant reading of their walls or private messages, almost to hear the next piece of juicy gossip. It’s truly creepy. The game itself has some aspect of choice that really had a deep impact on me as an observer. The few times you do have to make one it generally feels like some very critical and morally ambiguous parts of the story and while it didn’t really seem to affect the tale as a whole, the characters themselves are often changed in major ways, sometimes good and sometimes badly. You feel like they’re real people thanks to their great characterization, relatability and the writing style provided by Love. One choice felt great to me, only for me to shed a tear a few seconds later and that, at least to me, is pretty fantastic.
Visual novels aren’t just for the Japanese
It’s interesting to see the Anime style as well, which may put forward some interesting… assumptions to some people, especially considering it’s very heavy focus on relationships but unlike that… erm, style, the art style feels like a perfect fit for the characters and the story, maybe even to break some of those stereotypes of the anime genre. The characters themselves all look nice too and some of the more detailed animations are excellent.
Sure, there are some valid critiscims I can level at it, like the over reliance of slang words, which starts to grate on you as the game progresses, as well as some fairly unfocused ending chapters but it still shouldn’t stop you from at least trying it.
Maybe it’s the relatability to the characters, the interesting take on modern social networking, or the themes of love it explores but all of them develop into a deeply moving experience that shocks you in unorthodox ways, while making you truly care for the characters that are presented in the story and relish watching their relationships begin, fall apart and rebuild.
Overall, it’s a fascinating visual novel that is superbly told and will probably be missed by the majority of the gaming community. Hopefully I’ve convinced you that it seems worth your time and best of all, and best of all, it’s free.
Free download
Don’t take it personally babe, it just ain’t your story — Download now
