VN - Others - Completed - Teach Me Goodbye ~Comment te Dire Adieu~ [Final] [CRAFTWORK]

Another sad example of mental issues being used as spectacle and co-opted as a vehicle for shallow pseudo-philosophy and fantasies of graphic violence and sexual abuse. Not really fooling anyone with the pretense of depth there. If they wanted to make a fetish title, they should have just made a fetish title and been honest about it.

I imagine I and a lot of the types to even seek out this game in the first place understand the kind of post-graduation or post-work or currently-unemployed malaise of life where things don't seem to work out and you feel generally disconnected from the world. Maybe the days all feel interlinked and interwoven; the same routines, the same views, the same uncaring life moving by as you watch. Indeed, this kind of Durkheimian malaise makes either a good or the absolute worst state to play this game in.

You're a trainee teacher, working at this school before your training comes to an end and you become a full-fledged teacher. In the meantime, you spend your days after-school interacting with the various girls of the school at various locations (library, rooftop, classroom, etc.). And that's essentially your "gameplay loop." I find that the inclusion of even small choices like who you're going to spend time with in a given day a welcome thing. It doesn't add a whole lot of weight to your choices, but it does play into the endings you'll get.

I don't know much about denpa or the genre expectations around it. I'm familiar with some of the games considered 'related' to *Teach Me Goodbye*, but in my view, none of them capture the specific feeling of this game that I really like: dreamlike, uncertain, spiritual but panicked. There's this throughline in this game regarding the protagonist's tenuous grasp on reality and I struggled with it a bit. There's always the question of whether something's actually happening, whether you're dreaming, whether you're normal and everyone else is messed up, or even whether it's just the translation itself that's throwing you off. It makes it hard to grasp on to something concrete. And I loved that. The soundtrack plays in to that with that beautiful early-2000's je ne sais quoi. It harkens to a lot of my favorite stories where the border between reality and dream are constantly intersecting.

I'm not into gore or really violence itself in eroges. I just don't like seeing it. One of the screenshots in the listing shows some of the kinds of stuff I don't like seeing and there's some stuff in here worse. Hell, I'm not into the stuff that's in the very first opening scene. But I'll say this about it: I don't enjoy these scenes, and I found one of them disconcerting enough to skip past, but in the context of the game, they make sense to include. Said another way: I might not have played this game knowing some of its scenes, but I'm glad I did. It makes me feel more open to trying some of the "worse" games I've thus avoided in the spirit of trusting authors more.

On the translation: it's obvious pretty early that there are some problems. One of the earliest sentences that struck me was something along the lines of: "you should right that in your notebook." But, to be honest, it seems to mostly work. I was able to understand (as much as this game can be understood) what was going on at any given moment and the included guide, though also roughly translated (and not matching the game's text), I was able to make sense of with context clues. I hear there's a better translation coming through soon. I imagine *just* based on that I would've waited for it, but I'm still glad I played this old translation.