Emotion Overload

[Haika 12]

Ok, I just caught myself stopping my VN and feeling like the world was crashing around me for several minutes. We've had conversations here about the feelings of emptiness or emotional highs we get from these games, but I felt like I needed to post a new thread.

 

I'm playing Deardrops, and one of the characters has firmly decided to dive full into music, abandoning societal norms. And her excuse is that she doesn't want an escape route that might make her abandon her dream because of her human weakness.

 

This hit home.

 

HARD.

 

 

Beyond this I don't even know what happens, because I stopped and began writing this. Things may take a totally different turn as the VN continues. I don't know how else to explain it, but I just had to stop the novel and stare into space for several moments. I've sort of collected myself(still feeling enough to want to post this however) and reassured myself that my life is going the way /I/ want it to go. Not the way someone else wishes it, or how society decides it should be, or even just just the path of least resistance. I may still be fooling myself, life is cruel and harsh sometimes. Even so, I love it when the media I enjoy so much moves me to these deep levels.

 

These emotional moments in VN and eroge just seem to come out of nowhere sometimes. I'm wondering if others have had experiences like this, and if so, what happened to bring it on, and how did you deal with it?

[Arco 10]

How has nobody posted in this thread yet? Surely there's somebody other than me who thought, "Yes! I know exactly what he's talking about!!" when they read the opening post lol. Anyways, that's an amazing experience, eh Haika? I haven't played Deardrops yet (it's sitting on my portable hard drive in line behind Kamidori and all the other games I have yet to play lol), but now I'm looking forward to it much more than I was before reading your reaction.

 

To answer the questions at hand, I had a similar experience while I was playing Fate/stay night and I was going through the Unlimited Blade Works route (of course, haha). It was getting later into the route and then Shirou fought against Archer and right when Archer was about to crush Shirou using his own ideals, Shirou comes back and denies Archer while reaffirming his ideals . Right after the scene ended, I noticed I had to go to class, so throughout the time I was walking to class and then when I sat down, I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened in that scene. The ideas presented were just too amazing and I ended up just sitting there in awe for several minutes. Finally, I realized that I didn't want to forget what I had been thinking, so I whipped out a piece of paper and wrote down the truths I had discovered like a madman for about five whole minutes. The guy sitting next to me kept glancing over and I'm sure he was wondering why I was writing so fast and so intensely lol. The rest of the day (and that lesson) didn't really matter to me, and I was completely enthralled by the game for weeks afterwards.

 

I think it's this kind of experience that can make VNs so special; when everything comes together to present more than just a story and deliver a complete experience, I feel it more than any other kind of storytelling out there.