Devil Survivor 2: Actually hold that thought.
Goofiness vs. stupidity in games: I actually quite respect games that mix in humor. This is a GAME after all, I want to simultaneously save the world and be entertained by cute cats or whatever. There's a lot of parts of games where *theoretically* the weird cast o' characters should really let boring professionals do the job, or otherwise take things way more seriously than they seem to be, but... whatever. It's just like how in crossovers, REALLY characters should probably be suffering massive crises of faith that so much of their world they knew turned out to be wrong and everything is different and OMG etc., but that's lame and repetitive, so just roll with it and move on.
And on that note...
Devil Survivor 2: Sheesh, the game takes a turn for the lame on day 4. The setting for the first 3 days is quite grimdark, which is fine. The apocalypse has happened, it's an explicit plot point that one of the main characters has SEEN her parents die, everybody else is - at minimum - unhinged from the world they knew and its certainties, not having seen their families and knowing that due to the disaster things like getting or growing food is a huge problem. Let alone the fact that zillions of people are DEAD. Even if all the rampaging demons disappeared tomorrow, life is going to be screwed up for a LONG time (the characters don't know there's probably a magic reset switch awaiting them). To the extent that people aren't just breaking down and crying, it's amazing. BUT, they're the heroes, so pressing forward into the game is totally fine, and even preferred. Parcel out some melodrama but keep things moving.
Day 4 decides to amp up the comedy! Which.. could be fine. Except it's lame anime bullshit. Lame hur-hur gurls r purdy bullshit, specifically. Like. To be clear, I'm totally fine with romance in games, and for that matter saucy flirting is okay by me too! Shadow Hearts 2 is good times. Just. Day 4 is the cruddy junior high otaku "haha i can see up a girl's skirt" stuff. Like, one thing I'd be totally okay with buying is that, it's the apocalypse, we might die tomorrow, I dun wanna die a virgin, fuck me noooooooow and hard. Lots of emotions & hormones jangling around. So *actual romance* would be cool by me. For that matter something like Honeybee Manor, which, for all its silliness, is involving actual real life things - prostitutes, sex slavery (but that is secretly kinda cool in a really sleazy way because it's fiction and you can do that there), cross dressing, whatever. Basically what I'm saying is that if DS2 had gone full on eroge that'd almost have made more sense than juvenile tittering over sneaking over to watch the girl's physicals from the doctor and spy on their conversation where they compare breast sizes to each other and get jealous. HELLO IT IS THE APOCALYPSE WHAT IS THIS. The whole thing rings false. I'm reminded of one of Elf's comments on something he liked about Xenogears: that game pretty heavily implies that Fei & Elly actually get it on at some point, and at a time where it makes a certain amount of sense that hey, life is short, let's hurry this up 'cuz we might die tomorrow and enjoy things. If you want to have people reverting to the shit in DS2, at least have them be NPCs who have gone crazy and are coping by adopting childlike behaviors or some such. But I suppose the target audience in Japan thinks that this is all perfectly normal and also hilarious comedy so what do I know.
Seriously! This extends outside the above scenes, too. There's, like, an argument over a crepes stand in the mall and whether a 19 year old would fit in if it's a hangout for high-school girls. In something like Persona 4, fine, these are normal high schoolers living mostly normal lives, this is something they'd worry about. When said stand is probably unstaffed and all the food-making materials looted, the conversation makes no sense, at least not without bursting into tears at the end or something, so just don't do it. Sheesh.
