Another top 10 favorite games write-up ahead.
10. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
9. Perfect Tides
8. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
7. Chop Suey
6. Knights and Bikes
5. Super Metroid
4. Gone Home
2. The Last of Us Part I
1. The Last of Us Part II
3. BUTTERFLY SOUP
Sorry to change up the approach to banners here, but (likely owing to its considerable obscurity) Butterfly Soup proved to be the most banner-hostile entry on my list when I searched for title screen images to use. I opted for this stylization because I feel it better reflects the vibe of the game than the official title screen art does.
Anyway, Butterfly Soup is a very humble game. It was created by one person, Brianna Lei, who offers it for free here. (I recommend you be polite and voluntarily pay her something for it though because she's earned it.) It's not available on Steam. It's a pretty linear visual novel, so don't expect a lot of interactivity either. Player actions exist simply to keep you attentive and involved and add to your perspective on the lives of the game's characters, not to offer up multiple endgame scenarios or serious customizability. Why in the fucking hell would I rank something created on a shoestring budget that's designed in such a straightforward way that does almost nothing to take advantage of the greatest strength of gaming as a medium (interactivity) my third-favorite gaming experience of all time? Because it's the best visual novel title I've ever played before! And while it's greatest strengths aren't medium-specific, the existence of interactive elements does enhance the experience.
Where Butterfly Soup succeeds the most is in its writing. Which is a damn good strength for a visual novel to have!! It's kinda the whole ball game really, so to speak. Writing quality makes or breaks entries in this particular genre by definition. The landslide success thereof here with me is owed to its story structure. You proceed through key life experiences of four gay, Asian-American teenage girls living in Freemont, California, first as their elementary school selves, then as their current 9th-grader selves in 2008. First you'll see life through the eyes of Diya, a paralyzingly shy jock type of Tamil descent (I'm mentioning their ancestries here because it's relevant to their narratives); then as her over-achieving, Chinese-American best friend Noelle; third as the Indian-American class clown type, Akarsha; and finally as the Korean-American, highly assertive delinquent type, Min-seo (or Min for short). You're not re-experiencing the same events several times through different eyes though. Instead, events in the main narrative keep progressing forward in chapters, with each new perspective adding more dynamism to all the other character arcs and fresh context for previous scenes that enrich the player's understanding thereof through the steady addition of more layers. It works brilliantly!
Enough about the design though because what you're really here for is the story itself. Yes, as you may have guessed, this is a yuri novel. The best yuri novel I've ever played. The dif? This one was created by an actual Asian-American lesbian whose characters are inspired by people she has actually met and known. To these ends, you won't be surprised to learn that there are none of the tired fetish elements this genre is frankly best known for here. But neither is there the same tone that the aforementioned Gone Home features. Butterfly Soup's vibe is mainly positive and upbeat! Which is...you know, not the rule when it comes to lesbian period pieces in any medium. Make no mistake: the game is not only completely, brutally honest about the struggles its leading young ladies are navigating, but genuinely enlightening thereabout. Those struggles range, in various cases, from period-specific varieties of homophobia (like the whole battle over California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage the same year that the same electorate voted in Obama) to the sort of cultural expectations that commonly get placed on Asian-American kids, especially from immigrant families (like the concept of "Asian failing", which means scoring less than a 90% on something) to racist experiences to the idiotic cultural double-standards that are often placed on girls to straight-up child abuse. But where other lesbian period pieces might get bogged down in these troubles, Butterfly Soup puts them in perspective and revolves centrally instead around moments of camaraderie through sport, growth, love, and humor...lots and lots of humor, in fact!...that outweigh these problems for our protagonists. I can't help wishing that more stories about lesbian characters chose to emphasize things like humor, hope, and happiness over pain and narrowly avoiding suicide sometimes. It just gets depressing.
Speaking of humor, if you could classify Butterfly Soup as a kind of romantic comedy, then it's primarily comedy and secondarily a romance. And it's the flat-out funniest game I've ever played, no exaggeration! You will laugh. Out loud. A lot.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 14 January 2023
