I've been meaning to comment on this for a long time. I really love this RPG, it's one of my favorites. The combat system is great, the characters are interesting, the frame the story is told in is interesting (more on that later), I don't like all of the art, but some of it is really great and it's rarely bad, I love the music and still think of it in my own practice a year later. Also, the format of the big postgame dungeon is really novel to me and I somehow enjoyed it despite the blatantly grindy design. Overall this is the sort of game that makes me feel amicably jealous of the creator's tremendous artistry and I'm very serious when I say that.
But while I can criticize the game here and there (for example, I think the hive section and the spider boss come off as a bit "I'm 14 and this is edgy," but even then are still interesting and they don't ruin the game's tone after), I think it's probably obvious and not especially important, perhaps an artifact of an artist who developed over the course of making the work, but there's one thing that seriously bothered me. My apologies in advance, and spoilers I guess to anyone else reading this:
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The thing with Lars's Asian fetish bugs me in its presentation. Yes, I know you've gotten this criticism before, but hear me out because I want to discuss how to be constructive about it:
I am not saying that him having this fetish is a bad element or shouldn't be there, I think it's actually good at conveying how wretchedly pathetic he is, and theoretically it would give you a chance to comment on how it's not just his personal failing but a vice and derangement that is actively encouraged by otaku culture.
You can also see a very indirect refutation of it, because he nominally gets what he wants but is just as pathetic as ever and hiding from his new commitment like he hides from all of his other obligations, that's not lost on me. I call it indirect because it requires inference from the player, no one ever really remarks on the meaning of the situation, you merely see things in various states and are meant to connect them. Hitomi says almost nothing about this in the end, for instance, and neither does Lars himself except merely expressing avoidance, and no one else ever, ever mentions it.
Perhaps this goes without saying, but there are also a few layers to how bad this is on Lars's part. The racial fetish is gross, his projected codepedency is unhealthy, but then on top of this he literally ends up "picking up" a teen-coded girl from a god damn high school, impregnating her, and then just abandons her to take care of the child on her own. Throughout the whole process, he's never interested in Hitomi's perspective, she's just a thing to him to try to sexually vent all of his despair into. All of this is your intention, and I understand that, but I think the execution fails.
The reason I think your execution fails is that after that scene, I looked very closely through the entire game for a single word of refutation, and basically the only part of this that is criticized is his being a deadbeat dad. His overall mindset and the fundamental sordidness of his relationship is never given criticism. Now, I've already seen some people say "it's from the perspective of a little kid, of course he doesn't understand this topic" and I'm not expecting Jimmy to say that racial fetishism is bad, obviously I'm not. But it's not enough to just show a disgusting thing and have the player be disgusted at it, that's not anything but being disgusting, and you seem to clearly know that. I can tell because when other characters are over-ridingly wrong-headed, there is criticism of it, whether it's the father's failed intellectualizing of Jimmy's condition, Buck's aggression, or even the other predator of the game, Mr. Cat, where I think it's fair to say the shock-mongering is a little tasteless, but we also hear extensively from the victim's family afterward and they express their grief to us.
For Hitomi, we seriously get nothing. I don't expect you to write Lars having remorse, this is the sort of game where it could swing either way, but the issue is no one else having something to say. No overheard conversations about how messed up this all is (and there are so many overheard conversations for exposition in this game, what's one more line?), no commentary from her family about the barbarity of this arrangement, no commentary from Hitomi herself except being a little resentful of being a deadbeat, nothing at all! All I'm asking for is one single sentence anywhere in the game that acknowledges to the player the fundamental sickness at the heart of this, that draws their attention to how dehumanizing and exploitative Lars's attitude (and/or broader otaku culture) is.
Furthermore, Hitomi never really gets to have agency in this whole thing, she just goes from overly-amicable "waifu" to a tired housewife. I understand that there is reason for how strangely she's written. My interpretation is that Jimmy never actually met her, he only heard about her, which is why he understandably is imagining her as an anime lady and not a real human being, and this also means that her perspective is naturally inclined to be shut out. And yet, I don't think this is wholly justified, and you do let her express that Lars is a deadbeat. Even if he never met her, he has surely heard Lars talking about her, or if Lars never actually returned from "the moon" (Japan) he might have heard about their relationship from whatever correspondences are the basis for what we know he knows about their relationship, i.e. them having a kid, Lars being a deadbeat and so on. Because of the frame of the story, I think it's maybe kind of mediocre but not indefensible to have her be a severely flat character when she is introduced, because this is an expression of Lars's fantasy, but you clearly did understand that there was some need for reality to break through a little bit later on, that's what her expressing Lars being a deadbeat is about. I feel like it would have been so much better, so incomparably better, to let Jimmy be at least a witness to one tiny little dispute they have that isn't just Hitomi wanting help with the kid, because the fundamental issue isn't Lars being a deadbeat, it's him viewing Hitomi as a thing rather than a person. Surely she chafes under that yoke, right? Just imagining being treated that way and being condemned to that role for the rest of your life. She would get seriously upset even if social pressure ultimately does trap her and basically break her spirit.
Again, just a tiny bit of dialogue, especially from her since clearly you show that she's allowed to express a version of her viewpoint at least a little, just a tiny bit of dialogue about her perspective would have helped the game so much.
I have two more minor points: When I said Hitomi's introduction is mediocre, I said it because I think it obfuscates the real dynamic to the player, not just expressing Jimmy's not understanding. It's also just less interesting to have the perfect and interested waifu fall in his lap like that. As an alternative just for the sake of example, though it's not the only other way to write it: what I think would have been much more interesting is if Hitomi was shown as more of a normal person, and then Lars's growing obsession with having her as a waifu implicitly makes her into one, as a representation of his characterization of her to Jimmy changing. The issue here is that Hitomi's humanity isn't just erased to Jimmy but to the player, which shouldn't need to happen when the whole point of Jimmy is that we can understand things that he doesn't. Seeing Hitomi as a human and her getting warped into a waifu in Jimmy's eyes would be a good bit of underlying existential horror that is also a much better representation of the real-life inhumanity of the situation. Again, this is just an example, my point not being that you should do specifically this but that if you turn the idea over in your head a little, there are other ways of viewing this situation that let you acknowledge Hitomi's humanity to the player as it is being erased by Lars and therefore ignored by Jimmy.
Lastly, I do think Kyu is right that the presentation is a little insensitive in the sense that it brings up this highly charged issue with Lars being abominable but we're just buddy buddy with him and it just is left hanging for a while. Like, I get that the game is meant to be pretty dark and about "imperfect," "flawed" people, but you've got to understand that this is way more real and frankly traumatic to actual human beings in the real world than some zom-bees or evil queens. Like, imagine if Lars was talking about how he hates black people or is complaining about the "world Jewry" or something and then the narrative just ignores it for a while and he's just our good friend. He is literally that racist, he's just expressing a type of racism that we aren't shown the visceral, traumatizing aspects of as readily as the other sorts of racism, even though they are still incredibly hurtful to people.
That last one is a difficult issue and I admit that I don't even really have a proposed solution for it. It's not really about the game as "art" but as a consumer product and a social object, which admittedly I think less about than the art criticism stuff that you can see I wrote a whole wall of text for. Thinking of something right now, probably my best solution for it, and you may or may not agree, but my best solution for it is that he simply uses other language, like talking about "a girl like [made-up character] from [made up anime]" or something like that. Emphasizing the anime thing rather than extremely explicitly relating it to the real world immediately. I think even as a shock-monger (and I don't begrudge you that, to be clear) this could still work because some people might not really realize the social significance of what he's saying or what transpires (though you can and should hint at it), and we could get a passing comment from the family complaining about it that uses vocabulary that makes the real-life situation a little more clear, which to some would rightly be a moment of horror at what a piece of shit Lars is.
Again, any time that I mention an "alternative" way to approach something, I mean it as just rough examples and not "how it should have been done." You game's narratives are very carefully constructed and I'm not pretending that I could just hop in and whip up major revisions that are any good, I'm just trying to indicate a direction of thinking about how the issue could be approached.
Anyway, those are all of my thoughts on the issue. I'd really love to hear what you have to say, since I truly do admire you as an artist and I really do love this game, but I don't know if you are all that inclined to talk about this. Either way, I'm excited for your new game and everything else you do in the future.
Edit: I want to stress from the bottom of my heart that I'm not saying any of this from a place of judgement or trying to say anything bad about you, I mean this purely from a standpoint of trying to be helpful because I believe that you care.