I played the Class of ’09 series

[Finished December 29th, 2023. Rating: 2/10]

One of my personal favorite things to see in fiction is the portrayal of toxic/abusive relationships and circumstances. When executed well, these can capture some of the most emotionally powerful human experiences with sensitivity and depth that affects the reader as deeply as the characters involved. Of course, this isn’t just because I think seeing abuse in fiction is worth it for its own sake, but because of the meaning a story can convey by showing its impact — after all, fiction is invaluable for its ability to show nuanced perspectives a reader might never have considered prior. Some of my favorite stories have completely shifted my perspective on life through how they explore abusive environments and characters who struggle to cope with them.

The Class of ‘09 series of visual novels, then, is impressive in representing the exact opposite of what I look for in fictional portrayals of abuse. This series was sold to me as ‘lesbians under the pressure of a suppressive school system ending up resentful and obsessive towards each other because of their internalized self-hatred and heteronormativity’. And, okay, I’m not JUST disappointed because the series was way less about the lesbians than I expected (even if it is kinda disappointing!!). It still leaves a lot of room to explore how the school traumatizes its students, and a story about a girl messily trying to reconcile how she’s been failed by all the authority figures in her life sounded intriguing nonetheless. Ultimately, the problem is that in order to make good on its premise’s appeal, the writing has to be legitimately invested in the psychological consequences of what the whole story centers around. But it’s not. It is a story about a girl unemotionally taking very straightforward revenge against ontologically evil people for ten hours.

Nicole is a protagonist whose most compelling attributes are almost exclusively relegated to the first game’s opening cutscene. I really admire how efficient it’s able to be in writing a retelling of traumatic events by someone clearly biased by that trauma; the obvious possessiveness and repressed yearning for attention in her narration is the type of subtlety I wish was a constant throughout the story. Instead, after that first minute of intrigue, we immediately switch to what I can only describe as a clip show of abject misery. Class of ‘09 formats itself in a very unique way: rather than a followable coherent narrative, it splits its storytelling across vaguely connected two-minute skits involving a roughly consistent cast. This decision essentially means the audience isn’t privy to any development in the cast’s relationships, with all of the setup happening offscreen to give characters rigid and defined dynamics that never change. Neither of these things are inherently bad, either! Structuring a story unconventionally can be really cool, and characters can still be explored satisfactorily despite having flat dynamics with each other. However, as you might have guessed, Class of ‘09 would rather be a vapidly edgy slice-of-life mishmash with barely any throughline.

At its core, it feels as if Class of ‘09 most wants to be something like satire or vent art. It doesn’t really present itself with the priorities of a narrative, as the main focus is generally on Nicole making her cynical and depressive quips about various situations she finds herself in. Yet even then, it’s satire of the lowest order. These situations are barely meaningfully distinct from one another and certainly have nothing interesting to offer; most are either her being preyed upon by one of the countless faculty pedophiles and passive-aggressively rebuffing them before getting them fired, or her being harassed by the male students and casually deciding to ruin their lives as revenge. Maybe it would be interesting if Nicole’s responses to these things were detailed or layered, but they couldn’t be further from that. She’s an incredibly statically spiteful character who compensates for her trauma by retaliating in extreme ways against men who exist purely to be one-dimensionally evil. The conflicts are as repetitive as they are drawn-out, with those involved never being informed by anything other than the men doing evil things (because men are evil) and Nicole being apathetic and cruel (because she is traumatized). Her relationships with the girls around her are almost no better, with them all either being complete enablers of her behavior or complete victims of it — the second game’s focus on her relationship with Ari should be compelling, but it is literally just entirely Nicole being sadistic because she doesn’t care about others’ feelings and Ari being dependent on her because she’s an isolated lesbian. There’s nothing even theoretically being commented on here. It is a series about watching people suffer for no reason.

For a final note, I’ll say this: the series presents itself so insistently as a ‘socially realistic’ story in all of its marketing, but I don’t think the author understands narrative realism in anything but the most superficial sense. Sure, the dialogue is technically believable, but this matters extremely little as a selling point when the presentation of characters is so consistently unreal. Nobody in real life is remotely as much of a caricature, morally or personality-wise. When this story fails so consistently at representing these very real issues with even a semblance of the nuance or empathy they deserve, I find it easy to see that Class of ‘09 cares nothing for them beyond whatever cartoonish mockery it can make out of the people involved. These games fail to earn my respect, and I don’t think they should have anyone else’s either.