Yaso curse of soirée released by ItimatuSeika is a story about the strange journey of a girl Kirima Shoka in her own mansion.
Basically YASO curse of soirée, hereafter please call it YASO for short, is a simulation game released by ItimatuSeika on July 8, 2022. The game is set in a mansion built. in the 1900s of the Meiji period and has a strong Western architectural style. Despite having simple 3D graphics with a playtime of about 1 hour, what I felt in that 1 hour was really… well, pretty crazy. What is the specific story in YASO, right now, let’s find out with me.
Kirima Shoka’s Quirky Journey
At the beginning of the game, you will see a girl dressed in Western clothes named Kirima Shoka standing in the middle of the lobby of a large mansion. After that, the camera angle gradually changes, you switch to the role of Shoka and the game also changes to a first-person perspective. At this point, you will hear Shoka talking about leaving the mansion and at her feet appears a corpse whose face cannot be seen.
Shoka walked past the corpse to the door, but suddenly realized that she had dropped a paper crane lucky charm somewhere in the mansion. Unable to leave this place without the paper crane, Shoka starts going into each room to find it. At this point, I will control Shoka to break the vases in the mansion and find the keys to open the door to each room. Sometimes you’ll get slips of game instructions and hear Shoka monologue to herself.
When entering a Japanese-style room, we will see a man’s silhouette imprinted on the sliding door wall. The man didn’t seem very well and said in a low voice, that he thought he was dead but the paper cranes that Shoka gave him have kept him alive until now, he is happy to be her friend, but also please don’t come to find him again and then disappear.
After the figure of the man disappeared, the scenery of the mansion suddenly turned red with blood-stained hand marks appearing on the windows. At this time, moving in the mansion will be more difficult because the ghost of a man suddenly appears, every time he sees Shoka, that ghost will rush to attack her.
If you continue to the billiards room, a Japanese woman’s head will appear and ask Shoka to play a game of skewers to poke through a series of heads. After winning that horror game, Shoka can go to the garden outside and pick up a pair of scissors hidden inside the small shrine. If she kept walking, Shoka would hear a piano coming from a room inside the mansion, and a man waving at her at the bridge.
When controlling Shoka to go near the bridge, a giant head will appear and chase the girl. The only way to get rid of the head is to hide in a big boat by the lake. After getting out of the boat, the scenery of the villa will change to the scene of the city being flooded with water.
Continuing to swim in the middle of the block, Shoka will see a procession pass by in the distance. A woman in traditional Japanese dress appears and says she wants the protagonist to keep a paper crane as a tribute to a lost friend. After saying that, the woman’s face twisted and disappeared.
The journey only continued when Shoka stabbed the giant head with scissors and reached the gate of the temple. After going through the gate, Shoka will return to the mansion, but it is much older than before. Continuing around the mansion, Shoka will come to a luxurious room with a piano in the middle, at which point she will sit down and play.
A girl holding a violin, wearing a bright kimono, the lower half of her body is a snake’s tail will appear next to the main character and perform with her. Now your task is to avoid the obstacles to make the performance go smoothly.
After the performance is over, the girl with the snake’s tail will disappear, and Shoka will find her lucky paper crane lying on the floor. She picked up the crane and returned to the temple gate, where the giant head was waiting. After pulling out the scissors on the head, the scenery around Shoka would suddenly collapse.
In the dark, she saw a guy drop a rope into the hole and pull her up. If you don’t climb up, Shoka will be trapped in the dark forever. If you climb up, the guy wearing traditional Japanese clothes will greet her with a smile and instruct Shoka on how to leave this place.
Just keep going straight in the direction the boy directs, you will see a piano located behind the temple gate. Shoka sat down to play in the middle of a field of birches, telling herself that it wouldn’t be so bad to sit and play the piano all her life in a place like this, and the game ended there.
In another ending, if Shoka doesn’t choose to sit down to play, but instead picks up scissors and tears the paper crane, she will return to the old path, grabbing the scissors and severing the red threads in the way. The scenery on both sides of the road will gradually disappear, and in the end, Shoka stands at the starting point of the game and jumps out of the window. The game ends with an elderly woman sitting in front of a window, confiding that only she can pay for her sins, and the game ends here.
Metaphorical messages about domestic violence
After experiencing the game, you will surely wonder, what is the story behind these crazy scenes? So right now, I will analyze and clarify the meaning behind the images in the game with you.
Based on what happens during the game, I will temporarily hypothesize this is the story of a woman lost in the spirit world. The reason for this theory is that we can see a lot of youkai images in Japanese culture appearing in the game.
The first is the image of a woman’s head appearing in the billiards room. This image is quite similar to the youkai Nukekubi has the ability to separate the head from the body. Next is a giant head that appears in the garden and chases after the main character whose shape is quite similar to the youkai Tsurube Otoshi. Finally, the snake-body woman playing with the main character is also considered another form of the youkai Nure-Onna in Japanese mythology.
In addition, when the main character wanders through the flooded neighborhood, we can also see a rickshaw resembling the demon Oboroguruma walking on the street.
So the question here is why is the main character in the spirit world? Maybe she died and her soul was imprisoned in this place because of some sin, which I think is murder. To explain this, let’s go back to the scene at the beginning of the game, if you look closely, you can see that at Shoka’s feet now is a dead man.
Right from the start of the game, Shoka had been standing there, even calmly monologue, so there was no way she could just happen to pass by and meet the corpse, so she could only explain herself. Shoka killed the man.
So who is that man? And why did Shoka kill him? First, let’s take a look at the ghost of the man chasing Shoka at the beginning of the game. Most likely this ghost is Shoka’s husband, the same person she just killed.
Through Shoka’s lines throughout the game, we can see that her husband is a patriarchal man, violent and often beating his wife. He doesn’t let Shoka play the piano and often insults her with extremely vulgar words. Perhaps because of that, Shoka killed her husband and imprisoned his soul in hell.
As for the silhouette of the ailing man on the sliding wall and the one who released Shoka’s lifeline at the end of the game, I think he could be Shoka’s lover, or former husband. We see him and Shoka love each other very much through the detail that she folded more than 1000 paper cranes to wish him good health, but in the end he couldn’t fight the disease and passed away. The image of the procession that we see in the distance is actually the funeral scene of that unfortunate boy.
The evidence is that the clothes the woman talking to Shoka is wearing is very similar to the clothes usually seen at funerals. At this point in the English version, the woman calls the dead person “her”, but when compared with the Japanese version and the data in the game, we can see that the woman is referring to the boy as Shoka’s ex-lover. So the woman can be the mother of the other boy.
Out of sympathy for Shoka, the mother gave her a paper crane that Shoka had arranged for her son as a souvenir. That is also the reason why Shoka goes to search for the lost paper crane throughout the game. At the same time, she also hopes that Shoka can walk again, not needing to be tormented by her son’s death. This information also explains why I assume the guy is Shoka’s ex and not his current lover.
After that, Shoka got married and moved back to the mansion. However, she was often abused by her husband, so she killed him. There are two interesting details that the game maker has installed, namely the scene of Shoka standing in the lobby at the beginning of the game and the image of a flower vase. First, in the scene where Shoka stands in the hall, if we look behind us, we will see three glass paintings of morning glory, poppy and wisteria. All three flowers symbolize deep, faithful and eternal love.
This implies that even though she is married, Shoka is still deeply in love with her former lover, perhaps that’s why Shoka’s husband abused her. Regarding the image of vases placed everywhere in the mansion, it symbolizes that Shoka has to hide her feelings for her deceased lover to avoid her husband’s abuse. Shoka’s act of breaking the vases seemed to implicitly declare that she was now free from her abusive husband and no longer needed to hide her feelings.
The true meaning of endings in YASO
Finally, I will explain more about the three endings in YASO. In the first ending called Kurayami or Shadow, it only happens when Shoka doesn’t grab the rope dropped by her ex. It can be understood that in this ending, Shoka has decided to give up everything and does not want to try to escape from the hell that is holding his soul.
The second ending is called Yomi, referring to the world of the dead. In this ending, Shoka sits down at the piano and becomes a youkai in the spirit land. This action symbolizes that Shoka is not aware of the crime of killing her husband, so she is punished to become a youkai to play the harp for a lifetime in hell and pay the price for that sin. In addition, this ending can also symbolize that after killing her husband, Shoka committed suicide to escape crime and became a youkai in this place.
The third and final ending of YASO is called Jigoku or Hell. The image of the old woman sitting in front of the window is the image of Shoka when she is old. The image of the old woman muttering a confession symbolizes Shoka’s confession after killing her husband. The saying “becoming a yōkai who plays the lute in the afterlife isn’t too bad” probably refers to the fact that after death, Shoka’s soul will become a youkai. But different from the second ending because this time Shoka actively confessed and could rest easy because he had atone for all his mistakes.
And that is also the end for Mo’s analysis of the game YASO curse of soirée, what do you think about the above analysis? Note that this is just a hypothesis based on my personal point of view, so it may or may not be correct. For now, goodbye and see you in other posts.
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