Say It In Red

Dear Listeners,

I've been having nightmares recently. Maybe I shouldn't call them nightmares, but it's hard to describe them in any other way. Each night, I fall asleep – or at least, I think I'm falling asleep – only to see the silhouette of a tall, beautiful woman open my door right before I lose consciousness. The next thing I remember is walking through my old high school and finding one of my classmates drinking another girl's blood. Terror seizes me, because I forgot to study for my blood drinking exam. I run from the room,  mostly to give the girls their privacy, and fall right into a massive pit of worms. Dread arrests my limbs, because they're all sour gummy worms and now my clothes are covered in tart sugar and sticky goo. Also all of these gummy worms are dirty now and that's just adding to the stress. Around this time, a writhing shadow covers me and I awaken in a cold sweat, look up, and see the flowchart for Heaven's Feel open on the monitor in front of me.

On this episode, Sara, Runa, and returning guest MK complete their reading of Fate/Stay Night with the Heaven's Feel route! This route immediately diverges from the others, but still remains close to the Fate route until a scene in the Matou family basement pulls us deeper into the literal pit of Sakura's trauma and despair. When Sakura confides in Shirou about the abuse she's suffered at her family home, he takes her to stay at his house to protect her from Shinji and their terrifying grandfather, Zouken. When a mysterious, eldritch Shadow begins stalking the city and defeating servants, Shirou and Saber start investigating only to cross paths with a new servant, True Assassin, at the Ryuudo Temple. While Shirou faces off against Zouken, the master of True Assassin, Saber fights his servant only to lose not to Assassin, but the mysterious Shadow. Meanwhile, Sakura has been suffering from sudden intense fevers and bouts of weakness and Shirou encourages her to remain at his home and rest. When Shinji attempts to take Sakura back to the Matou home, Rin and Shirou try to protect her only to end up facing Rider, now revealed to have been Sakura's servant all along. From there the Shadow continues its rampage, Zouken continues scheming, Shirou continues experiencing unnerving nightmares, and Sakura's condition continues to deteriorate. The final secrets of the Holy Grail War come to light in this final route, as Illya reveals her connection to Shirou, Rin and Sakura reconnect as sisters, and Angra Mainyu properly takes the stage at last.

Fate/Stay Night Q&A Episode: 

Our April Episode will be a huge Q&A Episode about the whole of Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero questions are up for grabs as well! You can send us your Fate/Stay Night questions here and as long as you get them to us before our April Episode, we'll do our best to answer as many as possible!

As always, if you enjoy our show please consider supporting us by leaving a 5 star review on whatever platform you use to listen. You can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred where for just a few dollars a month you can gain access to our entire backlog of bonus episodes! These bonus episodes include a wide range of topics from deep dives into games outside of the Visual Novel space to fandom histories and much more!

Also, you can check out our guest, MK, experiencing even more Visual Novel excitement on the Moonshot Network where they're currently reading Virtue's Last Reward for the first time and will continue reading Visual Novels (and adjacent media) Saturdays on twitch.tv/moonshotnetwork!

Content Warnings for this episode:

Discussions of Sexual Assault
Mentions of Child Sexual Abuse
Insects, especially worms and body horror related to Worms, Insects, and Parasites

Dear Listeners,

Recently I witnessed a devastating battle in my dreams. On the floor of a figure collecting convention, an absurdly wealthy collector was completely annihilating everyone in a quiz competition about rare and obscure scale figures. Talented sculptors, award-winning painters, and industry darlings all wept in lamentation as their knowledge proved insufficient to compete with the golden-haired man who owned not only the first Saber Lily Distant Avalon figure ever produced, but also prototypes of promotional figures including the solid gold Gundam RX-78-2 as well as every single Winter edition Hatsune Miku scale figure ever produced. Then a guy who does garage kits came in and absolutely bodied him in the last round, it was incredible.

...Wait, actually I think that might have happened for real.

This month, Runa and Sara return to Fate/Stay Night with guest MK to read through the game's second route: Unlimited Blade Works. While the Fate route left them wanting more emotional resonance and less Shirou, the Unlimited Blade Works route delivers both in spades. Diverging from the Fate Route when Shirou uses a command seal to prevent Saber from attacking Archer and Rin, Unlimited Blade Works sees the two masters work much more closely together as they navigate their growing affections for one another while the Holy Grail War is going, admittedly, Pretty Bad for them. Not only do they suffer a devastating loss followed by an abrupt betrayal, the eighth servant Gilgamesh makes a much earlier entrance and quickly dominates the field. With Saber lost, Archer gone, and no command seals left, Rin and Shirou struggle to survive together as they piece together the mystery of Archer's identity, Shirou's future, and the magic that could help them win the Holy Grail War: Unlimited Blade Works.

As always, if you enjoy our show please consider supporting us by leaving a 5 star review on whatever platform you use to listen. You can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred where for just a few dollars a month you can gain access to our entire backlog of bonus episodes! These bonus episodes include a wide range of topics from deep dives into games outside of the Visual Novel space to fandom histories and much more!

Also, you can check out our guest, MK, experiencing even more Visual Novel excitement on the Moonshot Network where they're currently reading Virtue's Last Reward for the first time and will continue reading Visual Novels (and adjacent media) Saturdays on twitch.tv/moonshotnetwork!

Dear Listeners,

It has been ten years since that calamity. Though you survived, the memory of flame-scorched rubble haunts your dreams each night. Closure slips away from you in the vagaries of time and, a decade on, you settle back into a relatively peaceful daily routine. It would be truly terrible if you were to die multiple times in one night through no fault of your own. It would really suck if you got pulled into a death game that had an unnerving connection to the most traumatic moment of your childhood. If something that awful happened you'd probably at least want some kind of good fortune to balance it all out. Maybe getting to know a cool knight with a sick sword or something. Yeah, a cool sword could make this all alright.

This week we begin our four episode series on Fate/Stay Night, a tremendously popular and influential Visual Novel from Type-Moon and the first main entry into the vast and sprawling Fate series. Sara and Runa are joined by friend, fellow podcaster, and Fate enjoyer MK as the three of them begin unpacking the massive warehouse of material that is Fate/Stay Night (2004). Reading along in the recent remaster (2024) which is based on Fate/Stay Night's Realta Nua release (2007), this episode focuses on the Fate route which is the standard first route players experience when booting up the game. In this route, we initially follow the prologue and Rin Tohsaka, a highschooler and mage who summons a Heroic Spirit, a Servant who occupies a special Class and will be her chess piece within the Holy Grail War. After a few hours with Rin though, we shift to our protagonist's perspective: Shirou Emiya is a fairly normal high school boy apart from how he was the sole survivor of a catastrophic fire 10 years ago, and the fact that he, too, is a mage. He can only use reinforcement or strengthening magic though, which he employs to repair broken space heaters and the like for his school. One night while Shirou is at school after dark, however, he's cornered by a man in blue spandex with a giant red spear who kills him dead. It's alright, Shirou gets better - unfortunately his assailant follows him to his home where Shirou staggers backwards and accidentally summons a Servant, Saber. Looking up at this majestic woman clad in a knight's silver armor in the moonlight, Shirou enters the Holy Grail War without fully understanding how, why, or what he's supposed to do in this situation.

The Fate Route of Fate/Stay Night focuses on establishing the core ideas of the game and its world, particularly surrounding Servants, Mages, and the Holy Grail War. A real, powerful magical artifact manifests within Fuyuki City and provides the power to summon Heroic Spirits of past Kings, Champions, Gods, Demons, or even Fictional characters from the past, present, or even future. These Heroic Spirits conceal their identity and use the moniker of their summoned Class as a pseudonym - Saber, Archer, Lancer, Rider, Caster, Assassin, and Berserker. Only a Servant may touch the Holy Grail, and only one Master & Servant pair may use its power to grant their deepest wish. In the Fate Route, we also see the game's first romance play out between Shirou and Saber with mixed results. In spite of its shortcomings, Fate introduces a wealth of information and details which we'll be carrying forward into our next episodes on the remaining routes of the game. 

As always, if you enjoy our show please consider supporting us by leaving a 5 star review on whatever platform you use to listen. You can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred where for just a few dollars a month you can gain access to our entire backlog of bonus episodes! These bonus episodes include a wide range of topics from deep dives into games outside of the Visual Novel space to fandom histories and much more!

Also, you can check out our guest, MK, experiencing even more Visual Novel excitement on the Moonshot Network where they're

Video Games. For years, we have wondered: What are they? Where do they come from? And what do they want from us? Today, we have answers for you... answers that would delight even that strictest of industry philosophers: Sonic the Hedgehog. These are shorter games, far less hardware intensive than the latest AAA titles, and made by passionate developers. In fact, the only thing that might not satisfy Sonic's demands is that indie developers aren't always paid more to work less, but maybe by telling you about these Indie Visual Novels we played, we can encourage more people to send some money toward these incredible games.

This month, as is our semi-annual tradition, Sara and Runa each talk about a handful of indie visual novels they've played recently, each with its own incredible style, story, and impact. Some of these games are too short to warrant a full episode of the show, but honestly it's a struggle to keep ourselves from talking about each one for a full hour because they're just that good.

In these Indie Game Compilation Track episodes, which we do at least twice each year, we want to highlight some of the incredible indie VNs we've played recently and get people excited about the things happening in Indie Visual Novel development spaces. We want to not only showcase the amazing breadth of work coming from Indie developers but also talk about some of our favorite games, many of which touch on subjects, characters, and experiences we rarely get the chance to see in games from larger studios. You can find a list of each game we played below and we encourage you to play along with us, and go searching for other Indie visual novels as well! 

Most of these games are free and if not, fairly cheap (though please tip the creators if you are able), and you can read most of them inside of an hour or two. In fact, we want YOU, dear listener, to pick at least one of these games to play after you listen, and then tell us about it!

Games included in this episode:

• Stillwater by Studio Clump (00:04:30)
• May I take Your Order by Alexis Royce (00:10:27)
• Someone Stole MY LUNCH by Studio Clump (00:17:35)
• Mushroom Musume by Mortally Moonstruck Games (00:24:05)
• Penultima by Zetareishi (00:34:43)
• Doomsday Dreamgirl by Nadia Nova (00:46:35)
• Sink Your Teeth by SuperBiasedGary (00:54:36)
• He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me by Taylor McCue (01:01:10)
• Bad Faith by Mado (01:14:07)
• Dahlia by Crystal Game Works (01:23:06)

And we also mentioned...

• Rituals in the Dark by ebi-hime (01:30:20)
• Life after Magic by Chiraishi Games (01:29:21)

Dear Listeners,

Have you ever felt, particularly in late November when the rain picks up and keeps you housebound, that you are trapped in a strange house full of people you don't entirely know? In many ways, the distance between holiday revelry and horrifying mystery is smaller than we like to think. What would happen if all of our Thanksgiving reunions took place on an isolated, stormbound island? Would everyone in attendance keep a level head if a gramophone announced the most sordid sins of their past? If nothing else, you could take solace in knowing that it would be difficult for your own holiday gatherings to turn out as badly as those on Soldier Island in Agatha Christie's influential closed circle mystery, And Then There Were None.

And what better way to experience this book, the practical foundation and inspiration for so many mysteries and visual novels, than to force one unwitting Umineko fan to read it, stop before the final culprit reveal, and then deliver all of her thoughts and theories on the air for everyone to enjoy. That's exactly what happened in this episode - Sara, along with Umineko reading guests KT Kelly and Raven, found out that Runa had never read And Then There Were None (despite having read about a dozen other Christie novels even as early as middle school). So really, there was nothing else to do but to give Runa her assignment, listen to her theories, and then see how she reacts to the final culprit reveal live on the air.

You can even read all of Runa's Culprit Theories, including some truly wild things that didn't make it onto the episode!

As we mentioned here, you can also Submit a short audio clip telling us about an Indie VN you've played, and we'll be including as many of those clips as possible in our upcoming Indie VN compilation track episode coming out in December! 

This is a public release of a previous Patreon-exclusive episode! You can, and we hope that you will, support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred where for as little as $3 a month you can get access to over four years of bonus content, along with advance schedules to let you know what we're reading in the future! And as always, if you enjoy our show please tell your friends and give us a rating and review wherever you listen.

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Please remember this combination. When you enter the elevator (FIRST FLOOR! Don't enter from the ground level or garage!) press the play button on this podcast. You should do this alone, ideally late at night or in the early morning when no one else will try to ride the elevator with you. Make sure the building you're in has at least 10 floors. Once you arrive on the fourth floor, wait 10 minutes while you listen to the podcast and then press the button for floor 2. Repeat this for each step: 10 minutes of podcast, elevator button, wait for the doors to open and close, and then listen in the solitary, sealed room of the elevator for another 10 minutes. By the end of this, you will have heard our entire podcast, giving you a full overview of why you absolutely should not play the elevator game (unless you are a catgirl searching for your cat girlfriend).

For the height of the spooky season, Runa and Sara are discussing The Elevator Game with Catgirls(2022), in which catgirls Asahi and Kirin decide to play the fabled Elevator Game of urban legends lore. According to this game, if you enter an elevator, alone, and press the floor buttons in a particular sequence, you can travel to a strange and eerie Otherworld. You'll know when you reach that place because it will be entirely empty and devoid of life, and in the deep red sky you'll see a glowing cross. To return, you simply have to find the elevator you arrived in and complete the elevator game again... provided the elevator comes when you call it. After waiting outside in the snow for her girlfriend, Kirin, Asahi gets nervous and decides to rush in and try to find her. She quickly discovers that she, too, is now trapped within the Otherworld of the elevator game as well, which she wouldn't believe so readily had she not also had the paranormal experience of growing kitty ears and a tail months earlier. Through the process of solving puzzles scattered through the building's lobby and within the Otherworld, Asahi finds scattered notes that seem to reveal the inner thoughts and memories of the other people trapped there... including some from Kirin. 

As always, if you like our show and want to support us, please give us a rating and review on wherever you listen! You can also support us directly on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred. We don't advertise, so listener recommendations and word of mouth are the best way for new listeners to find us! 

How do I get to the convenience store from here? How does anyone get to a convenience store from anywhere? Where are you right now, and can I follow you for a while? I don't think I'm catching up even though I told you I was right behind you - I just didn't want you to worry or feel inconvenienced by my indecision. Hey, is it alright if we just sit here for a while? I think... yeah, even this much has worn me down this morning. Let me tell you about a game I played recently. A couple games, in fact. 

This month, Sara and Runa discuss the Milk series of games, covering both Milk Inside a Bag of Milk (2020) and Milk outside a bag of Milk (2021) and the surreal horror of mundane daily struggles with mental health, common chores, and our attempts to form connections. The first game focuses on you, the player, entering your name just before an unnamed girl entreats you to help her go to the store and buy a bag of milk. You have dialogue options, sometimes ranging from soft comfort to abject cruelty and often landing in sarcastic needling territory. As you accompany this girl, she reveals some small details about her daily struggles with life, chores, and the way she sees the world. "I'll try being a visual novel protagonist!" she says, and thus her thoughts appear as narration for us to read, even if she can't necessarily give them coherent voice. Once you've successfully helped her buy a bag of milk, she returns home to see her mother, represented as a blank, hollow-eyed mask, who tells her to go directly to bed. The second game picks up right here, immediately upon the girl's return to home as we now see her mother as a massive, formless being with sprawling arms and tendrils who injects a thin, needle-like finger into our protagonist's arm. From there, we help our protagonist, now trying out her life as an Adventure Game protagonist, search for her stray thoughts which have turned into fireflies. She longs for sleep and dreaming, and at the end of the night your choices will determine the vision she sees when she closes her eyes. 

This is, above all else, a game about plumbing the depths of your own mind, the ways we navigate society and life as we struggle with mental illness, the way we make sense of our pain and treatment, and the dreams we see when we can finally sleep. 


As always, if you like our show and want to support us, please give us a rating and review on wherever you listen! You can also support us directly on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred. We don't advertise, so listener recommendations and word of mouth are the best way for new listeners to find us!

Content Warnings for this episode:
Our episode contains mentions and discussions of suicide, self-harm, online harassment, and forced injection. 

August is not merely a month — it is an emotion. For some, the final month of Summer rings in its hottest days and the looming dread of a new school term. For others, it's a time steeped in nostalgia and the memories of summers' past. Perhaps your August is the feeling of bittersweet romance and the distant promise of your future. Perhaps, even, as the seasons turn you feel, more strongly than anything, a longing for 1992.

This month, Sara and Runa discuss Dōkyūsei: Bangin' Summer, a 2022 remake of a game from thirty years prior and one of the very first dating sims to gain widespread popularity and acclaim. Playing as Takurou, an extremely horny high school senior in the final weeks of his last summer break, you find yourself wandering the city to find girls, talk to girls, flirt with girls, take girls on dates, and answer quiz questions about their outfits in exchange for cash prizes. There are no fewer than 14 girls for Takurou to pursue, five of whom are his classmates as the game's title suggests while the other nine are adult women Takurou meets around town. Even in this early entry to the genre, you can see dozens of themes, mechanics, tropes, innovations, and gags that are still common thirty years later. In fact, if you ever feel that you may have a new, fresh, and never-before-seen idea to inject into a dating sim... play Dōkyūsei first. There's a high chance that one of the original entries into the genre has already beat you to the punch.

As a heads up for listeners, Dōkyūsei: Bangin' Summer is an adult game and some routes feature explicit depictions of sexual assault and violence. We've included timestamps below for the sections where we discuss these events.
You can also play the game without the 18+ patch which excises a lot of this content, though we found that playing without the 18+ patch skips large sections of certain scenes, even those which are not H scenes along with some potential graphical bugs that are solved by applying the 18+ patch.

Content Warnings for this episode
Teacher/Student route discussion - 1:36:45 to 1:45:15
Discussion of Sexual Assault - 1:46:30 to 2:06:20

"The small coastal town where you'll be staying this weekend bears the cool sea air like a mantle. Your suite, the luxurious Victorian era Revival room in a traditional Western style hotel, overlooks the harbor and the steep, switchback mountain trails that flow into town like a ruddy stream. Breakfast is served an hour past dawn and free ornithology classes are held each afternoon with the proprietress. When you leave here, you will forget some things. Don't be afraid - this is what we wanted for you. It's not the end of something. It's the start of your next journey.

Everything has a Reason.

9.5/10 stars
minus 0.5 stars because the manager got drunk and proposed marriage to me?"
- Customer review of a certain mountaintop hotel.

This month, Runa and Sara join returning guest Raven to discuss SeaBed (2016), a richly woven tapestry of memory, grief, kindness, and healing. The story begins as the lively and spontaneous Takako enjoys a seaside vacation with her long-time girlfriend, serious and grounded Sachiko. Or perhaps it begins in elementary school, when Takako and Sachiko first meet. Or... did it start when Takako disappeared? Was that four years ago? Two years ago? SeaBed quickly immerses you in the world of these two women, joined quickly by Narasaki, a childhood friend of Sachiko's who studies disorders and conditions of the brain and memory. As Sachiko struggles to recall exactly what happened, Narasaki guides her through the landscape of her past with Takako and into the strange pathways of Sachiko's own perception and memory. Soon, Sachiko recalls that Takako didn't just go missing - she died. That's when the story shifts, and we begin to see things from Takako's perspective where she's recovering from a memory condition in a seaside sanatorium.

For listeners who haven't played SeaBed, we avoid talking about major spoilers up until 00:56:00 minutes, so if you want to listen that far and see what you think, we encourage you to listen along up to that point and then check out SeaBed for yourself!

As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month. Our most recent episodes include some deep dives into The Executioner and Her Way of Life light novel series and you can find today's guest, Raven, on bonus episodes for Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, a Umineko volume 1 restrospective, and an in-depth explainer about Riverdale.

Dear Listeners,
Like the inevitable woe of an ancient curse, Summer is upon us once more. We're awash in refreshing recipes for strawberry rhubarb shrub, homemade swamp coolers, and the perfect accompaniment for a day indoors during a rainstorm: Indie Visual Novels. With huge bundles such as the annual Queer Games Bundle on itch, you're bound to find something that speaks to the most particular desires of your heart. Today, we're once again inviting you to explore the delightful space of Indie Visual Novels, and we've even brought some of our dear Patrons along to help us tell you about no fewer than Thirteen Indie VNs today!

This episode is the third in our Indie Game Compilation Track series, in which Sara and Runa explore the depth and breadth of indie visual novels, covering games that might be too short for a full episode but still warrant our full attention and praise.
We want to not only showcase the amazing breadth of work coming from Indie developers but also talk about some of our favorite games, many of which touch on subjects, characters, and experiences we rarely get the chance to see in games from larger studios. You can find a list of each game we played below and we encourage you to play along with us, and go searching for other Indie visual novels as well!

In these Indie Game Compilation Track episodes, which we do at least twice each year, we want to highlight some of the incredible indie VNs we've played recently and get people excited about the things happening in Indie Visual Novel development spaces. You should check out all the games mentioned here, but more than that you should go look around, find and follow creators, and discover small indie games that you can love with all your heart.

Most of these games are free and if not, fairly cheap (though please tip the creators if you are able), and you can read most of them inside of an hour or two. In fact, we want YOU, dear listener, to pick at least one of these games to play after you listen, and then tell us about it!

Here's the full list of games we played, and games our Patrons told us about, along with more information on where you can find them:

Runa and Sara played...

• Blood & Play: 00:01:49
• Co-Pilot: 00:11:01  
• Gender-Wrecked: 00:30:49
• Airtime Media: 00:16:37
• Bloom into Frost: 00:39:53
• Saint Spell's Love Guide to the Magical Student's Spellbook: 00:51:50
• 31st March, Midnight: 1:08:44

Patron Submissions

• Cel by Date: 00:08:27 (Sent in by Ioyful Knight)
• Reckless Sympathy: 00:14:05 (Sent in by Emrys)
• My Father's Long Long Legs: 00:23:54 (Sent in by Meowgon)
• Love and Dehumanization: 00:35:06 (Sent in by Case Deerly)
• Needy Streamer Overload: 00:46:45 (Sent in by KT Kelly)
• Misericorde, volume 1: 1:00:20 (Sent in by SuperBiasedGary)