Update Two Hundred and Ninety-Seven: 4 April 2019

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Oh man. I really feel like I’m not smart enough to write about this game. That’s a really cool feeling.

I didn’t particularly fuck with the first VN from this dev/artist duo, We Know the Devil, which turned out to be a detached prequel to this game. I was a little hesitant going in, but I’ve heard incredible things and a friend of mine in particular loved it (I bought it for them and they said it changed their life) so I figured, what the hey, it’s fighting robots in space, let’s try again.

Heaven Will Be Mine follows three girls in the last days of a pointless war fought in space, far separate (in more ways than one) from humanity. You play as one girl per playthrough as she confronts the other two through mission sorties—each girl is in a different faction, each faction has a different idea about what the future of the pilots and support staff in space should be. The real looming threat isn’t the Existential Threat they were sent up to face—it’s Earth.

Firstaball, this shit is metaphorically dense as fuck. So dense it can generate its own gravity (which means something in the story) and supply its own Culture (which means something in the story). I’ve read simpler shit in honors college courses. The writing is poetic, frenetic, varied (depending on the girl) and just opaque enough where you’re NEARLY grasping what it’s talking about… but multiple playthroughs are a must to understand what, precisely, they’re talking about here.

And what they’re talking about here is queerness in general and gender identity in specific. Growing and shaping your own body, being an outcast sent to fight alien forces and then becoming alien yourself, the ship-self mechs they fight in, of their choosing, both them and not-them in equal measure, the line blurring. It’s transhumanist cyberpunk, heavy on the trans, heavy on the humanist (and, of course, they’re all gay, too). While I don’t personally identify and relate to that struggle, I can appreciate it, and this game, the way it talks about its themes, the way it conveys the feelings of these lab-grown, space-begotten girls makes me understand it more. It challenged me to see shit from a different perspective, to not let things be easy, to choose struggle for the sake of struggle, and I liked that a lot, too.

The art is a big step up, the visual design of the characters and the ship-selves popping and lovely. I particularly adore the UI—each route has different elements and a different color palette and I adore it. It’s girls—nearly ALL girls, with only maybe two out of a cast of eleven or so being men—who are larger than life, larger than space, large enough to great their own gravity. Girls taking what shit they’re given and making the best ending, their own ending, out of it. How can I not fuck with it? Take a leap off earth and into heaven and you might just fuck with it, too.

Needless to say, Heaven Will Be Mine has a spot on my Visual Novel Master List.

Next up: I have a feeling that, as much as I liked Everlasting Summer, this is going to be a step down…

See you soon!