utsuge

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Japanese 鬱ゲー (utsuge, “depressing game”), a combination of 鬱 (utsu, “melancholy, gloom”) and ゲー (gē), a shortening of ゲーム (gēmu, “game”), itself from English game.

Noun

utsuge (plural utsuges or utsuge)

1. A Japanese visual novel genre characterized by tragic plots and pervasively bleak tones.
   • 2019, Robert Ciesla, Game Development with Ren'Py: Introduction to Visual Novel Games Using Ren'Py, TyranoBuilder, and Twine‎^[1], page 90:

     Utsuge, on the other hand, stands for pretty much the opposite of nakige, aiming to be as depressing an experience as possible.

   • 2019, Ema Bícová, "Visual Novel and Its Translation", thesis submitted to Palacký University Olomouc, pages 12-13:

     The related genre “utsuge” (“depressing game”), unlike “nakige”, does not typically achieve a happy ending.

   • 2020, Ana Matilde Sousa, "She's Not Your Waifu; She's an Eldritch Abomination: Saya no uta and Queer Antisociality in Japanese Visual Novels", Mechademia, Volume 13, Number 1, Fall 2020:

     Nitroplus, the company behind Saya no uta, specializes in utsuge containing body horror, gore, rape, and depression—in short, as scholar Clarisse Thorn puts it, games that are “not ‘fun’ in the way most people think about ‘fun,’ that’s for sure.”

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:utsuge.