Crapsack World / Visual Novels

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Examples of Crapsack World in visual novels.

• The Ace Attorney series shows just how common corruption and the ends justifying the means is in the world of law. Trials used to go at their normal pace until the public complained that trials went on for too long and nothing was resolved in a timely manner, along with correctional institutions being overcrowded with felons and suspected felons. To kill two birds with one stone, the courts decided that all trials have to be concluded within 3 days, which means the prosecution and the defense are under a strict time limit to prove that the defendant is guilty or innocent. It's even noted in game that many innocent people were sent to jail due to the new rules. And that's not even getting into the fact that the death penalty can still be handed out, meaning that anyone could be executed for a crime they didn't commit; in fact, one such person is only found innocent a single day before his execution date.
  • The courts are also heavily biased against defense attorneys due to said courts adopting the "guilty until proven innocent" mindset. The burden of proof falls heavily on the defense while the prosecution just needs to make a plausible case on why the defendant is guilty. You can see the concept of it all in every single case you play where the prosecution will pull every single stunt possible (within legal means, mostly) to make sure that you don't win. Phoenix Wright, a defense attorney himself and the main character in the "Phoenix Arc", is always riding by the seat of his pants and starts freaking out when things seem to be unwinnable for him until he can turn things around at the last possible moment.
    • This is also painfully Truth in Television, as the courts are based on the Japanese judicial system at the time the first game was released.
  • Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney explores the flaws of the court system further with Apollo noting that no matter what evidence, theory, or logic he comes up with, the prosecution comes up with a simple rebuttal that puts the game in their favor and Apollo feels like there's no true justice for the innocent. The broken law system is part of the reason why Phoenix helped create the Jurist System so that there can be people with an unbiased view overseeing the trial and the group can vote on a verdict.
  • By the time Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies rolls around, after several incidents of defense lawyers using forged evidence to win trials and prosecutors pressing false charges on the defendants to get them locked up happened, the public lost nearly all of their faith in the law system and "The Dark Age of the Law" came to be. Both defense attorneys and prosecutors alike will do anything to win, knowing that the public has given up on the system. There is also a law school where several members of staff aren't above letting students cheat their way through with money, and if Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit is anything to go by, they've been allowing that to happen for nearly a decade, or longer.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice decides to tackle a court system in a foreign country and it turns out the system there is even worse than the ones used in Phoenix's homeland. The Kingdom of Khura'in enforces the 'Defense Culpability Act' which makes it illegal to "support criminals". That is, if someone is deemed to be offering any kind of support to someone who has been accused of a crime, and the accused is then found guilty, then their "supporter" is to be considered guilty of the same crime and given the same punishment. This caused a lot of defense attorneys to die or suffer a heavy punishment to the point where no one wants to be a defense attorney, especially since the majority of the population has been convinced that all defense attorneys are inherently evil Amoral Attorneys willing to pull any dirty trick to get a win. All trials are now conducted with the prosecution giving their statement and evidence on why the accused is guilty, followed by a Divination Seance conducted by the kingdom's priestess/princess where the court sees the victim's final moments and they use that to seal the accused's fate. There's so much discontent with the law system that a group of rebels known as the Defiant Dragons are actively trying to overthrow the government and change things back, which has sparked a lot of clashes between the two groups. Throughout the game, you can just feel the sheer hatred and suspicion from the gallery in the courtroom in every trial Phoenix gets involved in due to their massive hatred for defense attorneys and demanding Phoenix to be executed for doing his job. Even when Phoenix proves the accused is not guilty, he's instead seen a foreign interloper bullying his way into affairs that are none of his business and is making a mockery of their traditionalist values.
• Analogue: A Hate Story exists in one, made all the more worse by the fact that you can't actually do anything about it. The game's focused on reading through the logs of an ancient Korean Generation Ship, the Mugunghwa that was lost thousands of years ago in order to discover why the ship, and everyone onboard, disappeared in the first place. The only way to achieve this is by working with the ship's only working AI, *Hyun-ae, who is the brain uploaded version of the girl who single-handedly killed everyone on the ship by shutting off the life support systems. Of course, you don't find this out until the climax of the story, after discovering that the Mugunghwa was in a misogynistic and ignorant society where the average life expectancy was between 30 and 50 years old and where the knowledge of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, was all but forgotten. Of course, the world outside of the Mugunghwa is better, but still...
  • Hate Plus explains the events that led to the Mugunghwa becoming a Neo-Joseon society in Year Zero, making it seem that much worse. How? It turns out that society regressed because of a Gayngst fueled crusade by a woman who wanted nothing more but to provide a better world for her "sister." To make matters even worse, the whole thing ended up being All for Nothing as her sister commits suicide because of said crusade. The knowledge of what happens to the Mugunghwa after this just makes the whole thing even sadder, as society only got worse on top of losing the only information on the birthrate decline.
• Danganronpa in general is an absolutely terrible setting to live in, comedic aspects aside. We're not joking when we say that once you get past the copious amounts of bright colors and wacky humor, or the fact most of the Dysfunction Junction Ensemble Cast of each mainline game consists of idiots, jerks, Butt Monkeys and the occasional Only Sane Man, the game's world can get pretty openly disturbing to think on very quickly.
  • The crux of the original timeline, Hope's Peak Academy, is a private school meant to groom society's elite, with the absolute best of the best developing talents alongside the superhuman level. However, it turns out to be a Gilded Cage with all windows and exits bolted shut, security cameras watching everything, and armed turrets almost everywhere. Fifteen students are trapped inside by a sadistic teddy bear named Monokuma and given a choice: either cut all ties to the outside world and live inside the school forever or "graduate." Graduating involves murdering another student and getting away with it, while the survivors investigate the crime and hold a class trial. If the killer is found, they will be punished and life will return to normal for the other students. If they're not, they get to leave while everyone else is punished. This leads to the fifteen students partaking in the first game tearing each other apart in pure paranoia. As in, how many people of those fifteen walk out alive? Six, and if you count the bad ending, four. The death toll in each subsequent game only gets higher and higher from there on out, by the way.
  • And it turns out it was a pretty terrible place even before this. On the surface, it was a prestigious school where students were provided tremendous freedom and guaranteed success in life if they graduate. In reality, it was a research facility dedicated to studying talent. The students weren't really taught any practical skills like a regular high school, treated more like circus animals. The school was also funded by the Reserve Course, made up of talentless students who payed ludicrous entrance fees, faced severe discrimination, and were kept largely segregated from the rest of the school. Hope's Peak also had a tendency to cover up any crimes that took place on its grounds. Anything that was too big to be kept secret was blamed on any adequate scapegoat, who was then either fired or expelled. They were also conducting secret experiments on the Reserve Course students, trying to turn one of them into the Ultimate Hope for mankind by giving them every talent known to man. They succeeded, unfortunately.
  • The outside world ended up like this thanks to The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History. What began as a student movement against Hope's Peak eventually escalated into an uprising of the lower class against the elite. Violence gradually normalized until people started killing and waging war simply for the sake of causing destruction and despair. Strong people murdered weak people, weak people killed weaker people, and weak people formed factions to lynch stronger people. The members of Ultimate Despair served to fan the flames of this chaos, initiating countless terrorist attacks and coup d'etats all over the world. The atmosphere is also horribly polluted, turning the sky a dark shade of red.
  • Spinoff game Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls shows that Hope's Peak even had an elementary school division, of which the main antagonists of said game, the Warriors of Hope, used to be a part of, and said division was just as horrible to its students as the main High School division was. And thats not getting into showing off just how horrible the Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History is first hand, including murderous Monokumas, children and adults killing each other, the brainwashed children that are killing adults televise their torture to the adult resistance live, and the Warriors of Hope themselves are all from horrible broken families. Except Monaca, who manages to be the child equivalent of Junko, but worse.
  • And, as Danganronpa 3 revealed, the Future Foundation, an organization formed to defeat the despairs and restore the world, is hardly much better. They're lead by a bunch of bickering, self-important branch heads who see killing every last one of the despairs as the only option and are willing to execute members of their own organization who disagree. And to make matters worse, Ultimate Despair had already infiltrated the Future Foundation, and it was The Mole's manipulations that helped foster the infighting.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony doesn't take place in the same universe as the other games, but it has its own crapsack elements. The game ended up having a "Truman Show" Plot that takes place within a reality show in which the characters are killing each other. Those characters have been willingly be part of the reality show. If the mastermind was to be believed, their entire existence have been replaced with new personalities, talents, and backstories though there is a chance of this not being entirely true. And the worst part is that the show has been going on for 53 seasons.
• Muv-Luv starts off innocently enough in Muv-Luv Extra as the game opens with Harem Genre hijinks. Come Muv-Luv Unlimited, however, things take a drastic turn when protagonist Takeru Shirogane awakens to find himself in an alternate universe where the Earth has been invaded by aliens known as BETA, Japan (which is still an empire even after World War II) battles them with Humongous Mecha. Takeru's first reaction is excitement, because what anime fan wouldn't want to awaken to find themselves in a world where they can pilot a giant robot and save the world? As he comes to learn in time, however, War Is Hell, and this war has been going poorly for decades: ever since the BETA made planetfall in 1973, they've virtually depopulated the Eurasian landmass. By 2001, only a billion humans are still alive, and that number is continues to drop as the BETA overwhelm humanity. In this world, Anyone Can Die — and when they do, it's often painful and gruesome. Come Muv-Luv Alternative, Takeru tries to use his foreknowledge of future events from Unlimited to prevent the Bad Future he experienced from occurring: As detailed in Muv-Luv Unlimited: The Day After, a hundred thousand people fled Earth while deploying G-bombs to wipe out BETA. Unfortunately, the mass bombardment they employed sunk Eurasia and Africa beneath the ocean, essentially turned Australia and most of the western hemisphere into a vast salt desert, and rendered most of the planet uninhabitable while the survivors fought over what remained — and to make things worse, there was still at least one BETA hive left, but its location at the bottom of the sea meant there was no way for humanity to effectively destroy them, forcing them on the defensive in a war of attrition that they ultimately cannot win. Unfortunately, his attempts to avert the events of Unlimited carry with it unforeseen consequences: his PTSD starts catching up with him, and becomes further compounded by his mentor dying violently in front of him, sending him into a spiral that drives him to call it quits and return to the safety of his original dimension. Unfortunately, he discovers he has become a causality conductor when his mentor's counterpart in his original dimension dies a similarly gruesome death not long after his return, and he ends up making his original dimension a crapsack world for himself simply by existing there, forcing him back to the world of Alternative to try and undo the damage he caused in the world of Extra by ensuring humanity's victory against the BETA, forcing him to endure yet more trauma until he finally helps end the war with the BETA and can go back home. Also, the reason why his neighbor Sumika is nowhere to be seen until Alternative is because she had previously been abducted by the BETA and reduced to a Brain in a Jar, which is placed into a robot shell.
• The Nasuverse, lovechild of Kinoko Nasu, is about what you'd expect in terms of Crapsackiness when it's not inaccurate to call it Japan's answer to The World of Darkness:
  • First off, the universe is divided largely into two different types of worlds amid the multiversal Cosmic Chess Game; the world of Fate, and the Tsukihime worldlines.
    • In the world of Tsukihime, Gaia is the will of the planet to survive and has overpowered humanity, with many vampiric Dead Apostles and their undead servants ruling the night with humanity being second fiddle to some of these overwhelmingly powerful servants of the night. The strongest among these Dead Apostles, the Twenty-seven Dead Apostle Ancestors, are country-destroying threats with the strongest among them being basically Physical Gods compared to humans, and many of the various demonic instincts from vampiric bloodline having some very nasty side effects, if the Tohno family isn't proof of that. Your hero is a Classical Anti-Hero Knight in Sour Armor with the ability to kill anything in one hit and with a psychotically-bloodlusted Superpowered Evil Side, and the closest humanity has to a defender is a Cloudcuckoolander Physical Goddess who's the original vampire who can and does go off the deep end in at least one of the routes. It's a world where humanity is too weak to leave its mother Earth, basically coddled by a cosmic representation of Gaia itself to the end of time.
    • You'd think that a world where Alaya — the representation of humanity's will to survive — being the dominant force in the Fate multiverse would be any better? Nope! It's a world where instead of Dead Apostle ancestors, you have Historical Domain Characters from various myths and histories — such as King Arthur, Cu Chulainn and Gilgamesh — fighting a war called the Holy Grail War alongside seven Magi for control of an omnipotent wishing device. Oh, and these figures — called Servants — are superhumans who need Mana to sustain themselves, which they can and do get by effectively acting as vampires to other humans. The hero of the work is a Wide-Eyed Idealist wanting to be a "hero of justice" who's horrifically a Broken Ace Fearless Fool with a Future Badass self who wants to kill himself but can't. This doesn't even get into the fact that Servants themselves can be downright monsters as well, as Medea and Gilgamesh show. The last time a Holy Grail War happened, it resulted in the entire city being destroyed and most of the characters wounding up dead while the bad guys get everything they need to continue their plans. And that's not getting into how the Holy Grail was corrupted into a Jackass Genie ready to birth the embodiment of all the world's evils, Angra Mainyu — something that would've come damn close to happening in one of the routes. The kicker to this is that Servants are meant to be used for defending humanity; they're being repurposed into fighting for wars, when they were intended for a PvE environment to defend humanity from existential threats.
  • Another common aspect of all worlds is that the Nasuverse all has The Magic Going Away — there's no "true" magic in the world except five magicians, everyone else is using a replication of magic called Magecraft that operates on Older Is Better and secrecy; the more people know about it, the less power they have. This, naturally, leads to most Magi being some of the most pretentious, elitist Jerkasses you'd ever see mages be depicted in from any setting; they're extremely conservative, hierarchical and completely Hopeless with Tech (because this universe operates on Magic Versus Science as its core principle; the amount of Magi factions that are competent with technology can be numbered on one hand) with most Magi families being deeply dysfunctional and abusive in ways that'd make the Hapsburgs cry, with rape and abuse being facts of life among most families. Just go ask Kohaku or Sakura. Not to mention, if you're just a normal Muggle, you're expected to be killed on sight to uphold The Masquerade, making them inherently hostile to outsiders and just aiding their massive dysfunction in general.
  • On that note, even The Multiverse it's set in is inherently broken by being driven through conflict as a core concept. Due to the multiverse effectively being a supercomputer, it has a limited amount of "water" that can only sustain so many timelines before the entire multiverse collapses in on itself. The solution? Have only the strongest universes with the most potential to humanity survive, and the "losers" of history — universes either immutable past the point of being changed or strayed too far from the Quantum Time-Locks put on the timeline — are subsequently erased from existence. It doesn't matter if said universe is a Utopia that's a paradise to live in or you have a normal life, you will be treated as Ret-Gone from existence in these timelines, not even your soul being able to pass onto the afterlife so much as just deleted from existence. These gut-wrenching sacrifices are sadly necessary, because the alternative — the Lostbelts — tend to be a lot worse, because it'd replace the current history with a new one, causing infinitely more to be wiped out of existence.
  • Speaking of Lostbelts, Fate/Grand Order showcases a lot of ones that are downright nightmarish:
    • The first Lostbelt, the Russian Lostbelt, is a terrible place to live. The Endless Winter with incredibly strong winds and temperatures as cold as 100 below zero makes farming plants and breeding animals impossible and demonic beasts trying to kill you are the only food source, along with the fact that the Yaga are so obsessed with survival that they turn against their fellow kind just to see another day in this miserable world that shows no signs of getting better, and the fact that "to survive" and "to live" are two completely different things, with the World deciding that this timeline has reached its end, thus pruning it. It was even worse near the beginning, as the Yaga hadn't fully figured out how to properly hunt Demonic Beasts, so they were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive.
    • Lostbelt 5.5: Heian-Kyo is a Singularity/Lostbelt hybrid world created by Ashiya Douman in the form of a warped version of Heian period Japan plagued with evil spirits, in which the Emperor's Minster of the Left is hosting a twisted copy of the Holy Grail War in which warriors hunt the heads of Heroic Spirits.
    • Lostbelt 6: Avalon le Fae tops all of these — the world itself seems nice, but its main inhabitants are fairies who have truly absurd Blue-and-Orange Morality that leads to them doing truly abhorrent things with smiles on their faces. They go from being friends with the protagonist to wanting to eat them at the drop of a hat, and that's just an early part of the Lostbelt. Even the reason the Lostbelt was supposed to be pruned is more vile than the ones for the last few Lostbelts - the Point of Divergence for this timeline was that the six fairies who were supposed to forge Excalibur took a nap that lasted long enough for the White Titan Sefar to scour the surface of Earth of everything. When Cernunnos the Horned God found out about this, he was going to punish them, but instead took pity on them. They promptly poisoned him, used his corpse to make more land, and cut his priestess into six parts so that they could use her to clone more humans to eat. It is made very clear that In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves heavily applies to fairies, to the point that Lostbelt Morgan le Fey had to impose tyranny upon them to get them to make a semi-functional civilization. Even worse, the world itself is trying to kill them as punishment for all the crap the original fairies got away with. Rather tellingly, the bizarre circumstances of this Lostbelt's origin means that, while it must be destroyed to restore Proper Human History, those who live in it can be spared by taking them outside the Lostbelt, which is normally impossible. By the time Chaldea is forced to leave, there is no one left to save from this Lostbelt, because they all wiped each other out.
  • About the only saving grace the Nasuverse has that prevents it from being as bleak as the aforementioned World of Darkness is that while the world is often extremely dark, it's very much mutable; while you can't solve all the world's problems, staying true to your ideals and fighting for what's right is what will help you Earn Your Happy Ending, and potentially even make the world a better place. Of course, it can also be made much worse, and that's not even getting into how you can fight for a better world but making it perfect will simply get you and it erased altogether, compounding the crapsackiness to a major degree.
• World End Economica: Both Earth and the Moon can be seen as Crapsack Worlds. Earth is described as a world that fell apart completely, falling victim to pollution, poverty, and overpopulation, leading to the Moon being colonized in order for humanity to get a fresh new start, and Earth economy cannot compete with the Moon's prosperity in any way whatsoever. Meanwhile, the Moon is a world entirely ruled by money, in which profit comes before morality, and things of emotional or spiritual value, like books or religions, are seen as worthless and futile.
• While it was implied throughout most of the game, the world of Hatoful Boyfriend is revealed to be this in the Bad Boys Love route, at least for humanity. In 2070, a mutant strain of bird flu called H5N1 quickly and lethally swept the world, killing billions. As a desperate means to stop its spread, a virus was engineered that would kill all infected birds, only for it to instead increase their intelligence. Humanity and these intelligent birds were at war for thirty years before humanity lost. By 2188, less than 140 million people- barely 1.38% of the pre-2070 population- have survived, immune to H5N1 but forced to live as hunter-gatherers in the wilderness while the intelligent birds have become the new dominant species. While a peace treaty between the two sides has held, there are still terror attacks and factions on both sides are eager to reignite a war. The protagonist, Hiyoko, was sent to prove that humans and birds can live together in peace. All of this can lead straight into humanity's extinction if you make the wrong decisions in BBL.