Singing Goodbye, A Script for a MetaWare High School (Demo) Video Essay

CLICKBAIT TITLES:

“A game DARKER than UNDERTALE”
“The game that solved my existential dread”
“How I learned to stop worrying and love the mochi”

An Introduction:

[Cold Open, fade in the MetaWare logo]

It was April 2nd, 2020, and at about 10:00 PM when I first finished the MetaWare High School demo. Whose final ending gave me a familiar sadness that was a unique blend of pity, compassion, and awe at the story that was just told. It made me cry.

[Cut to me on camera]

I took a couple seconds to grab my thoughts, wrangle them up into words that made just enough sense. And then promptly threw them up [Pantomime throwing up motion] all over the developer's DMs.

[Play the title screen music here]

I wanted to try and portray how the game made me feel, but all I really did, in my opinion, was spout nonsense with some praise mixed in. I would try and articulate what exactly made the game stay somewhere lodged in my noggin [Hit head a few times for comedic effect] for a whole year multiple times. And I still felt like I hadn't properly expressed what moved me about it.

Now, to be real here, the developer was never hard to reach or difficult to approach, there was no obvious intimidation factor that would make me "stammer" my words. And I never held the developer on any sort of perfect pedestal of idolization [Motion to pedestal graphic that will be edited in], they were very much human. What was making all of this so difficult to express for me?

What I decided was missing was some final understanding or closure needed for me to piece my thoughts together and finally figure out why I liked this game so much.

So, I wrote this video essay (-script that will never be filmed and edited into a video) to try to articulate what moved me when I completed MetaWare High School (Demo). [Cheeky Ironic Smile goes here]

This video was written explicitly for the 1 year anniversary of the game coming up on April 2nd 2021. And chances are, even if I end up finishing this video on time for that, it's going to be a long watch (a long read, and since this will never be in a true video essay format, it may not be as easy to digest as other media you could choose to consume at this time and to be perfectly honest, I'm not much of a reader myself. Still, I ask that at least you skim through this script!) hoo boy.

For me, this is really just me doing a really long and hard "think" on MetaWare over too long of a letter. I hope you will enjoy it.

And then the grandson flipped over the pickle.

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