This review contains some minor spoilers for Hadaka Shitsuji, but I’ve tried to avoid anything major. It also contains a lot of discussion of sexual assault.

Years ago, when I was first getting interested in visual novels, I started reading a strange story—one about a young man named Tomoaki who becomes the master of a mysterious mansion, where sexy butlers wait on him hand and foot. It wasn’t long before one of my choices led to the unexpected outcome of Tomoaki sexually assaulting one of the butlers. Then, in the bad ending to end all bad endings, I watched helplessly as Tomoaki downed a mysterious drug that caused his penis to engorge to a massive size and subsequently explode. Confused and unsettled by these bizarre events, I didn’t read any further at the time. But there was always something in the back of my mind that drew me to this weird VN called Hadaka Shitsuji. I just had to know what in the world it was all about. Recently, I finally un-stalled this first VN I ever stalled, and what a wild ride it was.

Before you read any further, if you’re looking for a portrayal of good, healthy BDSM with safe words and aftercare, you’re not going to find it in Hadaka Shitsuji. Hadaka Shitsuji is entirely about rape and sexual torture—but in this case, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I know I’ve criticized some other VNs for including graphic rape scenes in my previous reviews, but my issues with those were mostly that I felt the creators were blind-siding the readers with unnecessarily disturbing content. Hadaka Shitsuji, on the other hand, makes no claim to be anything but extremely fucked up porn, and my views on porn are generally pretty liberal. People can’t help it if they have weird fantasies, and as long as everyone involved in the production of porn that caters to those fantasies is a consenting adult, and any potential consumers of that porn are clear on what they’re getting into, then I’m glad it exists so that people who are into some weird stuff can enjoy it.

And I’m also glad Hadaka Shitsuji exists, because in a way, it’s absolutely fascinating. According to VNDB, it was essentially a solo project by developer Togo Mito, with the only major contribution by other people being the voice acting. That means one guy sat down and wrote, programmed, and illustrated this extremely long, extremely weird, and sometimes extremely complex magnus opus of butler rape. This VN has five main routes, a short true route and side story, and a couple short side routes, as well as a bunch of alternate scenes and endings that take a lot of experimentation to unlock—so much so that the most comprehensive guide I could find wasn’t even always right. There’s one CG that has fifty variations, because you have multiple choices about the order in which to undress your chosen butler (although some of those variations lead to inconsistencies in the following scene, which is kind of funny). There’s another scene where you have six or seven choices about which vegetables from the kitchen you’d like to shove up another butler’s ass. All of this was lovingly rendered by one passionate madman, and experiencing it is like getting a rare glimpse into the mind of someone who must love sadistic rape fantasies more than life itself.

And honestly, overall, I enjoyed it. While I would likely have found a lot of the content in it very disturbing under other circumstances, the characters and situations are all so silly that it very rarely feels at all real. People with darker tastes than mine may consider that a flaw, but I appreciate it, as it allowed me to find many of the h-scenes funny, genuinely enjoyable, or at least not that bad. The only exception to that was the route for the youngest butler, Arisato. His character flaws and emotional reactions to Tomoaki’s abuse made him come across as a little more realistic than the others—or at least a little more evocative of sympathy—making many of his scenes uncomfortable or just sad. But if you find this journey through the mind of Togo Mito as interesting as I do, Arisato’s route is worth suffering through just for the final scene, which speeds straight past highly disturbing into so completely absurd that I couldn’t help finding it hilarious. I won’t spoil it—it’s something that truly has to be experienced.

Those fantastically ridiculous parts of Hadaka Shitsuji really made it all worth it for me. I was always happy I had stuck with it through the boring, frustrating, or disturbing bits when I got to moments like that bizarre Arisato scene. Another great part is the true ending. While the “twist” is easily predictable, its obviousness kind of struck me as part of the campy charm of the whole VN, and the particular way the reveal happens is still unexpected and entertaining. Hadaka Shitsuji may be another VN I wouldn’t exactly recommend to that many people—who else would want to spend hours upon hours struggling to make the right choices to unlock another weird rape scene?—but I still had a great time reading it. So thanks for giving me that experience, Togo Mito, you wonderfully crazy bastard.