Citations:utsuge

Noun: "(video games) a Japanese visual novel genre characterized by tragic plots and pervasively bleak tones"

 * 2014, Ana Matilde Sousa, "The Screen Turns You On: Lust For Hyperflatness In Japanese 'Girl Games'", Post-Screen: Device, Medium, Concept, page 244:
 * And while Azuma also contends that "the rising interest in drama that occurred in the 1990s is not essentially different from the rising interest in cat ears and maid costumes" (p.79), it is enlightening to explore the postmodern, post-cinematic nature of nakige and utsuge in relation to their modern, cinematic root: the melodrama.
 * 2015, Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon & Martin Picard, "Beyond Rapelay: Self-regulation in the Japanese erotic video game industry", in Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games (eds. Evan W. Lauteria & Matthew Wysocki), page 36:
 * This is why it is also known as utsuge, or “depressing game”.
 * 2019, Robert Ciesla, Game Development with Ren'Py: Introduction to Visual Novel Games Using Ren'Py, TyranoBuilder, and Twine, 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.”