This is how Fuminori sees the world all the time.
This is what you get if H. P. Lovecraft worked in Visual Novels.All spoilers below are unmarked. Proceed with caution.
- Honestly, who wants to live with the fucked up senses that Fuminori got after the accident? The very first shot we get is of the fleshy lumps that represent his friends talking with jumbled text
◊ and distorted speech to boot. It ain't pretty. - This game features literal wall to wall guro the majority of the time and a tentacle monster that rather graphically kills and eats people. Your protagonist can either go from wistful madman in an asylum (sad ending for him and Saya since they may never see each other again), heartbroken madman on a transformed earth where all humans have changed into tentacle monsters (bittersweet ending for him and Saya since their "children" are taking over the world, sad ending for pretty much everyone else), or dead in a horrifically graphic manner that just gets worse with the "censor filter" off (sad ending for him, Saya and every other major character. Happy ending for anyone who wasn't involved in this fucked up plot. Noticing a theme?). Oh yeah, and it's an H-Game with a girl who can literally Mind Screw people. She's the tentacle monster.
- Saya, just Saya. If Fuminori is seeing the real world as a literal Crapsack World with the people there Humanoid or even Eldritch Abominations and Saya as a normal person, what does Saya look like in the real world? It is not completely known what Saya looks like (and it would be better off not knowing to begin with), but it is so Grostesque that those who do see it would Go Mad from the Revelation.
- The cannibalism. This was a given due to Fuminori's warped senses and whatever Saya is, but the way it is described is horrifying from Fuminori's POV, especially since he thinks nothing of it.
- Soon after this is the first main crossroads of Saya no Uta. You can have Saya return Fuminori's senses to normal, which leads to him being incarcerated in an asylum (more detail on that in the endings below), or have Fuminori reject his humanity and say that he doesn't mind eating human flesh, making him a Villain Protagonist.
- While eating Omi, Saya says she hasn't had food this big in a while, and she usually catches her prey in the nearby park.
- Saya has access to a dog collar. It is mentioned that there have been incidents where local cats have gone missing, and the bathtub in Ogai's house is full of the bones of small animals. Do the math.
- There's a couple songs from the soundtrack that stand out as Nightmare Fuel material, namely "Scream" and "Scare Shadow", with the distorted guitar making them sound all the more insane. "Scare Shadow" in particular starts out as a relatively "normal" creepy song but progresses to a middle part that's totally different. The start (and the end, which is the same) still obey some laws of sound itself, the middle part just... does not.
- That loud, distorted noise appearing halfway through both "Saya's Song" I and II, at the end of "Sin", and even in the vocal version of "Saya's Song", which may or may not be Saya's true voice.
- "Saya's Song", which is unnervingly eerie deep beneath its astoundingly beautiful tongue - an ugly monster in the guise of a beauty, which is what Saya is.
- Picture this scenario: You are a family man who has a daughter, a great marriage, and all is well. Soon after, your neighbor start giving you a new way to "see" things and as a result you immediately Go Mad from the Revelation and kill your wife and daughter. You also lose all sense of reason so when you "see" that neighbor, you rape her (which itself stands out as NF). Yeah, Yosuke had it rough.
- Dear God, the rape scene. Seeing the mind-corrupted Yosuke deriving pleasure from Saya's helplessness as he rapes her is too much.
- Omi's fate. Imagine going over to your friend's house only to find it seemingly abandoned, and you're greeted by some... thing instead. As you creep further into the stench-filled house, you notice a disgusting slime all over the floors, and then you finally reach the pitch black living room and flip on the light switch. A hideous warping of colors reminiscent of gore assaults your vision, causing you to collapse in shock. Then you feel something wet drip onto your neck. As soon as you look up, your fate is sealed. The thing plugs your mouth and nose before you can even scream, then tears open your stomach and begins eating you alive.
- As if suffering such a horrific death weren't bad enough, the rest of Omi's body is later preserved by Fuminori and Saya so that they can continue eating her. Fuminori even taunts Koji about her possibly being the first person he ate after the poor guy discovers a container with her remains in it. Ouch.
- Yoh's fate. Mutated into... whatever Saya is, just so she can serve as a family pet-turned-mindless sex slave, just aware enough of herself to really wish she'd been killed instead. In fact, Fumninori explicitly acknowledges that what Saya has done is horrible and sadistic, and that the merciful course of action would be to just kill Yoh. He goes ahead and rapes Yoh anyway because he finds Saya's jealousy-driven behavior very human-like and endearing. She is so broken by the time she escapes and meets Koji that she gets Mercy Killed by him, and when Koji meets Yoh at that time, she doesn't resemble anything human.
- Koji's almost-fate in the well. Picture it - you're hours away from any semblance of civilization, and someone you thought to be your best friend tricks you and leaves you to die of exposure, hypothermia, starvation, or dehydration. And no matter how hard you scream or shout, no one will hear you and you will die alone. Luckily for him, Ryoko had enough foresight to predict Fuminori might try to do something.
- The endings. No matter which one you get, someone WILL face a tragic fate and Fuminori and Saya will never get to be together. It IS an Utsuge after all. Those people are:
- Fuminori in ending 1, where he's locked away in a sanitarium, probably for the rest of his life, and will likely never see Saya again. The two say goodbye using text messages on a cell phone passed back and forth underneath his cell door because Saya refuses to let Fuminori see her real form, not wanting to taint their memories. This ending is achieved if you accept Saya's offer to restore your senses. Ironically enough, this ending has the LEAST amount of death and suffering in comparison to the other two below, yet this one is seen by some as a Non-Standard Game Over. While technically good, this isn't the best ending for humanity as a whole.
- Dr. Tanbo in ending 2, where Saya "blooms" and every human on the planet changes into her type of life form. Dr. Tanbo, however, being high up in the mountains where the spores have trouble reaching, transforms agonizingly slowly over the course of weeks as she completes transcribing Dr. Ougai's research on Saya for her own personal pride. At one point she even chops off one of her arms that had undergone the transformation while the rest of her was still human. As she finishes reading Ougai's notes, we also get a brief glimpse of the city, where giant splotches of flesh litter stairs and buildings, all while we don't get to see any other humans (if there's even any left). We don't even get to see what Tanbo looks like now. This ending is achieved if Dr. Tanbo doesn't appear in the final battle and Saya kills Koji.
- And finally, Koji in ending 3, as the only survivor of the final battle and last person remaining with knowledge of the now-deceased Saya's true nature and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. He has to live knowing he can't talk with anyone about what he's witnessed lest they think he's crazy (which he partially is at this point and likely getting worse), his girlfriend and two best friends are dead, and there's a revolver loaded with one bullet hidden in his bathroom in case the day ever comes that he can't take his schizophrenia and hallucinations anymore and commits suicide. In this ending, Dr. Tanbo appears during the final battle to help Koji and they both successfully kill Saya. Fuminori kills Dr. Tanbo and, seeing that Saya is dead, commits suicide. Yet with all that death, this is actually the best ending for humanity in general.
- Fuminori dies in a particularly gory way in this ending, repeatedly smashing his face into the blade of an ax. Thankfully, we don't get to see it.
