Visual Novel / Raging Loop

The feast has begun, can you escape the village alive?

Described by some as "What if Werewolf (1997) was a visual novel?", Raging Loop (Japanese: レイジングループ; also written in Japanese versions as Rei-Jin-G-Lu-P) is a work distributed by Kemco. Originally released for mobile phones in Japan in 2015, it received a Play Station Vita port in 2017, and was later ported again to consoles and PC for an international release, with fully-translated English becoming available by December 2019.

Haruaki Fusaishi, our protagonist, is a young man that gets lost in the mountainous region of Japan while trying to cope with some major changes in his life. He's rescued by a woman from Yasumizu, a settlement so remote that it is not on any map. Unfortunately, soon after he arrives, an ominous mist appears that signals the beginning of a dangerous tradition. The mountain god has chosen a handful of people to become monsters in the night, and the village must deduce who among them are the beasts, and execute them before they are all killed. As an outsider, Haruaki is immediately put under suspicion, but he does have one advantage...he's stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, and can use his memories of failed outcomes in order to find a path to survival.

See also Death Match Love Comedy, another visual novel set in the same universe as Raging Loop.

Tropes:

• Almighty Janitor: The convenience store cashier.
• Angrish: In Wits when Haruaki taunts Yoshitsugu that he's going to get it on with his mother after he dies, Yoshitsugu gets so mad he starts slipping into angry gibberish as he's trying to punch Haruaki.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • During the story branches, the locked options are visible even before you qualify for them with the keys needed to unlock them clearly listed. The choices that lead to your death are also marked if you get to that choice point again.
  • If you get the wrong combination for a secret door in the Nosato mansion you will die - and the game will automatically loop back right to the moment of picking the combination instead of kicking you to the start and have you go through the flowchart yourself.
  • The game includes an option to automatically unlock all content, in the event of someone losing their data or otherwise wishing to access the wealth of bonus content without playing through the story.
• Arc Symbol: The diamond with a spiral pattern in it, representing a wolf's eye. It appears in the pendant seen on the title screen (and in this page's image), at the beginning of each in-game day, and several times when the local myths of Yasumizu are being discussed.
• Betty and Veronica: Chiemi and Rikako display this dynamic in the Wits route when both become attracted to Haruaki. Interestingly, either girl can be said to possess traits belonging to both archetypes at once, depending on your point of view.
• Book Ends: The story starts with Haruaki having lost his girlfriend and riding his motorcycle alone through the mountains to escape from his problems. It ends with Haruaki and his new love Chiemi on his bike together setting out to face their future confidently.
• But Thou Must!:
  • After the first ending, any attempt by Haruaki to avoid returning to Yasumizu results in him getting lost in the mist and/or dying, leaving him no choice but to go back.
  • In the Darkness route, when Haruaki decides who out of Chikamochi, Hashimoto, and Yasunaga the wolves should kill, Kaori reveals that she already made the decision for them and unlocked the victim's door ahead of time — it's Yasunaga.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • A flashlight Haruaki gives to Haru in the Darkness route. It leads other villagers to realize both of them are wolves when they find it in Haru's room.
  • An early scene has Meiko playing in the middle of the village by tying grass into knots. So you know who to thank for Tokuji Kida's convenient stumbling.
  • Haruaki introduces himself to several people in Yomi, but each time he does so the kanji he uses to spell his name are different. That's because it's not his real name at all, so the way it's written doesn't matter.
• Closed Circle: Once the mists roll in nobody can leave the village or contact the outside - the village is remote so cell phones don't receive there, the landline is cut off, vehicles are destroyed and the way out is blocked by a landslide anyway, and trying to leave the village on foot inevitably results in your death. This is also true in a larger sense - after Haruaki loops back to before he enters the village, every choice where he decides to just ride along and not enter Yasumizu results in his death.
• Clueless Mystery: As a result of the game taking the perspective of an outsider observing a supernatural event, figuring out who the wolves are in Yomi, and why the Feast happens in the first place, or why the main character can somehow travel through time, is literally impossible. Wit plays somewhat fairer, and it is possible to figure out the wolves by process of elimination and by using knowledge of the characters gained from Yomi. As for Darkness and the endgame, a lot of it involves Haruaki seemingly re-writing reality in order to be correct, which means he's not so much deducing the rules of the setting so much as having his deductions become the rules. Some of the game's final mysteries outright require using Revelations Mode, and therefore being able to read other characters' perspectives, to figure out.
• Dark Secret: Despite being the protagonist, Haruaki is hinted to have a couple, mostly concerning the events that directly led to him ending up stuck in the mountains or his past. Turns out it's a Fauxshadow, and Haruaki's past is a bit more regular than the story might lead you to believe.
• Didn't Think This Through: When Haruaki decides to loop as many times as possible with Chiemi to find other ways to break the loop, he fails to account for the fact that Chiemi is already undergoing some Sanity Slippage given how many times she's looped, which eventually causes her to snap and become convinced that the way to break the loop involves killing Haruaki a bunch of times.
• Doing In the Wizard: By the final stages of the novel Haruaki proposes some completely mundane explanations to some supernatural phenomena that have been occurring. He proves to be absolutely right.
  • The final extra story alludes that Haruaki has some sort of (or is developing a) supernatural ability that lets him rationalize paranormal phenomenon as something mundane.
• Double-Meaning Title: "Rei-Jin-G-Lu-P", the original Japanese "English" title, is deliberately ambiguously constructed so it can be interpreted in multiple ways. In addition to the official English name, "Raging Loop" (referring to the "Groundhog Day" Loop Haruaki is trapped in), three additional interpretations are provided in three of the game's endings:
  • "Raging Loup" ("loup" is French for wolf, referring to the raging beasts that appear at night)
  • "Lèjìng Lǔbū" (the Chinese pinyin of the characters 楽境虜逋 in the original Japanese game, which broadly means "being captured and escaping from comfortable world", describing the game's setting)
  • "Razing Group" (written in Japanese as 零人グルウプ, reijin gurūpu, or "0-person group" in the original Japanese game, referring to the Dwindling Party and the "Everybody Dies" Ending)
• Embarrassing Nickname: Haruaki gets saddled with a different one in each loop, all courtesy of Chikamochi.
• Failure Is the Only Option: There are a few events where all but one option leads to an immediate Game Over, but that choice is impossible to select without seeing the Game Overs first.
• For Want Of A Nail: The course of feasts dramatically changes across different loops when new participants join the feast.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The player's ability to save, load, raise flags and go back to picking different options is represented by Haruaki's ability to remember information from the previous time loops. The latter is in fact a plot point in itself, and a crucial skill that the game intends for you to use to its full extent.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: The main draw of the story is that Haruaki is caught in one, allowing him to use the knowledge from failed outcomes to survive as long as he can. He's not the only one who's aware of the loop.
• Happy Ending Override: The Wits route's ending.
• Have a Nice Death: Most bad endings are followed by a hint corner, narrated by The Sheep. Revelations Mode expands them further.
• It Works Better with Bullets: Haruaki pulls this on Chiemi in the Wits route. After witnessing her rampage and dying to it, he loops back and this time discreetly unloads her and Chikamochi's guns the day before it happens, causing their efforts to fall flat when the same events start happening again.
• Kaiju: The resurrected Tsuchigumo is colossal, large enough to dwarf and step over mountains and blot out the sun with its bulk.
• Malevolent Masked Men: The outfits worn by werewolves and Miguruma on-site enforcers include snazzy wolf masks.
• Meaningful Name: The title of the game is a play on words, with the French word for wolf being loup (indeed, several endings have the word "loup" in them).
• Mood Whiplash: One moment Haruaki sees a titanic monster seemingly made of uncountable human corpses that towers over the mountains and proceeds to ravage the land. Next moment a flying plush cartoon sheep pops out of nowhere and starts chewing him out in human voice. The contrast could not be more jarring.
• More than Mind Control: Every character that gets chosen to be a wolf obediently plays through their part in killing their fellow village members - even though there is no supernatural compelling of any kind to it and that not a single one of them actually wants to kill anyone (Chiemi, additionally, is in fact fully aware that this is a sham). They still go through with it, out of faith, superstition, circumstances and role imprinting coercing them into it for most of them, resignation and apathy in Chiemi's case and rationalization and desire to figure out the truth in Haruaki's.
• Mysterious Mist: The werewolves come from Yomi whenever the Yasumizu region gets covered by thick mists.
• New Game Plus: Reaching the conclusion of the story unlocks a series of epilogues, as well as "Revelations Mode", in which going through the story again allows the player to see the hidden thoughts of the rest of the cast.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Darkness route comes about by Haruaki making sure nobody in Yasumizu dies before the first night the mist rolls in, but by doing so he ends up creating two very powerful adversaries in Mamiya and Hashimoto, especially the latter, when he is chosen to be a wolf.
• Omega Ending: The final true ending is unlocked after you play through all other timelines (and gather all the key information from them too, which will require some additional looping back and forth).
• Once More, with Clarity: Revelations Mode includes inner monologues from the entire cast, dialogues that Haruaki don't hear, and eavesdroppers that were listening in on Haruaki in secret.
• The Promise: During the Wit route Haruaki makes one with Rikako, motivating her to stay alive through the feast by swearing to each other Haruaki Fusaishi and Rikako Uematsu will live to see the end of the Feast and will each fulfill one wish of the other's if they both survive (with the implication he's giving a Wacky Marriage Proposal). Much later, during a later arc Rikako — now revealed to be both aware of the time loops and the Big Bad — tells Haruaki that since they've both 'survived' to this point she wants her promise fulfilled and asks him to join her in unleashing the Tsuchigumo. Haruaki counters with The Reveal that "Haruaki Fusaishi" is not his real name and such a person doesn't exist, making his promise to her null and void. Even Chiemi and Haru, who very much want Rikako stopped, are disgusted by "Haruaki" being willing to weasel out of promises like that.
• Reality Warper: The game is actually set in the midst of a conflict between two reality warpers - one is trying to bring out a world-ravaging monstrosity and the other is discreetly trying to stop her.
• Reckless Gun Usage: A scene accessible only in Revelations Mode has Haruaki accidentally kill himself while trying to disassemble some shotgun shells with a knife. He later personally addresses the player to not do anything like that in real life.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: When Haruaki learns key facts (represented as actual keys), he retains that information when travelling to different points in the story's flowchart and can "unlock" new paths. He also remembers which paths lead directly to a Game Over, which will be marked with a red skull. He's not the only one - Chiemi and Rikako also possess it, the latter by virtue of being the perpetrator of the looping.
• Sanity Slippage: Kaori's sanity takes a plunge when either of her sons dies.
• Scam Religion: The Feasts of Yomi-Purging in particular and the local beliefs that found them are a pure fabrication, designed and maintained by four head families of the region as a tool of social control.
• Servile Snarker: The Sheep. It's an assistant interface character that gives hints to players, yet it manages to be quite over-free and sarcastic. It should be noted that, for its irreverent attitude, it's not that snarky at the player's expense, but does not miss a chance to throw a barb at Haruaki. Justified, since it's actually his bitter ex.
• Slasher Smile:
  • When Kaori's poisoning scheme in Yomi fails, she openly lashes at the others with a deranged grin. It makes such an impression on Haruaki that he keeps comparing her to a demon in his thoughts for the rest of the novel.
  • Chiemi breaks out one when she goes on a rampage.
  • Rikako puts both of the above to shame in the true ending. Her face when her true goals and scheme are revealed is nothing short of horrifying.
• Shout-Out:
  • Haruaki manages to bond with several of the villagers through shared interest in pop culture. Chiemi likes Spirited Away, Kiyonosuke obsesses over Ninja Slayer and Haru is a fan of Star Wars.
  • Another one was sneaked in by the translators, when during the tutorial Rikako at one point laments how "we live in a society".
• Significant Anagram: Several, both major and minor over the course story - usually by rearranging kanji - in order to disguise the true meaning as something more mundane. "Haruaki Fusaishi" is "Fuzaishomei" (Alibi) to avoid giving his true name to strangers, the benevolent God "Shin'ai-sama" was actually the dreaded "Ookami-sama" (Wolf) all along and Yasumizu was originally "human sacrifice".
• Sixth Ranger Traitor: Badger guardian's job description.
• Small, Secluded World: Yasumizu, which is probably for the best, considering its occasional werewolf problem.
• Story Branching: The game's events are all contained in a flowchart, and the player/Haruaki can jump between them at any point in order to make different decisions with information they did not have before.
• Time Loop Fatigue: Haruaki is a downplayed example. Being stuck in a time loop gives him a certain detachment from the events of the village and leads him to do horrific things repeatedly with very little regret in the hope of escaping it. In contrast, Chiemi has been looping a lot longer and has become unstable — in one ending she starts killing Haruaki repeatedly to let out her aggression because she knows he'll come back.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Chiemi and Rikako - the former is an outdoorsy and energetic Hard-Drinking Party Girl, while the latter is a calm, demure and traditionalist Mysterious Waif.
• You Lose at Zero Trust: Some of Haruaki's earliest deaths can come from not being trusted enough by the town to avoid being mistaken for a monster and executed.