Review | The Final Prize Is Soup - A Testament To The Diversity Of The Visual Novel Format
When I first became a visual novel fan in high school, the Zero Escape and Danganronpa series had yet to come out. You couldn’t buy Higurashi When They Cry or its sequel, Umineko When They Cry, on Steam. The best visual novels (or at least, the ones that fans said were the best) were usually only available in English via fan translations. The handful of visual novels that were originally written in English, with the exception of Christine Love’s titles, were by and large garbage. That is what I thought back then.
The genre is in a very different place these days. Certainly, visual novels remain a niche of a niche. They have a greater chance of being the subject of an April Fool’s Joke than ever penetrating mainstream games (whatever that means). But the visual novel fandom, itself, has escaped containment. Fate/Stay Night developer Type/MOON maintains a massively popular phone game. YouTubers like Amelie Doree are introducing obscure titles like Kusarihime to a wider audience. Best of all, to my delight, there is now a busy scene of independent English-language visual novel developers.
The Final Prize is Soup was produced last year for the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam; an updated version was uploaded to Steam at the end of August. At the start, heroine Qian Hailu wakes up only to realize that she is dead. A beautiful woman in a red dress sentences her to three trials. Succeed and she might still return to life. Lose and she will be devoured by hungry ghosts. Also along for the ride is Cheng Yanxu, Hailu’s ex-girlfriend. Will the two of them repair their relationship while fighting for their lives? What about the mysterious woman in the red dress, who bears a secret of her own?
Survival games have a storied history in the visual novel genre. The Zero Escape and Danganronpa series, which feature colourful characters helping or betraying one another, are now cult classics in the United States. Long before those, Fate/Stay Night imagined a seven-way battle between sorcerous families. The best of these stories have you rooting not just for the protagonist but for everybody else, even the monsters.
The Final Prize is Soup, though, comes at the survival game from an entirely different angle–in fact, from a different genre. The developer commentary cites “infinite flow,” a genre of Chinese web novel, as a key influence on the game. Infinite flow novels kick their protagonists from world to world, demanding that they fulfil objectives or suffer the consequences. I Became a God in a Horror Game and Mist are contemporary examples.
What I find most interesting about The Final Prize is Soup is how it combines these various influences. The use of Chinese mythology, such as gu jars and the bureaucracy guiding Death, are distinctly infinite flow. At the same time, the game’s language is knotty and complex just like a TYPE-MOON game. An early sentence reads:
“What tripped me was nothing more than a pair of inanimate objects, innocuously scattered apart by my impact. Their premise was almost laughable in the face of what I imagined.”
That is a rather complicated way of saying, “I tripped over something on the ground, and freaked out before I saw it was just a backpack and not a corpse.” In another circumstance, I might criticize the game for superfluous language. However, The Final Prize is Soup is aiming for a specific vein of occult horror in which linguistic obfuscation creates a decadent atmosphere. With that aim in mind, I think the two sentences above nail what the team is going for.
Another way in which The Final Prize is Soup differs from most “infinite flow” novels is that it focuses on love between women rather than love between men. The game gives Hailu the choice between Cheng Yanxu and the woman in the red dress, who Hailu calls Eleven. Yanxu is cute, and kind, and has a neat cell phone cover. At first, you want to ask, “Why did these two break up again?” Once the game lays out the details, though, I was surprised by how willing the game was to call out Hailu’s mistakes. Mending her friendship with Yanxu (much less a romantic relationship) requires acknowledging her first and foremost as a person with agency rather than somebody to be protected.
Eleven is a very different kind of character. I’d compare her to a TYPE-MOON protagonist like Aruceid or Saber; she’s a figure from history who stands at a remove from Hailu and Yanxu. Pursuing her requires setting aside the fact that she’s an all-powerful entity who could condemn either one of you to death with a thought. Soon enough, though, you realize that Eleven is hurt as much as she is helped by her role as judge. The section in which Hailu pierces through time to speak to her past self, who even back then was similarly trapped between pain and privilege, is one of the best parts of the game.
The Final Prize is Soup offers four distinct death games. Eleven and Yanxu’s stories share the first two but then diverge for the third. All of them play out as conceptual puzzles the characters must solve: escaping a mountain that never ends, solving a mystery at a mansion. The section involving a room steadily filling with water is probably my favourite, although it suffers by separating Hailu from Yanxu and Eleven. Finding an opportunity for the three of them to interact at this point in the narrative may have been more efficient.
Make the wrong choices, and Hailu risks death–or a fate worse than death. These “bad ends” are among my favourite bits of writing in The Final Prize is Soup. Following the game’s main path confines the setting’s worst supernatural weirdness to its far corners. It’s only when the player makes mistakes and ends up (for example) cooked and eaten alive that the game becomes genuinely terrifying. I would have loved to have seen even more of this material, outside of the “bad ends” and climaxes of each route.
The Final Prize is Soup admittedly bears scars of its quick development. Eleven’s storyline climaxes with an ambitious action scene the game barely pulls off. A bonus storyline exclusive to the Steam release, where Hailu befriends Eleven’s monstrous steward King, is included as a written novel in-game rather than a fleshed-out visual novel route. I can understand why the team behind the game didn’t create additional art assets for these sequences, but I wasn’t happy about it. At first.
After taking some time to think about it, though, I realized that the presentation of this extra route was just about perfect. The Final Prize is Soup started after its developers fell into the “infinite flow” web novel rabbit hole. So why not have a “web novel” inside of the game? It helps that I think the King bonus story is just as good as the Eleven or Yanxu route. It ties the character to Chinese legend in a way that recontextualises her without dulling her edge.
It took me just about four hours to play through both endings of The Final Prize is Soup. That’s a lot shorter than the visual novels I grew up reading. But then, those visual novels (as fond as I am of them) were nearly always backloaded. All their best twists came in the last five hours of what could be 20 or 30-hour games. Before you slog through all of Fate/Stay Night on Steam, why not start with a compact game like this? It’s living proof that independent visual novels in English are alive and well.
