After playing all of the installments currently available on Steam, I'm going to attempt a serious critique of a VN series that I've come to hate very much. I think it comes down to the fact that it's pornography being sold without the pornographic bits, and so all we're left with here on Steam is the plot to an H-game. Which is unusually merciful in this case, because Nekopara in general made me feel gross enough without it.

With the exception of Vol. 0, which is actually good, the series is a slow boil of degeneracy. One disgusting thing after another just keeps happening. After exploring relationship dynamics with his catgirls, the protagonist discovers that he regards them as both his pets and his daughters, and so he does the only rational thing and promptly ♥♥♥♥♥ them. His sister, who wants to ♥♥♥♥ him, encourages and even enables this. Everything that happens in the story serves as typically unfunny Japanese-style comic mischief or acts to further the plot toward the inevitable conclusion of the protagonist ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ either his pet women or his sister's pet women--Also in typical Japanese style.

Nekopara is vapid pornography, but even pornography can be entertaining. Nekopara isn't. Its themes are disgusting, its humor is dumb, and its characters are either trite ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ or the perverts who prey on them. Because the ultimate goal of the story is to lead to a sex scene, the narrative is as uninteresting as the visuals are pretty.

To be clear, I hate Nekopara on a deep level. The entire experience is offputting and weird, even by Japanese standards, and it's deliberately so. If the game were bad merely as a result of the developer's incompetence or lack of writing ability, as is generally the case, there wouldn't be this much to say, but Nekopara is this way on purpose. It is all at once subversive and offensive in ways that Western games have been only by gradual degrees. It is a Weimarian display of hedonism and delinquint sexual practices that dwells in and glorifies its own filth and invites the reader to come over and masturbate in it while it watches with its grandmother. All digital copies of this game should be reduced to physical media, burned in a public spectacle, and the ashes buried in New Mexico next to all those E.T. Atari cartridges. Its developers should be bound and thrown into woodchippers for their brazen affront to common human decency. In short, I don't recommend it.