Thats very true and thats also the sense I’m getting from Needy girl overdose. Interestingly the game isn’t like that at all, no weird shots or cuts in it as far as I can tell. So I think they maybe made this creative choice to give it more substance, yet failing at that. I mean you can’t just put some random footage trough a video and then claim its deep, if it isn’t relevant to the story or somehow works to tell the story. If anything the story is very confusing and barely even there, its just teenagers moping and talking about edgy stuff thats 3edgy5me.

With Lain it was different, Lain could have weird cuts, weird in between footage and yet it helped tell the story, there was a much deeper story underneath and it had that substance. Ironically if they tried to take a page out of the Lain book a lot of it was actually NOT talking. There were a ton of long almost uncomfortable silences in Lain, characters not saying a word at all. Sure it sometimes had sort of narratives, but the rest of it was really up the viewer to notice and then interpret. Which was beautiful, Serial Experiments Lain to me truly is art. Wherest Needy girl overdose is just pseudo-intellectual drivel and random imagery and flashing texts pretending to be art.

I do truly appreciate the risk the studio took, but they themselves made this comparison and drew inspiration from Lain and with that they set the bar incredibly high. You don’t just go out and learn Macromedia Flash and then decide hey I’m going to make the next Akira, and not expect people to catch on. It just won’t work, you can’t force magic like Lain to happen, it just happens. The right people, the right time, everything aligned perfectly. You can’t force that kind of magic to happen. It needs to happen on its own.