Campfire Executables #002: Misfortune — The Curse Was a Lie
1. The Setup
Released in 1996 for the PlayStation, Misfortune: A Story of Suspicious Friendships (厄友情談疑 / Yaku: Yuujou Dangi) was Idea Factory’s second game—a studio infamous for kusoge long before Hyperdimension Neptunia ever found them fame.
Five students sneak into their abandoned school to unearth a time capsule. That’s the premise. What players got instead was a bizarre mess of gray, corpse-like CGI models, recycled FMVs, clunky music, and some of the most off-putting “heroes” ever rendered on PS1. It was panned, priced high, and forgotten—until fan translators revived it decades later.
On release it was called kusoge—trash game, broken game, disgrace. But in hindsight? It’s scripture.
2. The Mechanics of Madness
Misfortune is less a game and more a weaponized troll. The manual itself is comedy gold:
- No save system—just passwords. Quit? Start from the beginning.
- The instructions literally tell you: “Take out the disc to end the game.”
- A Zapping system lets you switch POVs mid-story. But instead of branching cleanly, it throws you into random moments with zero context. Imagine skipping to random pages in a book—it’s chaos.
- Random eco-PSAs interrupt the horror, urging players to recycle and protect the environment.
The game hates you. The devs knew it. And instead of fixing it, they leaned into it.
3. The Routes & Endings
Each of the five characters has their own route: the blank-slate protagonist Usui-kun, Kana, Kyoko, Hideaki, and Yuichi.
Most routes are short, gross, or nonsensical—ending with “End?” instead of any closure. Kana’s safe puzzle leads nowhere satisfying. Kyoko’s dreamlike tangents spill into alien reveals or hypnosis gags. Hideaki’s bad ends transform him into a moth, a caterpillar, or worse.
But here’s the trick: the “mystery” at the heart of the game only resolves if you trudge through it all. Hideaki’s good endings hand out puzzle scraps:
THE CU
A LIE!
RSE IS
Stack them together and you get: “THE CURSE IS A LIE!”
All those hours, all those deaths, all those clues… just to discover that the curse binding the story was fake.
4. The True Ending Slap
Yuichi’s route is where the devs bare their teeth. It’s just him, speaking directly to the player—mocking, questioning, dangling promises. He asks: “What did I write in the time capsule?” If you answer correctly, you don’t get salvation. You get this:
Yes! Everyone was lying! This was just a made up story to make the game interesting! Well… do you feel better now? Now the lies have been exposed, let’s just end the game here.
That’s it. No closure, no catharsis—just an admission that everything was fabricated to waste your time.
Players were furious. Hours invested, only to be told the entire thing was meaningless. But that fury is the point. The devs didn’t fail—they succeeded in leaving players with a scar, a slap, a memory they couldn’t let go.
My Take: Scripture in the Cracks
Most call it kusoge. I call it scripture.
Because here’s the truth: people don’t invest in lies because they love them—they invest because the lie promises clarity. The “mystery” hooks you. The “curse” dares you. The endings dangle meaning. And when all of it collapses into nothing? That sting is unforgettable.
It’s the same lesson as the Eggbreaker Doctrine—don’t wait for prophecies to hatch. Smash the egg, expose the yolk, end the lie. It’s the same weight as The Gaslight District—people waiting, hoping, praying for closure that will never come.
That’s why Misfortune matters. Not because it told a good story, but because it exposed how desperately people cling to bad ones. Where most see trash, I see blueprint. Where others got mad, I laughed. Because even in broken games, scripture hides in the cracks.
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