Analysis: Suck My Dick or Die!—Bad Title, Worse Game

CW: This game deals with heavy themes of rape and violence. Also one for a description of gore, thought that’s my fault because this game is so boring that I had to write out an agonizingly painful sensation on the fly to describe this game. Okay it was actually to stall so I don’t have to talk about it.

---

So, I know what you’re thinking, “that title sounds ridiculous, there’s no way that this game can be any good!” Well, hypothetical reader, you’d be wrong to make that assumption, and by wrong, I mean the exact opposite of wrong, this game is terrible. One could even say the Suck My Dick or Die… sucks dick… and then you, the player, dies because it’s so terrible. But seriously, this may be the worst visual novel I’ve ever read. Yes, I know, that title changes frequently, but I’m quite confident that I won’t see another VN with so little redeeming value for quite some time.

First of all, we need to talk about the game’s title. No, this is not an accurate translation of the original Japanese title Ryoujoku Guerilla Gari. That title translates to Rape Guerilla Hunting, which is still a garish and edgy title, but it doesn’t quite give off the same sense of despair and hopeless that Suck My Dick or Die gives off. Oh wait, let me clarify, I don’t means despair of hopelessness in reference to any sort of story related tension or emotion. I actually mean the feeling you get where a piece of your soul shrivels up and painfully peels away from you when you see this title and realize that the next six hours will be the worst of your life. The feeling is so inhumane that it’s comparable to the feeling of witnessing one of the Eldritch creatures in an H.P. Lovecraft story, but the closest physical feeling is that of a piece of your body rapidly decaying into a scabby mess of painful infected blemishes that crack up and fall off of you, leaving away an infected, exposed, necrotic wound that hurts upon touching air.

Oh yeah, if you thought I was harsh on Sakura Beach, you’ve seen nothing yet. I actually read through the entirety of Sakura Beach in a single session in a voice call with friends. While the game was ass, it was fun to take the piss out of it. I tried to do the same with this game, but I could never get as many people to join said call, because they could feel it in the air that this game would destroy their soul… but not even cause disturbing content or anything. This game was actually quite tame. I was hoping it would at least try to push the envelope for disgusting shock content and fetish fuel but nope, the most we got was a woman being raped at gunpoint. It’s hard to believe that this was the second game by Liquid, the same team that would later go on to create titles like Kuroinu or Eternal Torment. Or at least I heard those were fucked up games.

While I was never expecting this game to be good, I was hoping that it would at least push me to my limits in terms of grotesque fetish material. There’s one VN Youtuber who made a video claiming this game was more disturbing than euphoria (my review) and Starless… (my review) they must have been high off their fucking ass. This was perhaps the most agonizingly dull visual novel I’ve ever read, I feel myself becoming depressed just thinking about my experience with this game. I have to clarify that this part isn’t a bit like a few paragraphs before, I actually do feel myself growing numb thinking about this game.

One of the few points of creativity I could give to Suck My Dick or Die is its setting, which is more or less an expy of the Vietnam war, where the main villains are basically the US Military and the rebelling Guerrilla forces are the Vietcong. The intro to the game shows some definitely not military soldiers proceeding to rape and murder a random woman, all while being overseen by Lt. Prosper, the main villain of the story. This is then blamed on the Guerilla forces that are definitely not the Vietcong, and is used as an excuse for Prosper and his men to quarter themselves into the house of a local rich man named Maxim.

You play as Haresu, a servant who works at Maxim’s house, and your two love interests are Riru, a maid who works at the same house, and Sharumi, who is Maxim’s daughter. The conflict revolves around Lt. Prosper bringing both of these girls in for “questioning” under suspicion of allying with the Guerillas. Said questioning, in actuality, is being raped repeatedly. This setup is a shockingly accurate portrayal of real life war crimes covered up by the US Military, which is quite a based take for a game from 2001. Don’t let this fool you into believing that this game has anything to it.

Every character is dull as shit and every plot point is predictable as hell. There is almost no sense of tension and I could not get even remotely invested in any character in this game. As I said before, this game is agonizingly boring and poorly written. The sex scenes are the worst of all, and I’m quite frustrated with myself for losing the dialogue screenshots I have saved, but come on! Do you really think that the writing in a game called “Suck My Dick or Die!” is going to be anything Oscar worthy? To be honest though, I just REALLY don’t want to load up this game again to take more screencaps.

To be completely fair, I don’t entirely know if the abominable writing quality is due to the source material, or if it was because MangaGamer was much less experienced at the time. The repetitiveness of certain phrases like “nasty” and “arched back” due lead me to believe that the localization was of low quality, but I can’t say I’m confident in the Japanese original being of any significant quality on its own. Either way, the terrible writing kills any sense of arousal that was possible, but the rest of this game isn’t up to par either.

The artwork looks like your absolute most generic and lifeless early 2000s hentai, and out of nearly 100 hentai cgs, there are about 4 or five that I thought were sorta hot; none of which I’d actively seek out. This game genuinely makes me feel like I’ve been too harsh on Slave Witch April, another early MangaGamer title that I wrote a scathing review for, and that was the worst visual novel I had read at the time. As much as I hated that game, it at least had some good artwork. Suck My Dick or Die has NOTHING going for it.

There was maybe one point in this game where I felt any sort of engagement in this story. One of the key plot points later on is that Haresu decides to join the Guerillas to rescue Sharumi, who is being held captive by Prosper’s men for trying to rescue Riru. The Guerillas, however, are hesitant to want to rescue Sharumi since she’s the daughter of a rich guy, and thus their enemy. Whether or not they decide to rescue Sharumi depends on the route.

I mention this because there is one route where Haresu decides to turn on the Guerillas in retaliation for not rescuing Sharumi…… by reporting them to Lt Prosper. This in turn, leads to Alfina, Haresu’s private teacher who also works with the Guerillas, getting captured, and Haresu deciding to rape her as payback for not saving Sharumi from being raped. Now, ignore the monumental stupidity of the whole scenario for a moment, because the brief scene where Alfina tries to plead with Haresu is the highlight of this game. For a period of little under 200 seconds, I actually wanted to see what happened next and felt something in response to what happened on screen. And then that feeling went away because the embarrassingly bad sex writing killed the mood.

To further illustrate the level of creative bankruptcy with this game, Liquid was unable to think of a creative way to make Haresu continue down his bath of brutality on his own merits, so they instead have Prosper give him a drug that makes him susceptible to his commands. Also there’s an option to go through the story again from Prosper’s perspective, but I refused to continue after the point where they treated the fact that Prosper intended to enslave Riru and Sharumi from the beginning as if it was this super clever twist, and not something that’s incredibly obvious. That alone demonstrated that Prosper’s route, which shows all the same events, will add nothing to the story that wasn’t already obvious on Haresu’s route.

I think that’s all there really is to say about this one, it’s very bad. As an aside, this game has two sequels, none of which are in English. It’s quite telling how little interest there is in Ryoujoku Guerilla Gari 2 and 3, despite this title having been out in English for 14 years. I can only assume that this title has so little of a following that even fan translators don’t really care. Hell there’s very little coverage of this one as it is. I recall hearing that later titles by Liquid did improve – at least in the localization department. While I am open to giving titles such as Kuroinu a chance, this one can remain completely forgotten outside of its ridiculous title.

---

If you enjoy our work, please follow us on Twitter for more visual novel news and join the community in our forums and discord server: we’re pretty active there!

In addition, you can also support us on Patreon or by buying us a Ko-fi.