Most Boys Love visual novel fans are familiar with sweet pool, the 2008 release from NITRO CHiRAL that became Jast Blue’s inaugural English-language release a decade later. sweet pool is the story of Youji, a young man whose life spirals into horror when his body begins to exude strange meat-like parasites.
sweet pool was written by Fuchii Kabura, the Scenario Writer behind all of NITRO+CHiRAL’s games to date. Her Advisor on sweet pool was Urobuchi Gen, who is probably best known to the general public as the writer of the anime franchise Madoka Magica.
To visual novel fans, however, Urobuchi is known for the NITRO PLUS title Saya no Uta ~ Song of Saya. Song of Saya is a 2003 visual novel about a man named Fuminori (voiced by Midorikawa Hikaru, who plays Zenya in sweet pool), whose perceptions of the world are altered following life-saving brain surgery – everything appears to him as horror and meat… except for one girl, Saya.
Because NITRO CHiRAL is a branch of NITRO PLUS, both visual novels are body horror eroges with heavy use of pulsating, visceral imagery, and because Urobuchi was involved in both titles, it’s hard not to draw parallels between sweet pool and Song of Saya, but it’s worth delving into what inspired each game and in what context Urobuchi’s influence on sweet pool happened.
Urobuchi has said that Song of Saya came about because "When I try to write love, it only turns into horror... feeling such deep emotions to some other person you don't even know is a truly terrifying thing. Also, I wonder if love isn't a manifestation of madness in some way."
The mythos of Song of Saya is based on Cthulu, created by H.P. Lovecraft, whom Urobuchi is a fan of. sweet pool, by contrast, draws heavily on Catholic and Biblical imagery in creating its setting of a school secretly home to a religious cult, quoting Genesis at the beginning of the game and referencing the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Both games are known for only having downer endings, (though if you have mental problems like me you might find the endings where Saya and Youji are able to ‘birth’ a new race of eldritch beings to be heartwarming).
While sweet pool was in development, Fuchii asked Urobuchi what the visual novel’s atmosphere should be like. Urobuchi responded “your audience is all over the age of 18 and has grown up, stop giving them sweet romances."
He later elaborated in sweet pool’s liner notes that “I told her countless times, ‘Be true to your desires’” and went on to say that:
“Imagine your work is a bicycle: one wheel is Serving Others, and the other wheel is Serving Yourself. You need both, or else you're going nowhere fast. Thus, when I sensed that Fuchii Kabura was leaning a little too heavily towards the ‘Serving Others’ side with her previous work, Lamento, I told her to switch gears for her third game̶ and I'm highly satisfied with the results. As I hoped, Fuchii showed us all of the darkness she holds inside.”
It seems from these quotes that Urobuchi’s key influence on sweet pool wasn’t anything to do with encouraging a reprise of the viscera and gore of Song of Saya, but rather lay in encouraging Fuchii to delve as deeply as possible into her own twisted ideas and fantasies, which in sweet pool just happened to overlap aesthetically with the earlier Song of Saya.