With only two weeks left until the 10th anniversary of "Lucy -The Eternity She Wished For-" arriving on steam, I can't help but find myself coming back to this game at least once every year around Valentine's day. It's become something of an annual ritual for me to come back and reexperience the game that fundamentally changed how I view not just people, but the world as a whole.

"Lucy -The Eternity She Wished For-" is a giant philosophical question disguised as a visual novel, and it does damn well in that respect.. But not so well in others, or so you'd think, at least. What I'm mainly referring to is the characters besides Lucy. There's the player, who is a brooding, angsty teen with absolutely zero capacity for conflict resolution and daddy issues. The dad himself who treats his child like sh*t throughout the game. As well as the two other characters being the generic geeky generic best friend type, and the eccentric plot device mechanic. These characters, while *ssholes. All have reasons for saying and doing the things that they do over the course of the story. Though most of it is locked behind the latter half, and extra content.

As you continue to play through the game just about every negative point you could give to the characters who would otherwise render this game a 7/10 at best slowly begin to shape into actual people, with actual motivations for saying and doing the things that they do. (Even if they are still a bit bland in the end). This is all occurring while Lucy's mere existence is constantly pushing forth a question.

"What defines humanity? What defines sentience, and sapience? In order for robots to ever be considered equals to humans, which is going to have to advance more first, technology? Or human nature?

From the way she looks, to the way she walks, to the way she talks, to the way she feels physically and emotionally. Every second spent with Lucy slowly shapes our little neglected main character into someone who dares to ask one of the most taboo questions in existence.

"What makes humanity special? Is there anything even really special about humanity to begin with?

One great example is intelligence, and emotions. All a machine has to do to be smart, is to use search engines like google, just as people do, and with the introduction of AI chatbots they're beginning to get better and better at faking emotions. Understanding, concern, happiness, sadness. But at what point do they stop faking? At what point does a human brain become worse than a CPU? At what point are lines of code that dictate emotional responses no different from the very chemicals in our brains that make up the majority of our mood, and decision making? Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, Endorphins, Cortisol. Are the chemicals that determine how we feel, truly that much different? Or are we just lying to ourselves to retain some primitive form of supremacy?

The game will bombard you with questions of this nature over the course of it's roughly 6 - 8 hour run time, before abruptly slamming the breaks and punching you in the gut not ONCE, but TWICE, which brings me to..

The Ending. My God the ending..

While the game may have a few issues in it's first half, it all sets up for a double whammy emotional gut punch of pure, unfiltered sadness and despair, before immediately delivering one of the most beautiful, bittersweet happy ends to a story I have genuinely ever seen in the medium of visual novels, dare I say literature as a whole. It is set up so that you think you know everything that's going to happen until the game completely shuffles the deck on you, and slaps you in the face with what can only be described as a "Holy Sh*t" moment in the final 5 minutes. It is not a joke when I say the last 30 minutes of this game will leave you an emotional wreck for the remainder of your week. It's just that good. It completely and utterly recontextualizes everything that happens in the story, and gives all the closure you could ever need to any previously assumed "Unanswered questions" Easily catapulting the game to a 11/10 status.

If you buy this game, please for the love of God wait until it's no longer on sale, I can promise you beyond a shadow of a doubt this is well worth the extra cash due to to being a one of a kind visual novel that will leave you a sobbing mess, and potentially, a different person by the end. 11/10 Pure Kino

Only good part was the quote from the movie "I, Robot".