I'm going back in and keeping Monika's Void as the game, but I'm convinced that the Yuri route is the best first-time playthrough. Sometimes I suspected it was Monika who did it, because of course it would be - the writing is terrible at foreshadowing and practically has it right there in your face all the time. However, the constant mentions of "kill yourself" and "suicide" from yandere Yuri, as well as Monika's perceived fear, got me thinking she was the one who brought Sayori to kill herself and Monika was trying to protect her in some way Also that moment when you tell the crazy Yuri that you don't accept her bug-eyed confession and she stabs herself to death, leaving you with the decomposing corpse over the weekend THAT was absolutely great.
Looking back, the last half of this game is really shoddy with how Monika flip-flops in sociopathy
There really ought to be an "everyone gets happy" ending. It's so stupid this whole thing ends with Monika essentially sparing you more trouble by erasing the world even after she's just become one with the matrix, so to speak which COMPLETELY undermines the whole "oh, but really the friends are important" speech right before that! That's terrible writing (the rest of it was pretty good until then, got real nice Eternal Darkness vibes at some points).
The only way this should have ended was with either a perpetual loop OR the player being given the choice to remove himself from the "protagonist" and turn off the game for good, thus allowing everything in the world to continue on as its own reality without his direct involvement, since it's clear the Protag and all the characters has lives before the Player entered in.
Actually, why didn't we have that?
Everything went haywire when the Player entered into the world, an outside truly alive influence. I know that Monika says she was already realizing how false the world was when she took on the position of being the leader in the club and how the Player's involvement rescued her from either suicide or perpetual despair but that doesn't necessarily mean the "Player" being there wouldn't also do the same thing. The final choice could have been for the Player to establish the Player Character in the setting without him, essentially acting as the Player in his stead.
By having the player divorce himself from the protagonist (maybe have a bunch of dialogue boxes leading up to the choice to sacrifice yourself in leaving (i.e. actually remove your immersion) only to then show the dialogue boxes eventually selecting themselves and fading away) you get your BitterSweet ending without erasing existence. The Player cannot venture back into the game as it is because he'd just be watching a kinetic novel - he has no involvement at all and would just be observing the daily life loop of peace for the characters. Alternatively, have the game end with the paino piece and final letter of thanks, erasing everything as it is now, but with the implication that the game world would continue on its own despite you no longer being able to be involved. At least everyone you cared about gets a happy ending with "You".
As it is, I have little inclination to go through this again and its never explained why they can't just do something about the "perception" of the president's position since that's ultimately what ruined everything. Is this a game or not? Is it an alternate world or just some code that can be altered on its most fundamental level and undone? If it's exactly as the game said it was a game world then you can alter the data for that surely.
The game's not coded in infant blood and magic runes! It's just code, easily manipulated and easily broken! Why can't they do something about the "self-aware perception" thing with the president's position?
This is the most unanswered yet most crucial question that, ultimately, breaks the game's narrative entirely.
I still very much enjoyed this but seriously that ending and, more specifically, the unanswered question really puts the knife in its heart.