For Me It Was Tuesday

As other reviewers have noted, it isn't clear whats really going on - are the girls playing and insuling each other? Are they insulting Ken & Ryu? Are they wathcing other people play and insulting them? If so, one or two people? It isn't clear, and might actually change during play.

Anyway, here's the deal: you play Street Fighter in this game. You pick wether you play Ryu or Ken. It'll show you a graphic from a game of ST and it'll give you a choice of two moves, with their conventional notation (→↓↘+P for a Shoryuken, etc). The match has just started: do you punch, or kick? Ken just threw a fireball, do you jump or duck? Depending on the option you pick, you'll get a different graphic; ducking a hadouken will get you knocked on your ass, and so on. Depending on your choices, you can either win or lose the match. This part of the game is a pretty accurate representation of playing Street Fighter in the form of a CYOA. If that was the whole game, I think most people would play it and say "heh, cute. It's street fighter!"

Adding in these girls throwing insults at you over the top totally destablizes the experience & makes it into such a different game that neither of the other two reviews even mentioned the CYOA implementation of Street Fighter!

Due to a few of their other games I think the intention was probably indeed for it to be read as a kind of feminist inversion of sexist trash talk, but apart from a couple bits ("You play like a man!") the comparison doesn't really hold for me. Something like "You're pretty good with that joystick, and by joystick, I mean your dick!" doesn't work at all if you replace 'dick' with 'pussy' or something, there is no cultural provision for a sexist weirdo saying to a girl "you're probably good at jerking off", you know? There's something specific to male masturbation that gives it that kind of shameful quality, like jerking off is pathetic (as opposed to haivng sex), which lets it be used as an insult. For this reason it has a more natural analoge in femdom humiliation clips; the women are playing on the man's own neurosis about his sexuality and the role implied by his gender, and calling into question his ability to succeed as a man or men's ability to succeed at dominating women. But, this is also mixed in with lines that do read like a straightforward reversal, as above (and "pretty good, for a man!") and some lines could be easily read as both ("Just face it aready, women are better at videogames, we have better manual dexterity, its genetics!"). So, the fictions worldbuilding isn't really easily grasped, either - is this an upside-down world where theres a matriarchy, or are these women making fun of the man's ability to live up to expectations of patriarchy? It isn't clear, or changes during play.

That said, if you choose to read it as two women insulting each other, all of the lines work kind-of well if you imagine them as transmisogynist insults, each girl trying to imply the other is really a man. That's likely not the intended reading, but its part of the games success, I think, that by refusing to define the fictions actual subjects, such comparisons between different kinds of languge (misogynist jeering, fetish humiliation and cis women's transmisogynist banter) become possible.

Anyway, the game isn't saying a whole lot, I guess, but what it says it says convincingly.