2010, Brian Ashcroft & Shoko Ueda, Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential: How Teenage Girls Made a Nation Cool, page 154:
Nakige are known for their sense of melancholy. Take 2001's Kimi ga Nozomu Eien (The Eternity You Desire), for example, which was released by eroge label âge, a division of ACID. Soon after high school student Takayuki Narumi falls for his classmate Haruka Suzumiya, she goes into a coma after a car accident. Depressed and shocked, Takayuki develops post-traumatic stress disorder and becomes involved with Haruka's best friend, Mitsuki. "To put it simply, a nakige brings players to tears as they read the in-game text," says [ACID CEO Hirohiko] Yoshida.
2011, Alex Mui, "Visual Novels: Unrecognized Narrative Art", The John Hopkins News-Letter (John Hopkins University), 10 November 2011, page B5
The medium is dominated by nakige, the crying genre, much like how superheroes dominate comics and sitcoms television.
2011, Alex Mui, "The visual novel medium proves its worth on the battlefield of narrative arts", The John Hopkins News-Letter, 17 November 2011, page B4:
One pioneer influenced by Key is Romeo Tanaka. He used the nakige formula to psychologically shock the reader with mind-bending plots, causing them to actively think while reading. One of Tanaka's famous works, Cross Channel, follows the protagonist and his friends into a world where they find themselves the only living beings.
2014, Ana Matilde Sousa, "The Screen Turns You On: Lust For Hyperflatness In Japanese 'Girl Games'", Post-Screen: Device, Medium, Concept, page 244:
And while Azuma also contends that "the rising interest in drama that occurred in the 1990s is not essentially different from the rising interest in cat ears and maid costumes" (p.79), it is enlightening to explore the postmodern, post-cinematic nature of nakige and utsuge in relation to their modern, cinematic root: the melodrama.
2014, Patrick W. Galbraith, Otaku Spaces, page 79:
Also, the stories are good, especially in the genre called nakige (crying games).
2014, Patrick W. Galbraith, The Moe Manifesto: An Insider's Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming, unnumbered page:
In the 1990s, you had all sorts of games about love and romance being released by companies such as Elf and Leaf, and then in the 2000s there were the crying games (nakige) released by Key [see page 98].
2015, Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon & Martin Picard, "Beyond Rapelay: Self-regulation in the Japanese erotic video game industry", in Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games (eds. Evan W. Lauteria & Matthew Wysocki), page 36:
The nakige, literally, “crying game,” usually refers to a dramatic story whose purpose is to profoundly touch the user on an emotional level, usually with a bittersweet or sad ending, generally using pornography as yet another connecting agent between the user and the story.
2019, Robert Ciesla, Game Development with Ren'Py: Introduction to Visual Novel Games Using Ren'Py, TyranoBuilder, and Twine, page 90:
Utsuge, on the other hand, stands for pretty much the opposite of nakige, aiming to be as depressing an experience as possible.
2019, Ema Bícová, "Visual Novel and Its Translation", thesis submitted to Palacký University Olomouc, pages 12-13:
The related genre “utsuge” (“depressing game”), unlike “nakige”, does not typically achieve a happy ending.
2020, Ana Matilde Sousa, "She's Not Your Waifu; She's an Eldritch Abomination: Saya no uta and Queer Antisociality in Japanese Visual Novels", Mechademia, Volume 13, Number 1, Fall 2020:
Nakige also spawned another variation, the utsuge (“depressing game”), that seeks to depress players with “no happy end, no help, no hope” scenarios.
