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YOU and ME and HER (Visual Novel)
Life is like a staircase. You just gotta keep climbing. Otherwise, if you start to overthink it, you'll have trouble taking the next step.

YOU and ME and HER: A Love Story note , is a 2013 Visual Novel by nitro+. The game was released internationally by JAST USA on May 5th, 2020, with a Steam release in May 25th.

The story follows Shinichi Suzuki, a guy with no unique qualities and whose daily routine frustrates him. He puts his name under a romance novel club at his school, but in reality, he doesn't associate himself with any club. He also has a complex about being stuck in the background and ignored by his childhood friend-turned-class idol, Miyuki Sone.

Although Miyuki was Shinichi's childhood friend, she hides it at school and does not talk to him. She excels at the academy's drama club, and is great with a baseball bat; a skill she practices for the next drama club performance, which revolves around softball. She also loves cats, but unfortunately has allergies to them.

One day, at the roof of the school, Shinichi ends up meeting a pink-haired girl named Aoi Mukou. Aoi is a denpa girl who has trouble paying attention in class. She walks around with a smartphone with no reception, and her pastime is sending messages to "God" from the roof of the school. She also has trouble gauging distance between people. Most strangely of all, Aoi has a bad case of "gamer brain": she seems to believe she's a love interest in a dating sim and talks about nearly everything in visual novel terms, like "event flags", "routes", and "CGs".

The plot begins with Shinichi's attempt to teach the friendless Aoi how to socialize with people. Shinichi asks Miyuki for help, and the three of them start to spend time together. As Aoi begins to warm up to Shinichi, Miyuki draws closer to him too, rekindling the suppressed feelings they had from childhood, and pushing the three further into a love triangle. To complicate matters more for Miyuki, she's won the lead female role in a play, and it ends in a kissing scene, meaning Shinichi is on a time limit to give Miyuki her Sacred First Kiss... if he can even work up the will to confess his feelings.

However, things aren't exactly what they're look like at first glance. And soon, it all goes to hell.

The game is written and directed by Shimokura Vio (Sumaga, Steins;Gate's Suzuha route) and the character designs and art were illustrated by Tsuji Santa (of Super Sonico fame). The original soundtrack for the game was composed by Hirata Hironobu and features theme songs by Keigo Iwase, Swinging Popsicle, Tada Aoi and Kanako Itou.

Compare Doki Doki Literature Club!, another horror visual novel disguised as a Dating Sim preying on meta, anime and Visual Novel cliches, and the Fourth Wall. Not to be confused with You Me Her.

Due to the nature of its story, all spoilers are unmarked for the game, as it is practically impossible to discuss the plot without spoiling the whole thing. If you are the type of reader who is bothered by this, do not read any further than this before playing the game. You Have Been Warned!


YOU And ME And HER contains examples of:

  • 100% Completion: Deconstructed; completing the game normally results in any Aoi CGs and sex scenes vanishing along with her, and you cannot see every single part of the final route in one playthrough as one ending requires you to enter a specific phone number you only learn in the endgame. As such, the only way to get total completion is to enter a cheat code, or the phone number in a second playthrough — but this comes at the cost of turning Miyuki and Aoi into in-universe fictional characters, erasing them from existence, and if you do it the second way, Miyuki explicitly calls you out for being willing to make the characters repeat their torment and erase them just to satisfy your desire to see all the content, even if that means making cruel choices.
  • Almost Kiss: The very first scene of the game features two in quick succession: first Aoi tries to "get zappy" with Shinichi on the roof, only to be interrupted by Miyuki suddenly appearing. Then, when Miyuki proclaims herself to be Shinichi's girlfriend, Aoi requests that the two kiss to show her proof, only for Miyuki to get interrupted by Yuutarou suddenly appearing.
  • Ambiguous Situation: Miyuki claims that any ending she doesn't end up with Shinichi has her alone and miserable, but the pre-patch Bad Ending has her finding love with her co-star. It's not known if this was erased in the patch, or if Miyuki still pines for Shinichi.
  • Auto-Save: Since the final route disables your ability to save, this is how it keeps track of your progress instead, auto-saving after every scene. It also makes the big choices much more meaningful by preventing you from going back and altering them.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Quite a few of the endings are this:
    • The Bad End is this in hindsight. Shinichi is unable to confess his feelings to Miyuki, and she goes on to be a successful actress dating her co-star while he ends up a minimum wage worker lying to himself that he's happy for her, and Aoi's vanished from existence. But since the game was not altered, Miyuki doesn't gain self-awareness of her fictionality, and all the horror of the later routes is avoided. It's implied this may lean far on the bitter, as Miyuki implies any ending where she didn't get with Shinichi left her forever alone, but it's unclear if this was before or after Aoi's patching of the game to avoid the Bad End.
    • Miyuki's ending has Shinichi finally get together with her, but Aoi disappears since she's not longer needed, and the only remnant of her existence is Shinichi's vague feeling that he's missing something.
    • Aoi's ending would have been this normally; Shincihi is clearly not happy with the fact that Aoi has to cheat on him to avoid vanishing, but he chooses to accept an open relationship if it means he can be with her, and she loves him, not anyone else. Then Miyuki kills them both and hijacks the game.
    • No matter what the decision at the True End is, the result is the same. Despite the player successfully bringing Aoi back and convincing Miyuki to stop, Aoi is forced to leave the world along with YOU, disappearing from existence and everyone's memories in the process. Hope however is given through the photo Aoi and the player sends Miyuki, which drives Shinichi to finally confess his love to Miyuki in her ending, and, in Aoi's side, she promises to always be with YOU in the heroines of all other visual novels YOU play.
  • Blackmail: An odd example in which Aoi takes a picture of Shinichi and Miyuki together on the roof and threatens to show it to the class unless they agree to be her friends. The odd part comes in when you realize Aoi doesn't seem to fully understand why this might be seen as morally questionable. At the very least, one gets the sense she's doing it less out of malice and more out of an attempt to get on the "correct route."
  • Blamed for Being Railroaded:
    • The Aoi ending makes sure to let YOU know that Miyuki going crazy and killing Shinichi and Aoi in a jealous rage could have been avoided, if YOU hadn't played Miyuki's route first, which ends with Shinichi promising to be faithful to her. However, getting to Aoi's route requires YOU to play Miyuki's route first. Even if the player really only has interest in Aoi, there is literally no way to pursue her if you haven't romanced Miyuki. It's Played With in that much of this comes out of Miyuki's attitude and actions, as well as her realizing she's in a video game.
    • Additionally, the game blames YOU for not stopping Aoi when she patched the world even though doing so will be a one way trip to one of the bad endings, ultimately forcing the player to let her do it.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall:
    • A super meta example near the end of Aoi’s route. After Miyuki kills Aoi and severely injures Shinichi, she calls out the player for playing Aoi’s route because you had completed Miyuki’s first. Since you have chosen Aoi’s route after unlocking it through Miyuki’s, you have incurred her wrath. You are the one Miyuki is upset with, not Shinichi. As punishment for being unfaithful to her, Miyuki reprograms the game so you cannot save or load another save file or restart the game.
    • And later on she, Aoi and even Shinichi take turns speaking directly to the player before the universe is reset and their memories are wiped. They know you could set up the events that put them in that situation all over again and want to make sure you make good on the promise not to do that.
  • But Thou Must!: If you want to experience the complete game, you have to play Miyuki's route first. Aoi's route will only unlock after you finished it. Meaning there is no way to prevent Miyuki from feeling betrayed by the player and murdering Aoi and Shinichi at the end of Aoi's route.
  • Chekhov's Gunman: Two of them, in Yuutarou's younger brother Ryuujirou, and Miyuki's underclassmen Haru. They're actually the same person, and forms a major part of the narrative in the latter part of Aoi's route.
  • Dark Reprise: At the end of Miyuki's route, she sings Shinichi happy birthday while holding a bouquet of flowers in a cute and heartwarming scene. At the end of Aoi's route, she does the same thing... except the bouquet is stained with blood from Aoi's cat Eru, and she alternates between singing a line and battering Shinichi to death.
  • Deconstruction Game: Of romance games and visual novels in general.
    • Aoi's route deconstructs the idea of "CG Hunting", that being the idea that people who read erotic VNs only do so to get to the sex scenes. Aoi shows what happens when a girl is literally reduced to being a sex object, and her plotline is appropriately disturbing since she begins turning to methods like cuckoldry in order to farm more scenes, despite the fact that she doesn't want to cheat on Shinichi, because otherwise she'll effectively vanish from existence.
    • Miyuki's "true" route further deconstructs the "CG Hunting" attitude — she essentially assaults Shinichi in a desperate bid to get the player to love her, madly believing that sex is the only thing the player wants, and that if the player wants that, they'll get it. Not only is it made clear that only an incredibly mentally-broken person would believe this, none of the sex scenes are sexy at all — they're deranged ramblings where Miyuki admits she knows nothing about YOU but still creepily thinks she can start a family, all because visual novels make the reward for loving a girl sex instead of anything deeper.
    • The game deconstructs Story Branching, especially the visual novel standard of pursuing other girls, by bringing forth a very ugly truth — that the reader's "love" for the characters is a one-sided and shallow one based on appearance and surface-level characteristics rather than anything deeper. Not only does Miyuki take the player's declaration of love extremely seriously as one would in a real relationship, she takes it very badly (as one would in a real relationship) when the player picks another girl for their looks and surface-level personality, if not "just because". In real life, anyone going for another girl while already in a relationship, based on looks or shallow interpretations of her personality, would rightfully be deemed a heartless philanderer.
    • The game further deconstructs Story Branching and Multiple Endings, especially visual novels that gloss over what happens to the character you don't choose for a romance: one reason Miyuki goes crazy is because she becomes aware that if Shinichi/the player chooses any other character, she doesn't get to have a happy ending.
    • Featureless Protagonist, Flat Character, and Audience Surrogate player characters are given the works as well: Shinichi is painfully aware of how bland and unmotivated he is, and feels that life is pre-determined. He further acts contrary to the player as a real person would — getting angry even when the player is choosing options that would say otherwise. Not only does his blandness and his contrary actions cause Miyuki to break her friendship with him if the game isn't patched, the fact that he's so shallow makes Miyuki fall in love with the player instead of the boy she thought she loved.
    • 100% Completion: At several points in the game, you're given the option to input a cheat code that unlocks every CG in the game. However, doing so renders the story permanently unplayable, a jab at players who only care about CGs in Visual Novels. To make matters worse, if you input it near the end of the game, both heroines treat it as the ultimate betrayal, since doing so essentially erases them from existence.
  • Deliberate Game Crash: At the ending of Aoi's route, Miyuki goes crazy, reveals her Medium Awareness and kills Shinichi and Aoi out of jealousy. In the last moments, she is seen calling God to patch the world before the game forcibly closes. When you reopen it, a fake DOS updater runs and the interface gets messed up. This signals Miyuki's takeover of the visual novel.
  • Developer's Foresight: The loop in the final route has several Easter Eggs:
    • There are hidden scenes that will only play if you launch the game after not playing for an extended period of timenote . Up to 10 years.
    • There are also hidden intros that play when launching the game during certain holidays, like New Years, Valentine’s Day, or April Fools.
    • An early part of the route has Akihiko trap Shinichi in an infinite loop of either saying he loves her or trying to get him to say it. If you pick the first option and open the menu, Miyuki will tell YOU to say you love her 10, 100, and then 10,000 times, promising a reward for the last one. And if YOU actually let it loop that long, she is impressed you actually did it and gives YOU a kiss... which then turns into her passionately making out with YOU.
    • If you let six months of in-game time pass while stuck in the new world with Miyuki, she takes this as a final answer to asking you if you'll stay with her, and will permanently keep you in her route.
    • In the final choice between Aoi and Miyuki, if you choose either of them and then try to reset the game, it picks up right back after your choice, and the chosen girl flat-out asks you if you were trying to undo your decision.
    • Getting the final code in the game and then entering it earlier than when you are supposed to unlocks an alternate end where Miyuki and Aoi become furious that YOU betrayed them by resetting the game and put them through all their torment again out of curiosity.
  • Disguised Horror Story: At first, it seems to be a fairly typical dating sim, just with one of the two heroines, Aoi, being self-aware. Then Aoi's route goes into Netorare territory and turns into an emotional maelstrom for everyone involved... and then, at the very end when Shinichi has accepted Aoi for who she is, the other love interest Miyuki kills her, reveals she's also become aware of the truth of their world, and traps Shinichi in a "Groundhog Day" Loop in an attempt to connect with the player behind the screen, shifting into psychological and existential horror for the final route. And if you go out of your way to make her mad, it culminates in a psychologically disturbing sex scene and Miyuki completely snapping afterwards, chasing after Shinichi with intent to kill over and over again.
  • Downer Ending: Played With — if you don't let Aoi patch the game so you can successfully romance Miyuki, you're locked into a bad ending where Shinichi becomes a painfully lonely bachelor living on minimum wage, lying to himself that he's happy for Miyuki as he obsessively watches her shows — where she has found love with a nameless co-star. It ends on him crying alone and blaming it on Onion Tears. However, this averts everything that goes wrong, including Miyuki's insanity and subsequent imprisonment of Shinichi and the player themselves. There's also the question of whether or not Miyuki actually finds love, as she claims every ending where Shinchi failed to get with her leaves her with a lonely life.
  • Existential Horror: The game shows what it's like for characters who become self-aware they're fictional, and in something as railroaded and sexual as a typical VN — Aoi genuinely loves the player but hates the fact that, as a representation of every VN heroine, she has to do erotic scenes to exist, even when it's against her will, and only exists due to a cosmic fluke or a bug in programming. Meanwhile, Miyuki realises she's in a visual novel and takes the fact that the player doesn't actually love her like a real person in a setting she's aware is fictional drives her over the edge into insanity.
  • Fan Disservice: Many of the sex scenes after the Wham Episode.
    • Shinichi watching Aoi having sex with Ryuujirou, considering the desperate circumstances concerning Aoi being at risk of disappearing and how obviously miserable she is about doing it. Once Shinichi joins in, they have an odd but somewhat decent threesome...until it turns out Miyuki was under the bed the whole time, crying her eyes out and going insane, before proceding to bash Aoi and Shinichi's head open after revealing she's in love with the player.
    • There are not one but two scenes after the reboot where Miyuki makes the player go through a H-scene with Aoi that are intensely uncomfortable, both due to the context and how extremely strange Aoi's behaviour is in them. Not helped is that one of them is a full scene with Ryuujirou that is the exact opposite of how Aoi actually acts concerning him.
    • Continue rejecting Miyuki in the rebooted world and she'll eventually essentially rape Shinichi while making herself appear as Aoi. Her increasingly unhinged dialogue doesn't help matters. Afterwards, she even brokenly says that scene was meant for Aoi, and that it was an attempt to get you to love her and get revenge on Aoi.
    • Most infamously, after declaring she wants you to make love to her and thinking that the player believes sex equals love, Miyuki knocks Shinichi out and simulates having sex by the player by viciously masturbating in front of them. Cue an unskippable ten minute scene of her doing this to Liebestraum No. 3, all while her dialogue gets progressively more insane and unhinged — starting with her delusionally thinking she'll start a family with the player (impossible for obvious reasons), admitting she's got the same "Gamer Brain" issue as Aoi by knowing nothing about their romance is, but she's so far gone that she thinks she can will it into being reality.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • Early on, Yuutarou warns Shinichi that Aoi has a reputation for "being easy". He ends up being right, of course, but not for the reasons he thinks.
    • Aoi asking Shinichi if he's scared about getting cucked seems hilariously random, even from the space case that is Aoi...until later on in her route.
    • The in-universe You and Me and Her game is apparently NTR-focused and is (in)famous as a result. Miyuki's route pre-patch is doomed to end with Shinichi losing her to a nameless actor, and in Aoi's route, not only does Aoi "cheat" on you, Miyuki also becomes aware of your "infidelity" and snaps.
    • Haru is only shown in uniform in the auditorium, and is mentioned to work at Yuutarou's family shop, because he's actually Yuutarou's brother Ryuujirou.
    • Miyuki has a softball bat with her during her first appearance, and is rumored to have fought off a jilted suitor with that same bat when he turned violent. During Aoi's route, she uses that bat to murder Aoi and Shinichi in a jealous fit of rage.
      Shinichi: Alright, well, try not to kill anyone with that thing.
    • In Miyuki Route's Bad End, she becomes a successful actress and plays a yandere student in a TV drama, foreshadowing her transformation in the Aoi route. What's more is that her CG is staring right at the viewer/player as she demands her co-star love her forever... which is exactly what she does in Aoi's "ending".
    • In the same Bad End, Miyuki loves Shinichi to the point she finds the revelation that Shinichi thinks she loves someone else very poorly. Unsurprisingly, she takes Shinichi/the player going down Aoi's route just as poorly.
    • During Aoi's route, Miyuki will pop in to say that she can forgive someone making a mistake the first time, but she will never forgive them if they do it a second time. Sure enough, if you continue down Aoi's route despite this warning, she takes bloody revenge for your "mistake".
    • It's very easy to stop going down Aoi's route with the wrong decision. As Miyuki will reveal later, she set up everything to ensure that Shinichi/the player will keep going into her route forever.
    • Miyuki claims to not like video games and dislikes Aoi on the basis that being unable to separate fact from fiction is both horrifying and upsetting to her, and even goes so far as to dislike the term "gamer brain" because it's got the word "gamer" in it. She doesn't take her own advice and thinks Shinichi/the player truly loves her, and then falls apart when it's proven the player thinks it's part of the game — it's further implied that her realizing she's in a video game herself helped drive her over the edge.
    • Furthermore, Miyuki was apparently a lot like Aoi when she was younger, which partially drives her dislike of her — it's later revealed that Aoi is a representation of every VN heroine/love interest out there, Miyuki included. During the extremely wrong "love" scene where Miyuki self-absues herself in a bid to force the player to love her, she admits that she knows that her delusion doesn't make her any different from Aoi and her "Gamer Brain".
    • It's noted Miyuki keeps up appearances of being a perfect student who excels at everything while being prim and proper for a suitor (Shinichi), but behind it all, she's quiet and insecure. Not only does Shinichi accidentally trigger her insecurity bad enough to cause her to break off all contact with him in the Bad Ending, it causes her to completely snap as she realizes the player thinks their love was just a game and thus has 'abandoned' her.
    • Shinichi keeps going on about how bland and unmotivated he is, and each choice, major or minor, is handled by the player. He's revealed to be a Audience Surrogate and near-on Featureless Protagonist, which is why Miyuki falls in love with the player.
    • Shinichi also can't really figure out why Miyuki and him stopped being friends, and chalks it up to just growing up and drifting apart before wondering why he'd want to rekindle that friendship and turn it into something else. It's because if he doesn't suddenly decide to pursue her, there'd be no game. Furthermore, the only reason they get back in contact is due to Aoi — the literal embodiment of every visual novel love interest — triggering their meeting, also showing they needed what was basically an Excuse Plot.
  • The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: The ending of Aoi’s route reveals that Miyuki has fallen in love with the player and is lethally upset that they have chosen another route to play. Once she reveals her sentience, it’s quite clear that she is looking right at the player as she’s talking to them. She also chooses to punish YOU by reprogramming the game, trapping YOU in an endless loop of random romantic scenes with her, and doing stuff like taking away your save files.
  • Golden Ending: Played with in a very interesting way. While it is Averted in the main game, considering you can only choose between the Aoi or Miyuki endings and can't go back, inputting a special "cheat code"note  as the phone number at various points in the game will trigger the "100% ending", giving you full CG completion... at the cost of Miyuki and Aoi being erased from existence.
  • Gory Discretion Shot: The reader is thankfully spared the images of Miyuki beating Aoi to death with a baseball bat, breaking all of Shinichi's limbs, and then killing him by Groin Attack. Though you end up hearing almost all of it. This is lampshaded in that Miyuki notes the game doesn't actually show Aoi's de-brained corpse, because it would get censored anyway.
  • Guide Dang It!: After Miyuki has the world rebooted, progressing can be quite difficult without a guide. The player is required to specifically say things to Miyuki repeatedly which are meant to either butter her up so to give them an out, which is quite easy to mess up given that the player has very little reason to be nice to her, or piss her off enough, and the threshold to getting such scenes is quite high, making it easy to spend ages repeatedly picking options and getting no result. Continuing after Aoi's erasure is likewise somewhat obscure, requiring you to make a specific choice in one of the many randomly selected scenes the game cycles through, with zero hint there's even anything there.
  • Hypocrisy Nod: During the extremely uncomfortable sex scene with an insane Miyuki, she acknowledges her insane behaviour in believing she truly loves the player (despite not knowing anything about them) and that they're still a loving couple despite her murdering Aoi and violating Shinichi/YOU) isn't any different from "Gamer Brain", but she doesn't care anymore.
  • Indirect Kiss: Shinichi gives Aoi a can of tomato juice that he already took a few sips from, and she proceeds to chug the whole thing. After a few seconds of delay, she wonders if that would count as an indirect kiss and asks Shinichi if he's "trying to get on her route."
  • Interface Screw: At the end of Aoi's initial route, Miyuki takes over the game, messing with the game data (in her words, "messing with the route branch code"), nuking your saves, and making herself the only option. You are also unable to save, load, or access most of the other menu functions, and she can read your clicks (e.g., right-clicking to bring up the menu will result in her making a snarky comment).
  • Interface Spoiler: The first credits show that God and Eru share a voice actor, which should be very odd considering the former has never appeared and the latter is a regular cat.
  • Jump Scare: During the end of Aoi's route, Shinichi's vision will fade out once Miyuki says she isn't talking to him... and suddenly, Miyuki is very close to the camera, wide crazy eyes and all.
  • Love Confession:
    • The game starts because of a love confession gone wrong: due to the rumor that two people will share eternal love if they kiss on the school roof, Yuutarou asks Shinichi to unlock the door so he can ask Miyuki there to confess to her. Upon arriving first, Miyuki finds Shinichi there in a compromising position with Aoi and assumes he was the one who asked her to the roof.
    • Miyuki's route ultimately has Shinichi, in the good end, finally work out the courage to confess his love for Miyuki after spending the entire route refusing to do so.
    • Similarly, the True End repeats the beginning situation of the game, but Aoi is able to get Shinichi to confess for real before anything else happens.
  • Love Triangle: The main story focuses on the blossoming romance between Shinichi, Aoi, and Miyuki.
  • Metafictional Horror: Miyuki's sanity falls apart upon finding out she's nothing more than a character in a visual novel, and her desperation for the player's love results in the darkest twists and turns in the plot. Additionally, Aoi is a representative of every visual novel heroine — especially the erotic ones — and her existence is a glitch. She has to perform ero-scenes in order to keep existing, and comes to hate it because she really wants to stay true to the player and Shinichi.
  • Minimalist Cast: There's only five characters total, Shinichi, Miyuki, Aoi, Yuutarou and Haru. Six, if you count yourself the player. This is lampshaded and possibly literal, especially when Miyuki hijacks the game — Shinichi can't find anyone from school and only runs into Yuutarou by apparent chance, and the way Miyuki talks about the world is like it's devoid of anything but the player/Shinchi. Haru disappears, and apparently was a potential route.
  • Multiple Endings:
    • Bad Ending: If you make the wrong choices in Miyuki's route, Shinichi refuses to confess his feelings to Miyuki, and as a result, their friendship collapses while Aoi disappears. Years later, he's living by himself and watching Miyuki become a successful actress who's found love with a co-star.
    • Miyuki Ending: Shinichi, at Aoi's insistence, decides to confess his feelings to Miyuki, and is able to get her first kiss since the play with her kiss scene had to end early. The two end up together and happy... but Aoi vanishes since she's not needed anymore, and Shinichi can't shake the feeling that something's missing.
    • Aoi Ending: Less of an actual ending and more a lead-in to the final route; after learning that Aoi has to cheat on him in order to collect CGs and not be sent back to God, Shinichi reaches an understanding with her and reluctantly accepts being in an open relationship with her. Then Miyuki kills them both and seizes control of the game.
    • True Ending: Aoi is brought back and has to roll back the changes she made to the game's code, even though this will put Shinichi back on the bad ending route with Miyuki. The player must choose who to give their love to between Aoi and Miyuki; regardless of choice, the game world is back to normal. Shinichi finds the courage to confess to Miyuki anyway, while Aoi promises YOU before vanishing that she will reunite with YOU when she reincarnates in all the visual novels YOU will play.
    • Six Months Ending: If you go through the loop for six in-game months and choose the first option, Miyuki will take away all your choices and truly trap Shinichi with her forever, forcing YOU to have to reset the game.
    • 100% Ending: Inputting a cheat code causes God to unlock all of the CGs in the game, at the cost of erasing Miyuki and Aoi, thus rendering the game permanently unplayable.
    • God's Phone Number: An alternate version of the 100% Ending. Inputting the final phone number during the chase with Miyuki (which can only be done on a second playthrough) will lead to Miyuki breaking down, furious that YOU went and betrayed her and Aoi by resetting the game and putting them through their torment again just to see what would happen. Aoi then inputs the cheat code to render the game unplayable as punishment.
  • Netorare: In-universe, the game itself is this if Yuutarou's comments are any indication. Miyuki's route, if Aoi is stopped from patching it, is basically a BSSnote  where Shinichi, due to his refusal to tell Miyuki his feelings, ultimately ruins their friendship in a misunderstanding and loses her to a nameless actor. Meanwhile, Aoi's route is a forced NTR scenario where Aoi has to have sex with other guys to collect CGs so God won't summon her back for no longer fulfilling her purpose, leading to a very awkward sex scene where Shinichi has to watch her have sex with Haru. And Miyuki herself feels that YOU NTR-ed her by completing her route and then going onto Aoi's instead.
  • No Antagonist: In Miyuki's route, the main obstacle Shinichi faces is his own self-doubt about being good enough for Miyuki, which he needs to overcome before she gives her Sacred First Kiss away at the kissing scene in her play. However, Aoi's route onward has Miyuki herself take over as a proper Big Bad.
  • Onion Tears: In the default/bad ending of Miyuki's route, Shinichi starts crying about Miyuki ending her friendship with him, becoming successful, and finding love with another man. He blames the green onions stinging his eyes as he claims he's happy for her.
  • Pop Quiz: The penultimate challenge of the final route tasks Shinichi with hacking into Miyuki's phone by answering 10 randomly-selected security questions about her, testing him on how well he's gotten to know her, with the answers being found in the Memories scenes; and the answers are also randomized for each playthrough.
  • Recursive Reality:
    • Early on, Shinichi picks up a game that copies Aoi's life, and assumes that someone has designed a game after her and she now religiously follows it — he notes that the Crash-Into Hello scene was an exact duplicate of what actually happened. Later, he uses it to see into the future, and after one of the endings he replays the exact copy of the player's experience on top.
    • If you punch in the code to force the game to 100% Completion, then You and Me and Her becomes a Game Within a Game that Shinichi has played to 100% completion and is viewing the scenes of out of boredom, with Miyuki and Aoi reduced to even more fictional characters.
  • Reset Button Ending: In the true ending, Aoi realizes that the editing she did to the game's code is what caused Miyuki to snap and turn Yandere, so she rolls it back — even though this would put Shinichi on the path to Miyuki's bad ending. Aoi vanishes, but is able to send a photo of her with Shinichi and Miyuki happy together to push Shinichi to avoid his canon fate and confess his love. With the game reset, the only scene available is the intro, which goes in a different direction where Shinichi is able to confess to Miyuki thanks to Aoi's help.
  • Revenge via Storytelling: In the final route, Miyuki's play "Pandemonium" is based off of the life and relationship of her and Shinichi — with Aoi Mukou, her love rival who she killed prior, cast as a wicked temptress who tried to manipulate Shinichi's character with lies and acting sweet, only to be publicly exposed and humiliated just in time for the happy ending.
  • Sacred First Kiss: The primary conflict of Miyuki's route concerns her being the lead heroine in a play for drama class that ends in a kiss between her and the male lead, which will be her first kiss; except she clearly wants her first to be with her childhood friend Shinichi, and gives him obvious hints about this. Problem is, Shinichi doesn't think he's good enough for Miyuki and refuses to come clean about his feelings for her. It ultimately ends with him chickening out, only for a blackout to end the performance before it gets to the kiss, allowing him to give her the kiss on the school rooftop under the night sky.
  • School Play:
    • The main conflict of Miyuki’s route centers around one that Miyuki is starting in, because it ends with a kiss scene: problem is, Miyuki would really rather have her Sacred First Kiss with her childhood friend Shinichi, and so would he, but both are having trouble coming clean about their feelings.
    • In the final route, one Memories scene has Miyuki and Shinichi starring in "Pandemonium", a play written by Miyuki herself that is an obvious parallel of her school life and relationship with Shinichi, along with demonizing Aoi as a temptress who tried to steal her Shinchi away.
  • Shout-Out:
    • When Yuutarou yells "My Little Brother Can't Be That Cute!!!", Shinichi remarks that it sounds similar to some "mediocre light novel".
    • In her Golden Ending, Aoi references some of the Nitroplus games she'll be reincarnated to, namely Phantom of Inferno ("A soft-spoken assassin"), Demonbane ("A grimoire in human form"), Tenshi no Nichou Kenjuu ("An angel with a gun"), Gekkōu no Carnevale ("A doll with amnesia"), Sumaga ("A witch who protects the world"), and Super Sonico ("A bassist in an all-girls band").
  • Sitting on the Roof: The roof of the school is a major setting where several scenes take place, and it's stated Miyuki and Shinichi used to hang out there all the time. The fact that Shinichi keeps suddenly appearing on the roof with no memory of how he got there becomes a plot point.
  • Story Branch Favoritism: Downplayed, as the ending is technically the same no matter the final decision, but the game leans on Aoi's ending considerably more. Not only is the player picking her given more leadup considering their actions till then, but it provides far more of a thematic resolution to the story and even acts as a Stealth Prequel of sorts to other Nitro+ games, as well as having its own unique CG.
  • Trickster Game: Despite some strange metafiction sprinkled throughout involving Aoi, the Miyuki's route, the first route of the game is a fairly normal romance story. After the player decides to do Aoi's, however, a series of strange questions begin popping up that, if chosen incorrectly, suddenly lock the player into replaying Miyuki's ending. Because Miyuki's actually fully aware of the events of her route, and intentionally trying to sabotage you. Once she reveals herself, she hijacks the game and intentionally removes the save feature, just to ensure you can't fight her.
  • Uncanny Valley: When the player and Shinichi manage to snatch Miyuki's phone after she tries to kill Shinichi, Shinichi's hiding place is torn apart by Miyuki, who looks off, representing her in-the-gutter sanity: the teeth look disturbingly bumpy, and her cute anime eyes are ruined by her irises shrinking into something hollow as they stare directly at the player.
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change: The first two routes of the game, Miyuki and Aoi, are typical visual novel fare with a few simple choices here and there that determine which of two endings you get for each love interest. Then Miyuki reveals she's gone batshit insane from realizing she's fictional and that YOU broke her vow of love, brutally murders Aoi, and traps you in the final route, where it turns into an Adventure Game-cum-Psychological Horror-slash-Survival Horror where you have to play with various features and go through specific scenes in a certain order to figure out how to escape while Miyuki's mental state deteriorates even further, even throwing in a Pop Quiz at one point.
  • Wham Episode: The "Happy Birthday" segment at the end of Aoi's route has a series of revelations which utterly shatter how one perceives the story: Miyuki reveals she's gone completely insane after becoming aware she's in a video game, has fallen in love with the player, took the ending where the player's avatar promised her eternally love very seriously, and brutally murders Aoi.
  • Wham Line: One that completes the plunge from generic romance visual novel right into Existential Horror and dread — Miyuki rants about Shinichi's "betrayal" when he never pursued Miyuki once in Aoi's route, and Shinichi can only respond in confusion as he notices it seems like she's staring at someone else and not him. Miyuki cuts him off:
    Miyuki: I'm not talking to you [Shinichi]. I'm talking to YOU.
  • Wham Shot: The Reveal that Miyuki knows she's in a visual novel and has fallen in love with you, the player is accompanied by her leaning in so she's face-to-face and staring directly into the player's POV before addressing them directly.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Invoked: when Shinichi escapes Miyuki's apartment, he wonders where the hell everyone is and only runs into Yuutarou. He can thank Miyuki's modification of the world for that.
  • What the Hell, Player?:
    • There's a uniquely odd one in that, if you don't let Aoi modify the game and thus make Miyuki aware she's a fictional character and go crazy as a result, you get a Downer Ending in which Miyuki tearfully rejects Shinichi when he admits he couldn't stand the thought of Miyuki with someone else, and goes on to be a successful actress who has fallen in love with her co-star while Shinichi becomes a minimum-wage sad sack, sobbing over shows Miyuki's in and the fact she found a boyfriend. This is odd because it's technically a good ending, as it avoids Miyuki realising she's not real and consequently snapping as a result.
    • Miyuki, and later Aoi and Shinichi, call YOU out for the choices YOU make and the effect they had on the cast, specifically letting Aoi modify the game and getting Miyuki's good end only to go on Aoi's route afterwards. Borders on a "The Reason You Suck" Speech by the time YOU gather all three on the rooftop to reset the universe one last time, as Shinichi asks YOU to actually stick to one route and stop hurting the two girls, but assumes YOU'RE going to use backup saves and the like to cheat out of YOUR promise.
    • If you enter the number to revive Aoi early in the game, before you're supposed to know it, Miyuki and then Aoi tearfully call you out for cheating and breaking your promise before inputting the cheat code and erasing the story from the game — and technically killing them.

Alternative Title(s): Kimi To Kanojo To Kanojo No Koi

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