Mono Monet Gets a Steel Pipe and Beats a Boss in Rule of Rose on a Real PS2

V4MIRAI — Mono Monet, a V4Mirai streamer, spent a three-and-a-half-hour stream on the second session of her Rule of Rose playthrough, running the 2006 PlayStation 2 horror game on a real console and a real disc. She swapped a kitchen knife for a steel pipe, lost a boss fight once and won it later, and estimated that she was about five hours into a game she put at nine to ten hours long.

The stream opened with talk. Mono told a story about a child in a VRChat public instance who recited a short, sad tale about a musician’s death, then described a trip to Costco that day. She did not find glasses she liked, but she came home with a hot dog, an apple pie sundae, a thermal layer and a $15 pajama set. She drew the pajamas and her morning hair in MS Paint for viewers, and said she had taken a long, comfortable nap in them before going live.

“This might genuinely be some of the worst combat in a game I’ve ever had. It’s kind of insane how bad it is.” — Mono Monet, midway through a fight in Rule of Rose

About 37 minutes in she switched on the PS2 and gave the game some background. Rule of Rose, she said, came from the Love-de-Lic lineage of Japanese developers, which also produced Chulip, and she called it a game with incredible atmosphere and janky play. She said a complete boxed copy sells for about $1,200 or more, that the game was banned in Europe, and that she owns only the disc. The real hardware, she added, meant long loading screens.

In the game, she guided an orphan girl through an airship ruled by a club of children, with her dog Brown sniffing out items, while hunting for a runaway called Sir Peter. She fought off swarms of the ship’s children with a kitchen knife, and called the combat awful throughout. Around the two-hour mark she found a steel pipe and declared it far better. A boss fight soon after ended in her first game over and some lost progress. She spent much of the next stretch collecting healing items, along with ribbons, socks and clothespins whose purpose she could not work out. Back at the boss with a full stock of healing items, including a chocolate that restored all her health, she won, though she called the fight a letdown.

Chat answered the opening story with jokes about who had taught the child it, and cheered the pajama sketch. Three Super Chats came in during the stream. Mono closed by saying she wanted to wrap up and eat, and that the next day she planned to try a website that lets DJs mix live with each other over the internet. She said she was undecided about going to a Halloween party.