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PC Gamer
PC Gamer
Rich Stanton

Japanese book publisher 'urgently' reprints Dante's Divine Comedy because a gacha game where you can summon him has the weebs thirsting for that 14th century epic verse

A statue of Dante in Verona.

The Divine Comedy is one of the classics of world literature, and still taught in Italian schools to this day. This epic poem was finished in 1321, shortly before author Dante Alighieri's death, and essentially follows his quest to right the world's wrongs and put a lot of people he didn't like in hell. Virgil mouths off a bit too, though once he's replaced in Purgatorio it all gets much more boring.

The poem, which was initially just called the Commedia before Bocaccio added the "divine" element hundreds of years later, is incredibly influential in western literature, and has been the inspiration for countless subsequent works. One of the more recent to take inspiration is Fate/Grand Order, a popular gacha-style game in Japan: so popular, in fact, that one of Japan's major book publishers is running out of copies of The Divine Comedy (thanks, Automaton).

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