Rounding off my adventure through the Japanese versions of the GBA Casltevania games by playing this also on my Japanese Wii U's Virtual Console, with its very cool Japanese title "Concerto of Midnight Sun". I've always like this game better than CotM, and while I still do after this playthrough, I don't think it's by quite as large a margin as it used to be. It took me around 7 or 8 hours and I got the best ending.
Where Circle of the Moon was handled by another team, Harmony of Dissonance put Igarashi back in the driver's seat (where he would stay until the last Metroid-y Castlevania game was released), and it really shows. Where CotM kinda plays like a refutation to Symphony of the Night's design in many ways, HoD feels more like a refinement by necessity. They obviously couldn't put something of SotN's scale and visual quality on the GBA, so they took the elements from that game that were most key to the experience and made an experience that, while still feeling like a more simplified version of the experience, feels far closer than SotN than the NES Castlevanias. The narrative is similar to CotM, but the presentation and dialogue feels closer to SotN. It's once again a story about two friends who come to take down Dracula and save someone they care about but who Dracula manipulates to drive apart, but there's a bit more dialogue in this. Not THAT much more, but Juste and Maxim have a more interesting (albeit slightly) dynamic than Nathan and Hugh, and Death makes for a much better supporting villain in this than Camilla did in CotM. It's really nothing special either way, but I felt it worth mentioning here. I could definitely understand if some people feel that after this point the series becomes a bit long in tooth in terms of how much story it puts into the games, but I like how games after this (especially Soma Cruz's games) take the lore in weird places rather than treading over the same ground over and over. The biggest reason I like this game over CotM is the controls. No double-tapping to run, the whip goes off a bit faster, and they added dashing back into the game. And not just back-dashing, but forward-dashing as well, with L to dash left and R to dash right. It makes going through the castle way faster, and allows you to maneuver much easier in boss fights. That said, I do have a couple of tiny complaints compared to CotM. First, Nathan (in CotM) has a little bit more play control over his jumps than Juste does, as Juste really commits to a jump once he makes it and you often can't change direction mid-air. The second would be that you ALWAYS get knocked back from a hit in HoD, where in CotM if the damage is minimal enough, it doesn't break your stride. Presentation-wise, this feels far more like SotN than CotM. HoD's music isn't as good as CotM, as it opts for more original tracks than remixes of old tracks, but that's really the only place where it falters. CotM almost looks like a GBC game on a GBA at times, and that is far from the case with HoD. The game runs way better, Juste has a lot more frames of animation (his movement is SO Alucard it's almost comical) as do all the enemies. Sprites are also much more detailed and the enemy variety is also higher. There are also a lot more bosses in this game, some even entirely optional (in a SotN-kind of way), and although a fair few are very easy, the game itself is far from a cake walk if you don't take time to utilize your front and back-dashes correctly. The only real criticism I have on this game design-wise is the castle. The gimmick of this game is that the castle has a front-half and a back-half (not unlike SotN's two castles, but these ones are just different versions of the same areas, not upside down). The overall castle designs are much better than CotM's corridors upon corridors, and areas feel different to traverse in a way that's interesting to go through. It's a good thing they're interesting to go through as well, because this castle has no warp system the way the other Metroid-y Castlevanias do. There are a couple one-way warp points between a spot in Castle A and a spot in Castle B as well as several spots to change between the same point in both castles, but no castle-wide warp system exists. This can make back-tracking for collectibles a real pain in the ass, even if the addition of the frontwards dash does make traversal a little bit faster. The game also has one or two really poor bits of signposting, especially one where it is not at all obvious that a certain item is in fact a key, but only if you equip it. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. There are certainly better Castlevania games to occupy your time with, but this one is a fine entry. It's not really innovating anything particularly interesting, and it shows its early place in the series pretty easily with its rougher bits of design. That said, it still plays really well and has some great boss fights and visual design, so if you're in the mood for some Metroid-y Castlevania, this is one that isn't too hard to enjoy.
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In a trend this year of giving second chances to games I gave up on previously, I picked up CotM on the Japanese Wii U eShop. I ended up liking Paper Mario: Sticker Star a decent amount playing through it earlier this year. The second chance was worth it for me. This game however, the second chance was not really worth it for anything other than being able to say that I've now beaten all the Metroid-style Casltevanias. It's easily the worst of the Metroid-y Casltevanias in almost every way. I did everything but the hella difficult battle arena, and it took me around 7 or 8 hours.
So where to begin with this game. It's the only Metroid-style Castlevania game not to have production involvement from Koji Igarashi, and it was a very early title for the GBA. A problem back then that I did not have was that the backgrounds for the stages were nearly impossible to see on the OG GBA's super dark screen, and being that I played it on a Wii U with a Pro Controller, I also had a much bigger screen and different control method than one attached to the screen. It has a number of strange design decisions and steps backwards from Symphony of the Night that make it feel overall like a simplified version of SotN but with worse controls and less variety. It's almost like someone took Casltevania 3 on the NES and morphed it into a Metroid-style game. The first really baffling design decision is that the main character Nathan has no default run ability. You start off only being able to walk, and you walk SO slowly. The first power-up you get is the ability to run, but you run by double-tapping left or right. All that constant double-tapping really starts to hurt your thumb after a while. The combination of the removal of SotN's back-dash means your only fast movement for dodging is either this double-tap running or doing a Mega Man-style floor slide. This makes the game's movement really clunky and not terribly fun to do, as the need to double-tap means you're constantly reminded of how pointlessly awkward they are. The whip attack that Nathan uses is also quite slow and methodical, and he absolutely FLIES backwards when he gets hit, which when combined with the awkward walking really makes it feel like a weird Metroid-ification of a classic Castlevania game (and I never found that to be a positive comparison). The castle itself isn't super interesting or memorable. Almost all of it is either long hallways or vertical S- or U-shaped corridors in a way that makes the castle simultaneously vast and boring to traverse. In another strange step backwards from SotN, there is also a very strange utter lack of warp points in most of the castle for no good reason, meaning that you'll be doing a ton of backtracking on foot if you wanna use your new movement powers to get all the health, mana, and heart-count (for sub-weapons) upgrades littered around the castle. A lot of the movement powers also aren't that interesting or are entirely for opening up content gates. Outside of the double-jump and vertical leap, almost all of them are useless outside of the traversal sections that outright require their use. No bat-form, panther-speed, or special dodges to unlock here. The most fun I had with the castle was just going from place to place ticking boxes off a list getting more upgrades for my base stats, as the enemies are almost never really threatening (and when they are they kill you FAST), but the very rote feeling of reward of "I completed a task" is a fairly low bar for a game to provide enjoyment with. Speaking of the enemies, they're nothing really special either. The game has pretty low enemy variety even for a Metroidvania. It's not laughably paltry or anything, but it feels noticeably lesser than the other games that had the luxury of ripping sprites from older Castlevanias (a place where age has been unkind to early games in the series like CotM). The bosses aren't very good either. Most of them range somewhere between very strangely easy or super duper hard due to attacks that require outright luck to dodge and/or do more than half of your healthbar in damage. The final boss is particularly guilty in that regard. There are a couple fun fights (I liked the big green Ram thing and the fight with the guy with powers like yours), but most of the fights are forgettable even for a Metroid-y Casltevania game. Where the special stuff does lie is in the DSS card system the game has, and it messes that up too in a way that feels really unnecessary. The DSS card system is a system where you can find base and modifier cards (a dozen different kinds of each, iirc), and by equipping one of each and pressing the L button, you'll activate a special power. You don't know what they do until you activate them the right way, and the game won't even tell you what they do or how much MP they cost until you've activated them. There were a couple I couldn't even figure out how to properly activate, so they were left as "???" for the entire game. This lets you get stuff like a kinda crap mid-run shield (it's not active as you jump, so it's useless around 60% of the time, and some enemies phase right through it because of how they spawn), more powerful elemental whips, damaging shields, longer invincibility time, or even new weapons like turning your whip into a giant elemental sword. Of course, I didn't get to try out most of the DSS system because of the main flaw in it: The cards for it are far too hard to find. Certain enemies drop cards, and you have no idea which. Many of them are quite rare drops as well, so unless you know where to look and deliberately farm them, you very likely won't find many or even most (as was the case with me) of the cards in the game. The DSS feature is by far the best thing the game has going for it, so other than an adherence to genre conventions, I can't really imagine why they'd hide their best content this way. Graphically I have seen the game described as an enhanced GBC game, and that just about fits. The animations are very limited (especially compared to other Castlevania games), with most enemies only having a couple frames of animation, and the sprites aren't super detailed either. Some of the backgrounds are quite nice, although as said previously they would've been quite hard to see on an original GBA screen most of the time. Despite the limited graphics, the game still has problems with slowdown. It often isn't much of a problem, and is only present when certain enemies or several of a certain type are on-screen at once. However, it's an AWFUL problem on the final Dracula fight. There were many times on failed attempts at Dracula that button presses not registering how I wanted them to (particularly for the upwards high jump) had me falling into a powerful attack that got me killed. The other elements of the presentation are a mixed bag. The story is unobtrusive, sure, but it's also very uninspired and honestly might as well not even be there. The context it provides to certain fights is nice, but it's definitely the least ambitious story out of any of the Metroid-y Castlevanias. The music is largely remixes of older Castlevania music, so it's usually really good. The music is probably the #1 thing this game easily has over its GBA Castlevania counterparts. Verdict: Not Recommended. This is a trudging, sub-par Metroidvania affair the whole way through. Frustratingly difficult far more often than enjoyably challenging, clunky controls, boring presentation. Especially with the inundation of fantastic Metroidvanias coming on the market these days, your money can go towards much better than Circle of the Moon as can your time. I know this game has its defenders, but I can't enjoy this game the way they can. Before I started this playthrough I held the opinion that this was probably the worst of the Metroid-y Castlevanias, and the only thing this playthrough has changed is that now I know its definitely the worst. It's been a good few years since my marathon of all the Igavanias, and I've been kinda in a gaming funk the past week or so, so I picked up Aria of Sorrow on the Japanese Wii U VC. My memory does blend together a little with the sequel, Dawn of Sorrow, but this is still one of my favorite Igavanias. Certainly my favorite of the 3 GBA Castlevanias. It also kept in line with this month's TR theme, so that was an even better excuse to pick it up and give it another playthrough. It took me a little over 5 hours to beat it, according to the in-game clock, and I got the best ending with 99.6% of the map revealed.
This Castlevania was a bit of an odd-ball at the time for being not only set in the future of 2035, but also for being one of the first of 3 games in the series that utilized the Tactical Soul system. In short, any enemy you kill has a chance of dropping its soul, and there are 3 types of souls, activatables linked to pressing Up and B, activatables connected to holding R, and simple passives. This combined with not only different weapons to find, but weapons that have different attack styles (rather than how Alucard just has differently ranged straight-forward swipes in SotN, for example) really brings a lot more to the table for how you can approach combat. It also makes exploring new areas that much more exciting, because a new enemy in itself can present its own new brand of loot aside from any neat new weapons it may drop. The game handles great and it never is a huge pain to navigate the castle to go back to new areas like it so often is in Harmony of Dissonance. It also has a much more friendly difficulty curve than a lot of its predecessors while still managing to be challenging. It's not as pretty as the DS games, of course, but the graphics are very pretty. I never found the music super impressive though. I was listening to podcasts while I played it, but I still had the sound on, and only one song (Julius' battle theme) ever really managed to capture my attention. The game is identical to the American version for everything but the text (obviously), but I still found it interesting. It's nothing super special, but it takes a neat twist on the Castlevania stories up to that point, and it's never super obtrusive or boring beyond needing to mash through some conversations to retry boss fights sometimes. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Still the best of the Castlevanias on GBA, despite not being better than its DS successors. Still very much worth your time if you're into Metroidvanias and want something on the GBA, and it still holds up just fine as a 7$ affair on the Wii U in the year 2019 when there is no shortage of excellent Metroidvania games on platforms like PC and Switch. Only barrier to entry might be if you actually wanna play it on the GBA, as it's a bit short for what a hefty price it demands these days. When I stayed with my friend last weekend, this was a Gamecube game he got for peanuts that we thought "why not give a try". It has 5 "story mode" stories to play through, but beating one of them DOES give you the credits, and given that we've used that metric for fighting games in the past on this site, I'm calling this one beaten even though I only beat 2 out of the 5 myself. I seriously doubt my opinion on it would change at all given any more play time, anyhow
This is a fighting game by Konami based on their manga/anime Rave Master, a series I have never seen anything but adverts for like 15 years ago XP. My friend was a fan when he was younger though, and he said the story bits carried a very similar vibe from the show. There are story scenes with dialogue between fights that's sometimes funny, but ultimately pretty uninteresting to someone who knows nothing about the show like I did. Shock and horror, I know, an early 2000's licensed fighting game with a boring story :b. The only real criticism I can level against it is that these scenes aren't voice acted. For something based on a licensed property that DOES have some VA for the characters as they fight, it struck me as very odd to have literally no VA of any kind for the fairly short story scenes, not even in the Japanese version that we were playing. On a hilarious note, while the few female characters predictably have some pretty awful jiggle physics on their breasts, there's a male character how has the same physics for his BUTT, which had us absolutely in stitches with laughter when we first noticed it. The mechanics are basically a very poor-man's Power Stone 2. It's a 4-player arena fighter with not so stellar targeting, all the stages are basically the same with no ring-outs, some characters who are obviously really poorly balanced, and a series of passives you can pick up (one of each of three kinds) as well as weapons during battle. There's a kinda cool mechanic where, instead of items, you can make characters drop the weapon they're holding, and the random usable items that drop are other characters' weapons who appear in the game. This means that ever weapon basically has two styles: a style for the person who owns that weapon, and an "everyone else" default style. It's a neat idea, but the combat is so otherwise bad and the AI is so dumb that it doesn't matter a whole heck of a lot. The controls are kinda weird too. B is your default attack, A is a special attack, X is jump, and Z picks up and drops items (so dropping your weapon when you wanna pick up a passive happens a LOT). I haven't played Power Stone myself, so I don't know how true this is for either of those games, but for the arcade mode in this, the rule was basically that if you were one-on-one, you could combo someone into the dirt and probably perfect the match barely trying by just mashing B. But if you were fighting TWO enemies, you would almost certainly get very easily double teamed and the game would get WAY harder despite the omni-directional blocking. We only had one controller, so we couldn't play VS mode at all, although again I doubt that would've really changed my opinion on the game. Verdict: Not Recommended. This game is a waste of your time unless maybe you're a massive Rave Master fan. There are much better Power Stone-type games on the Gamecube that came along later in its life, and if you have a Dreamcast then Power Stone is a much better choice. Given that this came out 2 years after Power Stone 2 and the year after Smash Bros Melee, it's a pretty unimpressive entry into the vast hall of licensed/cross-over 4-player party fighters on Gamecube with its unimpressive mechanics and 13 playable characters. I've owned this game for a good few years now. I wanna say I bought it on PSN back on my actual PSP before I even had a Vita, which would put it at QUITE a few years ago at this point. At any rate, it's a game I already had that I could play on my Vita that fit very snugly into the qualifications for this month's Together Retro (portable horror games), so I decided to finally give it a go after all these years. To call my feelings mixed would be an understatement, but I played through all 5 main chapters and one extra chapter, and it took me around 18 or 20 hours over the course of a week or so.
I'm going to start this off with a warning that I get into some spoilers in this review because I really can't state my opinions without getting into some of the nitty gritty on the plot elements. If you want no spoilers, skip to the "Verdict" final paragraph for some spoiler-free final summations of the rest of this review. The narrative of Corpse Party is about a group of 8 students and their teacher. While conducting an occult ritual at school after classes have ended, they get sucked into a kind of pocket dimension run by vengeful ghosts and they need to find some way to escape. They've been split up into several different versions of the pocket dimension, meaning that characters can come and go at different times, and it also means that time and space are a bit fast and loose. From a mechanical perspective, it means they can effectively reuse the same areas for different chapters but with slightly different stuff, allowing for foreshadowing or building tension. It plays very much like something out of RPG Maker but with no actual combat, with the characters moving around a tile-based grid in what is effectively a horror-themed adventure game with some very light action elements around avoiding interacting with hostile NPCs. It has multiple endings (effectively collectible game overs) spread throughout 5 chapters of the main story, and certain endings unlock bonus chapters. As you walk around the school, interacting with corpses or certain objects allows you to find name tags of the students that died there, and the bonus chapters you play give little windows into who some of those collectible corpses were before they died. However, the story of Corpse Party, at least how I'll discuss it here, actually starts far before the American PSP release in 2010, and even before the Japanese PC release in 2006, and in fact starts in 1996. The original game to carry the title Corpse Party (the game we know by that title in the West has the subtitle "Blood Covered" in Japan) was made in an old version of RPG Maker for the PC-98, and is a substantially different game. It has no chapter system, it has a chibi art style, it has no students from other schools, and it has a cast of only 5 students as well as a much shorter total play time. The 2006 reboot/remake for Windows (that we eventually got on PSP) is a substantial remake to say the least, and adds the chapter system itself (as well as the extra ones), 4 more characters to the main cast as well as students from other schools, illustrated stills that appear for certain cutscenes as well as character portraits (Tales of's vignette-style), and finally also updating the art style to be far more mature and to fit in far better with the anime aesthetic landscape of 2006. I spell all of this out because Corpse Party 2010's biggest flaws, both mechanically and narratively, are almost entirely (although not universally) borne out of this legacy of being a reboot of an old RPG Maker game. First, let's address the new aesthetic and presentation changes, as they're where some of my most fundamental praises and criticisms of the game lie. For praise, the sound design in this game is really good. It has some excellent Japanese VA and music that really helps set a good, heavy atmosphere. Even playing it on a handheld screen, I sometimes was getting so worked up that I had to play with the light on to help calm me down (granted I'm a bit of a horror game lightweight) XD. Playing with headphones also helps a lot, as the game does a lot with its stereo sound (like voices/noises coming from L and R speakers or travelling from one to the other) that is almost impossible to appreciate with the built-in speakers on the PSP or Vita. For criticism, the game has an obsession with sexualization and torture porn that I found really soured the experience. The sexualization is largely found in the first two chapters, but the most subtle stuff is always there. The way the girls' breasts are drawn in really unnatural ways to accentuate them, the panty shots, the really crude language around sexuality from one character in particular (about whom I'll address later). It's all around minors who are stated to not be 18, and maybe it's just because I teach, but I found that aspect of the game absolutely revolting. It's far from the most gratuitous sexualized content out there for anime or horror, but it's something I have zero tolerance for. The torture-porn and gore stuff is also largely centered on the female characters, as the male characters in the story have a small fraction of the illustrated stills meant to show off particularly interesting scenes. The way the game really emphasizes both the girls' sexuality and the gruesome ways they die is something I can really only describe as perverse, and it's something I was never not uncomfortable with as I played the game. It also extends beyond just the moments its definitely in, as the game is so front-loaded with the worst offenders of the sexual content that it colors the rest of the game's scenes with well-deserved cynicism. It makes anything the game does that could be considered sexual very difficult to give the benefit of the doubt, as it all starts falling easily under that larger umbrella of sexualized fan service, and the better aspects of the game's writing suffer for it. The sexualized content is just a part of the overall experience, but it's one that definitely brings down the quality of the whole work in a noticeable way. Next, let's look at the expanded cast. The expanded main cast consists of the teacher character, Ms. Yui, as well as Mayu, Morishige (Mayu's friend), and Seiko (the closeted gay best friend of one of the 2 original main female characters, Naomi). Also new here are a series of students from other schools who were sucked in to the pocket dimension(s) recently as well. Ms. Yui, Mayu, and Morishige are incredibly shallow characters and almost entirely pointless additions to the story, and the overall plot and themes would barely change if they weren't present. They only really serve to bloat out the story, slow down the pacing even more, and have a horrible death that is just one more thing for the original cast of 5 to care about dramatically for a little while until the main plot starts properly again. Seiko is one of the most egregious additions in this fashion, as she is one of the main recipients of the game's earlier moments of sexualized and torture-y content. She speaks very crassly in the English localization, and while that does include sexual topics, it especially includes sexual language and flirting with her crush. The game allllmost comes close to analyzing the dynamic between her suppressed feelings for her crush and how to reconcile that with her suicide, but it never comes nearly close enough to make anything meaningful of it. At the end of the day, Seiko feels far more like a tool to try and give Naomi some pathos who the writers decided to make gay to get some extra exploitation out of the game's more graphic moments, and it's one of the aspects of the game's writing I have the most trouble giving any kind of pass to. By contrast, the addition of the students from other schools actually adds some of the best horror scenes in the game. These students fall into two main groups: the paranormal investigators, and the sadist. The paranormal investigators serve to add some mystery to the story, but they just as often make the story seem illogical and confused, so I give them more of a neutral addition. The sadist is brilliant bit of horror with the way they're introduced and how they slowly reveal their true nature. While they don't actually contribute that much to the overall plot of the story aside from kinda helping the main character they do meet grow and be braver, the dynamic posed by their incredible strength vs. the vulnerability of the main cast member they interact with makes for some really tense good scenes that are by far the best action sequences in the game. While I do think on the whole the new additions to the cast are a net-negative for the game, it would be a lie to say that I don't believe any of the new cast is of any value at all. Third, let's look at the last sorta element of the reboot's changes via the localization (as the original never had one). As someone who knows a fair bit of Japanese, I was able to pick up on a lot of the original Japanese script of the game via the VA. Although as someone who has taken classes on translation, I do have to admit that a decent amount of my criticism of the localization of the game comes down to stylistic differences. A lot of the English script is dedicated to explaining details that don't need to be explained, and it's a compounding issue. It's the equivalent of changing "be careful" to "don't touch that", but it's a compounding issue. These kinds of elaborations can at times make change how the tone of conversations is maintained (or not maintained, as is so often the case), and can at times make characters' actions seem contradictory to their actions because something that was supposed to be ambiguous was made explicit. What isn't so much of a stylistic choice relates back once again to the sexual content of the game, particularly Seiko (the gay character). The vulgarity and wackiness in how she says it is REALLY pumped up for the English localization. I said earlier that the game comes almost close to dealing with meaningful issues between her and Naomi because the Japanese version specifically handles their relationship with more subtlety and like they're actually having conversations where one is holding back some element of their emotions. Seiko's dialogue, especially later in the game, is so strange and silly compared to Naomi's reactions that it makes Naomi's whole character stop making sense and it really draws you out of the experience. It makes Seiko's already fairly exploitation-laden presence in the story that much more egregious in how she's used as a prop for fan service to the point where it's something I'd be ashamed to attach my name to if I'd been a part of that localization team. Aside from that more subjective stuff on the part of disagreeing with how embellishments and characterization changes of the original text are handled, some of the translations are down right just wrong. Really amateur-hour mistakes happen a shocking amount of times in how a common phrase is given a literal translation when the actual meaning is different and also makes a lot more sense (the most common example being "I miss you" 「会いたい」being translated literally as "I want to meet you"). This game comes off as if it was translated by someone who watched a ton of fan-subbed anime and then learned Japanese through textbooks while barely having knowledge of how Japanese is actually spoken, because some of these mistakes are things so simple that it's genuinely shocking to see them in an officially released product with otherwise such high production values. It's particularly surprising coming from XSEED, who usually put in a really solid effort when it comes to localization. The game's localization even adds a fairly heavy aspect of incest to a certain part of the game that is far less present (if at all) in the Japanese script in a way that totally changes certain aspects of the story for the English version of the game (again, in a way hard to give the game benefit of the doubt about because of just how much is aggressively sexualized. I can only guess that that was intentional on the part of the localization team, disgusting as it may be). Carrying on, the horror and storytelling This is another mixed bag largely brought about by the expanded cast. The first two chapters of the game. The pacing of the game is at times glacial because of how wordy characters can be as well as talking from characters who are super flat and don't ultimately matter. The first three chapters all set up, one after another, how a different section of the separated main cast is dealing with the realization that they're trapped in this hell dimension, and it feels so unnecessary and just drags the plot down. The later chapters get into a much more compelling mystery about how everything actually works and how our heroes can actually possibly make it out of this alive, but the heavy repetition of reintroductions to the setting and antagonist ghosts confuse the large amounts of exposition the game has. This doesn't help with how several of the characters look very similar and some others have quite similar names as there are so many characters but their names (especially first and last) aren't used often enough in their presence to get a good grasp on who they actually are (though the latter is more a localization issue than anything). The game does a fantastic job of introducing the story and characters in a way to make the game look totally incompetently written, when the back-half of the game shows that that isn't nearly as much the case. This game's script really needed another turn or two in the editing room, because it's a hot mess that takes some dedicated effort to figure out, even if you're playing it all in one sitting (I did the first 3 chapters in one day). The game has two endings that'll let you see the credits, and they're both fairly satisfying in their own way. You have one that's more of a "the curse continues" in an ironic way that feels much more in-line with Japanese horror, and another that's more of a happy ending (that at least I was happy to see in the game). Compelling character relationships, intrigue, and suspenseful horror are all there. The game seems to go out of its way to make you trudge through unnecessary garbage to get to it though. Finally, the mechanic and design elements of the game as an adventure game. A lot of the game's design problems relate to the glacial pacing of the script mentioned earlier, but certainly not all. For one, for a game with some fairly long cutscenes, dialogue is unskippable. You HAVE to button mash to get through them, and that came off as a bit of a silly oversight to me for a game that came out in 2006 and was then ported in 2010. Second, the game's signposting is pretty awful at times, and you can be left wandering around the school trying to figure out where to go. Especially when the proper progression endings to the first few chapters are related to "doing all the things", some of which are easily missed if you aren't paying attention, it can be very frustrating to go through a long cutscene AGAIN just to realize that you in fact missed the important thing and need to do this whole thing all over yet again. This is further compounded by the terrible action sequences which involve maneuvering around NPCs in the map who will instantly game over you if they touch you which is front-loaded to hell, especially in chapter 2. For the record, the one extra chapter I played was literally all about action scenes like this, which is why I decided to never touch any of the other ones. It makes navigating the maps really irritating, and the action sequences are often so annoying and frustrating more than actually difficult that the game suffers for their inclusion far more than it gains from them. The game would've been far better off as a puzzle-based horror experience (as some chapters very nearly entirely are), or as just a straight up VN with no RPG-style walking around stuff. Verdict: Not Recommended. This game as a whole is different than the sum of its parts, but that whole is dragged down by the worst actors. While there are good horror elements to be found here and a story with some genuinely interesting twists and turns, the work you have to put in to get to them is frustrating more often than it's fun (especially in the game's front half with how front-loaded with bad content it is). The sexualization of minors is the biggest offender here. If you aged up the cast, this would probably be a "hesitantly recommended" entry, but that last aspect kills any possibility of me recommending this in good faith. I can certainly see why some people who are less bothered with the sexual aspects of the game genuinely do enjoy the horror and mystery parts, and perhaps what I've described here sounds even sounds like something you could enjoy yourself. But for me, it was an experience where the good was far too tainted to be worth trying to salvage. |
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