Paranormal Syndrome is a psychological horror game created with RPG Maker 2000 by Yuuyami no Kisetsu (Season of Twilight) and translated by Tosiaki7. The story involves around four paranormal syndromes, each of them representing a Japanese urban legend such as: Hitori Kakurenbo (One man hide and seek), Kune-kune, Saru Yume (Monkey dream), Noh Mask.
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Underrated RPG horror game. That paper thingy on the field was such a nightmare fuel.
As the RPG Maker horror game bug bites me again, it feels like I keep falling deeper and deeper into some rabbit hole not meant for humans. The steps taken to make this game boot up were bizarre in a way I've never experienced before. RPG Maker games all have a standardized Runtime Package used for the graphics included with the engine, and most games simply just include the RTP within their files. Yet, you can also just have it be downloaded on the computer and every game on that version of RPG Maker could theoretically just reference that one set of files. Paranormal Syndrome goes for it--and hey its file size is uh. Well. Not that much smaller than its contemporaries. Oh well! All I need to do is go deep into Windows settings to change my PC's locale to Japan, download the Japanese RPG Maker 2000 RTP (but NOT from the dead link the translator includes in the near-decade-old tumblr post of the game's translation), install it, download the game, and then it is playable! Cool! Now I just press F4 to make the game full screen and we are ready to pl- the game crashed.
With all this setup and having to play the game in a 480p window that doesn't even take up a fourth of my monitor's screen, was it all worth it??? Yeah I guess so. It's fine.
The enticement for me here was each chapter of the game being based off a different Japanese urban legend, being stuck in a location where a paranormal entity is trying to hunt you down. The game starts out very appropriately, with a cryptid vibe keeping up the tension while you're exploring each area and looking for a respite. In a way, all of the setup I had to undergo to play this and the small window added to the experience, almost like I was experiencing one of those creepypastas with a haunted videogame ooooo spooky.
Chapter 2 of the game is where the game plays into its strengths the best, where you're magically entrapped within a small village with a disappearing population. You find a man willing to help you get out, but then he peers far off into the distance and starts to go mad. When you peer out yourself, in the distance, upon a real life landscape photo, a white humanoid creature lurking: a youkai known as "kurokuro". It approaches you, chasing you down until you find a noise loud enough to make it dissolve, keeping you safe until your next encounter with it. Later in the chapter, after a phone call with your soon-to-be rescuers, you try to leave the house you're in when the tv with its power cut suddenly plays a rogue signal: a several minute long eulogy of all the townspeople disappeared that day by the youkai.
Those two events engrained themselves into my mind, showing the heights of what the game is capable of. I was genuinely creeped out by it! Unfortunately, its not able to keep this up for the rest of the experience, where it slowly gets too indulgent in its gameplay. It's all standard RPG Maker Horror Game Gameplay(TM), with exploration focused lock-and-key puzzles, and it largely gets the job done. The game LOVES it's chase sequences, surprising you with one as you walk into a room, playing almost comedically intense music as you scramble for an item to either hide or fend them off. Again, it gets the job done, but in the later chapters both of these elements of gameplay are inflated onto much larger, very same-y maps with entities that can require finding multiple objects in one chase sequence to fend them off. It's not actually that fun to be meticulously checking rooms when you suddenly are chased to the other side of the map and don't really remember the route to get back to the room you were checking. Combined with a general lack of guidance, I broke down a bit over halfway through the game and used a kinda shitty guide made by the game's translator--as far as I could tell the only one that exists--to get me through to the end.
Another thing, the game's writing has a fairly stilted feeling to it, loaded with stilted dialogue that was difficult to read at times. I'm not sure if this comes down to the initial writing, or an amateurish translator, but considering that the blog post the translator released implied they were in high school at the time... sounds like it was the later! It was never unreadably bad, and I'm not going to go off too hard on the work of a high schooler over a decade ago, but it did make me appreciate vgperson's translation work just a bit more!
Despite all these issues, I still come out of the game feeling more positive that not. What works in it works really well, and underlying all of it is a neat little story with a protagonist that undergoes an endearing sense of growth throughout. It's not anything exceptionally good, nothing anybody needs to go out of their way to experience, nor is it good enough for me to try out its two sequels. But ultimately, I'm glad to have given it a try! There's something profoundly special about pulling an incredibly obscure media out of the void, something nobody else has ever heard of, and finding something one person put a lot of heart into. A gift directly to me that I will be sure to cherish, warts and all.
With all this setup and having to play the game in a 480p window that doesn't even take up a fourth of my monitor's screen, was it all worth it??? Yeah I guess so. It's fine.
The enticement for me here was each chapter of the game being based off a different Japanese urban legend, being stuck in a location where a paranormal entity is trying to hunt you down. The game starts out very appropriately, with a cryptid vibe keeping up the tension while you're exploring each area and looking for a respite. In a way, all of the setup I had to undergo to play this and the small window added to the experience, almost like I was experiencing one of those creepypastas with a haunted videogame ooooo spooky.
Chapter 2 of the game is where the game plays into its strengths the best, where you're magically entrapped within a small village with a disappearing population. You find a man willing to help you get out, but then he peers far off into the distance and starts to go mad. When you peer out yourself, in the distance, upon a real life landscape photo, a white humanoid creature lurking: a youkai known as "kurokuro". It approaches you, chasing you down until you find a noise loud enough to make it dissolve, keeping you safe until your next encounter with it. Later in the chapter, after a phone call with your soon-to-be rescuers, you try to leave the house you're in when the tv with its power cut suddenly plays a rogue signal: a several minute long eulogy of all the townspeople disappeared that day by the youkai.
Those two events engrained themselves into my mind, showing the heights of what the game is capable of. I was genuinely creeped out by it! Unfortunately, its not able to keep this up for the rest of the experience, where it slowly gets too indulgent in its gameplay. It's all standard RPG Maker Horror Game Gameplay(TM), with exploration focused lock-and-key puzzles, and it largely gets the job done. The game LOVES it's chase sequences, surprising you with one as you walk into a room, playing almost comedically intense music as you scramble for an item to either hide or fend them off. Again, it gets the job done, but in the later chapters both of these elements of gameplay are inflated onto much larger, very same-y maps with entities that can require finding multiple objects in one chase sequence to fend them off. It's not actually that fun to be meticulously checking rooms when you suddenly are chased to the other side of the map and don't really remember the route to get back to the room you were checking. Combined with a general lack of guidance, I broke down a bit over halfway through the game and used a kinda shitty guide made by the game's translator--as far as I could tell the only one that exists--to get me through to the end.
Another thing, the game's writing has a fairly stilted feeling to it, loaded with stilted dialogue that was difficult to read at times. I'm not sure if this comes down to the initial writing, or an amateurish translator, but considering that the blog post the translator released implied they were in high school at the time... sounds like it was the later! It was never unreadably bad, and I'm not going to go off too hard on the work of a high schooler over a decade ago, but it did make me appreciate vgperson's translation work just a bit more!
Despite all these issues, I still come out of the game feeling more positive that not. What works in it works really well, and underlying all of it is a neat little story with a protagonist that undergoes an endearing sense of growth throughout. It's not anything exceptionally good, nothing anybody needs to go out of their way to experience, nor is it good enough for me to try out its two sequels. But ultimately, I'm glad to have given it a try! There's something profoundly special about pulling an incredibly obscure media out of the void, something nobody else has ever heard of, and finding something one person put a lot of heart into. A gift directly to me that I will be sure to cherish, warts and all.