I finally got back to finishing this game and instantly remember my issues and why I hadn't come back to it in so long! The game is a horror where the characters get transported from their school to a deserted and falling apart school filled with ghosts, curses and the dead bodies of children of different kinds of ages.

The game is split up into different chapters and the characters are also split up into different areas of the school, completely cut-off from one another and at the mercy of these malicious spirits.

The story and writing I feel are done very well, though it feels like it's more censored than what I imagined when I heard about this game so often and so many visuals were missing compared to what I had expected to see. Still, it ends up achieving the rule "Sometimes, less is more" where even if you don't see the scene playing out, the description and sound effects are enough to make you conjure up images that could potentially be more disturbing that what the artists could achieve.

That said, this title has some pretty heavy flaws that I'll detail below:

-No Sprinting! (You have no ability to speed up your movement, which means if you're stuck, you can't run through all the places you've been previously but just walk slowly instead.)

- No Cuts! (If you attempt to get this game and you finish a chapter, even an alternate ending, you are forced to endure the credits and as the game refuses to run in the background you can't even mess around on YouTube to waste the spare time. Even if you've seen it once before, there's no skipping it!)

This was a difficult game to review, but I did genuinely enough it and getting all the ending to get a different angle up on the situation.

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.

I share a last name with Naomi. That's pretty cool isn't it?

Anyway, this is kind of like the grandfather of RPGMaker Horror Games. It didn't age too well but the horror element is definitely there. A lot of just "what the fuck am I supposed to do" moments really bring the game down for me.

Also the incest thing. Why did they do that. No fucking reason.

Corpse Party is responsible for introducing so many people to the world of RPG Maker and how it can be utilized in the creation of horror games. I can only imagine the amount of creators inspired, directly and indirectly, by this game to create their own horror games in the engine, and I think that’s a great thing. That is where Corpse Party’s merit as a game and a work of art ends.

For a survival horror game, Corpse Party has absolutely nothing to fear. While the abandoned, falling apart school might create a decent enough atmosphere, and the sound design is pretty effective, the vast majority of the game’s horror relies on shock and the repulsive: the corpses of dead children littered throughout hallways, buckets of maggots, literal piles of gore, but the threats that are actually within the school are comparatively pathetic. The few chase scenes here are genuinely hilarious, with virtually every enemy crawling at a snail’s pace while just yelling the character’s name. Actually, a lot of the horror is outright hilarious. There’s a scene in chapter 4 of a man throwing himself off of a roof repeatedly in the goofiest way possible, which had me cackling. Nothing to actually fear though, and the unintentional comedy isn’t frequent or good enough to turn this into “so bad it’s good”.

Any gameplay is an absolute chore. Most of the game is spent wandering aimlessly around the school’s hallways, with (again) no threats to speak of, and little direction to go off of. The school itself is far too big to warrant this directionless feeling, so it’s hard not to just rely on a guide while playing, just to get through these sections as quickly as possible. I’ve already spoken about the pathetic chase scenes, but there are also “puzzles” I haven’t mentioned yet, the highlights of which include following a ghost’s movements Simon Says style, saving someone from drowning by going to the exact tile the game tells you to go to, or picking up a teleporting item by having one character go to one half of the classroom, while another character goes to the other half, something the creators were so proud of that they repeated it like three or four times. Nothing here involves any sort of thinking beyond memorization, and it, again, leads to a lack of any horror, as the game just feels like an aimless haunted house.

Plot and characterization are just a big pile of nothing as well. The plot isn’t offensively bad, but pretty much any other Japanese curse story you can think of does everything here, except probably better. At least you can count on those stories having more interesting characters. I love video game stories featuring revolving protagonists, so I was initially excited to see where things would go, but all of these characters feel like they were just pulled from a mediocre Weekly Shonen Jump manga. As of my writing of this review, I’ve reached the final save point of the game, but haven’t actually finished it, so I will update things if the ending changes my mind (update: it didn’t), but for all of the mediocre gameplay I’ve experienced in so many RPG Maker games, at least those have interesting set ups, characters, and/or theming. Corpse Party is nothing.

To be honest, this is probably the type of game I would’ve loved if I played it as a teenager (I still have a soft spot for Misao, for example, which is basically a bootleg version of this game), but I can’t help but feel like Corpse Party is worthless in 2023. With the tropey characters featuring nothing to make them stand out, the unintentional comedy of the horror, and little details like the panty shots within otherwise serious scenes, Corpse Party’s standout feature is that it feels like a parody of itself. If you want a great Japanese survival horror game revolving around ghosts and a curse, check out Fatal Frame II. Actually, just check out Ao Oni, The Witch’s House, Utaho no Tatari, or even Misao, as these games are stronger indicators of the originality that comes out of RPG Maker (they’re also free, unlike this one). For all of the talk around Corpse Party, including its legacy and its being milked by larger companies over the years, I don’t see this game get recommended anymore as an actual video game, while I still see so many other RPG Maker horror games getting praise to this day. Playing it, it’s easy to see why, and while it might be interesting for those who like these games to go back to it, to see where things figuratively got started, I honestly think it’s better if we just let Corpse Party remain in the past, and let its legacy live on.

Honestly, the nostalgia is strong with this one. When I was a teenager, I watched so many people play this on Youtube. Used to have a real soft spot for it, too.

I wouldn't say I enjoyed playing it myself for the first time. Sometimes, the game really doesn't do a great job of telling you what you're meant to be doing and it's frustratingly easy to get a bad ending.

The writing is mostly fine but not the plot not particularly scary or well constructed. This very much has that edgy, gory vibe that was essential to older pixel horror games. Younger me loved Corpse Party for that just but now, as an adult, I can't really bring myself to care much about it anymore.

i was into this game WAYYYY younger than i should have been but i never played it until pretty recently because i never had the hardware for it. got it on steam. here’s what i have to say:
- if you’re not really a horror guy and you get scared easily (like myself! i do!!) i’d say this is more tame on the horror scale. even if the atmosphere is tense and there are odd sounds and the music cuts out and you’re scared shitless you’ll generally know when something is actually out to get you. like there are some chase scenes but they are NOT hard because your pursuers walk at half your speed.
- unfortunately if you can’t handle blood and gore this is not the game for you. the gore is everywhere. it’s actually worse in the pixel overworld than the CGs a lot of the time? you also get a lot of gross squelching sounds.
- but at least the game looks good? i think it holds up for being like 10 years old. the pixel sprites were my personal favorite part. the music is also pretty good, especially the vocal tracks sung by some of the voice actors :)
- the gameplay itself is like a walking around simulator. you will get lost and wander around aimlessly a lot. it’s not that fun after a while even if you get cool flavor text, so there’s no shame in using a guide! i relied on those a lot, especially when searching for wrong ends.
- there are a LOT of wrong ends and then the occasional odd ducks counted as “extra ends”. not all wrong ends are created equal because some of them get a lot more love than others but a lot of them have good voice acting and atmosphere.
- the voice acting in general is pretty top-notch! they have a lot of all-stars that you can recognize from various other games and anime. they also used dummy mics so headphones are recommended for the full 8d experience or whatever. for some reason in the extra chapters featuring ohkawa from byakudan his voice is mixed kinda weirdly so it’s hard to hear him but that is the only problem i had with the voice acting and his acting was fine it was just hard to hear him
- ok story. i think the story is fine. like as a standalone without considering retcons in future entries (especially the ever-controversial blood drive) it holds up pretty well.
- i do think there are some issues with the localization making a lot of dialogue sound more aggressive? at best it’s fluffed up with swears like fuck and at worst we have naho saying actual slurs. i don’t think this game was updated very much for its newer re-releases 😭
- the characters are pretty decent across the board. my favorites include yoshiki, yui and nana from musashigawa! even if some of them grate on you (like i personally could not gel with ayumi no matter how much i tried) i think you can generally tell that the stress they’re under brings out the worst in them. whether that worst is whiny or trigger-happy.
- i also quite liked a lot of the extra chapters for showing how the kisaragi kids got along before they got sucked in, as well as fleshing out people we didn’t see much of (if at all) in this game like the byakudan and musashigawa kids. my personal favorite was after effect, which was one of the two added for the steam/switch/ps4 release. unfortunately not all extra chapters are created equal either because on the other end of the spectrum we get the incest dimension and fart girl 2020’s misadventures in heavenly host
- so now is where i have to say it. kedwin and co. have a really obvious thing for underage girls in compromising situations. you will get panty shots. you will hear uncomfortable moaning. these are at their worst with yuka, who spends half the game needing to pee and also has an incestuous crush on her older brother. There’s a reason nobody likes Yuka.

overall corpse party is an interesting game because you go from experiencing some very profound and well-voice acted grief and bravery from kids in the face of adversity… to The Piss Dimension. if this game didn’t make me cry in the last scene it would be 2.5 stars.