Step aside World's End Club, there's a new sheriff in town.
Let me preface this by saying that I'm not surprised that I ended up really enjoying my time with Nirvana Initiative; I already enjoyed the original AI: Somnium Files three years ago and the sequel was probably my most anticipated release of this year. Having said that, I don't think it's anywhere close to perfect and it does carry a lot of the same quirks as the original, for better or for worse, so if you didn't like the original due to the absurdity of it all or the constant dumb jokes between characters as well as the often horny humor, this is not going to convince you and you should take everything I'm saying here with a grain of salt. But nevertheless, Nirvana Initiative feels like a much more polished successor, and in similar fashion to when I was playing the original, I could not put this down as soon as I was a few hours deep.
Two things stand out to me in particular as very noticeable improvements. The first is the improved gameplay; a lot more thought has been put into the interactive aspects of the game. The easiest aspect to explain here is the quick time events (QTEs) that make up the action sequences, and it's improved in a pretty simple fashion thanks to more rigorous inputs that require the joysticks, the letter buttons, and the triggers, sometimes in quick succession to add a bit more complexity when compared to the original. Also, Date's not the main protagonist anymore, so the porno mag gag is almost entirely absent! Huzzah! It's not perfect, because there are times where you have to watch a few minutes of cutscenes before they'll throw some required inputs at you if you get too complacent, but I'll take what I can get.
Somniums are improved a ton as well, thanks to better thought-out scenarios building upon the original formula. It's of a similar structure to the original, where you have to interact with items within the Somnium to get past mental locks and occasionally use Timies to limit the amount of time spent, but now the writers have elaborated upon the scenarios utilizing the same base structure by varying objectives and strategies involved. For instance, one Somnium is a straight parody of Pokemon Go, and requires you to find PokeStop lookalikes to "catch" characters from the game to defeat evil assassins and overlords. Another Somnium acts like a quiz show, and you have to correctly answer questions while figuring out the gimmicks on the fly to stay ahead of the opponent's score. And finally, there's a Somnium that takes some inspiration from Ace Attorney, in that you can present "evidence" in the form of what you know and have found out to force objects and characters to reveal their true nature. It's a huge improvement mechanically over the previous game's Somniums, which felt less like puzzles and more like trial and error with hopefully picking the correct choices with the correct Timies on hand while walking around mysterious landscapes with few, if any, knowledge or execution tests to be found. The Somniums are further aided by the addition of the Keys system, which by providing helpful descriptions, can help lead you to the correct choice/interaction by using up time here and there on "throwaway" observation interactions to better understand both the nature of the person whose Somnium you're in as well as make a more informed decision on how to progress. There's definitely a lot more depth and a lot less hassle here, and even though one could argue that there's still a degree of trial and error due to the need to collect Timies and waste negative Timies on minute throwaway interactions (since they force you to commit to an interaction with the time multiplier), you can even bypass this aspect entirely with Story mode Somnium difficulty if you choose to do so, a setting that I very much appreciated.
Speaking of detective game influence, Nirvana Initiative leans into the detective aspect a lot more than the original, thanks to its third major improved aspect of interaction: the VR segments. Throughout the story, the AI Balls will recreate the scenes of the crimes committed in a VR environment, and it's up to the protagonist to examine every bit of data as preserved through the three scans (the standard environment mode, X-ray mode, and Thermo mode) to dig up every related clue not easily detected by the naked eye. The cherry on top here is that it's played straight and typical of what you'd expect from the series, in the form of an exaggerated "reenactment" demanded by the AI-Balls that let you put your knowledge to the test while rewarding that newfound knowledge with more silly shenanigans as a satirical interpretation for how the crime played out. Seriously though, Ryuki's shrilly caricature of the voice of the victim while constantly protesting the snarky comments of the director kills me every time.
While I understand that the humor of the series is not everyone's cup of tea, there's definitely a part of me that just likes dumb dad jokes or over the top and batshit crazy plots and effects, and Nirvana Initiative had me grinning and chuckling throughout its runtime. The banter between Mizuki and Aiba as Mizuki attempts to assert herself as someone to be taken seriously or Aiba going crazy every time a bug got spotted in a houseplant or a fish got spotted in a pond, really helped uplift my spirits, especially in a murder mystery thriller, a genre that can often get pretty dark due to all the death involved. It also provided an incentive to constantly click on all the interactable objects of notability whenever I was in a new environment, just so I could get more dumb sofa jokes or flavor text of the whiteboard at the yakuza office with a totally unrelated "principle" that changed every time I visited. I get that the quirky humor can easily be written off as overused running gags and that there are definitely plenty of thinly veiled dirty jokes that might spoil the whole package, but ultimately, I came to really appreciate these light moments in an otherwise pretty dismal time of these characters' lives. And I'll give the writers the benefit of the doubt here; they're able to hold back the jokes when the going gets very rough and they just want you to focus exactly on understanding the harrowing plot details or talking with characters when they've let their guard down as to not take attention away from their intimate moments. Nirvana Initiative often doesn't take itself very seriously, but it's a more mature and aware product that knows when it's time to move on as well.
And speaking of awareness, that's the other main aspect that really stood out to me while playing Nirvana Initiative; the game is acutely aware that you are an active participant in all of this, and is not afraid to make itself known that it is aware of this. I'm not just talking about the fourth wall breaks that Uchikoshi's works are known for of course, that's to be expected at this point. Rather, the game draws you in by actively involving you with the central mystery, and not just by piquing your curiosity with a bunch of batshit crazy conspiracy theories, happenings, occult leanings, and so on. The game presents itself as a flowchart of related, sequential events, and oftentimes you will need to learn necessary information to progress forward through previously misunderstood locks that you once had no idea on how to approach (something that I very much appreciated as an organic way to both hide linearity while creating additional linkages between all the scattered and strange events of the game). And it's very good at testing your ability to maintain focus while keeping an eye on the bigger picture at hand, in a way that I don't think the original quite captured.
To put it another way: video games distinguish themselves from many other forms of traditional media by serving as an interactive form, and beyond that, a contest. While playing a video game, you're actively competing with something, whether that be another human/computer player or the game itself; the game would lose much of its meaning without another entity to interact with the work, and it's this inherent push & pull present in video games that marks the potential for games as a meaningful art form. When this idea was first presented to me by TotalBiscuit many years ago, I originally took it at face value as execution tests and knowledge tests... but now I want to expand upon that a bit more with this example. Nirvana Initiative is aware that you, as the player, handle a very specific role outside of just controlling the protagonist characters and interacting with the mechanics to progress the plot. It is constantly making its mark known that you are both an active participant and an observer, traversing the game's structure and environments while struggling to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical things that are going on in the in-game universe. And as a result, Nirvana Initiative is constantly fucking with your sense of perspective and perception. It throws every trick in the book at you, from execution & knowledge tests to keep you honest, to unreliable narrators and seemingly dangling plot threads, to subverting controls and manipulating the game's presentation while introducing new concepts here and there into the fold, and so on so forth. More realized than the original is this idea that the game has a mind of its own and knows that you want to solve the inherent mystery after getting invested, and it wants you to too... but not without a meaningful endeavor so you grasp every detail that is left in the shadows.
As a related side note, I found myself so invested at this point, that after the central "plot twist" was revealed, I tried to metagame back and scour the past events of the game to see if there were any gaping plot holes present as a result of the main reveal. Yet, after playing further with additional in-universe explanations and spending a bit more time analyzing the gritty details, I couldn't actually find any major plotholes, or at least no loose ends that didn't have some degree of a reasonable explanation attached. To go into further detail beyond what I have just written would be spoiling a crucial part of the experience, but I do have some draft notes regarding some of the more notable things contributing to the game's continuity that I'd be more than happy to discuss with others if prompted to do so. Needless to say, the game's attention to detail (both inside the narrative and outside in the meta-narrative) really impressed me.
Like I said before, I'm not going to pretend Nirvana Initiative is without its shortcomings; there's some dry characters here and there that could have their backstories and personalities expanded a bit (the relationships between a couple of the characters are some of the more egregious examples), there are some mechanical issues such as excessive downtime during QTEs or the trial and error of Timies, and the dumb running gags + seemingly pubescent one-liners are definitely going to drive away a lot of potential players. And that's not even mentioning some of the excess flavor mechanics like the optional Tamogachi pet minigame included for a few quick laughs and eyeballs to buy concept art and costumes, or the occasional technical issues like bugged character models or sudden frame dips when switching between characters in dialogue. But having said that, I'm more than happy to overlook almost all of this, because it just happened to strike the right flavor of what I'm looking for in the medium while improving upon the original in leaps and bounds. And even despite its dark and twisted plot or various layers of irony and fourth wall breaking, and the many other little details or irregularities I could point out, there's a certain earnestness to it all.
Without speaking too greatly on potential spoilers, there's a speech by Mizuki near the end of the game where she comforts a drunk by telling him that there's no need to be afraid of weakness, for it forces us to support each other and put aside our differences.. As she put it, with the cheesiness and triumphant vigor of any classic locker room speech (a perfect fit for this game, as it stands), "Humanity is rooted in weakness... to deny that is like denying humanity as a whole!"
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Let me preface this by saying that I'm not surprised that I ended up really enjoying my time with Nirvana Initiative; I already enjoyed the original AI: Somnium Files three years ago and the sequel was probably my most anticipated release of this year. Having said that, I don't think it's anywhere close to perfect and it does carry a lot of the same quirks as the original, for better or for worse, so if you didn't like the original due to the absurdity of it all or the constant dumb jokes between characters as well as the often horny humor, this is not going to convince you and you should take everything I'm saying here with a grain of salt. But nevertheless, Nirvana Initiative feels like a much more polished successor, and in similar fashion to when I was playing the original, I could not put this down as soon as I was a few hours deep.
Two things stand out to me in particular as very noticeable improvements. The first is the improved gameplay; a lot more thought has been put into the interactive aspects of the game. The easiest aspect to explain here is the quick time events (QTEs) that make up the action sequences, and it's improved in a pretty simple fashion thanks to more rigorous inputs that require the joysticks, the letter buttons, and the triggers, sometimes in quick succession to add a bit more complexity when compared to the original. Also, Date's not the main protagonist anymore, so the porno mag gag is almost entirely absent! Huzzah! It's not perfect, because there are times where you have to watch a few minutes of cutscenes before they'll throw some required inputs at you if you get too complacent, but I'll take what I can get.
Somniums are improved a ton as well, thanks to better thought-out scenarios building upon the original formula. It's of a similar structure to the original, where you have to interact with items within the Somnium to get past mental locks and occasionally use Timies to limit the amount of time spent, but now the writers have elaborated upon the scenarios utilizing the same base structure by varying objectives and strategies involved. For instance, one Somnium is a straight parody of Pokemon Go, and requires you to find PokeStop lookalikes to "catch" characters from the game to defeat evil assassins and overlords. Another Somnium acts like a quiz show, and you have to correctly answer questions while figuring out the gimmicks on the fly to stay ahead of the opponent's score. And finally, there's a Somnium that takes some inspiration from Ace Attorney, in that you can present "evidence" in the form of what you know and have found out to force objects and characters to reveal their true nature. It's a huge improvement mechanically over the previous game's Somniums, which felt less like puzzles and more like trial and error with hopefully picking the correct choices with the correct Timies on hand while walking around mysterious landscapes with few, if any, knowledge or execution tests to be found. The Somniums are further aided by the addition of the Keys system, which by providing helpful descriptions, can help lead you to the correct choice/interaction by using up time here and there on "throwaway" observation interactions to better understand both the nature of the person whose Somnium you're in as well as make a more informed decision on how to progress. There's definitely a lot more depth and a lot less hassle here, and even though one could argue that there's still a degree of trial and error due to the need to collect Timies and waste negative Timies on minute throwaway interactions (since they force you to commit to an interaction with the time multiplier), you can even bypass this aspect entirely with Story mode Somnium difficulty if you choose to do so, a setting that I very much appreciated.
Speaking of detective game influence, Nirvana Initiative leans into the detective aspect a lot more than the original, thanks to its third major improved aspect of interaction: the VR segments. Throughout the story, the AI Balls will recreate the scenes of the crimes committed in a VR environment, and it's up to the protagonist to examine every bit of data as preserved through the three scans (the standard environment mode, X-ray mode, and Thermo mode) to dig up every related clue not easily detected by the naked eye. The cherry on top here is that it's played straight and typical of what you'd expect from the series, in the form of an exaggerated "reenactment" demanded by the AI-Balls that let you put your knowledge to the test while rewarding that newfound knowledge with more silly shenanigans as a satirical interpretation for how the crime played out. Seriously though, Ryuki's shrilly caricature of the voice of the victim while constantly protesting the snarky comments of the director kills me every time.
While I understand that the humor of the series is not everyone's cup of tea, there's definitely a part of me that just likes dumb dad jokes or over the top and batshit crazy plots and effects, and Nirvana Initiative had me grinning and chuckling throughout its runtime. The banter between Mizuki and Aiba as Mizuki attempts to assert herself as someone to be taken seriously or Aiba going crazy every time a bug got spotted in a houseplant or a fish got spotted in a pond, really helped uplift my spirits, especially in a murder mystery thriller, a genre that can often get pretty dark due to all the death involved. It also provided an incentive to constantly click on all the interactable objects of notability whenever I was in a new environment, just so I could get more dumb sofa jokes or flavor text of the whiteboard at the yakuza office with a totally unrelated "principle" that changed every time I visited. I get that the quirky humor can easily be written off as overused running gags and that there are definitely plenty of thinly veiled dirty jokes that might spoil the whole package, but ultimately, I came to really appreciate these light moments in an otherwise pretty dismal time of these characters' lives. And I'll give the writers the benefit of the doubt here; they're able to hold back the jokes when the going gets very rough and they just want you to focus exactly on understanding the harrowing plot details or talking with characters when they've let their guard down as to not take attention away from their intimate moments. Nirvana Initiative often doesn't take itself very seriously, but it's a more mature and aware product that knows when it's time to move on as well.
And speaking of awareness, that's the other main aspect that really stood out to me while playing Nirvana Initiative; the game is acutely aware that you are an active participant in all of this, and is not afraid to make itself known that it is aware of this. I'm not just talking about the fourth wall breaks that Uchikoshi's works are known for of course, that's to be expected at this point. Rather, the game draws you in by actively involving you with the central mystery, and not just by piquing your curiosity with a bunch of batshit crazy conspiracy theories, happenings, occult leanings, and so on. The game presents itself as a flowchart of related, sequential events, and oftentimes you will need to learn necessary information to progress forward through previously misunderstood locks that you once had no idea on how to approach (something that I very much appreciated as an organic way to both hide linearity while creating additional linkages between all the scattered and strange events of the game). And it's very good at testing your ability to maintain focus while keeping an eye on the bigger picture at hand, in a way that I don't think the original quite captured.
To put it another way: video games distinguish themselves from many other forms of traditional media by serving as an interactive form, and beyond that, a contest. While playing a video game, you're actively competing with something, whether that be another human/computer player or the game itself; the game would lose much of its meaning without another entity to interact with the work, and it's this inherent push & pull present in video games that marks the potential for games as a meaningful art form. When this idea was first presented to me by TotalBiscuit many years ago, I originally took it at face value as execution tests and knowledge tests... but now I want to expand upon that a bit more with this example. Nirvana Initiative is aware that you, as the player, handle a very specific role outside of just controlling the protagonist characters and interacting with the mechanics to progress the plot. It is constantly making its mark known that you are both an active participant and an observer, traversing the game's structure and environments while struggling to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical things that are going on in the in-game universe. And as a result, Nirvana Initiative is constantly fucking with your sense of perspective and perception. It throws every trick in the book at you, from execution & knowledge tests to keep you honest, to unreliable narrators and seemingly dangling plot threads, to subverting controls and manipulating the game's presentation while introducing new concepts here and there into the fold, and so on so forth. More realized than the original is this idea that the game has a mind of its own and knows that you want to solve the inherent mystery after getting invested, and it wants you to too... but not without a meaningful endeavor so you grasp every detail that is left in the shadows.
As a related side note, I found myself so invested at this point, that after the central "plot twist" was revealed, I tried to metagame back and scour the past events of the game to see if there were any gaping plot holes present as a result of the main reveal. Yet, after playing further with additional in-universe explanations and spending a bit more time analyzing the gritty details, I couldn't actually find any major plotholes, or at least no loose ends that didn't have some degree of a reasonable explanation attached. To go into further detail beyond what I have just written would be spoiling a crucial part of the experience, but I do have some draft notes regarding some of the more notable things contributing to the game's continuity that I'd be more than happy to discuss with others if prompted to do so. Needless to say, the game's attention to detail (both inside the narrative and outside in the meta-narrative) really impressed me.
Like I said before, I'm not going to pretend Nirvana Initiative is without its shortcomings; there's some dry characters here and there that could have their backstories and personalities expanded a bit (the relationships between a couple of the characters are some of the more egregious examples), there are some mechanical issues such as excessive downtime during QTEs or the trial and error of Timies, and the dumb running gags + seemingly pubescent one-liners are definitely going to drive away a lot of potential players. And that's not even mentioning some of the excess flavor mechanics like the optional Tamogachi pet minigame included for a few quick laughs and eyeballs to buy concept art and costumes, or the occasional technical issues like bugged character models or sudden frame dips when switching between characters in dialogue. But having said that, I'm more than happy to overlook almost all of this, because it just happened to strike the right flavor of what I'm looking for in the medium while improving upon the original in leaps and bounds. And even despite its dark and twisted plot or various layers of irony and fourth wall breaking, and the many other little details or irregularities I could point out, there's a certain earnestness to it all.
Without speaking too greatly on potential spoilers, there's a speech by Mizuki near the end of the game where she comforts a drunk by telling him that there's no need to be afraid of weakness, for it forces us to support each other and put aside our differences.. As she put it, with the cheesiness and triumphant vigor of any classic locker room speech (a perfect fit for this game, as it stands), "Humanity is rooted in weakness... to deny that is like denying humanity as a whole!"
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
2 Comments
Thank you so much! I don't think the writing is out of this world necessarily, but looking back at it now, I'm surprised at how well all the minute details held up upon further examination. It would be easily to poke holes at the finer narrative threads, but ultimately a huge part of the series' appeal is how over the top and nonsensical everything appears to be, so I'm willing to let suspension of disbelief kick in for some of the more nebulous sections of the story.
cdmcgwire
1 year ago
This very much captures my thoughts on the game as well in more detail. Nice to hear some more people went back and did some more analysis of how the plot all fit together. I couldn't find any glaring issues either but it really is tricky keeping it all straight, so it was hard to definitively say if the writing was just that good or I was missing something.