Chaos;Head Noah is a visual novel with quite the history, from it kickstarting one of the best-selling visual novel franchises of all time whilst still being an underdog and not being released overseas for over a decade, and then when it released it was in a broken unreadable mess state that if it hadn't been for the team over at Committee of Zero it would've probably gotten us years for it to actually be able to read it without their professional grade translation. And all of that for a denpa science fiction heavy visual novel that in my opinion is just alright.

But, don't get me wrong. I do like Chaos;Head and I appreciate some things it does, I can't lie when I say there were some times when my jaw completely dropped at some of the most horror or gorier part of the story, some negative delusions, its surreal and philosophical nature too just really sets in the distinct tone of this visual novel that got really watered down in Steins;Gate for better or for worse, and the characters are pretty unique and cool (even though I wish there were more interactions amongst themselves instead of only with Takumi), sadly though sometimes it gets too pretentious with its themes of religion and stuff that really shows that this is pretty much just Neon Genesis Evangelion in the form of a visual novel with its tendency to be about a calamity, be psychological and somewhat erotic at some points as well as showcasing the inner turmoil and problems that confine our main protagonist from just "acting like a normal person".
Some people might hate Takumi Nishijō but you cannot deny that his showcase as a socially inept NEET chunibyo riddled with an anxiety disorder thats a byproduct of both constant self-isolation and growing up in internet culture, his unability to actually talk to other people firmly and just being paranoic as hell wherever he goes is pretty much real, he's an delusional idiot who speaks with anime girl figurines and in his head thinks he's better than anybody else, and it works so well when the story takes the turn of being chuni as hell, kind of like the delusions he imagines and then inserts himself into.

As for the rest of the cast, although I wish some of them had more interactions with themselves or we saw more people in general instead of the world revolving around the same 6 people or so, their routes sometimes really make you care more for them than what you'd usually be if you only read the common route, and that's good although it feels like the bunch of them are just a lot of added backstories, and they can heavily depend on if you truly care about any of the characters in the work.

I'm both not capable and not knowingly enough to talk about the psychological aspect of the work in-depth, as I am not really in the know for any of those topics and the sci-fi concepts really are just evil corpo wants to take over the world deceiving everyone's brains via 5G electromagnetic waves (or some bullshit like that) and then it all just goes back to Takumi having to do everything he does for X or Y motive and then it ends and happy ending. But it's a bit of a brain fuck, they don't hold back for most of these scenes and it's crucial that you pay attention to the distinct themes and concepts that are will be later referenced in next works, and honestly if you don't mind any of this it will not strike as bad, sometimes it can get a little bit boring as they talk in verbose, though.

Now, there's nothing exceedingly wrong with the visual novel. More like a bunch of little things piled up, but I feel like Chaos;Head's worst failure is its exposure. It's very clearly supposed to be a thrilling slow burn of a story, and maybe I am just really bad at reading (After all, I poured 95 hours reading this) but damn is the story padded out with a lot of nothingness very earlier on, and you can tell this when they're still introducing core concepts in later chapters instead of throwing them at you as the story progresses, or keeping them in the heroine routes so they're somewhat of a resource you learn later on to continue on with the true ending of it. But, a lot of it is introduced midway through a very long and oftentimes boring common route, this is most likely the case because the original Chaos;Head just consisted of its common route and endings, but I feel like for its revision they should've stopped the kinetic novel route and actually change up the beats of the story somewhat to actually make those heroine routes be sustainable enough to not feel bored as hell when reading through them (such was my case, but this can definitely be attributed to the fact that you need to skip through the entire game a good 6 times before locking into the routes themselves). Also the PC port was completely shafted out of all the cool effects the console versions had, so every dynamic part that would make you more immersed, such as the Delusion Trigger's static or the immersive sound of parts like Phantasm's concert was pretty much broken, some of it got salvaged by the Overhaul Patch but it's very clear that the bar was in hell.

Gotta admit, in some parts this kinda hit home hard and I'm not proud of that. We gotta do better Takumibros...