This review contains spoilers
I will start this off, as per tradition for the amateur reviews, with a food analogy. Suppose you buy a cake. It has a fundamental level of biscuit, the cream layers, maybe the jam layers, and the toppings. When you go for a slice of cake, you’re experiencing the gestalt of all those layers coming together.
Sekimeiya is a huge slab of biscuit with barely anything on top type of cake.
The foundation is extremely solid. The web of causes and effects is intricate and convoluted, but everything that appears to not make sense eventually will, and it is possible to feasibly figure out parts of it as you go along, or at least make decent guesses on the nature of what’s happening. Some things aren’t covered within the story, but, if you want complete understanding of the setting and mechanics not immediately relevant to the plot, there are post-game blurbs that will cover even that.
Despite that, the VN gave me little to no other reason to care about anything that is happening. This is especially evident in the first three or so hours devoid of any intrigue or apparent motivations for anything to happen whatsoever, that even avid Sekimeiya fans admit is kind of bad.
It’s multiplied tenfold by how the story is presented as well, there are dry emotionless impenetrable walls of text even for the very minute details of the environment or the very surface level observations. Basically, imagine the slog of this review, but stretched over twenty to fifty hours of reading. It has gotten so unbearable for me that I, a million-word fanfic and trashy manga reader, have started skimming the text about halfway through.
The character writing is extremely weak – they all have exactly the same voice. Thankfully, the game has an option to colour the dialogue text, or it would have been nigh impossible to tell who’s speaking at the moment. The characters have some distinctive traits, for the most part pertaining to their motivations, but all of them speak in the same exact robotic monotone you will read in the narration text for the entirety of the game.
The art is solid but unremarkable. The character sprites are very unexpressive, and you’ll be staring at them for the vast majority of the game, as the splash arts are few and far between, maybe a dozen or so over the whole game.
The music is mostly good, though as far as I’m aware, almost none of it was actually written for the game, so there’s very little thematic/melodic cohesion between the tracks, though they do capture roughly the same vibe. No character themes or location themes or persistent motifs or anything of the sort.
I can recommend Sekimeiya to anyone who puts untangling the web of causes and effects above everything else in a mystery story, to the point they’re willing to forgive it being mediocre to lacking in every other area.
I can’t recommend Sekimeiya to anyone for whom that just isn’t enough to engage them in the mystery the story is presenting.
SOMEWHAT SPOILERY PART OF THE REVIEW STARTS HERE
I’ve said near the beginning of this review that the story makes complete sense in the end. Now, how it gets there is a whole another question.
The beginning (the first 3 hours or so) is, frankly, atrocious. You’re immediately thrown into the thick of it and assaulted with exposition dumps to the point I was suspecting some weird memory-wiping stuff going on and that I was supposed to notice how flimsy and unconvincing the main character’s reason was to be where he is. Upon the incident happening, none of the characters react like you would expect them to react and go off on the little exploring adventure with absolutely no apparent incentive to do so (and with no non-apparent incentive either for the half of the cast).
Even after the beginning, the game is riddled with extremely convenient coincidences and actions taken for the sole purpose of getting on with the story, especially on the part of the main trio of characters. The characters themselves continuously oscillate between being so stupid you start to wonder how on Earth do they not forget how to breathe and super logically flawless 1000 IQ computing machines with eidetic memory as soon as it’s required of them to move the plot along.
As a lesser aside, the setting is very weird. And I don’t mean the tower – why did it have to be Japan? This just comes off as a huge case of “weeaboo, Japanophile for you gaijins”, the developers aren’t Japanese and it’s not ever relevant to the plot in the slightest, so I have no idea why didn’t they just write about the culture they lived in for their whole life, which would surely have added to the liveliness of the descriptions. Anime style doesn’t really lock you into the Japanese setting, after all.
For a game apparently inspired by Umineko, it seems to have taken the exact wrong lesson out of it: there is no heart to the story at all, none of the characters have more than second order depth (first being the motivation, and the second being the motivation for their motivation), and about half of them don’t even have that in the first place. Those motivations make sense on the logical level (example: she is his friend and he wants to save her) but not on the emotional engagement level (same example: the only interaction between them we get to see for a while feels more like a post-grad get-together of people who weren’t even particularly great friends at school, and the future interactions aren’t very convincing either).
The characters have no interests or quirks of distinctive ways of speech or particular ways they react to events or any strong opinions on anything. The few inter-character relationships the game has are more claimant than apparent – friendship apparently just means asking “how are you” periodically and giving a hug once. All this makes it especially funny when the game claims to avoid a certain type of paradox because the cause for the event originated in the characters mind, but there is no character to the character so it just ends up a one step removed motivational deus ex machina.
Honestly, the more I’m writing this, the less impressive it feels that the story makes sense in the end. It’s really not that impressive to write an intricate web of causes and effects, when you don’t have to work with characters being actual characters – that’s just basic puzzle design. Still, the recommendation stays the same – if you love solving puzzles just for the sake of it, so much that you can forgive the rest of it being less than impressive, give it a go. Otherwise it just doesn’t have enough of the rest of it to keep you invested
Sekimeiya is a huge slab of biscuit with barely anything on top type of cake.
The foundation is extremely solid. The web of causes and effects is intricate and convoluted, but everything that appears to not make sense eventually will, and it is possible to feasibly figure out parts of it as you go along, or at least make decent guesses on the nature of what’s happening. Some things aren’t covered within the story, but, if you want complete understanding of the setting and mechanics not immediately relevant to the plot, there are post-game blurbs that will cover even that.
Despite that, the VN gave me little to no other reason to care about anything that is happening. This is especially evident in the first three or so hours devoid of any intrigue or apparent motivations for anything to happen whatsoever, that even avid Sekimeiya fans admit is kind of bad.
It’s multiplied tenfold by how the story is presented as well, there are dry emotionless impenetrable walls of text even for the very minute details of the environment or the very surface level observations. Basically, imagine the slog of this review, but stretched over twenty to fifty hours of reading. It has gotten so unbearable for me that I, a million-word fanfic and trashy manga reader, have started skimming the text about halfway through.
The character writing is extremely weak – they all have exactly the same voice. Thankfully, the game has an option to colour the dialogue text, or it would have been nigh impossible to tell who’s speaking at the moment. The characters have some distinctive traits, for the most part pertaining to their motivations, but all of them speak in the same exact robotic monotone you will read in the narration text for the entirety of the game.
The art is solid but unremarkable. The character sprites are very unexpressive, and you’ll be staring at them for the vast majority of the game, as the splash arts are few and far between, maybe a dozen or so over the whole game.
The music is mostly good, though as far as I’m aware, almost none of it was actually written for the game, so there’s very little thematic/melodic cohesion between the tracks, though they do capture roughly the same vibe. No character themes or location themes or persistent motifs or anything of the sort.
I can recommend Sekimeiya to anyone who puts untangling the web of causes and effects above everything else in a mystery story, to the point they’re willing to forgive it being mediocre to lacking in every other area.
I can’t recommend Sekimeiya to anyone for whom that just isn’t enough to engage them in the mystery the story is presenting.
SOMEWHAT SPOILERY PART OF THE REVIEW STARTS HERE
I’ve said near the beginning of this review that the story makes complete sense in the end. Now, how it gets there is a whole another question.
The beginning (the first 3 hours or so) is, frankly, atrocious. You’re immediately thrown into the thick of it and assaulted with exposition dumps to the point I was suspecting some weird memory-wiping stuff going on and that I was supposed to notice how flimsy and unconvincing the main character’s reason was to be where he is. Upon the incident happening, none of the characters react like you would expect them to react and go off on the little exploring adventure with absolutely no apparent incentive to do so (and with no non-apparent incentive either for the half of the cast).
Even after the beginning, the game is riddled with extremely convenient coincidences and actions taken for the sole purpose of getting on with the story, especially on the part of the main trio of characters. The characters themselves continuously oscillate between being so stupid you start to wonder how on Earth do they not forget how to breathe and super logically flawless 1000 IQ computing machines with eidetic memory as soon as it’s required of them to move the plot along.
As a lesser aside, the setting is very weird. And I don’t mean the tower – why did it have to be Japan? This just comes off as a huge case of “weeaboo, Japanophile for you gaijins”, the developers aren’t Japanese and it’s not ever relevant to the plot in the slightest, so I have no idea why didn’t they just write about the culture they lived in for their whole life, which would surely have added to the liveliness of the descriptions. Anime style doesn’t really lock you into the Japanese setting, after all.
For a game apparently inspired by Umineko, it seems to have taken the exact wrong lesson out of it: there is no heart to the story at all, none of the characters have more than second order depth (first being the motivation, and the second being the motivation for their motivation), and about half of them don’t even have that in the first place. Those motivations make sense on the logical level (example: she is his friend and he wants to save her) but not on the emotional engagement level (same example: the only interaction between them we get to see for a while feels more like a post-grad get-together of people who weren’t even particularly great friends at school, and the future interactions aren’t very convincing either).
The characters have no interests or quirks of distinctive ways of speech or particular ways they react to events or any strong opinions on anything. The few inter-character relationships the game has are more claimant than apparent – friendship apparently just means asking “how are you” periodically and giving a hug once. All this makes it especially funny when the game claims to avoid a certain type of paradox because the cause for the event originated in the characters mind, but there is no character to the character so it just ends up a one step removed motivational deus ex machina.
Honestly, the more I’m writing this, the less impressive it feels that the story makes sense in the end. It’s really not that impressive to write an intricate web of causes and effects, when you don’t have to work with characters being actual characters – that’s just basic puzzle design. Still, the recommendation stays the same – if you love solving puzzles just for the sake of it, so much that you can forgive the rest of it being less than impressive, give it a go. Otherwise it just doesn’t have enough of the rest of it to keep you invested