This review contains spoilers
Since every chapter is on this site individually, I may as well review them one by one as I play them. I'll start by noting that I am, in fact, playing these in Japanese, and frankly I'm pretty shit at Japanese. I can make it through Ace Attorney games without much issue and with a very high degree of comprehension, but that's because a) I've played them in the past and b) they're much simpler on the writing side, specialized legal jargon aside. (Seriously, from this episode alone I've mined like 500 vocab words, and I'm sure I could have mined another 200 or so that I chose not to mine.) So take this with a massive grain of salt.
That being said, if I were reading this in English, I probably wouldn't have made it through the first 30 minutes. That's not because of the pace -- this game is slow as anything I've ever played, which I'll return to later -- but because of the writing style. I clicked over to the English translation every once in a while to make sure that I wasn't egregiously off-track with my understanding of what was going on (I wasn't, thank god) and every single time I did, the god-awful stylization made me want to tear my eyes out. I'm sure some people find it charming, but it was truly painful.
I can't say much about the quality of prose in a language I'm still very much learning, but I can definitely speak to the plot, pace, and characters. The plot of this game is good as fuck, once it starts to be real. There is a ton of time in the early game where almost nothing happens apart from children doing children things and living a normal life. I think the game justifies this very well with the moments of meaning slowly sprinkled in throughout the first several chapters, and each of the tiny little plot teases was very impactful for it. That being said, I feel like the time could have been used better -- the characters are pretty one-note, and after an interaction or two you know everything there is to know about them. I think the game is really aware of this, too, as after a few chapters it starts omitting a lot of the everyday stuff to just hit you with the key points.
Once the game gets going? Incredible for a few chapters. The festival had some of the best atmosphere in any VN I've read, and the next couple chapters were very tense and had me on the edge of my seat. Unfortunately, the encounters end up being very same-y, repetitive, and frankly stretched my belief further than I'm willing to extend it (as far as the behavior of non-possessed humans goes, specifically) and so the game really loses its spark towards the end. By the final chapter I was really wishing I could read as fast as I can in English so I could just be done with the episode already.
I want to say that the mystery was good in this episode, and maybe later on I will find out that it is. But for now, I feel like I have no fucking clue what's going on apart from some vague thing about the village being cursed (I did actually pick up that the possessed Mion and Rena specifically knew when people left or entered the village, which I was proud about when that was mentioned later on) and, er, everyone dying? Okay, in fairness, that's an exaggeration. I get the whole "there are three possible theories" thing that the game was going for with possession vs conspiracy vs delusion, and I'm almost certain that the game telling us those are the three options means it will be something completely different revealed later on. Of the three, I'd certainly lean towards the former with a bias to the "well-technically-it's-not-possession-it's-weird-medical-technology-or-something-that-lets-us-brainwash-people" school of Professor Layton-style bullshit. Which I hope I'm wrong about, because Professor Layton is campy enough to get away with it excellently, and this game decidedly is not.
I guess now's a good time to say that I'm going in, like, 98% blind on this -- I have a number of friends who are really big fans of this game series, so over the course of years of discussions that I didn't pay attention to, I know that somehow there's something like a time loop involved, and I was really expecting that to be set up towards the end of this episode. As it stands, it wasn't -- instead, everyone fucking dies, the end. Which is honestly cool as hell, but I don't get what is left to read? Like, there's the obvious cliffhanger with Ooishi presumably having the vial and doing an investigation on his own, but somehow I doubt that's what happens next just based on the fact that all the chapters in my steam library have pictures of the main five kids as their cover art. What the fuck is up with that?
This all sounds like I'm being critical, I'm sure, but I'm not. I'm very confused and tentatively very excited about what is to come, and I hope it lives up to the high expectations that this chapter has set. It's clear there's some sort of superstructure to the way this series is going to work, I just have no clue what it is. As such, that makes it really hard to give this game a fair and proper rating, so I fully reserve the right to come back and completely change it later based on whether I think it does its job in the overall scheme of the game well.
Actually, you know what, I lied earlier when saying that I can't evaluate the prose quality. I definitely can on one specific point: repetition. Holy fuck. I do not need to read Keiichi saying the same line four times in different ways and then thirty seconds later doing it again and then next chapter thinking back to the same line four times in different ways and then summarizing the same line four times in different ways by saying it in four more different ways and JESUS CHRIST unless this game gives me a very, very good justification for why it's doing this, I am just going to assume it's poorly written low-quality filler. Great for language learning, though.
Anyways, all said and done, this game feels like it has left me with a ton of questions, and I have a feeling they aren't going to be answered any time soon. It has an excellent tense atmosphere for half the game, it rewards you for making it through for a handful of chapters, and then becomes a slog. It stands to be seen whether future episodes can justify some of the contrivances in this episode well enough to make it really good, but even as a standalone work, I'm fairly happy with this. Would tentatively recommend.
That being said, if I were reading this in English, I probably wouldn't have made it through the first 30 minutes. That's not because of the pace -- this game is slow as anything I've ever played, which I'll return to later -- but because of the writing style. I clicked over to the English translation every once in a while to make sure that I wasn't egregiously off-track with my understanding of what was going on (I wasn't, thank god) and every single time I did, the god-awful stylization made me want to tear my eyes out. I'm sure some people find it charming, but it was truly painful.
I can't say much about the quality of prose in a language I'm still very much learning, but I can definitely speak to the plot, pace, and characters. The plot of this game is good as fuck, once it starts to be real. There is a ton of time in the early game where almost nothing happens apart from children doing children things and living a normal life. I think the game justifies this very well with the moments of meaning slowly sprinkled in throughout the first several chapters, and each of the tiny little plot teases was very impactful for it. That being said, I feel like the time could have been used better -- the characters are pretty one-note, and after an interaction or two you know everything there is to know about them. I think the game is really aware of this, too, as after a few chapters it starts omitting a lot of the everyday stuff to just hit you with the key points.
Once the game gets going? Incredible for a few chapters. The festival had some of the best atmosphere in any VN I've read, and the next couple chapters were very tense and had me on the edge of my seat. Unfortunately, the encounters end up being very same-y, repetitive, and frankly stretched my belief further than I'm willing to extend it (as far as the behavior of non-possessed humans goes, specifically) and so the game really loses its spark towards the end. By the final chapter I was really wishing I could read as fast as I can in English so I could just be done with the episode already.
I want to say that the mystery was good in this episode, and maybe later on I will find out that it is. But for now, I feel like I have no fucking clue what's going on apart from some vague thing about the village being cursed (I did actually pick up that the possessed Mion and Rena specifically knew when people left or entered the village, which I was proud about when that was mentioned later on) and, er, everyone dying? Okay, in fairness, that's an exaggeration. I get the whole "there are three possible theories" thing that the game was going for with possession vs conspiracy vs delusion, and I'm almost certain that the game telling us those are the three options means it will be something completely different revealed later on. Of the three, I'd certainly lean towards the former with a bias to the "well-technically-it's-not-possession-it's-weird-medical-technology-or-something-that-lets-us-brainwash-people" school of Professor Layton-style bullshit. Which I hope I'm wrong about, because Professor Layton is campy enough to get away with it excellently, and this game decidedly is not.
I guess now's a good time to say that I'm going in, like, 98% blind on this -- I have a number of friends who are really big fans of this game series, so over the course of years of discussions that I didn't pay attention to, I know that somehow there's something like a time loop involved, and I was really expecting that to be set up towards the end of this episode. As it stands, it wasn't -- instead, everyone fucking dies, the end. Which is honestly cool as hell, but I don't get what is left to read? Like, there's the obvious cliffhanger with Ooishi presumably having the vial and doing an investigation on his own, but somehow I doubt that's what happens next just based on the fact that all the chapters in my steam library have pictures of the main five kids as their cover art. What the fuck is up with that?
This all sounds like I'm being critical, I'm sure, but I'm not. I'm very confused and tentatively very excited about what is to come, and I hope it lives up to the high expectations that this chapter has set. It's clear there's some sort of superstructure to the way this series is going to work, I just have no clue what it is. As such, that makes it really hard to give this game a fair and proper rating, so I fully reserve the right to come back and completely change it later based on whether I think it does its job in the overall scheme of the game well.
Actually, you know what, I lied earlier when saying that I can't evaluate the prose quality. I definitely can on one specific point: repetition. Holy fuck. I do not need to read Keiichi saying the same line four times in different ways and then thirty seconds later doing it again and then next chapter thinking back to the same line four times in different ways and then summarizing the same line four times in different ways by saying it in four more different ways and JESUS CHRIST unless this game gives me a very, very good justification for why it's doing this, I am just going to assume it's poorly written low-quality filler. Great for language learning, though.
Anyways, all said and done, this game feels like it has left me with a ton of questions, and I have a feeling they aren't going to be answered any time soon. It has an excellent tense atmosphere for half the game, it rewards you for making it through for a handful of chapters, and then becomes a slog. It stands to be seen whether future episodes can justify some of the contrivances in this episode well enough to make it really good, but even as a standalone work, I'm fairly happy with this. Would tentatively recommend.