Quite possibly the biggest letdown I've had with a game in a long time. In regards to last year's games, while I do consider games like Soul Hackers 2 and Callisto Protocol to be worse overall, because those games are genuine dumpster fires, I have so much more disdain for Nirvana Initiative because of just how much worse it is than the original, how gargantuan of a letdown this game was to me, and how much it tarnishes the legacy of its predecessor. Every time I think about this God-forsaken game, the more I dislike it, so I'm writing this to finally get these thoughts out of my head and do things more productive with my life. AI: The Somnium Files is one of my favorite games of all time, one that I consider to be my favorite visual novel ever (out of the admittedly very few I have played) and one of the very few games I've played that I'd confidently consider a masterpiece. So, needless to say, my expectations for this one were pretty high. I wasn't expecting it to reach the same heights as the original, which, as you can guess based on the tone of this review, it obviously didn't; but it also went to much, much lower lows that I didn't even think were possible from a game with "Somnium Files" in the title.

Arguably the most divisive part of this game is its "big twist." If you already finished the game, you definitely know what I'm referring to, but for those who clicked the "Read Spoilers" button and don't care enough, or just flat-out don't remember, I'll catch you up to speed. The big mystery of Nirvana Initiative is that each of the murder victims has their body cut in half, directly down the middle, but here's the catch: one half appears in present day, taking place shortly after the events of the first game, while playing as Ryuki, a brand new character; the other half mysteriously resurfaces six years later, when you play as Mizuki, a very important character from the first game that has grown up since then. Most importantly, though, is that the halves from six years later show absolutely zero signs of decay. This crucial detail is the crux of Nirvana Initiative's mystery. A large part of the game is uncovering how this even happens, and using the clues you uncover to find your way to the killer. As you play, you try to figure out answers as to how this is possible: how can a body be cut in half, have one half disappear, only to resurface six years in the future with no decay at all? The game says there are no signs of freezing either, so that can't be the case.

Well, here's the answer: there's no mystery at all. It was just the game lying to you. Those other halves didn't appear six years later; the game just showed you the events of the game out of chronological order. The other halves of the bodies were actually discovered a couple hours after the first halves were. There was zero indication that this could possibly be the case, and it sure did throw me for a loop, and not in a good way. I hope I don't need to explain why this is such a lame twist, but I will anyway. So much buildup, so much digging is done to find out what's really going on, and all of it amounts to...that. All of that led to "Ope, sorry, we were just tricking you." This was the moment that my growing distaste for the game really set in. The twist is revealed in such an awful way, too. It's in a non-canon exposition dump cutscene, where you're playing as yourself as Mama recaps the plot and explains all the big cliffhangers from the end of each protagonist's route thus far, finally ending by dropping that "bombshell" of a twist. There we go, all caught up. Time to whine. Now, the game lying to you about the true nature of the mystery at hand isn't a bad thing in concept; season 4 of You on Netflix, for example, had a twist similar to this; the problem here is the god-awful execution. Unlike You's take on the twist, Nirvana Initiative's doesn't do anything to advance the story or characters' arcs whatsoever. The characters don't uncover some big revelation about the mystery through learning this; hell, they don't even learn that there is a twist, because there is no real twist to uncover. The story would have played out exactly the same, regardless of whether or not this twist was included at all. It was only done to mess with you, the player, and no other reason. Well, you got me. I certainly didn't see it coming. Doesn't make it any less stupid or pointless. But wait! I hear you ask. How do they explain Mizuki uncovering the other halves of the bodies six years in the past, when you play as her six years in the future? Well, dear questioner, that's easy: the Mizuki you play as in the past is actually the original Mizuki. No, not the Mizuki we know from the first Somnium Files, the original Mizuki. The Mizuki we know from the original Somnium Files, and the one we play as in the future, was retconned to be a clone of that Mizuki. It's a perfectly normal twist that makes complete sense, and definitely doesn't retcon a huge part of Mizuki's backstory from the first game, and was a writing decision absolutely not done solely for the sake of making this stupid twist work. kill me now.

Mizuki doesn't even get the worst of it, because that's just scratching the surface of how badly this game treats the shoehorned-in original cast. The one done the worst, by far, was Date. The level of dirty this game does him and his arc in the original pains me so much, and it's largely because of this game's oft-complained-about "spoiler-free-sequel" approach. His story ended so perfectly in the original game, and was the biggest reason I didn't really want a direct sequel to Somnium Files. I'm not gonna spoil what happens with him in the original, because play SF1, I beg you. Essentially, there's a big feature about him that is effectively retconned for the sake of remaining spoiler-free, doing him a massive disservice. He's also absent for most of the game anyway, and the way the game explains him not being present for much of the game until he mysteriously resurfaces in the final chapters of Mizuki's storyline before the twist is that he...got hit in the head in the explosion at the end of Ryuki's storyline pre-twist, suffered amnesia, and worked as a hotel clerk for like six years before randomly remembering everything and returning to the case, like nothing ever happened. No, I am not making a single word of that up. That should at least give you an idea of how ridiculously contrived the storyline is in this game, if literally everything else thus far didn't clue you in on that yet.

I need to reiterate just how contrived and unbelievably ridiculous the plot of this game is; there's limits to how much I can suspend disbelief, and this game took those limits and shot them into the stratosphere. I've often compared the SF duology to Death Note when ranting about this game to friends, and that's not just a funny haha joke about how ridiculous the second half of Death Note is; I mean it very literally. You remember that part of Death Note where they're tracking down pages of the Death Note on a literal missile? Yeah, something like that happens in Nirvana's finale. A missile carrying a crazy disease or some shit is launched from a stadium, and the entire main cast shows up to stop it from launching, culminating in the Mizuki twins riding a motorbike up the launch pad to disarm the missile mid-flight. Again, I am not making a single word of that up, this actually happens in the game. It sounds awesome, and it is awesome, so I'm willing to let at least some of the absurdity slide, but like...I didn't make a single word of that up. This is a dark comedy murder mystery game, and it ends with a sequence like that. That's not even mentioning the killer, Tearer, who is (again, I'm not making any of this up) two halves of two bodies stitched together. Because that makes perfect sense when you think about the logistics of such a thing for any longer than five seconds.

I spoke earlier about how I wanted a sequel to SF1 to not be a direct one, and this game is exactly why I wanted it to be more like a sequel in the Persona or Pokémon sense, and not like...well, what we got. Something set in the same universe with the general same rules, but has very minimal connection to its predecessor(s). SF1 ended on such a perfect note; every loose end was wrapped up, the character arcs were complete, and it didn't overstep its bounds or overstay its welcome. Nirvana Initiative's very existence hurts that ending, because much of the events of SF1's perfect ending get retconned for the sake of having a sequel with much of the same cast in a "spoiler-free sequel" setting, when they really didn't need to be there. There was no reason to dig up the old game. Nirvana relied far too much on multitasking between fanservice for those who played the original and making it spoiler-free for newcomers who didn't. This choice is such a strange one, and only served to hurt the narrative even more than everything else already did. I don't think the game is bad because it's a direct sequel to the original; it's all the juggling it tries to do between fanservice and not, and the absolute cavalcade of really stupid writing decisions, most especially that god-awful twist that shall not be named, that make it bad in my eyes.

To me, story isn't everything in most games; I can excuse a bad story if the gameplay is fun enough, because at its core, it's a video game first, not a book. As a prime example of this, Fire Emblem Fates is one of my favorite games (as if my name and PFP weren't dead giveaways of that). That game's story has been consistently dumpstered by practically everyone for nearly a decade at this point, so much so to the point that it makes cowards some people avoid the game entirely based on hearsay, but everything else in it, especially the gameplay, is so damn good that I genuinely could not care less. In a visual novel, though, the story is everything, due to the very nature of visual novels being almost completely devoid of "real" gameplay; and they dropped the ball hard with this game's story. I cannot recommend this game under any circumstances, even to fans of the original; no, especially to fans of the original.