Suda Is so crazzzzzy! Love him!!!
I don't know, I got up to Digital Man before throwing in the towel on this one. I usually make a habit of not reviewing games I abandon but I feel like I have to make sense on what I played somewhere because it wasn't exactly a short amount of time.
The only aspects 25th ward has over the silver case would be the visuals and the music, but aesthetics and vibes alone can't really carry what essentially feels like a retread of the first one without really adding a new spin to it.
While I'm glad the gameplay was toned down because it was easily the most mind numblingly dreadful aspect of TSC, 25th Ward would benefit significantly from being a phone game where it not for having even more obnoxious puzzles than Flower Sun and Rain. At least in FSR you could tell the game was taking the piss on itself so checking manuals and doing basic math didn't feel too tedious thanks to the writing, but I would be damned if I wouldn't prefer a fade to black over doing that w.c keyhole puzzle shit twice or any walking section of this game for that matter. The nail has been hammered in the prequels and any more strikes feel like you're just trying to crack the wall.
This is something I could stomach if the dialogue, characters or lore were remotely engaging, but whe word salad and innocuous interactions of the cast feel like a chore to read due to being a tiresome recreation of what was already on TSC, and without the big threat of Kamui on the horizon which neatly connected all the chapters like we had on Transmitter and Placebo, everything feels so distant from each other that even when returning faces show up, the stilted dialogue that should explain the titular 25th ward reads like a shallow "The autoritharian government is bad and killing is human nature!" to which again, been there, done that.
I'm glad that it exists and it's not lost media for flip phones. If anything it shows the potential in mobile storytelling while we are getting shit like honkai star rail and FGO clones thriving on the market but I can't exactly say this is approachable even as someone who enjoyed the first Silver Case, so the effort of making a physical copy and a collector's edition makes me wonder if it will suffer the same fate eventually.
I don't doubt it gets better eventually later on but knowing about the whole 100 endings thing and how it pokes fun at shallow, inconsequential choices in Visual Novels, making a "Is this what you wanted?" message at the end of your remake feels incredibly tone deaf because as I stated earlier: No. I really don't care about this game's choices given how most of the times they feel like padding, so it being a kinetic novel with no choices would have done wonders for you, Suda."
I don't know, I got up to Digital Man before throwing in the towel on this one. I usually make a habit of not reviewing games I abandon but I feel like I have to make sense on what I played somewhere because it wasn't exactly a short amount of time.
The only aspects 25th ward has over the silver case would be the visuals and the music, but aesthetics and vibes alone can't really carry what essentially feels like a retread of the first one without really adding a new spin to it.
While I'm glad the gameplay was toned down because it was easily the most mind numblingly dreadful aspect of TSC, 25th Ward would benefit significantly from being a phone game where it not for having even more obnoxious puzzles than Flower Sun and Rain. At least in FSR you could tell the game was taking the piss on itself so checking manuals and doing basic math didn't feel too tedious thanks to the writing, but I would be damned if I wouldn't prefer a fade to black over doing that w.c keyhole puzzle shit twice or any walking section of this game for that matter. The nail has been hammered in the prequels and any more strikes feel like you're just trying to crack the wall.
This is something I could stomach if the dialogue, characters or lore were remotely engaging, but whe word salad and innocuous interactions of the cast feel like a chore to read due to being a tiresome recreation of what was already on TSC, and without the big threat of Kamui on the horizon which neatly connected all the chapters like we had on Transmitter and Placebo, everything feels so distant from each other that even when returning faces show up, the stilted dialogue that should explain the titular 25th ward reads like a shallow "The autoritharian government is bad and killing is human nature!" to which again, been there, done that.
I'm glad that it exists and it's not lost media for flip phones. If anything it shows the potential in mobile storytelling while we are getting shit like honkai star rail and FGO clones thriving on the market but I can't exactly say this is approachable even as someone who enjoyed the first Silver Case, so the effort of making a physical copy and a collector's edition makes me wonder if it will suffer the same fate eventually.
I don't doubt it gets better eventually later on but knowing about the whole 100 endings thing and how it pokes fun at shallow, inconsequential choices in Visual Novels, making a "Is this what you wanted?" message at the end of your remake feels incredibly tone deaf because as I stated earlier: No. I really don't care about this game's choices given how most of the times they feel like padding, so it being a kinetic novel with no choices would have done wonders for you, Suda."