Hoo boy. I love bad games because I get to drop any attempt at writing a good review.
So I really love the Zero Escape series. Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is in my top 10, and its sequel Virtue’s Last Reward was also pretty enjoyable. The great characters and interesting atmosphere got me enthusiastic for visual novels in general, and they’ve served as a constant source of creative inspiration. Then, this game comes along. It’s not even like it’s a straight-up horrible game, you still have some interesting decisions to make and a couple nice bits of drama, but it’s... all wrong. The best I can do is to have you picture what it would be like if your favorite video game series got shelved for years, then had a chance with one last game to wrap up the franchise for good. The developers then decided that with such a low budget, it would be best to make it a porn parody of the rest of the series. Everyone could have some laughs, some characters could bang, and the plot could be wrapped up all at once in a way that didn’t set fan expectations too high. That’s pretty much exactly what this game feels like. Old characters are brought back in an ultra-flanderized form, the animations are laughably bad, the story is full of holes, and the amount of nonsensical melodrama makes it feel like a critique of the worst parts of the previous entries. There were multiple points where I just sat there, laughing in total shock of what the hell I was looking at. I laughed enough that I could almost recommend the game to fans of the series for that alone, but I can’t in good conscious tell anyone that they would enjoy this game.
So I really love the Zero Escape series. Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is in my top 10, and its sequel Virtue’s Last Reward was also pretty enjoyable. The great characters and interesting atmosphere got me enthusiastic for visual novels in general, and they’ve served as a constant source of creative inspiration. Then, this game comes along. It’s not even like it’s a straight-up horrible game, you still have some interesting decisions to make and a couple nice bits of drama, but it’s... all wrong. The best I can do is to have you picture what it would be like if your favorite video game series got shelved for years, then had a chance with one last game to wrap up the franchise for good. The developers then decided that with such a low budget, it would be best to make it a porn parody of the rest of the series. Everyone could have some laughs, some characters could bang, and the plot could be wrapped up all at once in a way that didn’t set fan expectations too high. That’s pretty much exactly what this game feels like. Old characters are brought back in an ultra-flanderized form, the animations are laughably bad, the story is full of holes, and the amount of nonsensical melodrama makes it feel like a critique of the worst parts of the previous entries. There were multiple points where I just sat there, laughing in total shock of what the hell I was looking at. I laughed enough that I could almost recommend the game to fans of the series for that alone, but I can’t in good conscious tell anyone that they would enjoy this game.