Coming in from AI, which was a pretty goofy but fun and intriguing mystery game, I suppose I didn't really know what to expect. I came away feeling like this was the worst of both VLR and ZTD with ZTD's boring mystery, plot and characters and VLR's incredibly goofy and badly executed plot twists making this a thoroughly underwhelming playthrough. Only once it dropped all pretense of being a mystery game did I finally begin to have fun with it and I rode the goofiness of the end to a somewhat satisfying conclusion but that doesn't excuse the remaining 80-90% of the game where I was bored to tears.
Getting it out of the way, the presentation is largely exactly the same as AI. They're serviceable with the fun character designs and goofy low-fi animations and extremely small environments. They're not trying to win you over with the graphics and that's perfectly fine. The music is great as ever with a lot of the same tracks from the first game but also a fair few new ones. I played it on Japanese and the voice acting is entertaining and I do hear good things about the English dub which was excellent in the first game.
In terms of gameplay, you're still largely just following a VN story for most of it, punctuated by the Somniums which are the "escape room"-esque sections where you need to solve puzzles in moon logic to try and make sense of a subject's dreams to find things out about them. I largely enjoyed AI's Somniums so color me very surprised when I realised that the Somniums this time around almost all hilariously easy or unreasonably frustrating. There was ONE Somnium that was good, one that was decent. The rest were either walks in the park with incredibly obvious solutions requiring next to no thought or logic, or unreasonably frustrating with instant death mechanics and lots of frustrating trial and error. Most of the Somniums, save the one good one, don't really have puzzles any more. You're not really figuring out anything. You are given almost the entire solution right from the get go making large portions of some of them extremely linear affairs where you're just doing the next singular thing. I'm also really not a fan of the many times you are essentially forced into protracted sequences that reduce your time but give you no option to use the timies which is a huge departure from the first game. The Somniums were a serious downgrade in my opinion.
And unfortunately, coming to the story, I did not like most of what was on display. The writer of this game, Kotaro Uchikoshi, loves his sci-fi and loves his plot twists. Unfortunately, in this case, the twists hurt the storytelling to the extent that it doesn't allow you to explore the characters and their tragedies which left me very unsympathetic to their situations and I cannot elaborate further without going into massive spoilers. The story structure is centered almost entirely around the core twist which leaves so much of the game shallow and bereft of any sense. Characters simply refuse to talk to you and elaborate on what they know, nonsensical explanations have to prop up and hurriedly stitch closed massive plot holes, characters aren't given the room to breathe and let their stories grow and so on. None of it hooked me until the very end when the game just lets loose in a blaze of unabashed and shameless glory and revels in the chaos. Rather than try and make sense, I really wish the game leaned more into how incredibly stupid it is. But the game is not really a mystery game and people who want an actual mystery to try and figure out, akin to a detective novel, will be thoroughly disappointed.
While I did not enjoy myself playing this game, I am very glad it exists and will definitely pick up whatever the team makes next. I did not find myself enjoying the game as I played it but I am still glad that I played it, if for nothing else than to experience the sheer madness of these titles. There's truly nothing else quite like it.
Getting it out of the way, the presentation is largely exactly the same as AI. They're serviceable with the fun character designs and goofy low-fi animations and extremely small environments. They're not trying to win you over with the graphics and that's perfectly fine. The music is great as ever with a lot of the same tracks from the first game but also a fair few new ones. I played it on Japanese and the voice acting is entertaining and I do hear good things about the English dub which was excellent in the first game.
In terms of gameplay, you're still largely just following a VN story for most of it, punctuated by the Somniums which are the "escape room"-esque sections where you need to solve puzzles in moon logic to try and make sense of a subject's dreams to find things out about them. I largely enjoyed AI's Somniums so color me very surprised when I realised that the Somniums this time around almost all hilariously easy or unreasonably frustrating. There was ONE Somnium that was good, one that was decent. The rest were either walks in the park with incredibly obvious solutions requiring next to no thought or logic, or unreasonably frustrating with instant death mechanics and lots of frustrating trial and error. Most of the Somniums, save the one good one, don't really have puzzles any more. You're not really figuring out anything. You are given almost the entire solution right from the get go making large portions of some of them extremely linear affairs where you're just doing the next singular thing. I'm also really not a fan of the many times you are essentially forced into protracted sequences that reduce your time but give you no option to use the timies which is a huge departure from the first game. The Somniums were a serious downgrade in my opinion.
And unfortunately, coming to the story, I did not like most of what was on display. The writer of this game, Kotaro Uchikoshi, loves his sci-fi and loves his plot twists. Unfortunately, in this case, the twists hurt the storytelling to the extent that it doesn't allow you to explore the characters and their tragedies which left me very unsympathetic to their situations and I cannot elaborate further without going into massive spoilers. The story structure is centered almost entirely around the core twist which leaves so much of the game shallow and bereft of any sense. Characters simply refuse to talk to you and elaborate on what they know, nonsensical explanations have to prop up and hurriedly stitch closed massive plot holes, characters aren't given the room to breathe and let their stories grow and so on. None of it hooked me until the very end when the game just lets loose in a blaze of unabashed and shameless glory and revels in the chaos. Rather than try and make sense, I really wish the game leaned more into how incredibly stupid it is. But the game is not really a mystery game and people who want an actual mystery to try and figure out, akin to a detective novel, will be thoroughly disappointed.
While I did not enjoy myself playing this game, I am very glad it exists and will definitely pick up whatever the team makes next. I did not find myself enjoying the game as I played it but I am still glad that I played it, if for nothing else than to experience the sheer madness of these titles. There's truly nothing else quite like it.