Nothing can take away the raw earnestness D exhibits. The arduous journey of developing and releasing a full-motion video, two-hour, grotesque adventure game rump is a daunting one to undertake, and it becomes all the more demanding when you're a small time video game studio in Japan with no major industry connections. Nevertheless, D's lead director put his future in game development on the line to see that D becomes a success. The same man even went as far to purposely hand-in D's golden master late, all in an elaborate scheme to swap out the "clean" cut of the game with his uncensored, vulgar original vision.
This ambitious man is known as the late Kenji Eno, former president of Wrap and video game industry cowboy. A man so eccentric that he bundled in condom feelies in the packaging of one his studio's titles. A man so punk, that after the disastrous botching of D's PlayStation version pre-orders by Sony, he showcased a video of a PlayStation logo morphing into a Sega Saturn logo at Tokyo Game Show 1996. Not only that, but to further cut ties, he presented a video of his team at Wrap dancing and singing a song with lyrics along the lines of "Enemy Zero is a good game, Wrap is a good company", followed by him violently tossing a plush of Muumuu, the mascot of Sony's Jumping Flash!, onto the ground.
The legacy of D and Kenji Eno especially are inspiring to say the least, and it is what mainly attracts people to Wrap's unfortunately short but admirable list of releases. Successful the man was as well; for a creator who would probably be barred from the industry if he was still with us, Wrap's D went on to sell over a million copies, becoming a game that succeeded not only critically but financially. It's hard not to love D, and especially Kenji Eno. No other game, let alone developer, has such a chaotic yet down-to-earth backstory, and it's important to understand the kind of place D came from before diving into the work. For D without that context, relinquishes the form of an allusive, sincere, video game oddity and reveals itself in all its crude, banal essence.
Eno's intention with D's universe was to craft a bleak, sinister world first, with an enthralling narrative coming more as a second thought. It's due to this that D is rather light on story elements throughout. Yet in spite of that, what little narrative is there is one that tilts heavily towards the characters', Laura and her father Richter, rather than the meticulously crafted space of D's fully CGI castle. There's one resounding "why" throughout D's story, what drives a man to massacre an entire cluster of people so suddenly?
Lightly hidden about the setting are grotesque flashback sequences. These digressions are the signature flair of D, despite their sheltered-nature. They served as a vehicle to flesh out the plot after the adventure segments were basically complete. While these cutscenes don't offer much in the way of thematic nuance, they do act as the most spectacular, unsettling scenes the game has to offer and it'd be disingenuous for me to say they don't hold much merit given that D's graphical fidelity is one of its secondary selling points. Even so, it does significantly hurt D for it to not have much substance for one to sink their teeth into. Substance is what gives your journey through horror's typically hostile worlds meaning, and without much in the way in meat in D's world, it leaves the whole journey feeling somewhat hollow.
While it is damning that D's narrative is lacking in eloquence, it is essential to reiterate that the focus of D was to construct an ominous, isolating adventure game setting. D's CGI landscapes are nothing short of a technical marvel, every scene is confidently showcased via sweeping camera angles and dynamic cuts. The music is a constant, nice ambient throughout, and it cuts to silence at times to exacerbate the tension. Yet, just as with the narrative, there's a tinge of vapidness to D's world. The world never emits the same peculiarity nor hostility of your typical horror work. Every mystery the castle introduces is well within the range of human understanding, and anything that exists outside of these bounds has their mysticism robbed by the game explaining them away soon after their encounter. As a whole, the setting of D feels detached from its narrative, and more execrably, fails to capture the atmosphere that it strove to capture.
All we're left with now is D's gameplay, which is, to be frank, the most abominable aspect of a game that is already full of poorly executed concepts. D's pacing can only be described as indulgently methodical. Every FMV sequence takes at least fifteen seconds to play out. This very quickly graduates from charming to aggravating when you realize none of the decisions you'll be making contain enough gravity to make these slow, deliberate animations tolerable. Outside of a forced game over if one takes over two hours to complete the game, there is no fail state in D. You are never at any threat of harm, failure, or difficulty regardless of what action you take. The only purpose these FMV serve is to pompously showcase D's largely forgettable environments.
This is all amplified by the fact that D has the audacity to intermix puzzles within its already monotonous gameplay. No matter how rudimentary these puzzles are, nothing will change the sheer amount of time each of them wastes for absolutely no reason. Bar none, I've never reckoned with a puzzle that has wasted as much as my time as the central puzzle of D's Disc 2. For one-third of the game's runtime, you will be forced to engage with a puzzle that has no barring on the game's narrative, atmosphere, or anything of meaning whatsoever. Five minutes into the puzzle, you will have probably already figured out what the solution is, but that doesn't matter when you have to sit through D's plethora of 20+ second animations. These puzzles aren't here to be mentally engaging, they're here to extend the game's run time past the thirty-minute mark so audiences don't feel like they wasted their money on a game that has absolutely nothing to offer on any front whatsoever.
I want to love D.
Nothing excites me more than a game with a chronicle as offbeat as D, and Kenji Eno's legacy resonates with me to the core. It's atypical for me to go into anything with any other expectation besides it executing on what it's aiming to do, but it's hard to dash that feeling of D being meaningful when it has all the foundations of a game I'd fall in love with. I pondered on rather I would say D is meaningful for a good night after playing through it. To be honest, I don't think I quite figured out the answer till I went back and revised this review.
D, despite all my misgivings with it on a fundamental level, is still a significant experience. It's not significant because it did the nearly impossible task of satisfying even a quarter of the game's initial, enchanting allure. It's significant because the story behind Kenji Eno, his legacy, and his drive to see D succeed is a rattlingly human, inspiring tale, and regardless of how you feel about D coming out of it, his ambitions will always resonate deeply within any person who's felt a creative drive and I strongly recommend it to anyone who's one of those people.
This ambitious man is known as the late Kenji Eno, former president of Wrap and video game industry cowboy. A man so eccentric that he bundled in condom feelies in the packaging of one his studio's titles. A man so punk, that after the disastrous botching of D's PlayStation version pre-orders by Sony, he showcased a video of a PlayStation logo morphing into a Sega Saturn logo at Tokyo Game Show 1996. Not only that, but to further cut ties, he presented a video of his team at Wrap dancing and singing a song with lyrics along the lines of "Enemy Zero is a good game, Wrap is a good company", followed by him violently tossing a plush of Muumuu, the mascot of Sony's Jumping Flash!, onto the ground.
The legacy of D and Kenji Eno especially are inspiring to say the least, and it is what mainly attracts people to Wrap's unfortunately short but admirable list of releases. Successful the man was as well; for a creator who would probably be barred from the industry if he was still with us, Wrap's D went on to sell over a million copies, becoming a game that succeeded not only critically but financially. It's hard not to love D, and especially Kenji Eno. No other game, let alone developer, has such a chaotic yet down-to-earth backstory, and it's important to understand the kind of place D came from before diving into the work. For D without that context, relinquishes the form of an allusive, sincere, video game oddity and reveals itself in all its crude, banal essence.
Eno's intention with D's universe was to craft a bleak, sinister world first, with an enthralling narrative coming more as a second thought. It's due to this that D is rather light on story elements throughout. Yet in spite of that, what little narrative is there is one that tilts heavily towards the characters', Laura and her father Richter, rather than the meticulously crafted space of D's fully CGI castle. There's one resounding "why" throughout D's story, what drives a man to massacre an entire cluster of people so suddenly?
Lightly hidden about the setting are grotesque flashback sequences. These digressions are the signature flair of D, despite their sheltered-nature. They served as a vehicle to flesh out the plot after the adventure segments were basically complete. While these cutscenes don't offer much in the way of thematic nuance, they do act as the most spectacular, unsettling scenes the game has to offer and it'd be disingenuous for me to say they don't hold much merit given that D's graphical fidelity is one of its secondary selling points. Even so, it does significantly hurt D for it to not have much substance for one to sink their teeth into. Substance is what gives your journey through horror's typically hostile worlds meaning, and without much in the way in meat in D's world, it leaves the whole journey feeling somewhat hollow.
While it is damning that D's narrative is lacking in eloquence, it is essential to reiterate that the focus of D was to construct an ominous, isolating adventure game setting. D's CGI landscapes are nothing short of a technical marvel, every scene is confidently showcased via sweeping camera angles and dynamic cuts. The music is a constant, nice ambient throughout, and it cuts to silence at times to exacerbate the tension. Yet, just as with the narrative, there's a tinge of vapidness to D's world. The world never emits the same peculiarity nor hostility of your typical horror work. Every mystery the castle introduces is well within the range of human understanding, and anything that exists outside of these bounds has their mysticism robbed by the game explaining them away soon after their encounter. As a whole, the setting of D feels detached from its narrative, and more execrably, fails to capture the atmosphere that it strove to capture.
All we're left with now is D's gameplay, which is, to be frank, the most abominable aspect of a game that is already full of poorly executed concepts. D's pacing can only be described as indulgently methodical. Every FMV sequence takes at least fifteen seconds to play out. This very quickly graduates from charming to aggravating when you realize none of the decisions you'll be making contain enough gravity to make these slow, deliberate animations tolerable. Outside of a forced game over if one takes over two hours to complete the game, there is no fail state in D. You are never at any threat of harm, failure, or difficulty regardless of what action you take. The only purpose these FMV serve is to pompously showcase D's largely forgettable environments.
This is all amplified by the fact that D has the audacity to intermix puzzles within its already monotonous gameplay. No matter how rudimentary these puzzles are, nothing will change the sheer amount of time each of them wastes for absolutely no reason. Bar none, I've never reckoned with a puzzle that has wasted as much as my time as the central puzzle of D's Disc 2. For one-third of the game's runtime, you will be forced to engage with a puzzle that has no barring on the game's narrative, atmosphere, or anything of meaning whatsoever. Five minutes into the puzzle, you will have probably already figured out what the solution is, but that doesn't matter when you have to sit through D's plethora of 20+ second animations. These puzzles aren't here to be mentally engaging, they're here to extend the game's run time past the thirty-minute mark so audiences don't feel like they wasted their money on a game that has absolutely nothing to offer on any front whatsoever.
I want to love D.
Nothing excites me more than a game with a chronicle as offbeat as D, and Kenji Eno's legacy resonates with me to the core. It's atypical for me to go into anything with any other expectation besides it executing on what it's aiming to do, but it's hard to dash that feeling of D being meaningful when it has all the foundations of a game I'd fall in love with. I pondered on rather I would say D is meaningful for a good night after playing through it. To be honest, I don't think I quite figured out the answer till I went back and revised this review.
D, despite all my misgivings with it on a fundamental level, is still a significant experience. It's not significant because it did the nearly impossible task of satisfying even a quarter of the game's initial, enchanting allure. It's significant because the story behind Kenji Eno, his legacy, and his drive to see D succeed is a rattlingly human, inspiring tale, and regardless of how you feel about D coming out of it, his ambitions will always resonate deeply within any person who's felt a creative drive and I strongly recommend it to anyone who's one of those people.