getbehindmesatan
19 Reviews liked by getbehindmesatan
I'm so pissed that this game spent so much time building up the cool-ass meta 4th wall breaking shit only to be so anti-climactic and lame. They clearly wanted to do something ridiculous with this game and were too fucking cowardly to go all in, so we got this half-assed attempt that just results in the actual game being mid in addition to the metanarrative being incredibly shallow. Team Zero Escape has continually fumbled every game since ZTD.
I think the patented Uchikoshi Meta Twist of this one is terrible. It feels like the gimmick took time and development away from what could have been a much more engaging narrative.
I desperately hoped it would make the long playtime with its lukewarm cast worthwhile, but I think it made the whole experience worse.
I desperately hoped it would make the long playtime with its lukewarm cast worthwhile, but I think it made the whole experience worse.
This review contains spoilers
Since every chapter is on this site individually, I may as well review them one by one as I play them. I'll start by noting that I am, in fact, playing these in Japanese, and frankly I'm pretty shit at Japanese. I can make it through Ace Attorney games without much issue and with a very high degree of comprehension, but that's because a) I've played them in the past and b) they're much simpler on the writing side, specialized legal jargon aside. (Seriously, from this episode alone I've mined like 500 vocab words, and I'm sure I could have mined another 200 or so that I chose not to mine.) So take this with a massive grain of salt.
That being said, if I were reading this in English, I probably wouldn't have made it through the first 30 minutes. That's not because of the pace -- this game is slow as anything I've ever played, which I'll return to later -- but because of the writing style. I clicked over to the English translation every once in a while to make sure that I wasn't egregiously off-track with my understanding of what was going on (I wasn't, thank god) and every single time I did, the god-awful stylization made me want to tear my eyes out. I'm sure some people find it charming, but it was truly painful.
I can't say much about the quality of prose in a language I'm still very much learning, but I can definitely speak to the plot, pace, and characters. The plot of this game is good as fuck, once it starts to be real. There is a ton of time in the early game where almost nothing happens apart from children doing children things and living a normal life. I think the game justifies this very well with the moments of meaning slowly sprinkled in throughout the first several chapters, and each of the tiny little plot teases was very impactful for it. That being said, I feel like the time could have been used better -- the characters are pretty one-note, and after an interaction or two you know everything there is to know about them. I think the game is really aware of this, too, as after a few chapters it starts omitting a lot of the everyday stuff to just hit you with the key points.
Once the game gets going? Incredible for a few chapters. The festival had some of the best atmosphere in any VN I've read, and the next couple chapters were very tense and had me on the edge of my seat. Unfortunately, the encounters end up being very same-y, repetitive, and frankly stretched my belief further than I'm willing to extend it (as far as the behavior of non-possessed humans goes, specifically) and so the game really loses its spark towards the end. By the final chapter I was really wishing I could read as fast as I can in English so I could just be done with the episode already.
I want to say that the mystery was good in this episode, and maybe later on I will find out that it is. But for now, I feel like I have no fucking clue what's going on apart from some vague thing about the village being cursed (I did actually pick up that the possessed Mion and Rena specifically knew when people left or entered the village, which I was proud about when that was mentioned later on) and, er, everyone dying? Okay, in fairness, that's an exaggeration. I get the whole "there are three possible theories" thing that the game was going for with possession vs conspiracy vs delusion, and I'm almost certain that the game telling us those are the three options means it will be something completely different revealed later on. Of the three, I'd certainly lean towards the former with a bias to the "well-technically-it's-not-possession-it's-weird-medical-technology-or-something-that-lets-us-brainwash-people" school of Professor Layton-style bullshit. Which I hope I'm wrong about, because Professor Layton is campy enough to get away with it excellently, and this game decidedly is not.
I guess now's a good time to say that I'm going in, like, 98% blind on this -- I have a number of friends who are really big fans of this game series, so over the course of years of discussions that I didn't pay attention to, I know that somehow there's something like a time loop involved, and I was really expecting that to be set up towards the end of this episode. As it stands, it wasn't -- instead, everyone fucking dies, the end. Which is honestly cool as hell, but I don't get what is left to read? Like, there's the obvious cliffhanger with Ooishi presumably having the vial and doing an investigation on his own, but somehow I doubt that's what happens next just based on the fact that all the chapters in my steam library have pictures of the main five kids as their cover art. What the fuck is up with that?
This all sounds like I'm being critical, I'm sure, but I'm not. I'm very confused and tentatively very excited about what is to come, and I hope it lives up to the high expectations that this chapter has set. It's clear there's some sort of superstructure to the way this series is going to work, I just have no clue what it is. As such, that makes it really hard to give this game a fair and proper rating, so I fully reserve the right to come back and completely change it later based on whether I think it does its job in the overall scheme of the game well.
Actually, you know what, I lied earlier when saying that I can't evaluate the prose quality. I definitely can on one specific point: repetition. Holy fuck. I do not need to read Keiichi saying the same line four times in different ways and then thirty seconds later doing it again and then next chapter thinking back to the same line four times in different ways and then summarizing the same line four times in different ways by saying it in four more different ways and JESUS CHRIST unless this game gives me a very, very good justification for why it's doing this, I am just going to assume it's poorly written low-quality filler. Great for language learning, though.
Anyways, all said and done, this game feels like it has left me with a ton of questions, and I have a feeling they aren't going to be answered any time soon. It has an excellent tense atmosphere for half the game, it rewards you for making it through for a handful of chapters, and then becomes a slog. It stands to be seen whether future episodes can justify some of the contrivances in this episode well enough to make it really good, but even as a standalone work, I'm fairly happy with this. Would tentatively recommend.
That being said, if I were reading this in English, I probably wouldn't have made it through the first 30 minutes. That's not because of the pace -- this game is slow as anything I've ever played, which I'll return to later -- but because of the writing style. I clicked over to the English translation every once in a while to make sure that I wasn't egregiously off-track with my understanding of what was going on (I wasn't, thank god) and every single time I did, the god-awful stylization made me want to tear my eyes out. I'm sure some people find it charming, but it was truly painful.
I can't say much about the quality of prose in a language I'm still very much learning, but I can definitely speak to the plot, pace, and characters. The plot of this game is good as fuck, once it starts to be real. There is a ton of time in the early game where almost nothing happens apart from children doing children things and living a normal life. I think the game justifies this very well with the moments of meaning slowly sprinkled in throughout the first several chapters, and each of the tiny little plot teases was very impactful for it. That being said, I feel like the time could have been used better -- the characters are pretty one-note, and after an interaction or two you know everything there is to know about them. I think the game is really aware of this, too, as after a few chapters it starts omitting a lot of the everyday stuff to just hit you with the key points.
Once the game gets going? Incredible for a few chapters. The festival had some of the best atmosphere in any VN I've read, and the next couple chapters were very tense and had me on the edge of my seat. Unfortunately, the encounters end up being very same-y, repetitive, and frankly stretched my belief further than I'm willing to extend it (as far as the behavior of non-possessed humans goes, specifically) and so the game really loses its spark towards the end. By the final chapter I was really wishing I could read as fast as I can in English so I could just be done with the episode already.
I want to say that the mystery was good in this episode, and maybe later on I will find out that it is. But for now, I feel like I have no fucking clue what's going on apart from some vague thing about the village being cursed (I did actually pick up that the possessed Mion and Rena specifically knew when people left or entered the village, which I was proud about when that was mentioned later on) and, er, everyone dying? Okay, in fairness, that's an exaggeration. I get the whole "there are three possible theories" thing that the game was going for with possession vs conspiracy vs delusion, and I'm almost certain that the game telling us those are the three options means it will be something completely different revealed later on. Of the three, I'd certainly lean towards the former with a bias to the "well-technically-it's-not-possession-it's-weird-medical-technology-or-something-that-lets-us-brainwash-people" school of Professor Layton-style bullshit. Which I hope I'm wrong about, because Professor Layton is campy enough to get away with it excellently, and this game decidedly is not.
I guess now's a good time to say that I'm going in, like, 98% blind on this -- I have a number of friends who are really big fans of this game series, so over the course of years of discussions that I didn't pay attention to, I know that somehow there's something like a time loop involved, and I was really expecting that to be set up towards the end of this episode. As it stands, it wasn't -- instead, everyone fucking dies, the end. Which is honestly cool as hell, but I don't get what is left to read? Like, there's the obvious cliffhanger with Ooishi presumably having the vial and doing an investigation on his own, but somehow I doubt that's what happens next just based on the fact that all the chapters in my steam library have pictures of the main five kids as their cover art. What the fuck is up with that?
This all sounds like I'm being critical, I'm sure, but I'm not. I'm very confused and tentatively very excited about what is to come, and I hope it lives up to the high expectations that this chapter has set. It's clear there's some sort of superstructure to the way this series is going to work, I just have no clue what it is. As such, that makes it really hard to give this game a fair and proper rating, so I fully reserve the right to come back and completely change it later based on whether I think it does its job in the overall scheme of the game well.
Actually, you know what, I lied earlier when saying that I can't evaluate the prose quality. I definitely can on one specific point: repetition. Holy fuck. I do not need to read Keiichi saying the same line four times in different ways and then thirty seconds later doing it again and then next chapter thinking back to the same line four times in different ways and then summarizing the same line four times in different ways by saying it in four more different ways and JESUS CHRIST unless this game gives me a very, very good justification for why it's doing this, I am just going to assume it's poorly written low-quality filler. Great for language learning, though.
Anyways, all said and done, this game feels like it has left me with a ton of questions, and I have a feeling they aren't going to be answered any time soon. It has an excellent tense atmosphere for half the game, it rewards you for making it through for a handful of chapters, and then becomes a slog. It stands to be seen whether future episodes can justify some of the contrivances in this episode well enough to make it really good, but even as a standalone work, I'm fairly happy with this. Would tentatively recommend.
-prefacing this by saying i did play this in its original intended form although a bit unorthodoxly. i used VNDS to play this on DS hardware but the overall experience remains unchanged from its initial release aside from the compressed audio.
it’s self indulgent while also taking the time to indulge its audience as well. i could feel the author’s disposition behind it. ryukishi gets it. he gets those dog day weekend afternoons where you can attentively hear the birds chirping and the trees rustling in the wind. he gets those chaotic schooldays of youth where the only thoughts of importance were the ones in the present moment. how the world and its characters are portrayed puts me in a spot where i can find solace and relatability within while also appreciating the collective creativity and compassion behind its development.
i grew up (and still live) in a fairly quiet town. if you listen close enough you can hear the cicadas in their prime during the ever-warming months of june. admittedly our community isn’t nearly as small as the benevolent townsfolk of hinamizawa but there’s a level of mutuality between everyone who falls under our umbrella. we know everyone who works at that local barbershop or supermarket, and they know us back. within our pool of classmates everyone knew each other. while my circumstances weren’t on the nose with higurashi’s context, higurashi still transcends its own being and allows the reader to place it within their own sense of self and experiences.
the juxtaposition of the wacky yet wholesome character art modeled against the uncanny photographs presents this degree of intimacy and honesty. despite their contrasting appearances you can really feel the heart that they share; the author’s passion for his hometown is as strong as the characters’ for theirs. the characters themselves aren’t particularly special but i find that to be the point. a small merry band of classmates who try to enjoy every second they share together. i think the slice of life content can be a bit too much at times but it’s still highly endearing in the end and is integral to developing these characters.
how ryushiki handles the horror and mystery aspects as of now is super engrossing. a simple conversation on the phone transforms into a frenzy of mental disparity. love how little bits and pieces of the mystery are fed to the player while their appetite continues to grow as the story unfolds. i’d share more of my thoughts on the narrative…but i think i’m getting a bit ahead of myself seeing as this is only the first chapter. i intend to experience the entire story before i give my complete analysis. i just wanted to express how beautifully this initially grabbed me. i wanna thank my buddy cloudkastel for continuously pushing for me to experience this, while i was skeptical at first eventually he had sold me and i’m glad i’m taking the time to immerse myself. this is a refreshing breath of fresh air. until next time, when the higurashi cry once more.
it’s self indulgent while also taking the time to indulge its audience as well. i could feel the author’s disposition behind it. ryukishi gets it. he gets those dog day weekend afternoons where you can attentively hear the birds chirping and the trees rustling in the wind. he gets those chaotic schooldays of youth where the only thoughts of importance were the ones in the present moment. how the world and its characters are portrayed puts me in a spot where i can find solace and relatability within while also appreciating the collective creativity and compassion behind its development.
i grew up (and still live) in a fairly quiet town. if you listen close enough you can hear the cicadas in their prime during the ever-warming months of june. admittedly our community isn’t nearly as small as the benevolent townsfolk of hinamizawa but there’s a level of mutuality between everyone who falls under our umbrella. we know everyone who works at that local barbershop or supermarket, and they know us back. within our pool of classmates everyone knew each other. while my circumstances weren’t on the nose with higurashi’s context, higurashi still transcends its own being and allows the reader to place it within their own sense of self and experiences.
the juxtaposition of the wacky yet wholesome character art modeled against the uncanny photographs presents this degree of intimacy and honesty. despite their contrasting appearances you can really feel the heart that they share; the author’s passion for his hometown is as strong as the characters’ for theirs. the characters themselves aren’t particularly special but i find that to be the point. a small merry band of classmates who try to enjoy every second they share together. i think the slice of life content can be a bit too much at times but it’s still highly endearing in the end and is integral to developing these characters.
how ryushiki handles the horror and mystery aspects as of now is super engrossing. a simple conversation on the phone transforms into a frenzy of mental disparity. love how little bits and pieces of the mystery are fed to the player while their appetite continues to grow as the story unfolds. i’d share more of my thoughts on the narrative…but i think i’m getting a bit ahead of myself seeing as this is only the first chapter. i intend to experience the entire story before i give my complete analysis. i just wanted to express how beautifully this initially grabbed me. i wanna thank my buddy cloudkastel for continuously pushing for me to experience this, while i was skeptical at first eventually he had sold me and i’m glad i’m taking the time to immerse myself. this is a refreshing breath of fresh air. until next time, when the higurashi cry once more.