you know i was actually looking forward to playing this for a long time once i heard high praises about it being a peak point of the psych horror vn genre. gradually became more and more disappointed the more i played because i figured out what saya was within like 20 minutes of playing and then they just included two completely unneccesary rape scenes that were just so fucking weird its insane. using rape and sexual assault as a horror trope is the peak of lazy writing and i was immediately put off. honestly up until that i wasn't minding it - the intention of this game is to make your skin crawl and make you feel immense discomfort. but when it gets to a point where its so uncomfortable because it uses such dark things as a horror plot device... yeah no what the fuck was the fucker writing this on because clearly they were not fucking sober

tldr: this game is literally just glorified loli porn and anyone who enjoys it seriously needs their hard drives checked

hands down one of my favourite games that i've played in a long time.

writing at the start of the game is sloppy and cringey at parts, but it's got such a gripping plot in my opinion that i honestly wanted to keep seeing the next part. the writing for me picked up in the later missions and i genuinely had a lot of fun with the final stories. i honest to god got really attached to this cast and found a lot of enjoyment in finding out how their stories ended. character design and the visual style of this game is stunning too.

i'm not a fan of speedrunning games, but this game gets the job done so fast it doesn't even make me that mad to do a level over and over again for an ace medal. the levels are insanely well designed and i had a hell of a lot of fun playing them. i think the only real complaint i have is the gifts; i went out of my way to collect them all regardless, but some of them are so stupid it's baffling.

now onto the heaven and hell rushes, getting ace on all the missions and potentially 100%ing the game... if it doesn't finish me off

I enjoy this game, I really do. It's a fun little spinoff to the main drama tracks and manga plot of Hypnosis Mic, with some really fun and interesting rhythm game mechanics (besides the scratch notes. I'm not talking about those.). I initially rated this 4 stars, but I've since dropped it to 3; now, it's a rhythm game, so perhaps I shouldn't be so critical, considering most of them are just cut and pastes of each other, but hear me out.

As of writing this review, I've sunk a solid 225 hours into this game, and had a lot of fun playing it, if the fact I'm DJ Rank 132 wasn't evident of my enjoyment. But honestly, when you reach a certain point, it just becomes really repetitive and boring. The only consistent thing to do is complete new bingos that come out, which generally give lacklustre rewards (100-200 crystals), and play to get event points to get the latest event card. That's honestly about all there is to do once you reach around DJ Rank 100. By that point, you've completed all the songs, maxed out your decks to get high scores to complete the individual song missions that get you crystals, and that's genuinely one of the only places you'll get a hefty amount of crystals, the only other places being stories (which are released periodically, and typically give you about 200-300 crystals), bingos (which I've mentioned previously) and the character ranking system, which is fun, but once you get everyone to around rank 20 like I have, it takes a long time to level them up again for such a low reward. Considering the gacha rates are about standard for a gacha/rhythm game, and one 10 draw costs you 2500 crystals, it becomes impossible to actually get the cards you want when they frequently come out, especially when you're a fan of the more popular characters, particularly Samatoki, who genuinely never gets a break from gacha and seems to have a new card at least once a month. This becomes an issue, especially if you're constantly having to spark for these cards, which takes 150 pulls.

I've had a lot of fun playing this, but unless the developers actually give more resources to grind crystals and start regularly adding more game features - as Hypnosis Mic as a whole doesn't regularly release songs, and the game is now nearly caught up to what's currently out - I don't think I can see it being something I will continue to play actively. In-game stories are also pretty much impossible to consume, as the western fandom for this series as a whole is miniscule, and even smaller for the fans that know Japanese who are willing to translate, which is a big selling point of the game in the first place, considering it has an exclusive story that doesn't follow the plot of the canon timeline.

I'm not even sure why I'm so passionate about the bog standard rhythm gacha game, considering these things are cash grabs half the time anyways, but HypMic as a whole is a series that holds a lot of meaning to me, so this I have a lot of feelings about this game, too.

this game caused irreparable damage to my psyche

in all seriousness, this game remains one of my favourites, if not my favourite, i've ever played to date. the beauty of the hello charlotte series lies in the fact that no matter how hard you think, absolutely none of it makes sense. there is no coherent plotline and that fact really adds up to the fact the story was born from charles eyler's fucked up crazy little mind. this is honestly one of the only games i've played that actually has accurate depictions of mental illness, especially highly stigmatised mental illness such as psychosis, and a lot of the content hit incredibly close to home. an incredible game through and through. i could replay this over and over again.