This… took quite a bit of time to complete, on my end. I started roughly mid-September, played it for an hour before feeling low-energy and stopping, then not proceeding to play it until early October, then playing it until the first story split, then dropping it until November wherein I just kind of blitzed through nearly the entire left side of the flow chart, dropped it and didn’t pick it up until early in the new year, wherein I went through the rest of the game in the space of a couple of days. It was… a lot more sporadic of a process than usual for going through a VN (mostly due to busyness, nothing to do with the game itself) and I think that ended up hurting the game a little bit. For a mystery that focuses quite a lot on foreshadowing and micro-details, losing your memory of a lot of what happens right at the beginning does make parsing future information/figuring out the mystery harder than it’d otherwise be.
But regardless, I finished it, eventually, and… I think this is my favourite Uchikoshi game?
Well, maybe. It’s between this and Virtue’s Last Reward, and although I do love both games in semi-equal measure, I thiiiink this game gets the edge mostly because of its status as a standalone, not needing to stand within the context of a series in order to reach its full potential. You play as Special Agent Kaname Date, a detective investigating the death of his old friend Shoko Nadami. To do this, he and his police department, ABIS, utilize a top-secret interrogation technique called ‘Psyncing,’ which lets him delve into the Freud/Jungian unconscious of a character to find out what secrets lie within. In gameplay, these Psyncing segments are represented by ‘Somniums’ — adventure-game-ish segments where you look around a room, interact with objects, and break your subject’s mental locks in order to come closer to the truth of the case. Somniums often possess multiple solutions — which each reveal separate things — and through uncovering these different ways of solving the puzzle the story can split off in several ways, each branch (similar to other Uchikoshi games, like Virtue’s Last Reward) revealing different aspects of the investigation and, once you’ve turned every stone, coalescing together in the end to give you the full picture.
And I think the way you slowly work your way through the mystery is one of the game’s strongest aspects. While there’s one issue I have — a major component to the mystery that isn’t really teased or foreshadowed at all until it comes up near the end — I think Uchikoshi’s multiple-route-based, plot-heavy, solve-the-overarching-mystery style of VN really works well translated to a whodunnit like this game. The way you get answers and more questions with every little bit of story progression, the way that the plot can twist and turn and veer off onto tangents and yet still make sense with context, the way the story pretty perfectly resolves everything when even details of the mystery itself can change depending on your branch… it’s great stuff. I marathoned basically the entire final act of the game in the space of one night because I knew I had to see how everything got resolved and ultimately, in hindsight, I really don’t regret that decision. I’m pretty happy with how it all went.
And while the mystery on its own is a strong positive towards this game, I think what really made me love this game’s story was the focus on its characters. There’s a large cast of, like, 30 people in total, and while some of those characters are obviously more important than others there isn’t particularly a weak link within the main cast, which is pretty incredible on a cast that runs the spectrum on things like age, personality, sexuality, and how much the game takes them seriously. I appreciate the game’s handling of anime tropes — your main character being majorly horny is a lot better when it’s a. completely optional whether you be that or not and b. actually justified within the context of the story, and I’ve found that tsunderes are a lot more likable when they’re both your daughter and also twelve years old — but most of all I really love the way characters are defined through their relationship to Date, and by extension, you: the player. Date’s core character traits — being aloof and distant to people and unfamiliar with a lot of details regarding the world and the situation at hand yet still having a sense of humour about the world around him — are traits that are very easy for the player to insert themselves onto, and the way you can choose how Date reacts to specific things, what offhanded statements he makes, or where to go first during an investigation really hits that line between Date being his own distinct character while still having the player kinda feel the same way he does about certain things. You too can feel the same sort of frustration when you rock up to haughty, obviously corrupt-and-evil congressman So Sejima’s place for information and end up with nothing because he knows how to “you don’t have a warrant” his way out of any confrontation you want to have with him. You can go off-topic to leer at or flirt with the receptionist and you feel the eyes of everybody else in the room judge you just like Date does. It's a quiet, subtle way of making the main character an insert of the player, and I think it works really well.
And again, I love how a lot of these characters are characterized by Date’s relationship with them, and how certain facets of them are revealed just as Date begins to know them on more than a surface level. I’ve mentioned Sejima above — how Date’s inability to achieve anything every time he walks onto the Sejima estate really does a great job at selling how untouchable the guy is — but I’d really like to shout out Iris and Aiba for really showing just how well the game does with its characters. Iris — the deuteragonist for the right side of the flowchart — is on the surface an energetic and cheerful idol, but from her very first appearance she uses that exact initial appearance to pressure Date into doing exactly what she wants, which immediately works to signify that she’s a lot more relevant to the mystery than she initially seems. Aiba — an advanced AI that functions as Date’s left eye for the majority of the game — mostly functions as exposition and the main source of comic relief, but there are moments where the two of you are alone and Aiba functions as your conscience, helping Date calm down through what’s on his mind and showing that, despite being an AI, she feels things exactly the same way Date does. It’s great stuff, and just an example of how well the game writes its characters. I’m really happy that there are points when even in the middle of the investigation that the characters can just sit down and have some downtime. It really suits this game’s biggest strength.
(and also Mizuki is adorable and easily the shining star of the cast and I’m SO HAPPY that she’s the protagonist for the sequel but also I couldn’t figure out a good place to put this so)
Honestly, the game’s really easily strong enough to be considered excellent, and I’d otherwise consider it as such… but there’s one really major aspect of the game that drags it down: Somniums. The short of how Somniums work is that you’re placed in an area and you’re expected to play around with the items within it until you stumble onto the thing that works and progress. A lot of the game’s irrelevant sense of humour is on full display during these puzzle segments, and most of the alternate options, while not what let you progress, are still worth doing because they’re fun and show a bit more of Date and Aiba’s relationship. Initially, it was fun, and kind of interesting to see all the dream logic stuff, and I was down to see exactly how this core concept iterated as it went on.
How it iterated was by adding a time limit. A really restrictive time limit. One that kind of singlehandedly goes against the best aspects of the Somniums and made me dread whenever they came up.
The way it works is that every action taken inside a Somnium detracts usually at least ten seconds (though these can detract up to 30 seconds or a full minute) from a hard six-minute time limit. Certain actions award you TIMIEs, which you can use to divide/subtract how much time an action takes, but certain actions can award you negative TIMIEs, which then multiplies how much time an action takes. Somniums almost immediately become an exercise in finding the quickest route through, and when the puzzles run on dream logic and brute-forcing through options until you find the right one, this… comes at odds with itself fairly quickly. Later Somniums basically become an exercise of knowing the correct path from the start because if you happened to mess up (or, y’know, do other things so you can get an achievement/read the funny dialogue) too much there’s a point where the puzzle becomes unwinnable and you have to go back to the beginning. This means skipping through (what can be) a lot of dialogue all over again, which… even with the shorter Somniums ends up becoming super frustrating. It gets even worse when some of the later Somniums have major plot beats within. Oh, hey, you want to experience the emotional climax of one of the story arcs which heavily explores the history of these two characters and represents major character development for one of them? Do you want to go through a haunting depiction of a cognitive disorder that paints the medium and heavily recontextualizes everything you’ve thought about one of the weirder characters so far? Get ready to force yourself through the same dialogue over and over again as you realize you have to go back to the very start in order to have enough time to get through. Get ready for what was once emotionally resonant to become a complete chore. Again, maybe if the time limit wasn’t there these would’ve been a lot more fun, but by the time I was ready to push towards the end I just opened up walkthroughs for Somniums and skipped all the potential fun dialogue they could’ve had. Sucked, but it was better than having to deal with repeating stuff over and over again.
More minor, and potentially spoilery, but one thing that did disappoint me about the resolution of the mystery is that… unlike the 999 trilogy, there wasn’t any IC explanation as to why locks existed and why you needed information in order to break those locks? There’s the beginning of an explanation... but then it kinda just goes “no that’s stupid it’s obviously parallel universes” when the topic of alternate timelines was barely even brought up in the game before or afterwards. It’s mostly obvious that it’s just an OOC “you can’t go here yet,” and that it’s kinda needed so that the player doesn’t stumble into endgame revelations/the true ending immediately, but when I ran into a lock the very first route I got onto, and when one of the actual endings just very suddenly cuts off, I kind of spent the whole game wondering why exactly things were working out like that only to… not really get what I was kind of hoping for, that things just cut off because the story requires that the story cuts off at that exact moment. I think the flow chart works really well, I think it’s integral to the game’s structure and story, but when the 999 trilogy always made sure the flow chart had an IC reason for existing… it’s hard not to strike a negative comparison here.
But ultimately, I thought AI was great! The way its puzzles are executed and some quibbles with the flow chart kind of stop it from being excellent, but if you’re into Uchikoshi’s tried-and-true story structure, or if you’re looking for a crazy mystery with great, low-key character writing and an amazingly irrelevant sense of humour, then I’d say this game’s a pretty strong 8/10.
But regardless, I finished it, eventually, and… I think this is my favourite Uchikoshi game?
Well, maybe. It’s between this and Virtue’s Last Reward, and although I do love both games in semi-equal measure, I thiiiink this game gets the edge mostly because of its status as a standalone, not needing to stand within the context of a series in order to reach its full potential. You play as Special Agent Kaname Date, a detective investigating the death of his old friend Shoko Nadami. To do this, he and his police department, ABIS, utilize a top-secret interrogation technique called ‘Psyncing,’ which lets him delve into the Freud/Jungian unconscious of a character to find out what secrets lie within. In gameplay, these Psyncing segments are represented by ‘Somniums’ — adventure-game-ish segments where you look around a room, interact with objects, and break your subject’s mental locks in order to come closer to the truth of the case. Somniums often possess multiple solutions — which each reveal separate things — and through uncovering these different ways of solving the puzzle the story can split off in several ways, each branch (similar to other Uchikoshi games, like Virtue’s Last Reward) revealing different aspects of the investigation and, once you’ve turned every stone, coalescing together in the end to give you the full picture.
And I think the way you slowly work your way through the mystery is one of the game’s strongest aspects. While there’s one issue I have — a major component to the mystery that isn’t really teased or foreshadowed at all until it comes up near the end — I think Uchikoshi’s multiple-route-based, plot-heavy, solve-the-overarching-mystery style of VN really works well translated to a whodunnit like this game. The way you get answers and more questions with every little bit of story progression, the way that the plot can twist and turn and veer off onto tangents and yet still make sense with context, the way the story pretty perfectly resolves everything when even details of the mystery itself can change depending on your branch… it’s great stuff. I marathoned basically the entire final act of the game in the space of one night because I knew I had to see how everything got resolved and ultimately, in hindsight, I really don’t regret that decision. I’m pretty happy with how it all went.
And while the mystery on its own is a strong positive towards this game, I think what really made me love this game’s story was the focus on its characters. There’s a large cast of, like, 30 people in total, and while some of those characters are obviously more important than others there isn’t particularly a weak link within the main cast, which is pretty incredible on a cast that runs the spectrum on things like age, personality, sexuality, and how much the game takes them seriously. I appreciate the game’s handling of anime tropes — your main character being majorly horny is a lot better when it’s a. completely optional whether you be that or not and b. actually justified within the context of the story, and I’ve found that tsunderes are a lot more likable when they’re both your daughter and also twelve years old — but most of all I really love the way characters are defined through their relationship to Date, and by extension, you: the player. Date’s core character traits — being aloof and distant to people and unfamiliar with a lot of details regarding the world and the situation at hand yet still having a sense of humour about the world around him — are traits that are very easy for the player to insert themselves onto, and the way you can choose how Date reacts to specific things, what offhanded statements he makes, or where to go first during an investigation really hits that line between Date being his own distinct character while still having the player kinda feel the same way he does about certain things. You too can feel the same sort of frustration when you rock up to haughty, obviously corrupt-and-evil congressman So Sejima’s place for information and end up with nothing because he knows how to “you don’t have a warrant” his way out of any confrontation you want to have with him. You can go off-topic to leer at or flirt with the receptionist and you feel the eyes of everybody else in the room judge you just like Date does. It's a quiet, subtle way of making the main character an insert of the player, and I think it works really well.
And again, I love how a lot of these characters are characterized by Date’s relationship with them, and how certain facets of them are revealed just as Date begins to know them on more than a surface level. I’ve mentioned Sejima above — how Date’s inability to achieve anything every time he walks onto the Sejima estate really does a great job at selling how untouchable the guy is — but I’d really like to shout out Iris and Aiba for really showing just how well the game does with its characters. Iris — the deuteragonist for the right side of the flowchart — is on the surface an energetic and cheerful idol, but from her very first appearance she uses that exact initial appearance to pressure Date into doing exactly what she wants, which immediately works to signify that she’s a lot more relevant to the mystery than she initially seems. Aiba — an advanced AI that functions as Date’s left eye for the majority of the game — mostly functions as exposition and the main source of comic relief, but there are moments where the two of you are alone and Aiba functions as your conscience, helping Date calm down through what’s on his mind and showing that, despite being an AI, she feels things exactly the same way Date does. It’s great stuff, and just an example of how well the game writes its characters. I’m really happy that there are points when even in the middle of the investigation that the characters can just sit down and have some downtime. It really suits this game’s biggest strength.
(and also Mizuki is adorable and easily the shining star of the cast and I’m SO HAPPY that she’s the protagonist for the sequel but also I couldn’t figure out a good place to put this so)
Honestly, the game’s really easily strong enough to be considered excellent, and I’d otherwise consider it as such… but there’s one really major aspect of the game that drags it down: Somniums. The short of how Somniums work is that you’re placed in an area and you’re expected to play around with the items within it until you stumble onto the thing that works and progress. A lot of the game’s irrelevant sense of humour is on full display during these puzzle segments, and most of the alternate options, while not what let you progress, are still worth doing because they’re fun and show a bit more of Date and Aiba’s relationship. Initially, it was fun, and kind of interesting to see all the dream logic stuff, and I was down to see exactly how this core concept iterated as it went on.
How it iterated was by adding a time limit. A really restrictive time limit. One that kind of singlehandedly goes against the best aspects of the Somniums and made me dread whenever they came up.
The way it works is that every action taken inside a Somnium detracts usually at least ten seconds (though these can detract up to 30 seconds or a full minute) from a hard six-minute time limit. Certain actions award you TIMIEs, which you can use to divide/subtract how much time an action takes, but certain actions can award you negative TIMIEs, which then multiplies how much time an action takes. Somniums almost immediately become an exercise in finding the quickest route through, and when the puzzles run on dream logic and brute-forcing through options until you find the right one, this… comes at odds with itself fairly quickly. Later Somniums basically become an exercise of knowing the correct path from the start because if you happened to mess up (or, y’know, do other things so you can get an achievement/read the funny dialogue) too much there’s a point where the puzzle becomes unwinnable and you have to go back to the beginning. This means skipping through (what can be) a lot of dialogue all over again, which… even with the shorter Somniums ends up becoming super frustrating. It gets even worse when some of the later Somniums have major plot beats within. Oh, hey, you want to experience the emotional climax of one of the story arcs which heavily explores the history of these two characters and represents major character development for one of them? Do you want to go through a haunting depiction of a cognitive disorder that paints the medium and heavily recontextualizes everything you’ve thought about one of the weirder characters so far? Get ready to force yourself through the same dialogue over and over again as you realize you have to go back to the very start in order to have enough time to get through. Get ready for what was once emotionally resonant to become a complete chore. Again, maybe if the time limit wasn’t there these would’ve been a lot more fun, but by the time I was ready to push towards the end I just opened up walkthroughs for Somniums and skipped all the potential fun dialogue they could’ve had. Sucked, but it was better than having to deal with repeating stuff over and over again.
More minor, and potentially spoilery, but one thing that did disappoint me about the resolution of the mystery is that… unlike the 999 trilogy, there wasn’t any IC explanation as to why locks existed and why you needed information in order to break those locks? There’s the beginning of an explanation... but then it kinda just goes “no that’s stupid it’s obviously parallel universes” when the topic of alternate timelines was barely even brought up in the game before or afterwards. It’s mostly obvious that it’s just an OOC “you can’t go here yet,” and that it’s kinda needed so that the player doesn’t stumble into endgame revelations/the true ending immediately, but when I ran into a lock the very first route I got onto, and when one of the actual endings just very suddenly cuts off, I kind of spent the whole game wondering why exactly things were working out like that only to… not really get what I was kind of hoping for, that things just cut off because the story requires that the story cuts off at that exact moment. I think the flow chart works really well, I think it’s integral to the game’s structure and story, but when the 999 trilogy always made sure the flow chart had an IC reason for existing… it’s hard not to strike a negative comparison here.
But ultimately, I thought AI was great! The way its puzzles are executed and some quibbles with the flow chart kind of stop it from being excellent, but if you’re into Uchikoshi’s tried-and-true story structure, or if you’re looking for a crazy mystery with great, low-key character writing and an amazingly irrelevant sense of humour, then I’d say this game’s a pretty strong 8/10.