atrocious plot and awful characters but good gameplay!

2008

really fun if you go into it with no good or bad expectations at all

DWARVEN LORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the boss is too hard though but that's just because i suck at games

super great! a lot less complex than VN snobs would have you believe -- and that's a good thing. at its core, umineko is about love and dealing with grief.

it's great! I'm terrible at it

Far from the best plot that the series has to offer, but it still has a special place in my heart. Lyon is also probably one of the better FE villains out there.

I have played and enjoyed the ZE series, but this didn't quite hit the same spot for me. I'll preface this by saying that I definitely recommend playing it, but found that there was much that Uchikoshi left unexplored in the game. There was also a lot of content that could have easily been cut, and many routes seemed a bit pointless. Although entering dreams, the primary mode of gameplay, was quite enjoyable, other parts of gameplay mainly involved a combination of quick-time events, interrogation of suspects and point-and-click. The quick-time events could have been removed from the game altogether, since failing them just gives you a game over and they lack any actual challenge (although I do appreciate the humour that they added to the game). The point-and-click elements and interrogations were poorly-executed, because it was literally impossible to fail them — if you tried to submit clues that were irrelevant, you face literally no consequences because you're immediately told that "it doesn't seem right". This is in contrast to other games with similar mechanisms like the Ace Attorney series or LA Noire, in which bungling your objections or interrogations will cause you to lose "health" (AA) or affect achievements (LA Noire). In summary, while the story of the game is generally good and engaging, it still left quite a bit unexplored or underutilised while including elements that seemed a bit arbitrary, and might have worked better as a straight VN with dream sequence gameplay segments.

This review contains spoilers

An excellent visual novel that explores gender, sexism, xenophobia, familial and spousal abuse, and many more complex themes. Controversies aside, the translation team did a great job; unlike many VN translations, this one reads extremely naturally and I was almost unable to tell it had actually been translated at all. My one criticism of it would probably be that it drags a bit at times, and that it honestly doesn't really need to have choices and different endings at all, since the story is fairly linear.

full of surprising plot twists. the translation is excellent and extremely natural, and the voice acting is great. graphics definitely have aged a little poorly but it's understandable for a small game like this one.