The loot pool is better and the swamp area being somewhat shrunken down (or at least less focused on) help make the core game itself more fun to actually play this season, but everything else surrounding it still remains really eh compared to the previous seasons. The battle pass still wasn't good enough to warrant spending for, alongside the seasonal quests being formatted in a really strange way that hinders doing multiple tasks in one match if you could survive doing so. I don't understand this generation of shooters having an obsession with this godawful Hulu ass UI design because the lobby didn't need changing to this massive scrolling list that actively hides the core gamemodes (what the hell, Epic?), the already mentioned quest and map menus should have gotten changes instead.

Epic in general feels like they're struggling to both maintain a playerbase as well as making sure they keep spending money. The massive layoffs at the company that got media attention outside of the game is one thing, but you can also see it in the game itself with things like forcing in incentives for Crew subscriptions to be recurring rather than subbing for a month and immediately cancelling for one skin, a pass and some currency. Crossovers seem to be dwindling down now that other companies are seemingly less interested in Fortnite trying to be this massive "metaverse" that it kept trying to be advertised as. The UI redesign was clearly to encourage more playtime in the Creative worlds, but Roblox this ain't and I just don't get why Epic doesn't seem to understand this. Fortnite at its core is a genuinely very good third person shooter, it should keep sticking with what its good at rather than trying to be this bizarro multi-game engine that it will never be able to compete with the bigwigs on, especially when it's nowhere near as accessible as its competitors are in terms of platforms and hardware requirements.

honestly i probably spent more time on that horde rush mode they added midway through than the actual battle royale mode itself

Dead dove, do not eat.

I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.

This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.

IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.

To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.

But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.

By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.

Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.

Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.

At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?

And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.

I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.

Compared to other mediums, video games are harder to sell as members of the so bad it's good club. Something about the agency the player has over their own experience makes it hard to point and laugh at a game with serious flaws.

That being said, this is one of the funniest games I've ever played. A true growing pain in the shift to 3D models, Rugrats: Search for Reptar is clunky, annoying, and way too easy to beat in one sitting. But something about it... The repeating voice lines, the egregiously bad camera, the fact that bumping into a wall makes Tommy recoil - these things make it impossible not to laugh along as you play.

I would not seriously recommend this game, but I would absolutely recommend it in jest. It's all a matter of sharing my sense of humour.

The student becomes the master overnight.

Lies of P is a game that came completely out of nowhere, left no impression on me beyond "why would someone make a dark, moody game about Pinocchio", and then managed to completely eclipse every expectation I had. I got back on Game Pass for Starfield and PAYDAY 3, and decided to give this a crack solely as a might-as-well-try-it; not only is this the better of those, it's one of the finest games I've ever played. I mean this honestly and heretically: it is better than all three mainline entries of the Dark Souls series.

Yes, Lies of P is derivative. No, this does not detract from its quality. The obsession with "newness", both as an inherent virtue and as something all creators ought to strive for, is an ideal forced to take root almost exclusively at the behest of European bourgeois Romantics all looking to (ironically enough) copy what Rousseau was telling them to do in the 1700s. Art as a whole has spent centuries upon centuries cribbing from other pieces to put itself together, and it's a fairly recent development that doing shit that someone else did but in your own way is seen as a failure of the artist. I, personally, do not care about this in the slightest. If you do, I would ask only that you examine why you believe this to be so; do you have a legitimate grievance against derivative works for any reason other than because others have told you that they're some synonym for "bad"?

Round8 Studio has come almost completely out of nowhere to deliver something that's immensely fun to play, narratively engaging, and utterly gorgeous in just about every area you can find yourself in. Any developer that can come out swinging this hard and connect with just about every blow deserves to be celebrated. There's a lot to talk about, and certainly a lot of it is in regards to the way that people are talking about it. I'll get my core thesis out of the way, first:

If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game.

If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game.

Lies of P rides a fine line of being distinct, but not different. The overlap between FromSoft's PS3-and-onward output is broad, borrowing bits and pieces and rearranging them around; something similar to Sekiro parries, something similar to a Bloodborne dodge, something similar to the Dark Souls 3 enemy ambushes. But Lies of P is distinct enough in its execution of these elements that long-time Souls players will unilaterally be chin-checked when they try bringing over their muscle memory from these other titles.

Perfect guards are a guard, not a parry, and tapping the block button Sekiro-style will make you eat a hit. The dodge offers fast, generous invincibility, but it's never as safe as the one in Bloodborne is; enemies using their big red attacks will cut through your i-frames by design, encouraging you to either parry or move well out of the way. Enemies will usually come in ones and be very obvious, but many will hide just out of sight in the hopes of clipping players who haven't yet been trained to look around before charging past a blind corner. The game is uncompromising in demanding the player to meet it on its terms, rather than copying wholesale from the games that obviously inspired it and allowing the skills you learned there to completely carry over.

If you try playing this exactly like every other FromSoft Souls game you've played up to this point, you will lose, and hard. If you can not (or will not) adapt, you will probably get filtered out by the Archbishop and start publicly wondering why anyone likes this game.

There's a very strange — and frankly, it feels borderline dishonest — set of complaints I've seen where people are just outright wrong about the way the game functions, and they then use their incorrect assumptions as a base from which to knock on the game. I've seen complaints that large weapons aren't viable because you don't get poise/super armor on heavy attacks; this is blatantly untrue, and charge attacks with heavy weapons will regularly blow straight through an enemy hit. People say the dodge is unreliable, but it really isn't; if you're getting caught, you're either messing up a (fairly generous) timing or you're getting hit by red fury attacks, which the game clearly tells you cannot be rolled through. People say it's an aesthetic rip-off of Bloodborne, and this really only applies to a couple of the eldritch enemies; Parisian streets, circus theming, and fantastical automatons lend to a pretty distinct visual identity from any of the other heavy-hitters in the genre.

People say the voice acting is bad, but most of the cast is made up of established, talented stage and screen actors returning from other games like Elden Ring and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, where their performances were lauded; they sound borderline identical to what they've done since just last year, so what makes it acceptable there, and laughable here? People say the translation is bad, but I only noticed a single grammar mistake and typo in my entire playthrough, and they were both buried in the flavor text of a gesture; the rest of the writing offered some evocative lines that managed to bounce between introspective, beautiful, and the coolest fucking thing I've ever read in my life. Where are these complaints coming from? Did we play the same game? It makes no sense. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out how anyone even came to most of these conclusions. It really feels like the most vocal naysayers only played enough of Lies of P to come up with a few surface observations and then made up the rest wholesale.

None of this is to imply that the game is without fault, because it isn't. Boss runs are still present in all of their vestigial glory, consistently adding a mandatory and boring twenty seconds before you can retry a failed boss attempt. Elite enemies — especially in the late game — are often such massive damage sponges that it's a complete waste of time and resources to actually bother fighting the ones that respawn. The breakpoint at which an enemy gets staggered is a hidden value, so you're always just hoping that the next perfect guard will be enough to trip it; we've already got visible enemy health bars here, so I can't see why we don't get enemy stamina bars, too. (Stranger of Paradise continues to be the most mechanically-complete game in this sub-genre.)

For these faults, though, there are at least as many quality-of-life changes that I'm astounded haven't been adopted elsewhere already. Emptying your pulse cells (your refillable healing item) allows you the opportunity to get one back for free if you can dish out enough damage. Theoretically, as long as you can keep up both your offense and defense, you have access to unlimited healing. It's such a natural extension of the Rally system, where you can heal chip damage by hitting foes; Bloodborne's implementation of blood vials looks completely misguided next to this. If you have enough Ergo to level up, the number in the top right corner of the screen will turn blue, no longer requiring you to manually check if you've got enough at a save point. When a side quest updates, the warp screen will let you know that something has happened, and where to start looking for the NPC that it happened to.

It's a challenging game, but it really isn't that hard. I do agree with the general consensus that it would be nice if the perfect guards could be granted a few extra frames of leniency. I managed to start hitting them fairly consistently around halfway through the game, but it's going to be a large hurdle that'll shoo off a lot of players who don't like such tight timings. Tuning it just a little bit would help to make it feel a bit more fair without completely compromising on the difficulty. Everything else, I feel, is pretty strongly balanced in the player's favor; I got through just about every boss in the game without summoning specters and without spending consumables, but they were all there for me if I really needed them. I'd like to go back and play through it again, knowing what I know now, and really lean into the item usage. It's not like you won't wind up with a surplus, considering how easy everything is to farm.

I understand that Bloodborne is something of a sacred cow, especially on this website — it's currently two of the top five highest-ranked games — so anything that seems like it's trying to encroach on its territory is going to be met with hostility before all else. I understand. It's a special game for a lot of people. That said, I'd suggest going into Lies of P with an open mind and a willingness to engage with the game on its own terms; you might manage to find it as impressive of a work as I do.

Quartz is stored in the P-Organ.

The most tragic victim of CyberConnect 2's ever-endearing tendency to craft an extremely ambitious concept but ultimately stops short of being an engaging game to play. In spite of this, I was still enthralled from beginning to end.

I feel dirty giving this game a 5/5 because I adore everything about this game except the game itself. It's by far the most technically impressive game on the DS I've played; the characters are all charming; the story is whimsical like every shonen anime you loved as a kid; the amount of work that went into the worldbuilding alone is nothing short of astounding, the lore was carefully crafted from the remnants of Tail Concerto's for a decade and it shows. I just wish the game didn't feel the need to hold your hand so firmly by solving every puzzle in the game before you've even entered the room. I wish the combat weren't so simplistic. I wish the game weren't so easy. I wish I could say that the game were more fun to play. It's not.

But there's a kind of magic to it. It's inexplicable. CyberConnect 2 poured their heart and soul into this project, and in spite of its shortcomings, its charm overcame anything that might get on my nerves. I suppose, emotionally speaking, that's quite a feat.

Salut.

     'Then he whirled around, pressing his fists to his temples, and howled — a long, roaring howl like that of a beast. A cry of confusion and desperation. A cry that tore at the hearts of all who heard it.'
     – Keigo Higashino, Yōgisha X no Kenshin, 2005 (tr. Alexander O. Smith).

Played with BertKnot.

A distinctive feature of death penalty in Japan is the regularity with which it is applied, in contrast to other countries such as the United States. Even after the moratorium that followed the LDP's fall from power in 1993, there was little change in judicial practice, with no politician willing to make serious changes on the issue. In 2009, a major judicial reform was undertaken to correct the excesses of the system, notably by strengthening the rights of the defendant and limiting the value placed on confessions, which are often brutally extracted by inspectors. Some commentators have seen the introduction of jury panels as a means of opposing the death penalty, on the assumption that citizens would be reluctant to choose it in a real case that they would have followed from within. In other words, the 2009 reform hoped to bring about a slow change in mentalities and a rejection of the death penalty through its reduced use.

     Capital punishment, public opinion and Japanese detective fiction

While the 2009 reform has been effective in changing concrete aspects of police investigations and increasing public confidence in the judiciary, its impact on the application of the death penalty has been particularly disappointing. In the 2010-2018 period, the capital punishment was adopted in 68 % of cases where it was requested by prosecutors, compared with 56 % for the 1980-2009 period [1]. This higher figure can be explained by a more careful choice on the part of prosecutors, who restrict the death penalty to the least ambiguous cases. It is worth noting, however, that juries are fairly consistent in following the recommendations of prosecutors on this issue and remain particularly conservative. Japanese public opinion thus remains attached to the death penalty and its application. This situation is not surprising: liberal nations that have abolished the death penalty have often done so against the tide of general opinion and under more progressive governments.

One feature of Japanese opinion is the moral and ethical value it places on the death penalty. It is considered both inevitable (yamu o enai) and necessary to avenge the victims [2]. Although governments are content with this situation in order to avoid reforms from above and going against the tide of public opinion, Japanese detective fiction was quick to question this phenomenon and felt compelled to take a stance on the issue. Among popular works, Kindaichi shōnen no jikenbo (1992), featuring a rebellious detective growing up in the Lost Decades, emphasises the tragedy of killing and the detective's function in society. This desire to understand the criminals serves to build a discourse in favour of rehabilitation. Alternatively, Meitantei Konan (1994) presents an idealised detective in a society where the police institution is characterised by exceptional probity: Gōshō Aoyama, despite his social conservatism, passively opposes the death penalty, as his universe seems completely unaware of the concept.

Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE, which inherits the comic and violent aesthetic of Danganronpa, also revolves around these themes, but offers an overly vague and conservative moral. The player takes on the role of Yuma Kokohead, an apprentice detective flanked by Shinigami, a goddess of death whose powers allow mysteries to manifest physically in a Labyrinth. While these powers allow Yuma to solve various cases, the price is the soul of the guilty party, who inevitably dies after solving an investigation. The events of the opening chapter lead Yuma to investigate the secret of Kanai Ward, alongside the various one-off cases he encounters. The title takes a disturbingly lighthearted approach to the death penalty, and never manages to make the moral dilemma facing the detective believable.

     A chain of references serving as a parody

This frivolity is understandable, given the game's representational choices. Kanai Ward is immediately reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII's (1997) Midgar, and RAIN CODE never hides its inspiration: Amaterasu Corporation is literally a copy of Shinra, and the similarities extend to the interiors of buildings and laboratories. The title piles up references constantly: the Mystery Labyrinth is an odd borrowing from the Palaces in Persona 5 (2016), while the cases crudely parody stratagems found in Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies (2013) or Meitantei Konan. The series of locked rooms in Chapter 1 is particularly clumsy, and the subsequent mysteries are astonishingly simple – Chapter 4 gives all the solutions to the investigation straight away, but drags on for several hours, deliberately avoiding the obvious answer to the mystery. Instead, the player is forced to spend two hours investigating a trivial murder mystery, before spending an hour and a half traversing the Mystery Labyrinth, only to suffer two more recapitulations of the investigation.

Because the progression is so sluggish and the pacing so helpless, it is impossible to take the various characters seriously. In Danganronpa, the Trial mechanic created a genuine, if clumsy, discussion between the characters, and swept the player into a storm of contradictory and naive opinions: this approach suited the game's premise. RAIN CODE tries to be more surgical, but above all it comes across as more ridiculous. The Reasoning Death Matches, similar to the Non-Stop Debates, lack substance because the gameplay has been simplified by the more action-oriented gameplay of RAIN CODE, which forces the player to dodge the opponent's sentences. To compensate for the mental strain, the game steers the player significantly more towards the right answer. The irony comes to a head when the most interesting questions within the mysteries are clearly considered too complex and are solved by simple QTEs with no choice. More generally, Kazutaka Kodaka has chosen to spend more time on mini-games, which follow each other for several dozen minutes with very little variety.

In some respects, RAIN CODE is reminiscent of the structure of Meitantei Konan & Kindaichi Shōnen no Jikenbo: Meguriau Futari no Meitantei (2009), with a series of small cases and simple puzzles, but without the strong interactions between the characters of two historical detective series. RAIN CODE only has one-dimensional characters, either because they are immediately discarded or because they have to lose their memories to justify the game's mechanics. Similarly, Kanai Ward is never built as a coherent universe with a genuine social texture. The game is content to pile on a few noir fiction clichés and offer side quests whose hollowness is rare in the medium. There is something particularly ludicrous about the way the inhabitants of Kanai Ward interact with each other, and this only serves to undermine the game's twist, whose pretentious revelation is undermined by the fact that it is one of science fiction's most famous narrative twists.

     Kazutaka Kodaka: morals and fetishisation

While Danganronpa simply highlights the tragedy of the desperate actions of high school students, RAIN CODE attempts a broader discourse on democracy, corporatism, social organisation and capital punishment. Firstly, it is hard to take any ethical considerations seriously when Yuma is flanked by Shinigami, who combines all the most outrageous elements of sexualisation – the Shinigami Puzzles, reflections of Hangman's Gambit, seem completely out of place with the beach aesthetic and Shinigami in a bathing suit. Until chapter 4, RAIN CODE never manages to get away from the idea that justice is about maintaining order and that the death penalty is a necessity (yamu o enai). Even afterwards, the title absolves the player through a series of events that allow Yuma to shrug off any responsibility. The discourse on finding the only truth – a rehash of Meitantei Konan's catchphrase, stupid as it is – is particularly hypocritical when even Aoyama's manga argues against the death penalty.

Above all, RAIN CODE spends its time sexualising female characters in all their forms, from schoolgirls to maids: at least two characters regard women as sexual objects, and are portrayed as comic devices. The game feels much more voyeuristic than Danganronpa, as there is no strong character who can really stand up to Yuma until the very end. The resolution of the final chapter is particularly muddled, attempting to rehabilitate the characters for the heinous murders they have committed based on the belief that everything fits into a carefully thought-out 'perfect solution'. That criminals had to be slaughtered to achieve this solution hardly seems a problem. The title's audacity culminates in the epilogue, where one character finds a magical and simplistic solution to Kanai Ward's central predicament, effectively rendering all the tragedies pointless.

In many ways, RAIN CODE takes its cues from Danganronpa, but in a crude and unpleasant way. The game suffers from an excessively slow pacing and always feels perfunctory in the way it treats its characters. Technically, the game is particularly abysmal, suffering from substandard graphics and a soundtrack that is nowhere near the chaotic and enjoyable explosiveness of Danganronpa. Given the disastrous and conservative way in which the death penalty discourse is handled, there is reason to fear that the very likely sequel to RAIN CODE – buoyed by its very satisfactory sales in Japan – will, if the post-credits scene is to be believed, explore the violence of the Californian riots of the 1980s and 1990s.

__________
[1] David T. Johnson, The Culture of Capital Punishment in Japan, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2020 [2019], p. 85.
[2] In particular, the victim's relatives can plead directly before judges and juries, explicitly requesting the death penalty for the defendant. These proceedings are marked by theatricality and intense emotions that directly and negatively affect lawyers, magistrates and jurors. On this subject, see Yūji Itō, 裁判員の判断の心理:心理学実験から迫る, 慶應義塾大学出版会, Tokyo, 2019, pp. 48-66.

"How could this get any worse?" I found myself saying this aloud time and time again throughout my playthrough of this game. And to my amazement, Rain Code always managed to outdo itself. It's incredible how the game is capable of pulling this off, I honestly must applaud.

Everything about this game is made to undermine something else, and it is one of the most brilliant ways of writing a story. Mysteries that seem difficult to solve? Don't worry, the core mechanic of the game, the Mystery Labyrinth, will spoon-feed the answers to you. Solving a mystery means killing the culprit, what a cool idea that could be used for some heavy moral decisions later! Not to worry though, most of the culprits are either petty criminals or already dead. Partner characters enter the Mystery Labyrinth with the protagonist, meaning a sizeable chunk of their screentime, and therefore development, happens there. Too bad they lose their memories of everything that happened within when exiting said Mystery Labyrinth! I could go on.

How could this get any worse? These mechanics being at odds with each other is bad enough, but how about some of the worst gameplay in a visual novel yet? Not only are the controls themselves incredibly sluggish, but there are horrendous copies of minigames that were in Danganronpa that serve little to no purpose other than to rehash things people seemed to like about those games. In-between these minigames are sections of nothing but mindlessly walking forward in a straight line until getting to the next one. There are boring and forced side-quests as well as points you earn that go towards a skill tree, both of which serve zero purpose other than to make the game longer and have the appearance of there being more to do.

How could this get any worse? All of Rain Code's problems culminate in one of the most absurd and atrocious final chapters of any story I have ever experienced. Every issue is dialed to the max, and Rain Code isn't afraid to jump the shark and go completely off the deep end. But in a strange turn of events, it was the most enjoyable part of the game. I didn't enjoy it for the reasons that the creator, Kazutaka Kodaka, wanted me to, however. This was an entertaining train wreck that somehow kept getting worse and worse, and I grabbed my popcorn and watched it go up in flames. I am astonished at just how bad it got, and because of that, I enjoyed laughing at everything this game tried to do.

With enough noise, anything can become a symphony. Rain Code conducts this orchestra with such fine attention to detail, making sure nothing is consistent and nothing is harmonious. It walks a thin line between the amazing bad, and the just bad. And what an orchestra it is. I found myself appalled at every twist and turn this game took, and I would once again repeat: "How could this get any worse?"

And yet, it does. After suffering through this piece of shit for hours on end, I reached an epiphany. Among the chaos, I became enlightened: "This is one of the worst games ever, which is why it's one of the best games ever." No game, nay, piece of media will ever achieve what Rain Code has done. While being one of the most inconsistent and infuriating things ever, with awful gameplay, minimal thematic tones, and ideas that constantly undermine themselves, Rain Code is able to use its absurdity to rise above the standards of what makes something "good" or "bad" and become something uniquely its own. The best part? It's not meant to be absurd. It's supposed to be serious. This game fucking sucks in every sense of the word, and at the same time, it is one of the most entertaining games ever. I laugh at this game, not with it. And it feels goddamn amazing.

So, Kodaka, I ask you: How could you get any worse?

Alright, let’s get this over with so I don’t have to spend any more time on this than I already have. This game sucks, but let's take a look at why:

First, let’s take a look at that long list of positives -

• UI is genuinely cute and looks very nice on the PS Vita

• Touko and Komaru are two female protagonists that have some fun banter and cute moments

• The final boss is fun in that you have to use all the moves you’ve learned and put yourself to the test in a satisfying way

Now let’s have a gander at those negatives:

• The camera sucked and made some bosses incredibly difficult

• The game is not so much action-adventure as it is my absolute least favorite formula of just run from point A to point B to see more cutscenes

• Touko is way too overpowered, making the game mind-numbingly boring, but as a game made for fans of the series’ visual novels and not so much action, I guess I can understand the lack of difficulty

• I was excited for the music as I loved it in the original Danganronpa, only for it to feel like they reused the same 3 songs over and over again here

• Bosses loudly repeat the same 2 lines over and over again, to the point I had to mute my Vita giving me a disadvantage on hearing non-verbal noise cues

• Has this kids vs adults theme, but oddly continuously calls Komaru and Toko adults even though they’re both underage and wear school uniforms to boot! It could have been a cool dilemma of adults vs kids and the teenage protagonists have this dilemma of figuring out in the chaos where they fit when they can socially fit both (and have a cool ‘growing up is scary, but it’s something we all go through’ lesson like in Persona 2), but no, they just straight assume they’re both adults with no further explanation, I’m guessing so the panty shots are more accepted. (Blah, turns out my memory is worse than I thought. Thank you to HaloBlues for the correction!)

• There’s just an open pedophile in the game that leads the adult group with no repercussions, in fact our protagonists even compliment him on it, when one of the little girl’s reasoning for killing adults was being sexually assaulted by them creating the most fucked-up messaging in a game I’ve ever played

• The girl who was sexually assaulted in turn tries to assault the protagonist with a… groping machine. Whole thing is played off for laughs, with additional panty shots of the literal elementary school aged girl during it. Touko then makes mentions of the little girl “taking your virginity” throughout the rest of the game

• The whole game is just shocking to be shocking with little thought put into what makes something funny or interesting, such as having to save on a children’s training potty, listening to a kid ramble on about ripping out and eating adult guts, and having to watch the children french-kiss each other

• Touko continuously brings up to Komaru that she thinks she has a sexual relationship with her own brother, which Komaru just giggles and waves off

• You get to watch the same scene of Togami getting whipped like 7 times, which wasn't even funny the first time they showed it, but my God, they’re gonna keep showing you it until you think it’s funny!!

• The ending sequence on whether or not you should break the controller was complete ass as the characters repeat the same lines of dialogue over and over to you. I immediately broke the controller and saw that was the wrong answer, so the constant moral dilemma of if I should break it or not was instantly gone, and actually very annoying as the next 15 minutes had me continuously choose on breaking the controller or not (it was 8 times, I counted) when I already knew the “right answer” was to not break it

There’s so much more I could go into, but I’ve wasted enough energy on this game. Similar to past Danganronpa games, Ultra Despair Girls tries to handle morals and messages way too advanced for its own good, instead creating something incredibly offensive and downright awful to watch. After finishing the game, I plan on selling it, as I have no reason to ever want to play it again, and the person who gifted it to me is no longer in my life.

I recommend Persona 2: Eternal Punishment if you want a story about the difficulties of growing up, and I recommend the Resident Evil series if you like the idea of hiding from and shooting enemies that are chasing after you.

1/5