Dark Souls 2 plays very, very good. It has probably the worst hitboxes of the series, but that doesn’t undermine a combat system that expanded on what were already some pretty solid foundations and vastly improved each aspect. You can even wear four rings now, thank the Lord for that.

Unfortunately, if I had to recommend a Dark Souls game, I’d rather emphasize how much better the previous and the later chapter did every thing this game did well: Dark Souls 2 suffers from a lore which, overall, always feel more like a spin-off than a main chapter. Nothing major is added or explained regarding the Cycles except the fact that they exist, the characters inhabiting the world receive mostly the same build-up and contextualization of the first game but their feats and their importance is much less impressive compared to the first title; the environment shows some pretty variegated dungeons, especially in the DLCs, but still not as well thought and designed as the other two titles. Even the combat, the one thing it undoubtedly does better than the previous title, still doesn’t hold up to what came next in Dark Souls 3.

Dark Souls 2 doesn’t suffer for being an uninspired rehash of discarded idea for the first title (which is the only conceivable explanation for some pretty abhorrent encounter in the game), it still is a good game on its own but as a Dark Souls title it is unavoidable to compare make a comparison with the other iterations of the series and notice how it comes out utterly defeated. Those who want to play the game for the sake of completeness though should probably go for the Scholar of the First Sin, it has some improvement over the base game and it already includes the three DLCs, which by far had way more thought put into them than the main locations, in regards of bosses, maps, exploration and story.

Dark Souls 2 plays very, very good. It has probably the worst hitboxes of the series, but that doesn’t undermine a combat system that expanded on what were already some pretty solid foundations and vastly improved each aspect. You can even wear four rings now, thank the Lord for that.

Unfortunately, if I had to recommend a Dark Souls game, I’d rather emphasize how much better the previous and the later chapter did every thing this game did well: Dark Souls 2 suffers from a lore which, overall, always feel more like a spin-off than a main chapter. Nothing major is added or explained regarding the Cycles except the fact that they exist, the characters inhabiting the world receive mostly the same build-up and contextualization of the first game but their feats and their importance is much less impressive compared to the first title; the environment shows some pretty variegated dungeons, especially in the DLCs, but still not as well thought and designed as the other two titles. Even the combat, the one thing it undoubtedly does better than the previous title, still doesn’t hold up to what came next in Dark Souls 3.

Dark Souls 2 doesn’t suffer for being an uninspired rehash of discarded idea for the first title (which is the only conceivable explanation for some pretty abhorrent encounter in the game), it still is a good game on its own but as a Dark Souls title it is unavoidable to compare make a comparison with the other iterations of the series and notice how it comes out utterly defeated. Those who want to play the game for the sake of completeness though should probably go for the Scholar of the First Sin, it has some improvement over the base game and it already includes the three DLCs, which by far had way more thought put into them than the main locations, in regards of bosses, maps, exploration and story.

If you were truly searching for the most standard of the JRPGs, something that has everything the medium already did but didn’t try even a little to put our something new or memorable, a title where the protagonist would be your average lovable goofball, the side characters the most basic standard heroines and stock personalities, you’d probably be happy to get Fairy Fencer F. It’s not that it is inherently a bad title, rather if you bought a Neptunia game you’d get the same combat system with some sort of substance put into it.

What Idea Factory did with this game was releasing just the bare minimum: the dungeons are linear and uninspired, ever more than Neptunia I mean; the characters never bother to be surprising or entertaining; the plot plays exactly like you imagine from start to finish; the combat is also pretty bare. Everything gives the feeling that this game was made out of obligation rather than because a team of creatives had and idea and came together to release this idea to the world.

I enjoyed my time in Fairy Fencer F, but I can’t help but think that despite being light-hearted, mindless fun I could’ve gotten better from similar titles.

Whilst The Elder Scroll: Skyrim succeeds in putting the player inside an immersive, fabulous world, it fails at giving it any sort of depth or interesting content. I didn’t complete the game, I just stopped going around once I visited every location of the map.

I really think one couldn’t be blamed for doing so: the mods add some sort of fun content but not so much you’d stick with the wooden narration, the terrible combat and the general feeling that no one around you is acting like more than a few millions of soulless pixels put together.
The plot is abysmal, dull and predictable but without charismatic characters or an interesting lore to redeem it: you are given orders by random strangers with no reason or rhyme and almost every quest can in some sort boil down to “Fetch me this”, “Kill some of those”, without anything gripping enough to let the players feel like they are accomplishing something noteworthy. Even the Dragons, supposedly the main appeal of the game, after a while feel repetitive, predictable, lose their mysterious charm because you quickly realize where they usually nest and how to kill them since there are never new mechanics added to the fights.

Skyrim is a chore, and endless shopping list of tedious checks which expands in every new city full of cardboards giving you empty missions for empty rewards and empty felling of accomplishment. You’d better be playing Dragon Age Origins or The Witcher if you wanted both a more compelling narrative and a more interesting world to explore.

“Come, gather and bear witness to my opera, now in the making. Its script is the height of cliché, I am forced to admit. And yet its actors are of the finest fold; beyond exquisite. Thus, I believe you will find it enthralling.”

This is a line from a pretty late stage of the game, yet it is for understandable reasons being often quoted to express many of the things that make Dies Irae impressive. For one, the prose is absolutely stellar: if the incredible amount of care put into every line from the English localization team mirrored the quality of the original Japanese release, we are in front of a work that transcends the limit of games directed to a young audience and leads into the realm of actual literature. Each character expresses themselves with fitting and recognizable verbal quirks, their voice acting is nothing short of superb, the insight given to their personalities is of the most eloquent and beguiling kind, certainly if one had to read Dies Irae for one purpose it would be for how well narrated are its characters.

As the translation team discussed, what appears to be a regular plot of bad villains (Nazis, moreover) threating the world hides a deeper layer of meaning where are discussed the fundamentals of its own genre, being so subtlety hidden that, even when the dialogues are close to be so metafictional you could hear the fourth wall shattering, the plot still doesn’t cease its adrenaline rush, nor loses focus. When you think you finally reached the climax, the game goes beyond and a new, more impressive climax is just around the corner, you’ll find yourself jaw dropping while reading some of the most superb over-the-top scenes ever conceived. Whenever ‘Ω Ewigkeit’ starts playing, since its first usage as the title menu theme, you can’t help but feel the blood rushing, the thrill, the awe, being swarmed by whatever is bound next to subvert your every expectation.

Dies Irae is a crescendo that can’t, or rather shouldn’t, be halted, ever, not until the reader has enough understanding of its core content to properly decide if it was impressive or tedious, charming and elegant or uselessly over bombastic. It also the hope for many more similar remarkable visual novels to receive a western release so that, even if it has still a niche of fans, many can rejoice for the wonderful possibilities of the medium.

I think it is impossible to discuss the value of Little Busters! without focusing on how it achieves to be a successful emotional ride. Did I cry or was I moved? Yeah, I did, something like seven years ago when I first read it. This time around, after the Steam release, I found myself much less impressed by some portions of drama which, admittedly, oftentimes feel just thrown around for the sake of exasperating the melodrama. Also, the plot is mostly goofy and juvenile, some nice spins are given here and there, while the prose does its job it is largely mediocre, and if you won’t find the humour and the chemistry between the characters compelling you’re in for a tour de force rather than a pleasant tale about friendships.

However, the thing about the power of Little Busters! is how being aware of all of its shortcomings doesn’t affect my appreciation of the work Visual Art’s did here, at all. Maybe Little Busters! wouldn’t work magnificently as a story, but it sure is impressive as a visual novel: whilst many similar works would limit themselves to introduce characters and let you focus on a fixated path following which one interested you the most, Little Busters! add far more branch and choices, sometimes seemingly pointless, to let the player experience a bountiful of side contents, comedic or lore-related vignettes, and secrets hidden all over the place that just ask to be found. There’s also the gameplay, in the form of several quick mini-games which range from baseball practice to a fighting tournament, from hunting down mysterious creatures (which give a pretty hilarious insight on the character of Kyousuke) to serving in a cafeteria. And the impressive thing is how all of these are plot related, not because how the gameplay fits into the story but how because how much they reciprocally influence each other. I can’t emphasize enough how I adore the way this novel build around its theme by slightly changing, after each playthrough, some minor bits of it to give a more concrete idea of the characters changing and developing after major events, and the more obvious way to notice this would be, in fact, to check the protagonists’ stats at the beginning of each tournament.

As the story is in its surface state, I wouldn’t think much of it beside it being a heart-warming bildungsroman focused on friendship, but the care put into its every detail, from the immense content hidden in it to the game direction heavily helping the narrative with a pretty fitting musical score and spot-on CG events, raised it to being of my favourite product of its medium.

Sail. Sink. Repeat.

The most frustrating aspect of Sunless Sea, which is bound to have players abandoning the game before achieving anything noteworthy, is the terrible amount of repetitions one is going to face of the early stages in any new playthrough. Also, the grinding wasn’t really well thought out, too much resources wasted too quickly, so that instead of being nervous for the unknown threats awaiting in the most obscure corners of the Unterzee the players will mostly find themselves rushing to the nearest port for a mere barrel of gasoline.

That being said, if you are able to counter these two problems and focus of the explorative side of the game, one is going to be immensely rewarded: Sunless Sea has one of the best writing ever seen in a game. It is immersive, gripping, terrifying and even humorous at times. In contrast with the slow pace of the player’s ship traveling discovering new isles and hidden stories, the sense of anticipation for a new menace or an unpredictable event is ever so present as long as the map has undiscovered bits left.

The game in fact shouldn’t end as one completes a main quest or surrenders to their inevitable death: the allure of the game is present as long as there are still mysteries left unsolved and new stories to adventure through (which, thanks to the dedication of Failbetter games, get regular updates and additions). The world itself displays incredible charm thanks to the art design and the simple, yet striking game engine, all the more emphasized by an atmospheric score fitting for the most diversified events.

Should you surrender to the chore that grinding is in the beginning of the game none shall blame you, be only aware that beside the game limitations what you are going to miss is a story worth of rivalling Melville and Conrad’s sea tales of descent into the abyss of human madness.

I’d like to advise against buying this game, but the only complain I could use to uphold such an opinion is to admit that I’m terrible at it. The reason I stopped playing is because I got tired of the unforgiving combat system and the amount of dedication required to master it enough to succeeds in every mission, which is something that many other players instead may find worth the effort (or easier than the agony it was for me). Should they manage to resist, they’d be hugely rewarded.

Nioh is stunning as an action title, fast paced, complex, with a very inspired design behind enemies and main characters, most of them colourful revivals of historical Japanese figures, and a level design complex but self-contained enough to never let the players feel lost. The plot was kind of a let-down, not because it was bad but because it was poorly narrated: the storytelling alternates between cutscenes, ADV segments and most of the explanations being done in the missions’ briefings and the game encyclopaedia. It’s a mess.

Yet you are not playing to be the best buddy of Oda Nobunaga, although that would’ve been absolutely groovy, you are playing to slay demons bigger than a house with some stylish sick blade combo and tons of hard to master but hugely rewarding abilities. Much like an ordinary RPG, building a character compromise between different weapons and side arts (in this case omnyo and ninjutsu) that grant the players to experiment with any sort of preferred combat style. The upgrade and enhance mechanics are really easy and intuitive to understand albeit quite expensive in the long run if you plan to stick to certain pieces of equipment. The one thing I cannot justify or appreciate no matter what is the loot system, more akin to a MMO where you’ll often discard your preferred gear five minutes after building it because the enemies drop better stuff at an absurd rate. Considering how every piece of equipment relies on individual stats, you could hold in your inventory ten swords with the same name but very different effects that not always conciliate with what you were trying or hoping to receive: RNG plays the major role in it and frankly, for the kind of game it is, it really felt unnecessary complex and arbitrary.

Edit: Yup, tried it again, I definitely hate this game.

Edit2: Hayabusa can go seppuku himself.

I’d like to advise against buying this game, but the only complain I could use to uphold such an opinion is to admit that I’m terrible at it. The reason I stopped playing is because I got tired of the unforgiving combat system and the amount of dedication required to master it enough to succeeds in every mission, which is something that many other players instead may find worth the effort (or easier than the agony it was for me). Should they manage to resist, they’d be hugely rewarded.

Nioh is stunning as an action title, fast paced, complex, with a very inspired design behind enemies and main characters, most of them colourful revivals of historical Japanese figures, and a level design complex but self-contained enough to never let the players feel lost. The plot was kind of a let-down, not because it was bad but because it was poorly narrated: the storytelling alternates between cutscenes, ADV segments and most of the explanations being done in the missions’ briefings and the game encyclopaedia. It’s a mess.

Yet you are not playing to be the best buddy of Oda Nobunaga, although that would’ve been absolutely groovy, you are playing to slay demons bigger than a house with some stylish sick blade combo and tons of hard to master but hugely rewarding abilities. Much like an ordinary RPG, building a character compromise between different weapons and side arts (in this case omnyo and ninjutsu) that grant the players to experiment with any sort of preferred combat style. The upgrade and enhance mechanics are really easy and intuitive to understand albeit quite expensive in the long run if you plan to stick to certain pieces of equipment. The one thing I cannot justify or appreciate no matter what is the loot system, more akin to a MMO where you’ll often discard your preferred gear five minutes after building it because the enemies drop better stuff at an absurd rate. Considering how every piece of equipment relies on individual stats, you could hold in your inventory ten swords with the same name but very different effects that not always conciliate with what you were trying or hoping to receive: RNG plays the major role in it and frankly, for the kind of game it is, it really felt unnecessary complex and arbitrary.

Edit: Yup, tried it again, I definitely hate this game.

Edit2: Hayabusa can go seppuku himself.

Since its earliest moments, Little Nightmares has led my thoughts back in time, down the narrow corridors, ever so familiar to me, of the manor of Gormenghast which Mervyn Peake imagined in the middle of the last century. Having in mind my undying love for that book, it could only mean I was in for a good experience.

Little Nightmares is designed as a side scroller platform which gives particular emphasis to realistic game physics: aspects such as gravity, objects weight, acceleration and velocity, all follow a logic that, as did Little Big Planet back on the PS3, add to an exceptionally 'playful' guise the feeling of being inside a miniature of the real world. The player is asked to walk, crouch, run, jump, move stuff around and solve puzzles, by resorting to all the aforementioned, in a setting which begins with single simple rooms and develops into more complex (but never excessively so) connected environments. As some old school horror games did (White Day and Haunting Grounds come to mind), it also adds mechanics such as escaping and hiding from invincible enemies. Combining these aspects with the realistic physics I mentioned, the game does great at building a genuine sense of tension behind every step taken or object grabbed, as it makes the player’s control feel less like pressing buttons and more like actually engaging in those actions.

Stylistically, for those unfamiliar with the Gormenghast novels, Little Nightmares is a bleak, gloomy, largely grotesque game, full of cramped locations, claustrophobic, grimy and dirty, dark or dimly lit. This should give the player a horrifying and disturbing atmosphere, yet the extremely bizarre way in which everything is portrayed emphasizes instead a world whose grotesque is synonymous with absurdity, not fright. This can be also implied by the characters, who present the most disparate physiognomy, comically deformed, oblong, enlarged, disproportionate and eerie, like cartoons that the unconscious mind of suggestible children re-elaborates and regurgitates in their sleep.

The story is conveyed mainly through visual narration and the interpretation the player gives to each small clue and detail in the environment. Despite possibly resulting in some blanks or unintelligible pieces in the plot, it is certainly the best method of narration when considering the medium: the player is not only a passive spectator of explanations or dialogues, he or she is not generally given a dot on the map to be reached for the next checkpoint, but instead there is active participation in the exploration that will provide details and clarity on the mystery and confusion that protagonist and player mutually feel.

Quite short on its own but prone to be expanded with some challenging achievements and DLC, Little Nightmares is definitely a recommended title for those who search a good (albeit not very challenging) platform game, a visually stunning and curious adventure and a bizarrely grotesque yet humorous narrative experience.

The indie horror scene has been for some years the backbone of intriguing and novel approaches to a genre mostly doomed to forever rely on jump scares and zombies. The good old times when horror meant to tear apart one’s sanity with obscure and disturbing imagery seems now long gone, and we are left mourning the lack in our lives of successors for gems like Silent Hill 2, Rule of Rose and Eternal Darkness Sanity’s Requiem.

Not to say we don’t have good horror games lately, they are just mostly serviceable and uninspired. Indie games made in RPGmaker are a clear example of this but, whereas they fail to achieve compelling game mechanics and still rely on easy puzzle and predictable jump scares, what they show is the passion of individuals who want to convey simple but thrilling stories, meant both to entertain and give a couple of hours long chill ride. Yet Coffin of Ashes simply is incapable of doing this.

The plot is beyond being serviceable, it is instead pretty boring and clichéd for its first half and devoid of acceptable explanation or payoff in the latter half: it is a blend of every conceivable plot point already used (locked house, ghosts, evil scientists, tragic love and some more spoiler-ish stuff) and once you reach the complete elucidation of all the mysteries and details behind the plot, not only it seems way contrived, but it is also undermined by further exposition which just blocks large portions of the game, making the ending an endless drag. Moreover, once you beat the true ending you get more exposition for twists that are at the same time unnecessary and add nothing to the experience. Not to mention the terrible translation, which also hugely affects the delivery of the story: some dialogues are either incomprehensible or their phrasing plainly do not work in the English language.

That being said, Coffin of Ashes had some slight missteps but it does not affect my opinion on indie horror RPG games’ potential, if I had to recommend such titles though I would rather mention Mad Father, The Witch House, Ib, Mermaid Swamp, Hello Hell…o, Misao, there’s plenty of choice.

Eden deals with sensible topics such as despair, love, hope and struggle against fate in the most barebone way possible. It is hard to find fault in a story which plays exactly like you know it will play, after all arguing how novelty and originality matter when judging a story is subjective to how much one knows about the genre and the tropes at hand. Eden constantly plays it safe, never trying to explore unknown territories in an all too familiar and stale genre.

It is difficult to evaluate it purely as a visual novel, since it uses narrative and graphics techniques which resemble an animated series, with shift in perspective, lip sync, close-up etc. and, given the general (subpar) quality of the narration and the dialogues, we could equally associate it to anime and manga and not lose much in the comparison. The list of works that deal with what Eden* tries to narrate is boundless, and arguably each one of those has greater character and precision, just accounting for the Japanese industry; studio minori does not try in any way to revitalize the formula and instead discards any possibility towards new horizons to get back on the safe tracks of the mainstream.

Are you satisfied with a flat, predictable plot where some music and a few tears shed are enough to stir up a mirror reaction of sadness in you, leaving aside any substance of emotion and with a side dish of unfunny and boring anime clichés? By all means, take a seat and enjoy your journey, this visual novel has been designed exactly for you.

I have always had a problem with sandbox games, namely I got tired of everything I was told I could do to the point that nothing seemed relevant: after all, why play bowling with Roman when I could go out and do the same with real friends? Rockstar in particular, leader of the genre, has always looked for a way to make ordinary side activities interesting or not too disjointed as to not hinder the main plot. Grand Theft Auto in its latest iterations (IV and V) was heavily undermined by excessive minor features, but with Red Dead Redemption they seemed to have found a perfect balance between compelling narrative and side activities which don’t feel mundane or trivial.

In Bully they followed a similar approach but with a significant difference: compared to a GTA game, Bully is narrower, it avoids making the player feel lost in an incredibly vast world by presenting a smaller yet still fun setting. In a sense, I like to think that Bully was a prototype for Red Dead Redemption, because both develop a more peculiar and self-contained environment so that exploring and trying different events do not give the feeling of boring routine, and both rely more on narrative than just giving the player the means to cause massive mayhem. Finally, in the later segments of the game, once the map is completely open to the player and all that the game had to offer has been experienced, the game realizes that it has nothing new to present and ends, without forcing any new content. Why is it so difficult to create a world in which you do not feel lost?

Beyond the differences in setting, Bully's school presents more or less all the classic patterns of a Rockstar game: there is the microcosm of a real society with shops, institutions, well defined and idiosyncratic groups and the fact that everything is proposed in a high school rather a whole city, thus replacing guns and race cars with slingshots and bicycles, is in itself enough to have a good laugh. The gameplay, standard third-person with nothing to roam about, is quite clunky and poorly optimized for keyboard and mouse and modern OS, but once it works it is responsive and easy to master. It certainly feels like a good game for 2006 standards, just it hasn’t aged that well. The school mechanics are quite fun and well developed though: as the title implies you play the role of a bully so there’s a lot of fighting and hindering to do, yet you could also choose to help people in distress, to wake up early and attend classes like a role model student to get better grades (and in turn better equipment, such as slingshot, stink bombs and new clothes, or abilities related to the class you attended) or to ditch everything and constantly be chased by teachers and cops. There is a real time mechanic so eventually your day will be over and you’ll be forced out every activity, but there is not any form of time limit so the player will be able to complete everything eventually.

Regarding the narrative, Bully follows the story of a boy, Jimmy Hopkins, basically abandoned by his mother after her second marriage in a boarding school notorious for its strict discipline: her hope is that they will fix the protagonist Holden Caulfield-like character. Not even a day after the beginning of lessons and the harsh reality of high school hits the protagonist, forced to juggle between nerd, jocks, thugs, cheerleader replacing femmes fatale and amidst all of the this, quite ironically too, the protagonist Hopkins, the 'bully' of the game, will be several times hero and knight of the school rather than its destroyer. The cast serves its purpose, there will never be great developments from the aforementioned stereotypes, but for a twenty-or-so hours game they are nice and amusing caricatures.

Despite being such a short and compressed game compared to the standards of its genre, though as I mentioned its shortness is one of the major positives aspects to me, I can recommend Bully. It surely offers less in size and purpose compared to similar titles but while not necessarily presenting anything new from a gameplay viewpoint it certainly is a fairly different experience for its setting and story to deserve a try.

What has distinguished the Atelier series over the years is Gust’s ability to create JRPGs that, beyond conventional mechanics of exploration and turn-based combat, still manage to convey to the player feelings of relaxation and placidity rather than frenzy and hunt for the battle. Of course, their games are still plagued by busy work, flat and impersonal side-quests and an amount of grinding that, especially in this Atelier Sophie, will absorb far more hours than one could afford to spend in the name of completism and fun.

From the gameplay viewpoint, mixing the already discussed turn-based combat with the simulation system of the alchemical synthesis, Atelier Sophie offers to the players the possibility to enjoy the fruits of their loots (which actually include, among other things, fruits) and be able to transmute them from poor quality plants or minerals into medicines, equipment and weapons that will save the party from massacre in the next dungeon. Keeping an eye on recipes, requirements to unlock new equipment, traits and effects of materials and the potential of mixing them together to obtain stronger skills is essential to ensure the players keep up with their opponents. The synthesis minigame by itself is addictive enough to make one spend tens of minutes on a single item to ensure that the highest number of bonuses is attained from its transmutation so that, when it will be used in combat or reprocessed in turn as a material, they will always have stronger skills at their hands: this works by proposing to the players different cauldrons, in the form of grids, into which they must insert, in the form of blocks of various shapes, previously selected ingredients, taking into account that the order and position of their insertion can vary enormously bonuses and final quality of the synthesized object. Juggling between combinations of shapes, colours, effects and qualities make a system initially simple and straight-forward an excellent base for the insane tetris one will deal with later in the game, to interlock blocks in combinations made of the most useful traits, and this mechanic is by far one of the better and more entertaining aspects of Atelier Sophie.

As for the combat and the gathering system, they are busy work, plain and simple. The combat gives a cap in levelling your characters pretty early on if one is dedicated enough to exploring new areas and fighting new monsters, so that by that point onwards all the efforts are going to be devoted into maxing the party’s abilities and synthetizing the best possible gear as to encompass all the useful skills one might need in various situations. The party can also use a limited number of skills and items so there will rarely be any need to strategize before an encounter. Also, enemies’ levels don’t scale so once their patterns are figured out the only problems are going to be the mini bosses and the endgame dungeon: those are though, especially on the higher difficulties, but otherwise combat is going to be a simple medium to gather more materials.
Gathering works by either harvesting different areas including different varieties of resources or killing specific enemies to collect what they drop as loot (for example plants can be harvested but killing a monster grants bones and fur). During the exploration, the map also displays five different levels of gathering, the higher the level the better the items and the stronger the enemies: said levels increase by gathering many resources or killing many enemies, it is hard to hit the fifth level without having already completely filled the basket but it is worth dropping some early collected junk to ensure better loots in the long run.

The story is primarily focused on the mundane life of a young girl, the title’s Sophie, as she pursues her desire to become a better alchemist so to help the people of her village and the ones she meets along her journey. Once she finds a talking book, who presents herself as Plachta, Sophie quickly finds new means to improve her abilities as an alchemist and, with the help of her newfound book friend and companions, she is going to fill her everyday with joyful meetings and caring smiles. The plot is the textbook definition of “love thy neighbour” or “smile and the world and the world will smile back”, so if one is into this kind of soothing tales about daily life with no urges or excessive drama, then they are going to have a very pleasant experience. There are some pretty serious developments towards the end, but just a quick major plot that needed to be told, with no lasting consequences.
All the other major characters, either party members or store owners, have their subplots to explore and, on some degree, ‘solve’, and they are a very mixed bag: on one hand, not one of them is anything really original or memorable, but on the other hand, for the aforementioned reason of the story being exclusively a peaceful experience, there is no need for anyone being memorable. Still, while some of the characters are likeable and pleasant to explore, others are just stiff gimmicks that only resorts to one, comedic trait and never add anything substantial to their personality (yes, I am talking about Fritz and Oskar).

Atelier Sophie is a nice game, it’s about repeating over and over the same activities but also about understating the value behind such routine, much like playing as a farmer that has to collect his crops over and over across the years to make a living. If this kind of life where to grow onto the player, the experience they will receive will undoubtedly be rewarding, otherwise they will mostly feel robbed of their time and think that real life is generally a dull routine rather than a stream of possibilities hidden in known grounds waiting to be discovered.

There was a large part of this novel I absolutely despised, yet it would be unfair to advise against reading it mainly because I was not probably the target audience for its contents. To tell in short, Fata Morgana answer the need of feeling constantly depressed, reminded that life is a never-ending stream of suffering, much like reading Wuthering Heights or Judas the Obscure but with a more mundane, easily accessible, japanese-ish anime-ish narrative.

At its core, The House in Fata Morgana is a bizarre yet somehow familiar story made of mystery and supernatural tropes that are neither foreign to Japanese and Western literature, as it really does read as a – inferior – gothic novel from the 19th century with a more modern take on character interactions and fantasy. It directly borrows from medieval folklore and superstition and it mixes it with mildly historical contents and a long tale of guilt, revenge and forgiveness.

My main issue with Fata Morgana was not with its overall plot though, rather with the weird delivery of its content. There are many ways to describe how the narrative works in this novel, in Japanese it is called ‘utsuge’, which directly translates in the English language as misery lit, or misery porn. What this means is that most of the time the reader will be presented with an endless stream of depressing and graphically brutal content, often missing any sort of convincing delivery behind the suffering of the characters. Sure, there are many movies where the point is to witness the desperation and death of a character, notoriously there are the Passions of Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc, but we are comparing relatively short movies to a 30 hours long novel, where the satisfactory reward will not show up until the last three to four hours of gameplay.

In Fata Morgana you are asked to root for characters that apparently do not know what happiness is in life, or rather, there are happy times in their life but they are mostly treated as a justification to the pain and misery, as footnotes necessary to understand the story. The most striking example of this might be a character who supposedly lived just three years of their life as the most beautiful and blissful, and whilst these three years are often mentioned during the long depictions of grief the character has to go through, they are almost never actually showed or described, and if so in very brief detail.

Then there are random complaints about the characters themselves. I appreciated their depiction as flawed and complex human beings, but this depiction was ultimately biased: there are maybe two characters you have to actively appreciate, as they are pristine, faultless, immaculate, Mary Suecough I mean, fundamentally constantly good people. They are also the worst written characters as most of their traits and dialogues can be summed up with dumb anime tropes and jokes that may seem reasonable to read in a YA novel. Then there are all the others characters, a nice mixture of either sympathetic of plainly despicable human beings that might have worked as a believable depiction of humanity worst sins, but ultimately failed to be so. These characters are presented in black and white, firstly you have to know about them being horrible people and then the story will reveal that they do have – questionable – motivations to act as they did. This biased presentation prevents the readers from forming their own opinion on the story and the characters, it leads your judgment because the story is more interested to deliver shock and cheap twists to the readers than actual human portraits.

Moreover, thorough the latter half of the game, there is a huge chunk of the same events being told from different perspectives but with very little added to the overall narrative, giving unnecessary padding to a novel already long as it is. Not to mention how most of the story takes place during different historical periods yet all the characters seem to talk using the same pattern, particularly during a section in the Middle Age where the dialogues are made of unbearable anachronistic onomatopoeias. So much for the immersion, I guess.

All in all the story was compelling and interesting, but the structure could have been done much better.

Technically, Fata Morgana was nothing short of sublime. While the art may have had its ups and downs with some weird looking facial expressions and overly complex drawings, the eerie atmosphere given from the sound design, the photographical backgrounds and the beautiful musical score all helped in providing the mansion a magnificent aura of both magic and obscurity.

If one were to wish buying Fata Morgana, my only advise would be to carefully consider how much unending, and many times superfluous and pointless, suffering could be endured before reaching the payoff, otherwise on a similar note I’d recommend reading Umineko (much, much longer to read and greater in scope) or Cross Channel.