Yurukill Pre-Purchase Impressions: Worryingly Interesting

 

Yurukill is a game that doesn't come out until July this year but after seeing the trailer it's such a weird idea that I have to say a few things about it.

Yurukill is being advertised as an "escape adventure bullet hell" game that is planned to be released for the Switch, PS4/5 and PC.  From watching the trailer it's easy to tell that this means the game is a visual novel combined with a sort of point and click adventure type thing that's ALSO combined with a....bullet hell shooter...of all things.  It's an interesting idea that will either be really good or be the gaming equivalent of chocolate mint ice cream on black pudding.  An idea that's so out there that regardless of what I hear about it from now until release, it's basically guaranteed that I'm going to buy it

Being a cross genre game doesn't inherently make it a bad idea.  Games like Persona 3 and up that combined Tokimeki Memorial style dating sims with RPGs turned out to be a fantastic idea and indie darling Undertale showed that you combine bullet hell "shooting" and RPG mechanics for something really special.  However what a game like Undertale also shows is just how hard it is to make a decent bullet hell shmup.

Let's be honest here, the combat in Undertale is kind of ass.  With the exception of maybe Sans and Genocide Route Undyne, most of the enemies have boring as shit, dull as dishwater attack patterns and the controls feel sort of "heavy" and the combat generally isn't all that great.  The writing and characters in that game is what makes it so special and the sub-standard combat can be forgiven because it's contextualised probably as part of the story.  As a "shmup" Undertale is a pile of ass but when regarded as an entire piece, it's not bad at all.  The other thing that elevates Undertale is that the set pieces in that game are incredible.  Like sure, the controls are kind of dog water and the patterns are basic and a bit dull for a shmup but the overall vibe of a fight like Metaton or the emotional weight behind the battle with Asgore means that it can get away with it.

But then there's Yurukill 

Just from this game player trailer alone you can see that Yurukill is a boring, generic looking ass shmup that looks like it was pulled from the underside of some doujin game freeware site.  Also it's hard to say for sure given what we know right now but it also looks like it doesn't benefit from having story context to help forgive boring game play.  Like there's a bunch of visual novel shit and then "oop, time for a shmup break" and the impression I get is that it's poorly thought out.  Some proper Triggerheart Excellia lookin-ass garbage.

But these are just my initial impressions from a trailer, who knows the later shmup levels might be crazy intense with fun game play and story context, don't judge a book by it's cover right?  I have another, slightly more personal reason for being wary of this game.  The first thing that this whole thing reminded me of when I first saw it wasn't Daganrompa, like it seems to in most people, but  Deadman Wonderland.  A fucking HORRENDOUS anime about a high school student being framed for a murder and having to serve a prison sentence in a theme park prison where people have to the death duels with their blood-based super powers.  It's fucking awful and I can't look at Yurukill and not get traumatic flashbacks to watching that pile of garbage.

Yurukill is an interesting combination of genres that means that even despite all the shit I just gave it in the above paragraphs I'm going to buy it and therefore I hope to whatever God may be watching down on us all that I'm wrong and the game is actually incredible.  But a dull shmup and a setting reminiscent of one of the worst pieces of fiction ever made means it has some work to do for a good write up.  

Fingers crossed though, I love it when whacky ideas work

Twilight Syndrome: Investigations

 

As a fan of the developer Grasshopper Manufacture and their lead dude Suda51, I decided to take it upon myself to go and experience a few of his older works when he used to work with another company called Human Entertainment.  Very recently I finished off Twilight Syndrome: Tansaku-Hen and so I thought I'd share some thoughts on the game.

Well I guess I should use the word "game" very lightly because there's very little in terms of game-play here.  Twilight Syndrome is a visual novel about 3 school girls who find themselves often caught up in some kind of spooky happenings.  Each chapter starts with some kind of rumor that one of them hears about and then the 3 go and investigate and a bunch of weird shit happens.  The main "gameplay" in Twilight Syndrome is the same kind of "gameplay" that you get in most games of this type, where you read the story and then every so often you are presented with A, B or C options and you pick one.  The choices that you make throughout each story change the outcome but I'll get into that a bit later.  Sometimes you are also able to control the girls around certain environments but there's not really anything to explore and they all walk so slow that I think going from one side of the school building to the other in Chapter 4, for example, caused me to age about 2 years.  Gameplay is not what we are here for.

Weirdly enough there is also an EKG at the top of the screen that at first made me think there might be things to hide from or options that would cause the girls to panic or die of fear, thus resulting in a game over but nothing ever came of it.  There's one chapter where one of the girls gets caught in a looping train station and every time you make the loop you find a public phone that's ringing.  If you choose to not answer the phone the girl runs away and loops back to it, causing the EKG at the top to pulse faster and change color from deep blue to green to red.  I wanted to test the effects of this so I kept on running away rather than taking the call and despite the bar being red and the pulse being extremely fast, nothing happened in the end.  I went the whole game and it never came into play so who fucking knows what that piece of shit bar is there for. 

I bitched about this in the last post but depening on the choices you make during each stage, you can end up getting a game over.  At the end of each chapter you are given a rating that includes 区 meaning bad luck, 中吉 meaning medium luck or 大吉 meaning big luck, based off what you get when you do those temple fortune telling thingies.  If you get 区 then the chapter is considered failed and you have to replay it.  This is annoying because the game doesn't feature a fast forward and it doesn't allow you to skip past the bits where you made correct decisions so if you fuck up you have to replay the WHOLE THING again, which is tedious as all fuck.  Usually though, these decisions are not hard to notice, where usually you'll get the worst result if you abandon an investigation early or leave a character behind.  For example there was one stage where one of the girls gets trapped in a room with a ghost and your choices shortly after are to either leave her behind and go home or go back and try to help her.  While I was streaming it I decided to leave her there to get ghost-wrecked because I didn't know about the game overs only to have a big 区 slapped on the chapter select list and told to do it again and properly this time.

But that's fine, that was me fucking around with the obviously stupid answer and finding out.  However there was one chapter where the wrong decision didn't feel so obvious and caused a game over.  It's in the aforementioned train station chapter near the end, where the girls find themselves on a ghost platform with a ghost train.  One of the girls decides it might be a good idea to ride the ghost train and you can choose between talking her out of it, or lending her about $300 for a ticket.  Now before I said that most chapters end in 区 if you abandon the investigation, correct?  Well this is the one time in the game where you HAVE to abandon the investigation or you get a failing grade.  Failing to talk her out of the train ride leads to her going missing for a week and then the police find her somewhere out of town with a hard case of amnesia.  What makes this double annoying is that this comes right at the END of the god damn chapter so if you got on that train because you've been conditioned to see your spooky shit to the end, then enjoy re-reading the whole thing, fuck face, 区 for you.

Annoying design problems aside though, the game is sort of interesting.  It sort of reminds me of something like Goosebumps are Are you Afraid of the Dark or some shit.  Not something I'll be ranting and raving about like Suda51s other works such as Killer7 but interesting for a one time play through and good enough to make me interested in it's sequel which is also called "investigations" but in Japanese it's 究明 instead of 探索.  Maybe "search" would be a better translation for this game's title but that sounds stupid as fuck to me

Anyway, if you were looking to play this for yourself you might be shit out of luck because as far as I'm aware none of of the Syndrome games have English translations.  Someone on YouTube has done a playthrough of them with English Subtitles attatched though so you could go look that up and just watch that instead.  You're essentially getting the same experience.  

For me though, this game ended on a cliffhanger so I'll probably write another post when I beat 究明