999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

 

Chunsoft, or I guess Spike Chunsoft as they are now known, are a developer I really like.  They've been around since the 80s but I was really made aware of them in the mid 2010s when I got my hands on a very cheap copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru for the Super Nintendo.  Kamaitachi isn't really a "game" per se, it's more of a choose your own adventure novel slammed into a SNES cartridge.  There is a game element to it, the process of combing through the story to deduce who did the murder that takes place at the start of the game but gameplay consists entirely of reading through long passages of text with very little actual input from the player.  It sounds boring as fuck when I write it like that but Chunsoft are quite adept at weaving a decent mystery and so the game is carried by strong writing and some clever twists and turns.

Fast forward from the Super Nintendo to 2009 and Chunsoft are still at it with the first entry in what is now known as the Zero Escape series, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.  No longer just a sound novel, 999 has graduated into a full on visual novel with character art and even, if you're playing the PC re-release like I was, voice acting.  The original version didn't have the VA so its a little closer to its roots in that regard, I suppose and the VA in both English and Japanese is sort of crap so maybe the DS is the way to go.

The gameplay is pretty simple with it consisting mainly of reading the story and making choices at various key moments.  Unlike something like Kamaitachi though, 999 splits its talky, novelly sections up with point and click adventure segments where you poke around a room and solve puzzles.  The puzzles are mostly pretty easy and getting stuck usually means that you've missed some clickable aspect of the environments you're in but they are a welcome addition either way.

They story is sort of hard to talk about in a review like this because the story is all there really is to this game.  If I go into any detail with it and spoil it then there's no real reason for you to go play it and I DO want you to go play this game, it's good.  To summarize in a not quite accurate way, the game follows 9 people who have been kidnapped onto a sinking ship and have 9 hours to get out or else die in a watery grave.  Doesn't sound too complicated until you factor in that each victim has a numbered bracelet which, through some simple math, allows them to access the numbered doors in the ship which block their escape routes.  The other problem with those bracelets is that they will send a signal to the bomb in their gut if they fuck up and kill them.  So think of it kind of like anime Saw.  That doesn't quite do it justice because writer Kotaro Uchikoshi was fucking ON something (good connotation) when he wrote this game but it's an easy comparison to make.

My one problem, and I will put a spoiler for one of the endings here so stop reading and fuck off to play 999 if you haven't already, is that mistakes in this game feel undeserved and bullshit.  For example, I stumbled into one of the endings where everyone gets murdered at the end but the choices that you make in 999 don't give any indication as to that being the path that you're on.  In Kamaitachi, when I got one of the many bad endings for that game it felt like my fault.  A bad decision somewhere down the line, a misunderstating of the facts.  But in 999 pretty much all the choices you make are "pick a door".  Imagine some guy comes up to you in the street and says "pick a card", so you choose one at random and then he shoots your dog.  You had no way to know that the card you picked was the dog murder card, you'd be pissed.

Thankfully the game doesn't twist and turn quite as much as other Chunsoft games and you can use a flowchart to jump to any previously viewed point in the story to make the other choice so I guess 999 actually ends up being more book-like than the SNES games despite the point and click editions.

Either way, it's a good game, worth playing and it's got a decent steam version that comes bundled with the sequel that, at time of writing, I have never got around to playing.  I'd probably suggest the DS version over the PC version just because I have fond memories of curling up in bed with my DS, a hot beverage and a good mystery but there's nothing overtly wrong with the port so just get comfy in your gaming chair if need be.

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

Moonlight Syndrome

 

If you've listened to me on the stream or read this blog extensively you may be aware that one of my favorite games of all time is Killer7.  Killer7 is the brainchild of Suda Goichi, or Suda51 as he's more commonly known and he's the guy responsible for games like No More Heroes and Killer is Dead, games famous for being a bit weird to say the least.

Suda51 before starting his own studio, Grasshopper Manufacture, actually got his start making games for a company called Human Entertainment and so I decided to go back and check out some of his past work and the first game I decided to sink my teeth into was Moonlight Syndrome on the PS1.

It may have been a mistake to start with Moonlight Syndrome because from what I can understand, it's a sort of alternate universe type story based on a game called Twilight Syndrome but I was already an hour in when I realized so I just kept going.

The game follows the adventures of a high school girl called Mika who lives in a town where a series of progressively fucked up things are happening.  Mika takes it upon herself to investigate these strange happenings after a road accident kills one of her class mates and we get to join her on her weird and dark misadventures.  

Game play wise there isn't really a lot to talk about since Moonlight Syndrome is essentially a visual novel.  You control Mika or one of the other characters moving left or right along each of the games areas but there isn't really anything to do other than watch the walking animation and listen to the loud footstep noises.  You do this until you meet another character or hit an event trigger and then more story plays out for you.  They story is presented in a number of chapters and while the main characters lines are all denoted with text NPCs all get weird PS1 CGI and voice acting.  There are a couple of moments in the game where you have to solve a "puzzle" which usually involves finding an event trigger or talking to a specific character.  For example there's one bit when Mika is investigating an apartment building and you have to find someone living in room 9 on a certain floor.  If you just count the doors you go down you'll end up at the wrong door because in Japanese apartments a room 4 doesn't usually exist and the idea of calling that a "puzzle" is a bit sad really.

 Overall though, Moonlight Syndrome is a weird game that I think is worth checking out if you're a big fan of Suda51s more modern titles.  It's fun to go back and see what he was doing early in his career.  As far as I know though, the game doesn't have a fan translation and was never released outside of Japan so unless you can read and understand Japanese you may be shit out of luck.  If you do though, give it a go, it's not overly long and it's quite an interesting little game.  MAYBE check out the previous titles first if you really want to get into the series though.

An Outsiders View on Bandersnatch

I just can't seem to escape people talking about this thing.  I've not seen it so I wasn't going to make any comment on it but the way people are ranting and raving like it's the second coming of Jesus Christ I feel like, as someone who enjoys the genre this interactive show is clearly based on, want to throw in my two cents.

As a warning, if you haven't experienced it yet and want to do so completely for yourself then warning for maybe some spoilers. 

So if you somehow haven't heard of Black Mirror, it's a show on Netflix that is written by one of my favorite people ever, Charlie Brooker and is a sort of science fiction anthology show that likes to show a sort of potential dark future of technology.  My personal experience with it is limited to clips and snippets of different episodes but what little I have seen of it seems really good and it is on my list of things to watch fully once I find some time to do so.  Black Mirror Bandersnatch is special because it's sort of a choose your own adventure type deal.  Instead of the episode just playing and you just watching, there are certain points in the show where you must pick an option and the events of the episode will change based on the choices that you make.

Now I've not seen what official publications are saying about it but my Twitter and Facebook are going crazy frothing at the mouth about how cool it is because of its interactivity.  This is all well and good and given the shows pedigree I'm sure it's very good but going crazy over it because it's some kind of "new thing" makes you look just a little bit stupid.

You see, games have been doing this for forever.  For example one of my favorite titles on the Super Nintendo, Kamaitachi no Yoru is essentially the same concept as Bandersnatch but its mainly just text and still images.  It's a pretty famous series in Japan and has a whole bunch of sequels on PS2 and other systems

But Kamaitachi 2 is mainly just text with very limited movement and all the characters are just blue silhouettes, you might say, it's NOTHING like Bandersnatch.  Well I have two points to counter you there, imaginary reader.  First, not only is the interactive aspect exactly the same but Bandersnatch's story flow is actually rather limited and looking at nothing but a flow chart of events, it seems a bit shit

There are A LOT of choices on that chart that mean exactly fuck all of nothing, which isn't really good when you're making an interactive experience like this.  Kamaitachi on the other hand, will not only change events but will even change what kind of story your playing.  The base path for that game is a murder mystery but certain choices might turn it into a zombie survival story, an occult horror story, a raunchy comedy or even a sci fi alien invasion. Sure you can't make EVERY choice wildly change events but Bandersnatchs flow chart seems incredibly limited and easy to work out how to reach each ending.

"But that's not fair! This silly Japanese game is just text! this is TELEVISION!"  Well here come point number two because once again, games have been doing this way before Netflix decided to rip it off

Now I'm not a huge fan of Heavy Rain, I think the writing is a bit shit, another blog post for another day, but this is, once again, essentially the same thing.  Not only do you have to make choices that affect the plot but, because it's being delivered as a game, there's even added interactivity in how the scenes themselves go down.  Take the famous scene where the protagonist must cut off his own finger, if it was Bandersnatch you'd have two choices to cut or not cut and the character would do whatever you pick.  In Heavy Rain you not only decide if he does it or not, but you decide HOW he does it.  Saw? Hot poker? Hammer it off? Are you gonna get drunk before hand to try and dull the pain? It's all up to YOU

Now again, I know I'm being mean but I'm not hating on it really.  I don't have a Netflix account and Bandersnatch has legitimately got me trying to force time in my schedule to sign up and experience it, it looks awesome, but praising it as this "new original thing omg so cool!" is just a bit stupid.  Praise it for it's acting, praise it for its writing, praise it for the originality of the plot if it has it, of course, but do keep in mind that games have been doing this for decades before this came along.

And before any smart ass wants to comment, I know Choose your Own Adventure books did it first but if you google "Bandersnatch" all the news is about how they are being sued for ripping them off so I didn't feel like I needed to talk about it.

Anyway I'm off to sign up for netflix, I'll make a post about what I think of the show itself at a later date

Steam Censorship: What's The Point?

Before I start this isn't going to be a kind of "OMG CENSORSHIP SO BAD blah blah blah" kind of post.  Censorship of any kind is complete and utter bullshit but I can kind of see why they are doing it here, I just don't see the point.

So for a while new Steam have been providing a few VNs and other games that are a bit more adult in nature.  What I mean by this is that they are flat out selling porn games (known as Eroge in Japan) except they cut out all the porn.  Now I'm not going to get all angry at not being able to see anime characters fucking in my steam games but the whole thing seems completely pointless.

Why bother releasing something which you KNOW going in is an Eroge or some kind of porno game and make it available on Steam with all the tits and fucking cut out?  When people buy these kind of games, about 70% of the time they are buying them FOR the tits and fucking.  After experimenting with the genre a little bit over the years I have found a fairly sizeable number of pornographic games which either have really good plots to follow or have solid game play.  Big famous examples of these porn games with a bit more than meets the eye are things like Yume Miru Kusuri and Sengoku Rance.  The first telling a gut wrenching story about bullying and being true to oneself while the other plays like a Total War title where victory is rewarded with sex scenes.  Both are solid titles that stand up without the porn, but there's porn included for people who need some....release and that's probably why they bought them in the first place.

In some cases I've seen games on Steam where this censorship for all ages has actually affected reviews from users.  One game in particular that I came across (I forget the name, but I'll edit if I find it again) had a bunch of negative reviews from people who had played the non steam version because plot important shit only found in the sex scenes had been cut from the game and the Steam version of this title was therefore incomplete.

Why censor these games at all?  Just have a 18+ section or some shit where you can provide these games in their original, uncensored form for the people that want them and then younger users or people who aren't interested know what those games contain before they even click the games store page.  Otherwise, why bother putting Eroge on Steam at all?  The tits, fucking and cute anime girls are the genres main selling people and you're taking 2/3s of that content out so you're just shooting yourself in the foot.  Why would anyone buy a game like that on Steam when they can get the version with the goodies somewhere else?  The only reason I can think is if they didn't know it was an Eroge before they bought it but then again people who enjoy this genre are fairly well clued in about it so I imagine that number of people is rather small.

Either sell porn games or don't.  There is no point providing them if you're going to censor them other than trying to score a quick buck off ignorant users.  I'm sure if you labelled it probably no one would give a shit.  That said, Steam is too lazy to properly label their early access bullshit on the listings so they would probably be too lazy to do this too.

What the Hell is Happening to Steam?

I love Steam, the convenience it brings along with the insane sales that it does is amazing.  I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression either, despite what I'm about to say I still love Steam and I have absolutely no intention to stop using it.

However, something weird has been going on recently with the games that are being released, probably mostly the fault of Steam Greenlight but more and more the latest release list is making me unhappy.  There used to feel like there was some degree of quality about the games on Steam.  Not that every single game was good but there was at least some degree of quality control when it came to which games got put on the market and which were not.

But then Greenlight came along and shit started to get weird.  Now there's all these weird fucking indie games which look like they have 0 production value put into them and they cost about 40p to buy.  Not only that but there's lots of fucking RPGMaker games which by itself isn't a bad thing but I'm so sick of clicking a title only to find it's been made in that.  RPGMaker is fucking game development on easy mode, hell, I'M in the process of making a game in RPGMaker and I'm a fucking idiot.  If I ever finish it I sure as fuck won't be charging any money for it and I'm not using any of these original assets but games made in that engine feel cheap and shitty, at least to me. 

The one thing that really gets me though is the fucking visual novels.  I don't mind a good visual novel, I've played and enjoyed a good handful of them (not on steam) but the ones that get released on this platform are the fucking lowest kind of crap.  All about fucking anime girls doing bullshit or created by westerners who got their hands on Ren'Py.  I know this is an extremely shallow case of judging a book by it's cover (almost literally) but I'll happily eat my fucking shoes if ANY of them even come close to the levels of quality of games like Kamaitachi no Yoru and 999.

The weirdest thing of all when it comes to this shit are the censored porn games that are available.  Shit like NekoPara and Hunnipop which you can buy on Steam but are censored so that all the nudity and sex are left out.  Why would you even play a game like that if not for the gratuitous anime porn that's available as a reward for putting up with it's cringe-moe BS.  NekoPara is a particularly interesting example of this because if you want it on Steam with the censoring removed you have to buy the fucking game TWICE!  At that point why even bother with the Steam purchase at all?

And before I finish, let me just take a minute to bitch about Early Access again because it's fucking awful.  Stop charging for early access because you're asking for money for an unfinished product which is just lazy bullshit.  I don't care if your game plays "like it's finished" (lookin' at you Necrodancer and Darkest Dungeon), the fact is that it's not and your trying to charge me money for it and that's not on.  If you want to drum up interest for your game then make a fucking demo instead of charging full price for your shit and then just promising that you'll do it.  Just have the end of the demo link to your kick starter or whatever and then you don't need to clog up steam with all this unfinished yet expensive bullshit.

Anyway like I said, Steam is still great and there is a lot of great stuff being released.  That said, finding the good stuff is getting progressively harder thanks to them allowing all this stupid crap clogging up the market lists.  I guess this is why they introduced Steam curators...

All These VNs on Steam

What the fuck is going on here?!  Since when did Steam get so many goddamn weird visual novels.

Recently I've been noticing this trend of Visual Novels appearing on Steam.  This isn't a bad thing because I've talked about Visual Novels before and good ones can be really fun to play.  However, all the visual novels that seem to get put on Steam are all the fucking same super kawaii dating sim type games that look awful.  It has even reached the point where there is an actual porn game on Steam now but with all the sex scenes taken out.  This doesn't stop people from inserting the original files into the game directory to play the steam version with all the steamy stuff left in.

Granted, I'm judging these without having played any of them but I doubt very fucking much that any of them are any good.  I'm more than willing to give them a go at the very least at some point and if I ever find one with any kind of real quality to it I'll be fucking stunned.  Where are all the GOOD visual novels, huh?!

Where's my PC steam port of Kamaitachi No Yoru?!  This is a REAL visual novel!  None of this fucking stupid kawaii anime girl with huge tits trying to slobber over your dick, this is the real deal.  A really well written murder mystery game that tasks the player at trying to figure out who the killer is for themselves rather than just being strung along by the nose with text boxes.  This game is not only a great read but there is some actual challenge and puzzle solving to be done if you want to get the best ending.  This is double true if you play the original version that doesn't have all that flowchart crap.

I'm all for this increase in VNs on Steam but can we get some actual good ones rather than all this wank material?

Visual Novels: An Understandably Underrated Genre

A few months ago I picked up Kamaitachi no Yoru from a retro game shop.  My wife has been playing the shit out of it with a friend of hers and I've been tagging along for the ride.  During their evenings of playing Sherlock Holmes I couldn't help but feel that the Visual Novel as a genre of gaming is slightly underrated

For those that don't know, a visual novel is the video game version of a "choose your own adventure" book that was popular during my childhood.  The game presents you with a story and at key moments in the plot you are presented with choices and those choices will affect the outcome of the game.

Kamaitachi no Yoru, for example, is a murder mystery game about a group of people who find themselves stuck in a ski resort log cabin with a murderer.  You read the story from the perspective of the main character as he tries to unravel the mystery and stop the killer from taking more victims.  It's an extremely interesting experience because despite it being no more than a picture book on an SNES cart it kind of plays just like a puzzle game with you trying to figure out who the killer is based on the events unfolding around you.  Your decisions in that game may lead you down the right path to the murderer or get everyone killed and with many endings to discover multiple playthroughs are required to get the full story.

Kamaitachi no Yoru is not the only visual novel I've enjoyed though.  There are quite a few and games like 999 and Virtues Last Reward are rated pretty highly for the story and ability to allow someone to get truly lost in a world of mystery.  Even badly translated visual novels such as Lux Pain on the DS still had a strange charm to them that kept me playing and wanting to figure out what was going on even if the writing in the English version was laughably bad.

Since these games only have to focus on one thing, they do it REALLY well.  Sacrificing traditional game play for an immensely well thought out plot and an unforgettable experience.  At this point you may want to call me a hypocrite because I slam games like Gone Home for being "non-games" or "walking simulators", but there's a key difference between Gone Home and a game like Kamaitachi.  You see, in Kamaitachi I'm using my brain to figure out a puzzle of who is going around committing the murders.  I have to take in all the events around me and play detective in order to reach the best ending of the game.  In Gone Home, you walk around a house and read badly written articles about how someone is a lesbian and the amount of brain power involved in that process is exactly 0.

But I understand why Visual Novels aren't as popular as maybe they should be and that's because their reputation has been sullied by the porn game.

You see, whenever I think of visual novel my mind ALWAYS goes straight to Japanese porn games.  Understandably, people don't want to play or be associated with games that involve schoolgirls being fucked or whatever because that shit is kind of weird (for most, some must find it hot or this shit wouldn't sell).  But these porn games are probably in the majority, or at least it seems that way when if you walk around some of the stranger specialist shops in Japan so the Visual Novel kind of has a bad reputation as a result.

What's really strange about this situation is that I gave one of these porn visual novels a try one time (the above one) and it actually told a really touching story about a girl being bullied at school who finds a friend in the main character and together they stand up to their adversaries, win the day and fall in love.  Sure there were some scenes of gratuitous fucking but if you took all that shit out then there's a good story in there and I think it's sort of a shame that it's ruined by these weirdly drawn sex sequences.

So I think everyone should give Kamaitachi no Yoru or any non-porn Visual Novel a try.  You may be pleasantly surprised just how enjoyable they can really be.

The Phoenix Wright Movie

So last night I was sat around watching TV with the family and we end up being engrossed in this Japanese court room drama called Legal High.  Legal High is an extremely light hearted and somewhat ridiculous drama about lawyers and if you could compare it to anything else it would be Phoenix Wright.  That's when it struck me that last year (I think) Phoenix Wright got it's own movie adaptation so I hunted it down an gave it a watch.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (or Gyakuten Saiban 逆転裁判 as it's known in Japan) is a series of mystery solving video games that are half visual novel and half point and click adventure.  You play as Phoenix Wright, an up and coming defence lawyer who takes on various cases for people who have been wrongly accused of something that's usually murder.  You spend half the game trotting around various locations talking to people and collecting evidence and the other half of the game in the courtroom having a sort of evidence war with the prosecutor.

Now 9 times out of 10, video game movie adaptations are a pile of complete wank, but Phoenix Wright is actually pretty good.  If there is one thing that I can say about this movie, it's that for the most part, it stays faithful to the games.  The story follows the I think the second and final cases from the first game but they do a good job of setting everything up so if you haven't played the games you'll still be able to follow the murder mystery.

The characters are well acted and the costume and makeup work is really really good.  It's not completely perfect with Dick Gumshoe being a little bit too thin and competent for what I'm used to and Maya not quite matching her in game personality 100%, but it's not changed enough to the point to be offensive.  The core character is still there and when it's backed up by costume design that would make even the best cosplayers green with envy it's a lot of fun to watch.

They also do a good job with the camera work trying their best to mimic the shots that you would see from the game.  Granted the actors do move around a bit more than they would in the video games but if it was just 3 people behind desks talking and slamming tables it wouldn't really be all that good for a movie.

Really it's the care that was taken to make this movie resemble the games as close as possible is what makes it so good.  If you're a fan then pretty much everything is here and you'll feel really familiar with all the characters right off the bat.  All the key scenes are there too including the infamous cross examination of a fucking parrot so you there aren't any points where you'll feel frustrated because key points from the games are excluded from the movie.

Finally, the movie does take some liberties with the setting a little bit.  The courtroom has this steampunky projector system that they use to present evidence with.  I see why they did it but it just seems out of place within the setting.  Also there are parts of the movie that seem a bit dark and grim where they shouldn't be such as the visiting room in the prison.  In the movie it's a really dark, dank and horrible place but it's never shown in such a way in the games.  Also the shoehorning in of the police mascot was a little silly but it didn't really ruin anything.

So to round off, Phoenix Wright is quite frankly, the best video game movie that exists right now to my knowledge.  If you're a fan go watch it, you'll get a kick out of it as you see all your favourite parts from the first game acted out.  If you're not a fan, go watch it anyway since you'll still be able to follow it and it's a pretty good murder mystery movie if not a little bit on the silly side.

Visual Novels! Not Games, Still Fun

I think a lot of gaming enthusiasts are aware of these but I doubt many pay much attention to them since they can just go play proper games instead of spending 5 hours glued to a screen reading.

That said, the whole visual novel thing is something I've been trying to get into for a while now as I've been told there do exist really good ones.  You see, my view on visual novels is a little skewed since all I ever see from the genre on store shelves for the PS3/PSP are stupid, semi dating sim love stories set in high schools.  Either that, or stupid shit like Milky Holmes which looks so insufferably annoying I couldn't bare to sit down and translate the damn thing.

So I've been making careful picks and I'm actually quite impressed with the results I've had so far.  I've played 2 in Japanese and 2 in English and I've enjoyed them enough to be arsed to seek out more.  The two English visual novels that I played were 999 and Lux-Pain both on the DS.  999 is pretty well known for it's quality and Lux-Pain, while having a terrible English translation still had quite an interesting premise.  The two Japanese games that I've had a crack at are Silent Hill: Play Novel and Kamaitachi no Yoru which are both extremely interesting if a little difficult for me sometimes,  Mainly due to lack of Kanji ability

I've also heard good things about Dunamis 15 and Steins Gate which are titles I really want to try.  The problem is that if you want to play the really good ones then quite a good command of the Japanese language is required.

I want to go into more detail about these games in individual posts but the game play across the board is basically the same.  You have a story with choose your own adventure style choices at certain points along with minor puzzling so that you're really not just reading a book on your PSP or DS.

So to anyone who may dismiss the VN because of it's lack of game elements, I'd urge you to give them a try.  The good ones are actually really interesting and I would easily recommend 999 to anyone as it's one of the best ones with an English version.

Watch this space for more detailed articles on individual titles.