Recent reviews by Azuri Caelum

Senren * Banka is an interesting case in the visual novel space for how to do things well, yet also how to do things badly. The experience within is well worth the price of admission if you're looking for a good storyline in an interesting setting accented by a beautiful aesthetic, but you're going to be sorely disappointed if you come for the characters or the romance.

The common route of this piece is a full arc in its own right. It follows Arichi Masaomi as he assists the shrine maiden of Hoori, Tomotake Yoshino, and her ninja companion, Hitachi Mako, in solving the mystery of the curse casted upon Hoori and attempting to resolve it. It's a neat storyline that progresses at a good pace, then ends in a good spot before branching off into the various character routes. This part of the story is, for the most part, well done. The setting and the conflict fit together well and it's entirely believable that the solution that is used to resolve it isn't discovered before the time of the main story.

The strength of the story carries on through to the routes. Discounting the sub-routes of Roka and Koharu, the other four routes each carry a significant piece of the puzzle regarding how the curse came about and its full nature. I'm a big fan of this type of storytelling in Visual Novels since it grounds the entire story together to be a compelling whole rather than a jumbled set of individual arcs. My one complaint, which is generally a consistent one across this style, is that there is a near required order to the routes that will lessen the impact of the individual routes if you do not follow it. The generally accepted route order that I usually see is Yoshino -> Mako -> Murasame -> Lena, but I strongly believe that doing Murasame's route last is much better for the overall arc of the story, even if it doesn't have the best climax at the end. It's ultimately whichever you prefer for whichever route order you would enjoy more.

The art and music are definitely above average. The characters and set pieces are vibrant and do a great job of setting the right atmosphere for the entirety of the piece. Murasame in particular has a design that directly shows how much effort went into setting the right atmosphere for the story. The voice acting is consistently high quality as well, even among the side characters. Lena and Genjuurou are the two performances that I was particularly impressed by, since their characters felt like the most difficult to properly pull off for how well the performances were nailed. The music isn't top notch by any means, but it was clear that care went into the composition. These two together would comprise around a 7/10 in my eyes; definitely good enough to be worthy of praise, but not so good as to be memorable for months afterwards.

Finally, let's get to the worse parts of Senren * Banka.

While the setting and the story are quite good, the characters are the most glaring weak link. The main character is a jumbled mess, having a very lackluster backstory that doesn't match his personality or actions throughout the story. Each of the heroines have very generic personalities throughout the common route that range from minimal to decent characterization in their routes. Murasame's route features the most characterization of every route, while the other three primary heroines get essentially generic or minimal changes. The characters simply do not make the routes work the way you would hope in a romance story. As a plus, however, the side characters are quite well characterized, which is bizarre since it's rare for them to have a depth of personality when it doesn't feel like the primary characters do.

Speaking of romance, it's very lackluster. This is likely because the characters involved are so weak, but the romance in every single route (including the sub routes) are essentially retreads of the same thing. You're getting the same flowery generic romance story six different times with the differences coming down to the individual way the overall story affects that particular arc. It feels very forced and that they didn't even want to create a romance story in the first place, or that the developers fleshed out the overall storyline of this piece and just shoved romance in to appeal to the masses on release.

In conclusion, Senren * Banka joins the extensive list of Visual Novels that had a lot of potential out of the gate, but simply fall short in an important way. I don't regret buying and playing through this game, and its clear that there was a lot of effort put into it, but this is an experience of driving through a beautiful landscape on a terribly maintained road. Enjoy the aesthetic and the story, but keep in mind that there is a price to pay to experience it.

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I play Visual Novels for its characterization and storytelling potential. If you are interested in the medium for these reasons, visit my profile for more information. This includes more reviews and a link to my vndb profile, where I have ratings and TL;DRs of every Visual Novel I have played. Thank you.

This review was originally written for VNDB. Spoilers are also present.

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As somebody who values strong plots and characterization above all else, I had very mixed feeling about this particular title. While the premise is on the interesting side relative to what you normally see in these standard high school romances, there's also enough red flags to show that there isn't going to be a hidden masterpiece here. Either way, I decided to give WAGAMAMA HIGH SPEC a chance to see which side of the line it would fall on.

By the end, the biggest impression I had about it was that there was simply no ambition put into it. I'm a fan of writers and artists taking a chance to try to make something unique, even if it doesn't quite work out the way they expected to. In this particular case, though, there is nothing here that stands out as the writers wanting to tell the reader anything. That impression says much more than the content itself does.

But, let's dig into this more deeply. The characters are nothing to write home about. Narumi Kouki is the stereotypical harem protagonist, somebody who easily gets caught up in everyone's antics and lets himself be the punching bag of everybody that has a clashing personality with him. The dime a dozen protagonist that is seen across plenty of these titles. Rokuonji Kaoruko is the Student Council President who is the ever-tolerant hard worker who openly wears her heart on her sleeve. Sakuragi Ashe is the Student Council Vice President that is very naive and overly competitive with the protagonist. Miyase Mihiro is a great cook that loves to tease the protagonist about everything. Narumi Toa is very lazy and selfish.

All of these are essentially the main five's personalities in a nutshell, and all of their non-route-specific interactions can be boiled down to them acting in these specific ways. That's not necessarily a bad thing if it's used as a jumping point to build upon characters, which is the point of the routes, but that's underutilized as well. Except for the addition of sexual contact and the openness that necessarily comes along with it, most of the characters are barely explored throughout their routes. Kaoroku and Toa's routes feel more like Kouki's routes, except the structure is borderline identical between them. Mihiro's route doesn't change anything on a fundamental level about Mihiro. Ashe's route is the exception, since she does undergo a significant change throughout her route... while having a very similar structure as Kaoroku and Toa's routes.

That's correct, one of the biggest glaring issues with Wagamama High Spec is that three of the routes are essentially the same thing with a bit different context. Ashe's route is the clear standout, giving enough into her character to drive home how she sees the world and how Kouki fits into it while also having a cohesive enough plot that makes sense. Toa has the best character growth with the differences between her outward personality and inner personality, but her route loses cohesiveness somewhere along the way and turns into a jumbled mess. Mihiro's route is the worst one, with a big focus on Mihiro's cooking and Kouki just being along for the ride before the most disappointing ending of the bunch. Kaoroku's route predictably deals mostly with their partnership on their manga, but it essentially turns into taking steps backwards before returning to where they were before. There's simply not enough to the content to justify recommending this title based on that alone.

However, I'm really not surprised. The signs of this being a mediocre title are there, primarily the fact that each of the girls' sprites are heavily focused on their breasts combined with their very trait-centric personalities. I regard the idea of a consistent breast focus in a VN's art as a compensatory feature for lack of a cohesive personality, and it rings true here. The common route also quickly reinforces this with the side characters all being a mess of 1-2 tropes given flesh solely for comedic value and shallowly fleshing out the protagonist's time outside of the presence of the main heroines. There's nothing special about any of these characters, and their assigned jokes get old long before the runtime ends.

The art is fine. The backgrounds aren't particularly special, but they're serviceable for what you're getting otherwise. The character art is pretty, but it's a bit disconcerting how all of the heroines look like they could almost be identical twins if not for the hair colors. The art that shines in this title is in the CGs; there aren't any that are clearly worse quality than the rest, which is a consistency meriting acknowledgment considering how much of a variety in situations and angles are involved. The art team did manage to leave an overall good impression, if a stilted one.

The sound team fared less well. The music was very forgettable, with me not remembering any part of any single track within a couple hours of finishing the game in its entirety. The voices range from good to poor, but this is understandable with what the voice actors and actresses were given to work with. It ultimately comes down to whether you like how the individual voices sound whether you will like them or not, but there isn't anything that stands out in sound otherwise.

Overall, Wagamama High Spec fails to deliver anything that hasn't been done to death many times over. There isn't any innovation to speak of that differentiates this title from the rest outside of the lukewarm manga writer protagonist idea. The developers took a very safe route with this title. While nothing (except for maybe the duplicate routes) was particularly terrible about this, it's an experience that I don't think the majority of people would enjoy with their brains fully engaged and taking in the story. This is the type that is better to read when you simply want to experience without wanting to think too hard about what you're getting through

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I play Visual Novels for its characterization and storytelling potential. If you are interested in the medium for these reasons, visit my profile for more information. This includes more reviews and a link to my vndb profile, where I have ratings and TL;DRs of every Visual Novel I have played. Thank you..

Wonderful Everyday is a unique experience unlike anything I've played within the Visual Novel space. It has a plethora of disturbing content and has left me feeling uncomfortable with how easily it delved into dark topics, but it feeds into one of the most phenomenal experiences in storytelling I have ever seen in not only visual novels, but through gaming in its entirety.

Before continuing, I would like to state outright that the free patch Frontwing provides on their website is required for this visual novel. The base game only has one of the seven chapters, so you will be getting next to no content if you do not install the patch.

In the interest in maintaining the intrigue of the story, I will be intentionally vague about the details of this work. There's a level of magic about this piece that is lost when you know details about the characters and the story before experiencing it for yourself, so I will depart from my usual review style and extend my thoughts through a list.

The Characters - The characters that are most involved in the story are almost all excellently developed. This doesn't necessarily equate them to being likable, but their motivations and actions all feel like they could have been stolen directly from the real world.

The Story - The style may or may not be your thing. The story does not hold your hand throughout most of it, often explicitly stating facts long after they can be reasonably deduced. It's even common for specifics of the story to not be explicitly stated at all, so this isn't the type of visual novel that you can go in and shut your brain off for. Expect to have to engage into it in order to get anything out of it.

The Art - The art style isn't particularly high quality, and some sprites do look pretty goofy at times, but I think this style works very well for this piece when they need to shape it to their needs. However, I do have to admit that it could have been better.

The Soundtrack - Excellent. This visual novel has given me several new tracks to add to my favorites list, and it pulls off a number of different tones very well. There are better soundtracks, but you can't go wrong with this one at all.

Choice System - Very very minimal, but I think that fits the game well. The few choices you do have are designed to affect your thought processes towards the game more than anything else, which I find very fascinating for this medium.

Conclusion -

Wonderful Everyday is absolutely in my top three favorite Visual Novels of all time. You don't need to be a philosophy nerd to enjoy this game, and you don't need to have a desire to consume extreme content either. If you have a strong stomach and want a story that you can chew on for potentially weeks after you finish, this one is a very strong choice and I'm ecstatic that I finally gave this one a chance.

I don't think I could ever read through Looking-Glass Insects again, though.

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I play Visual Novels for its characterization and storytelling potential. If you are interested in the medium for these reasons, visit my profile for more information. This includes more reviews and a link to my vndb profile, where I have ratings and TL;DRs of every Visual Novel I have played. Thank you.

This visual novel is interesting. When I went about and listed all the things I thought this game did really well, I had no shortage of things to list out. However, the downsides are just as numerous as they are potentially debilitating. Ultimately, this is the type of experience that I came away from satisfied, but the journey was a bumpy mess at times.

The biggest asset of this story is the overarching plot. Despite the structure being a standard list of individual heroine routes branching off from a single common thread, there's a remarkable sense of connectedness that there rarely is with these types of visual novels. While each heroine has their own route to flesh out their own characters, you also learn more about the setting and how all the events, both past and present, connect together. Hoshizora no Memoria does a phenomenal job of building up to the climactic true route, where it connects all the threads together in one fell swoop.

As for the characters, it ultimately depends on how you approach them. Each heroine within their route follows an organic arc that makes them compelling to watch. However, outside of their routes, it is anything but. The common route suffers a lot from the cast being very one dimensional characters, often repeating the same jokes and mannerisms in the same ways even in different situations. They don't feel like actual human beings until the story directly says it's their turn to get all the attention, and then they go back to being cardboard cutouts once their arc is complete.

The routes, as well, have disappointing levels of quality throughout. The true route, of course, is the creme of the crop, with Komomo's being not too far behind. Two other routes are also quite good, but are definitely a step down from those two. Two more have good premises, but are executed poorly. Mare's route... is clearly nothing more than an extra to the true route, which is unfortunate since she is the only character that is consistently strong up until that point. What I believe the issue is with these arcs is that there was a definite struggle in balancing these individual arcs with the information gained from them relating to the overarching plot. The central conflict of every route (minus Mare's) was consistently high quality, and the emotional moments throughout always hit when it truly mattered. The soundtrack especially helps with this, with the strongest tracks absolutely nailing the tone that these emotional moments needed to have. The pacing at times does feel like a major slog, predominantly due to the scenes where You and the major heroine aren't present.

I could speak much more about the visual novel and it's various strengths and weaknesses, but a lot of my notes on this particular visual novel are more in the details than the overall elements present. If you are somebody that can get past very one-dimensional comedy and can handle spotty drops in quality, what you will find beneath it is a work of passion. A story that will hook you on the edge of your seat one moment, then cry your eyes out the next moment. And at the end of it all, a satisfying conclusion that shows that all the dips in quality was truly worth the trouble. This visual novel is not one of my favorites, but I have to admit that when this game hits its highs, it can truly stand among the best of the genre.

And if you're like me, you'll be humming songs from the soundtrack for days afterwards.

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I play Visual Novels for its characterization and storytelling potential. If you are interested in the medium for these reasons, visit my profile for more information. This includes more reviews and a link to my vndb profile, where I have ratings and TL;DRs of every Visual Novel I have played. Thank you.

I am torn on this visual novel.

On the one hand, this work is clearly a step above all the other VNs in the short and sweet category. On the other hand, this work easily would've been a masterpiece if it was given only a bit more of a push. While Eden* is clearly great, there is, unfortunately, a fatal flaw. However, if you are simply looking for whether this visual novel is worth your time, stop here with the knowledge that it absolutely is. The flaw I am referring to only moves this work down to simply great.

Before I go into that, I'd like to go into what Eden* does great. The setting is not only intriguing, but it shapes the narrative wonderfully. Everything that happens is a natural progression from the simple premise that the Earth is guaranteed to die. The cause of the planet's death and why a red star proves it is never explained, but this isn't necessary in the slightest. It's simply the truth, and the story would not be enhanced by them attempting to explain it.

The characters are all great. There is no fluff here with this. If a character appears, they are important. All of them have an arc that makes total sense with their established personalities and background. They all connect together in ways that are, well, remarkably confidential, but also in a way that feels completely natural. It's hard to understate how impressive it is to take a cast of I believe seven characters and give them all enough time to really flesh them out in a visual novel this short.

This is especially pronounced in the theme, regret. In a scenario where you know you must leave somewhere, knowing you will never return, it's important to be sure you will never regret your choice. The arcs of every character ends in this theme, acting in the way that will allow them to move on with no regrets. It's a powerful theme for a character to have, and it gives the ending a strong bittersweet taste.

But what exactly is this flaw I mentioned?

It's simple. The way all of this information is structured was not given enough finesse. There's a strong baseline for allowing the first third or so of the story to be given as memories from Ryou before his life alone with Sion. It would help build up the tension as the research facility section does, but can easily transition directly to Maya's appearance as it ends. As it is, the tonal shift into what appears to be entirely peaceful before the final choice appears makes the work have a whiplash that makes the message dissipate somewhat.

However, this is still relatively minor. The blunt truth is that even with this flaw, the story of Ryou and Sion is beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. I'm glad I got to experience this, and I would recommend this story to anyone.

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I play Visual Novels for its characterization and storytelling potential. If you are interested in the medium for these reasons, visit my profile for more information. This includes more reviews and a link to my vndb profile, where I have ratings and TL;DRs of every Visual Novel I have played. Thank you.

Eiyu*Senki is a visual novel game that tries to fill the void that Sengoku Rance leaves after you've finished with it. It's a similar type of premise in that you take control of a protagonist that is given control of a small piece of the world and tasked with taking over the world. Of course, there are complications regarding "the big bad" that is looking to twist the world to their ends, but beyond that the story is mostly it's own thing from Sengoku Rance. However, where Sengoku Rance succeeds in creating a compelling story with strong gameplay elements, Eiyu*Senki falls flat on its face.

First, the story. You are the "Servant of Heaven", essentially a being that materialized from the sky to protect Himiko, the leader of Zipang (in reality an old name for Japan, but in this game the weakest subsection of Japan), After unifying Japan, he is named as the official leader of Zipang and tasked with taking over the world in the name of peace. Cue wars with civilizations from various parts of history, from relatively modern USA all the way to the ancient civilizations Egypt and Greece. With next to no exception, real male famous figures from all these civilizations are placed into the game as female warriors, and you acquire these women to use in your battles as you conquer each civilization. You start with a fairly modest list of heroes to choose from, but this balloons to an insane amount by the end of the game, to the point of having around 80 heroes to choose from for the final battle, assuming you wiped the entire map beforehand.

The way the story is structured is entirely on the world map. You are given choices of missions to undertake, each of which being assigned to a city. Flags indicate a mission that advances the story, a character's face indicates its for their side quests, gold meaning you get gold, and a diamond indicating you get an item. Technically, everything other than the flags is entirely optional, and as far as I know there is no consequences from delaying any of them, but you get more tidbits about the setting, how the characters interact with each other, and you get resources or access to ways to make your characters more powerful in the meantime.

The story starts out pretty linear and railroaded, but it soon enough balloons out to being a fake open world where you are given quite a few choices, but you are essentially going to want to go specific routes anyways. It all converges together as you take over more of the world map, but each independent country functions in its own way with their own particular types of units they like to fight with, what their overall strategy is, and the like. These along with the names of the nobody units does give each country their own flavor beyond who their named heroes are, which is quite nice for how many there are in the game.

Overall, the story is passable enough for what it's working with, albeit generic at best. The tone is clearly geared towards silliness, but it doesn't hit the same way that Rance does in his game. Rance barely cared about actually running a country, leaving it to his vassals and having them stress about keeping him in check while he went around doing his own thing (essentially having sex with any woman he sees). The silliness works in that instance because it's congruent with itself. The main character in Eiyu*Senki clearly takes his job very seriously and handles it the way a caring leader would, but that doesn't even fit the "opposite" tone shift that visual novels like Danganronpa make use of. It just feels inconguent to have a story that looks like it's trying to be a sensical fighting for peace story have so many instances of nonsense randomness across the game.

Speaking of which, the characters are almost exclusively between laughably shallow and passably okay. the upper end pretty much coming down to what traits you actually like. This is incredibly sad considering that there are few characters in the game that don't come down to a single personality trait becoming basically their entire character, and for what it's worth, I can't even think of a single one that I would consider an actual fleshed out character, although they do tend to get worse in quality really quick after the initial stage of conquering Eastern Asia.

As for the gameplay, it's structured in a way that makes a ton of sense and that I can easily see being a strong concept, but the developers really screwed it up in execution.

First of all, the game difficulty is a joke. I admit that I did abuse a loophole in the game to get extra money by spreading out my action uses to get more per-turn income (there's zero incentive to keep your turn counter low, unlike Sengoku Rance). However, this trick actually is borderline needed to get off the ground if you do attempt to go for all of the difficulty bonuses. This game handles difficulty in the most baffling way I've ever seen, in which you are given a single choice of very easy, but are given the opportunity to increase the difficulty level by taking over more difficult nations before easier ones. If you conquer India before Mongolia, you are given an item and the ability to increase the power level of the other nations. This is absolutely insane, because what ends up happening is that you are given a really strong challenge initially, but the power boost is nowhere near enough to make the easier nation compare to the one you just defeated. If you go for every single bonus, what you will find is that in the first third or so of the game, it's a ping pong effect of pushing your units to their limits to take over a very challenging nation only to topple laughably easy opponents immediately afterwards. It's absolutely insane how this is allowed to exist, but this is the only way to get any difficulty out of the game.

I even recommend going that route because the difficulty in the game vanishes really quickly. Except for Russia, which has an insane gimmick that makes the game artificially harder, the game becomes an absolute joke when you start getting more and more units and items. If you're keeping up on everybody's sidequests, you'll soon find you have more than enough to fit three or four full teams that can handle just about anything the game throws at you. I'm sure there's many ways to go about it, but I simply abused all of the spear units I got since they can easily hit anywhere on the field, while I used high defense units with healers for any fights that proved to be more difficult than a random group of units could handle. Even through the end of the game, it's not hard at all. By the end of the game, with that loophole I mentioned earlier and with constantly keeping all my units around the same troop count throughout the game, I was able to push almost everybody I had to around 8000 troop cap, which made just about everybody a monster with their ultimate abilities or even just some of their basic ones. I'd discovered early on that it seemed most fights were balanced around you having a bit less troop count in your heroes than the AI groups, but I never quite saw that past the early game.

Finally, I have one more complaint about this game before wrapping it up. This game has an absolutely hideous obsession with trying to give each character a backstory. This isn't necessarily bad, but with how utterly shallow most of the characters are and the sheer amount of them you get throughout the game, it's absolutely insane how the average amount of side quests for each of them appears to be around four to five. This makes pacing incredibly slow if you're looking to be thorough. It seems fine early on when you might get a couple sidequests popping up for characters and maybe one for gold that leads to another for gold, then maybe an item one. However, by the end of the game, you start noticing that every time you conquer a city, all of a sudden you're getting something like eight sidequests popping up.

Continued in comment.

I'm somebody who is more than happy to give a mystery story a shot, especially when it comes to a murder or escape one. However, I cannot say that this series is what I was looking for, at least this installment did not give me enough faith that it would.

Before I go further into why I did not enjoy this Visual Novel, I would like to point out that this is a series of four separate visual novels, each being $20 as of the time of this review. I bought the first installment on a sale for $12. Each installment functions as a separate route in a bigger story, each focusing on one particular female character as the primary lead for that route. Furthermore, it appears that each story builds on the ones before it, despite likely being different 'scenarios,' as you will. So, as you read through my impressions, keep in mind that I do not have the full picture before me, simply my impression after reading through the first episode.

As for my impression of this visual novel in its entirety, it feels very amateurish. I've looked up this company before writing this review and have noticed that they have made quite a few visual novels before this one, so I'm baffled at how they managed to make this particular one fumble the way it has. It reads like the developers began at the idea of having a different route for each section of the story rather than fleshing out the concept and deciding on the structure that would best fit the story they are attempting to tell.

The most glaring issue I've noticed is that this story appears to be going for an "In Medias Res" opening, which is absolutely not a bad idea for the type of plot that they are going for, but the action that they decided to start in is shortly after the relic breaking and artifacts being released into the world, where the scene shifts to the primary female lead of this chapter being hassled by fans, and then the main character and his sister leaving. The reason I believe that was what they were going for is because this isn't explained until some time later, and therefore it just leaves me feeling like what I got was a particular character's route after completely skipping the common route of a typical VN with a branching heroine structure.

The characters also leave a lot to be desired. I can forgive Haruka and Yuuki being very one-dimensional since they're obviously meant to get their primary focus within their own routes, but as of the end of Episode One, I don't understand why Yoichi is even in the story. Whenever I see characters like this, usually their primary purpose is to help emphasize the shift in the protagonist's perspective, a comic relief character to help break up the serious moments, an accessory to help flesh out the protagonist's lifestyle and how it affects their personality, or even as their own character that fills in some need that the story would have to awkwardly fill or go without if they weren't there. Yoichi fills none of these and simply comes across as someone thrown in just to have a "best friend" character, a character given a backstory that he does not act towards. I will note that I am directly giving Haruka and Yuuki a pass because they have their own routes, but they do come across as one-dimensional in this episode as well. Sora doesn't quite fit this mold, but her personality still only comes to two-dimensional, which is ominous with how much screentime she has.

And finally, there's Kakeru and Miyako. Miyako's sense of justice is never really explored, and I'm even questioning whether that's actually a personality point with her by the end of the novel. It feels tacked on to make the mystery section of this story work, and it simply doesn't. The second half of the story is taken up mostly by the two's romance with each other, to the point that the main mystery plot gets almost discarded in favor of it. Nothing is really explained, the story just starts to pick up and then shoots itself in the foot with an anti-climactic end. Ironically, the most compelling thing about Miyako throughout this story was undermined by her own words towards the end of the story, which leaves me wondering whether she was simply meant to be a romantic partner for Kakeru with the only thing differentiating her from any other heroine being her power.

I completed the game in about six hours, although I did have probably 20-30 minutes of idle time in there. This is also over about 16 days, which is... not a good look on how well this game hooked me with how short it is.

The art is nothing to write home about, but it's attractive enough. I did enjoy how expressive the sprites were, and I found the characters at least distinct enough in appearance to be able to recognize them separately and to their assigned personality traits without much trouble. The music was forgettable.

All in all, I'd still recommend this visual novel on sale to those that are mostly interested in romance novels. You're not going to get a slam dunk by any means, but it's a solid generic choice if you just want to see a budding relationship form and solidify without having to think too hard about it. I will very likely not be buying and playing through the other installments of this series, especially not for $60 to finish the entire collection, and I recommend that those who were interested in the mystery aspect to turn away as well.

You can get the R+18 patch for free and apply it to the steam version if that's your thing.

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I play Visual Novels for its characterization and storytelling potential. If you are interested in the medium for these reasons, visit my profile for more information. This includes more reviews and a link to my vndb profile, where I have ratings and TL;DRs of every Visual Novel I have played. Thank you.

Before continuing with this review, I'd like to point out at first that I fully believe that this type of story is something that the potential reader should consider whether they would enjoy before diving into, as the way this particular Visual Novel is structured is something that a lot of people will either love or hate with likely few falling in the middle. If you enjoy reading visual novels for a story to go through without thinking, you will likely find little satisfaction in this one. This story puts a lot of emphasis in digging deeper into what you've already seen and experienced, bringing out hidden truths in what is already there. It's a mystery to be solved, not simply a story to be read. As an aside, this Visual Novel is firmly in the domain of Character-Focused storytelling over Plot-Focused storytelling, so keep this in mind.

The story takes place inside LABO, a nuclear facility that, on September 16th, 2030, undergoes a sudden series of explosions, trapping a total of nine people inside. The story takes place through the eyes of Watase Kasasagi, the amnesiac captain of the rescue squad sent to ensure the evacuation of the facility goes as it should, and Natsuhiko Tenkawa, a high school boy who has the aptitude for telepathic powers. The other seven are two members of Watase's rescue squad, two of Natsuhiko's high school friends, their teacher, one of the researchers, and a teenage girl with a fear of Watase. All nine must find a way to survive for nine hours in a facility where radiation is a continuous threat, a potential murderer is on the loose, and hidden agendas creating significant levels of distrust among them.

Root Double is structured across four different routes.

√A begins the story with a standard experience depicting the incident itself from Watase's point of view, including the oddities of their situation and the growing unease. However, there are few answers given, instead leaving plenty of questions in its wake.

√B, despite being available at the beginning, is far better to experience second, story-wise. It depicts Natsuhiko's journey through the week preceding the incident, as well as the moments of the three high schooler's experience within the facility as the incident begins. By the end, it lays the foundation for the experience that the rest of the Visual Novel will provide while giving enough background information to understand it properly.

√C functions as the bridge between the set-up of √A and √B, and the resolution of √D, Very little is actually new about this route, it is simply there to resolve the most pertinent mysteries that will become assumed knowledge going into the final route and providing context into a lot of the oddities across √A.

√D is the turning point and the resolution. With sufficient setup established, the story now focuses a lot on fleshing out the remaining characters and tying them all into the main story, then resolving the many remaining plot threads and giving a multitude of potential resolutions to the incident (not counting the bad endings, eight!) that test the cast's ideals and wills against each other, where the quality of the ending directly indicates how resolved the incident truly is.

I see many complaints about the true ending in reviews for this game, and I feel they're slightly missing the point. This Visual Novel is never about the 'what', it's about the 'why'. There is a key difference between this ending and the various other resolutions you may find, and that difference is why the ending makes sense for the story.

Now, for the technical design. The biggest divergence from typical Visual Novels, as well as the biggest thing that gives away how this visual novel should be experienced is the Senses Sympathy System, or SSS for short. Instead of being given individual choices, you are given the opportunity to change how the protagonist feels towards each of the nine survivors at specific points, and those feelings will affect how they react to each situation presented to you. Functionally, it works similarly to how standard choices do in other Visual Novels in practice, but it's an important change in perspective, as this forces you to think about things on your own terms, rather than through a set list of predetermined options. However, the one thing I cannot overlook with this system is that there is a point where the player will eventually see through this system and realize that there is rarely a point to as much nuance as the system provides (especially since the game, especially throughout √B, has moments where you're pushed towards abandoning this nuance). While it's a fantastic idea for the story within, the execution leaves much to be desired.

As for the characters, naturally the nine characters trapped within the facility take center stage throughout the story, although a tenth can also be considered a major character. As the story unfolds, each of the nine hold very key parts to the whole tale, each having their own circumstances leading them to being within LABO at the time of the incident, each having their own agenda, There are no superficial characters here, and these details coming out make them feel like you're reading a story through one of nine human eyes. While not every backstory is high quality (Kazami's comes to mind especially), it's hard to not be impressed by how seamless each character is able to switch from different attitudes towards their situation based on the situation or the emotions that the SSS pushes them towards.

Root Double / Before Crime * After Days / is a remarkably ambitious title that I'm very happy I took the plunge into. As somebody that enjoys Visual Novels for the unique storytelling that is possible within them, I strongly feel this particular story would have worked nowhere near as well in any other medium. It's clear that passion was the heart of this project, and it shines through with the care you would expect from a title with so many twists and turns.

However, I will say one thing.

Did they really need to make Kazami and Ena's breasts that big?

I've been out of the visual novel scene for quite some time, but I picked this one up due to the overwhelming positive reviews and the fact that it was on a 60% sale (so only costing $4).

There's a mixture of good and bad things about this particular visual novel. The two bad things I can say about this visual novel mostly tie in together; the relative short length of the story does the game a bit of a disservice, primarily because the characters can definitely seem like they're very rushed in getting these specific moments out there to change the main character's perspectives. For reference, I have gotten every ending with my 4.3 hours and am only missing one or two achievements from not selecting specific choices throughout the game, and for a story that has as many plot points as it does within it, that's really not very much time to run through them all. If you do decide to buy and play this game, be aware that the characters do feel rather flat and unrealistic at times, and it's a fairly short experience.

However, there are several good things that overshadow it. While the characters are rough around the edges, they are specifically designed to have their particular perspectives be realistic for the setting that the game is taking place in. There were no strong immersion-breaking events that didn't make sense within the setting as well, which is a significant plus. The focus is very direct and gives you no unnecessary information. While this may seem paradoxical to what I complained about in the previous paragraph, I do still think that exploring Lucy's and You's relationship more would have aided the story and made the payoff even bigger.

But finally, the single biggest point I will say as the biggest upside to this game is the ending. Without spoiling anything, seeing the two endings is easily enough to make the entire experience worth it, even if the above points seem not worth trying or off-putting at first glance.

This game is best played in a single sitting, so you are able to see the entire relationship between Lucy and You grow and reach its peak all in the same sitting.

Just keep tissues handy.

There is a major spoiler alert for this review since I will be going into a lot of detail, so if you're just looking for the abridged version, then it is this:

Get this game. Immediately. The chances of another game trumping this for 2015 are low. $20 is not a bad deal for this game, so you're doing yourself a favor by picking it up.

Now that that's out of the way, it's time to go into why this game is my current pick for game of the year for 2015.

First of all, the gameplay is solid. I used an Xbox360 controller to play, and the only issues I could find were very minor things such as sticking to walls when I didn't want to and rarely having a slight analog push register as a full push. Beyond this, the controls are crisp and intuitive, which is absolutely critical to a platformer where most of the abilities you unlock are based on increasing your ability to move around the maps.

It helps that the game is very well tutorialized. Every time you gain a new ability, you're given an opportunity to use that ability in every way that the game could possibly expect you to do within minutes of picking it up. Even if you forget how to use the ability fast enough or are returning from a hiatus from the game, the status menu will allow you to see the abridged version of how to use the ability at any time.

Even outside of abilities, there's no place in the game where you simply are expected to know something that's not intuitive. A lot of things in this game that damaage you have either a spike type of texture or a glow, and you're given a lot of time and room early on to make that connection. The game doesn't hold your hand by telling you the rules, but there is enough wiggle room that it's easy to figure out the rules of the game.

Ability points are the way you upgrade in this game, which is further split up into three trees. The Combat tree increases your ability to deal damage with Sein, who is essentially an outside damage dealer that hones in on enemies nearby. Some of your other abilities also deal damage or interact with enemies in some other way, both of which fall under this tree. The Efficiency tree is all about convenience in finding all the hidden upgrades strewn throughout the world; maxing this tree will show every single secret in the game on the map (provided you have explored near the area) and allow you to see through hidden walls. The Utility tree is all about convenience in general; you use less energy, gain health when you save, and take less damage among other things when you max out this tree. Note that maxing every single tree is absolutely overkill, but it's a fun challenge and will make things much easier in the long run. It's very difficult to miss when you gain a skill point since Sein will send out a shockwave across your entire screen that will do a lot of damage to all nearly enemies.

Now it's time to talk about the defining feature of this title and a largely significant reason that this game is generating buzz: the atmosphere.

The game is gorgeous. The graphics, while not fantastic, fit the gameplay itself like a glove. Parts of the scenery are dark and foreboding, yet will become lighter and greener after reviving the Ginso Tree and cleansing the water. Everything you can interact with is distinctive, at least the mandatory things. Some of the secrets are trickier to figure out, but that's not a negative as there are other clues to lead you in the right direction. Plus, secrets are placed the way they are for a reason; it wouldn't be much of a secret if you could find it without any trouble.

The animations are what truly set the graphics apart. Ori's animations especially are top notch. Despite to having a healthy size of abilities that all require their own animations, it's impressive how smoothly they blend into each other. It's a blast to just run around comboing your abilities together to get around just to watch Ori move, which is only a good example at how good the animation quality is. The background will also move when the situation demands it; the best example is if you level up in a grassy area. When the shockwave hits, virtually everything on the screen moves along with it the way it would in real life. It's mindblowing how much effort went into this type of minor detailing, but it truly adds an extra layer of depth and immersion to the game.

The soundtrack. There's no doubting it; this soundtrack is fantastic. A lot of the tracks don't sound as impressive by themselves as they do in game, but they complement the mood they're in so well that it's difficult not to be swept away in what is currently going on in the game. One clever thing I really like about the soundtrack is how much of the ambeance is in the sound effects of the situation; listen to the Forlorn Ruins escape sequence and then listen to the song by itself. The song doesn't sound anywhere near as epic by itself. One other small touch I like about this game is that the songs will loop sections of it during a cutscene where you have to move to a destination to continue, but will immediately transition to a new section of the song once you do in order to sync with the actual 'cutscene' section.

Don't even get me started on the syncing. I don't even want to know how much effort and care it took to make the music and video match up as perfectly as it does, especially since a lot of cutscenes in the game have a single song for the entirety of it.

So the graphics, animation, and sound all combine together to create a fantastic atmosphere of the game, but all that does is showcase the single best part of this game and the true reason I would consider this game a fantastic example of how video games can be art:

The story.

Note: This is where the majority of the spoilers will be from, so be very careful if you don't want the story to be spoiled.

This game takes several concepts that are incredibly difficult to pull off and succeeds with flying colors with all of them. The prologue introduces two characters and kills one of them off within minutes, and yet they manage to craft it in such a way that it makes the player emotionally invested enough to be sad at their loss. I know enough about story-telling to be very aware that this type of plot point so early in a story is extraordinarily difficult to do well, and when it doesn't go well... it completely fails.

The reason it works is because of how much care went into crafting the prologue. You control Naru as she finds Ori in a storm. You control Ori's walk to see Naru to create a bridge towards a feast of fruit. You control Ori's walk to investigate the ominous light. Finally, you control Ori's trek back to deliver the final batch of fruit in the nearby area to try to save Naru's life.

The ingenius thing about all of this is when the game gives you control over the characters. The first two instances are directly and blatantly happy things. The second one is ominous, but it feels like the resullt is nothing you could have any control over. The fourth is a bit different, but it drives home the overall theme of this story:

Hope vs. Despair.

Ori sees a total of four flashbacks of memories with Naru that you have just seen before the forest began to die. Ori is worried about Naru's life... but there is still hope within the fruit in Ori's arms. It's only after Ori returns and happily presents them that it becomes clear, first through confusion, then panic, then realization, that Naru had died and Ori gives in to despair. The rest of the prologue is Ori stumbling through the forest, dejected and weak, until the last breath is drawn and ends in Ori's own death. It's clearly showing that giving in to despair will erode the will to live.

Continued in comments as I ran out of room.