Recent reviews by dari ★

dark auction. hm. the game i was hyping and waiting for years with my friend turned out to be a big dissappointment. kohske's art and art direction in general carried the whole game and if it wasn't for her art i would've dropped the game the instant i saw the, undisclosed btw, usage of offensively bad ai generated content, but that's the elephant i'm going to address throughout the review because there's baffingly worse things going on here than the shameless ai slop usage. before i start hemming and hawing, since negative feelings obviously inspire me more to write than positive do, it's absolutely unforgivable for a project that was worked on as well as crowd sourced three years to release as an unfinished project (eg. lines of code can be found in the auction text, translation which is badly formatted and i suspect is a polished MTL, text lacks signs of interpunction, messes up or straight up uses wrong names of the characters and ofc ai backgrounds and "art" that is being "patched out" which i have yet to see.)
if i was aware that dark auction released in this miserable state i would think thrice about buying it but at this point i'm glad if some of my funds go to kohske.

first of all i simply can't believe rika suzuki wrote this. she is the main reason i got into dark auction, along with kohske, since i loved hotel dusk/last window as much as other reviewers here obviously. the story is insanely shallow and every single topic was done on such surface level that at moments it simply gets offensive. i do not expect of a video game to teach me history or to be mega faithful to it, it's fiction after all and that very fact allows us to create a story free from rigid boundaries and to create something meaningful and something that will stick to us players.
when you as a writer decide to tackle heavy topics such as ww2 and nazi germany as well as hitle- i mean dictator x's trials and tribulations, you need to have tact and nuance which suzuki lacks. i won't go in details about it here because other reviewers worded it better than i would so i will continue with other things that bothered me while playing it.

once again - the plot is insanely shallow and wishy-washy. the story starts out well and it intrigued me as a reader but that didn't last long. i need to weave in the gameplay in this writing section because that goes hand in hand in a visual novel type of game. in the beginning i thought there would be exploration of the castle and discovering the mysteries of it on OUR OWN while collecting collectibles and piecing together the story by ourselves. because well, that shows that the writer has confidence in the reader--- that's not the case here. the insane lack of gameplay makes me wonder why the game isn't just an ordinary visual novel because this handholding and lack of trust in the player as well as the mind-numbingly linear nature of the game made my whole game experience a boring slog. the auction gameplay simply sucks. it's like doing a simple puzzle and then reading the final memory film that is insanely plain and i have my doubts that the dialogue in the memory film is, well, also ai generated (em dashes and sentence constructions characteristic to chatgpt) as if the stupid ai slop scenery and the very fact that the important characters for the main cast were just ai generated are not enough (which btw is making me crazy and ruins the immersion so so bad + the very fact that kohske's maria design was fed to chatgpt is making me so mad) dark auction plays out in such a repetitive well known formula that just doesn't give the player a single chance to think for themselves, everything is served on a very plain, childish and intellectually offensive plate. every character has their own sob story that rarely scratches the surface and everything is always conveniently and very quickly solved and wrapped up, nothing is ever earned or you feel rewarded for revealing like, anything really. somehow we are served dictator humanization and apologia which left a bitter taste in my mouth. the stakes are supposed to be high and we are supposed to feel the oppressive, scary and uncanny atmosphere but no one ever feels any consequence for their actions, especially noah, who borders on gary sue territory. everything is in his favor, his actions have no consequences even though the game goes out of its way to spell it out for us, he does whatever he wants and we are just suppossed to deal with it.
as for the other characters i'll try not to go into much detail but the first two auctions are kinda same-ish and didn't make me care much for the characters in question but by the end of the game, the most "genuine", and even that is overstating it, relationship is between noah, otto and edgar. karla had potential to be a really interesting character and her relationship with noah could be very compelling but it's just not convincing because we never get to know the characters more than their designated chapter and it's all so insipid. only christoph manages somewhat to be okay and "realistically" written and his reaction was completelly fair if i may say but his DID was really clumsily written, mental illnesses don't work like that. won't comment on lorraine at that point i just stopped taking this game seriously anymore and started flying over the text because you just lost me guys.

if you think that i'm finished you're sooooo wrong. it somehow gets even worse that it's just becoming insanely ridiculous. the ending was pretty predictable but the time travel shenanigans which led into a sequel bait was absolutely laughable. it makes no sense at all, though i can't say the game had any lore or world building if we don't count chatgpt generated information as lorebuildimg but i digress. it's unconvincing, comes out of nowhere and everyone is just okay with it because not one of the characters has enough agency to question whatever the hell is going on around them, they accept everything noah says as a fact because they're friends<3 not a single segment in the game was present to convince us that they had genuine bonding moments or anything outside of their pretty shallow auction chapters which as i said showed us NOTHING. i won't write more about that stupid time travel plot that serves as a foundation for a potential sequel (which i doubt this game will get considering the reviews and awful developing practices) but i will talk a bit about the ending which is so unserious and unearned. everyone feels lobotomized and got their ♥♥♥♥ together magically and they walk away in the sunlight while wishing noah good luck in his time travelling adventures searching for his father. once again. the end.
i wrote this extensive review so i can save you money guys, just play higurashi when they cry if you want an actual well written visual novel. peace out✌️

I played this game for the first time in 2017, just when it came out on vgperson translations, since I frequently visited that site. I saw YTTD was being compared to Danganronpa a lot and somewhat enjoying DR I decided to give YTTD a shot, not expecting much. Boy, was I wrong...

YTTD truly left me speechless. It had everything I thought DR lacked - fleshed out characters and genuine dynamics and development between them and their respective relationships. Even the characters I originally didn't care about became dear to me. The ost, art and atmosphere are so good in making you immersed in the moment and the fact that only one person is working on this game is impressive.

I love Sara so much, she's so fun and refreshing as a protagonist... Honorable mention goes out to Keiji... save me sleep deprived busty detective...save me...

Iirc you can play this game for free but honestly? I rarely recommend people to buy games when they can play them for free but the amount of effort and love put into this game is truly worth these $16...Trust me, you won't regret it.

Waiting patiently for the final chapter, I trust Nankidai to make something great!

shaking and crying while writing this review, this game was absolutely phenomenal and my head started hurting because i cried so much at the ending, it's superb and played with every one of my feelings. you can see how much work and love was put in it. i reccomend it with my whole heart.

Absurdly fun game with amazing designs and soundtrack but the port is awful. Crashes a lot, 0 graphics or resolution customization, also the steam achievements are buggy for some reason? Especially that kill 510 one. I really reccomend this game but the port is just. :/ bad. Hoping for a patch soon.

I rarely write reviews, I think this is one of my first ones, actually, but I just couldn't stay silent. I only finished ending A, so this review may be edited until further, but I just couldn't wait. NieR Replicant was originally a PS3 game, and frankly, I have no idea how I got to play it in the first place. Maybe because I played Drakengard beforehand, but I digress.
This is my second time playing this game and honestly? It hits even harder than the first time. I can't honestly pinpoint why it hits me harder the second time, but I cried a lot during my playthrough. The graphics, the music, the setting, the atmosphere is fantastic, especially the new ''Little Mermaid'' content, it was haunting. Brother Nier is amazing too, I love him a lot, he's kinda different from your usual JRPG protagonist, though this isn't an ordinary JRPG game, this is Yoko Taro we're talking about, but not to go to spoilers too much, I like how self-aware he is of his actions in general. I enjoyed Kaine very much, she's badass and not your ordinary female heroine, she's simply a delight. Emil too, best boy, made me cry a lot but I love him. Aside of the main gang, even the side characters like the King of Facade and Fyra are superb, they're just so good and again, made me cry a lot. I'm not an expert when it comes to combat and the technical stuff but I had so much fun with the combat and I feel it's a vast improvement compared to the PS3 version. If you played Automata before this game, you can feel some similarities between certain two characters which was very nice to see. Anyways, this is one of my favourite games and I hope this review will make at least someone play it because it's such a beautiful and sad journey that you need to experience. Even 4 years after playing the original, the emotions stay the same. Hope you'll decide to give it a shot because even this review can't explain how much love I feel for this piece of media.

This game reminds me on the anime 'Erased'. The protagonist, Yama, like Satoru, has memory lapses except Satoru can travel through time. Serial killers, child dissapearances and ofcourse the main antagonist and the serial killer is the teacher. Yashiro and Ryota.
Or so I think, I'm still playing it but I have noticed these similarities. I feel a heavy Erased vibe. 9/10 for now.

Why not? Because it's ♥♥♥♥.