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So, I guess I love this game? It's in a really, really weird spot, though. I'm just gonna put this whole thing in tags and not worry about which microns are not spoilers. So, like, the primary thing I come to an Uchikoshi game for is to get punk'd. There are other considerations, like, yeah, give me some good mind-bending mystery poo poo, give me some heart-destroying character moments, and definitely give me a main character who's nonsensically horny and everyone's sick of his poo poo, that's all good stuff, but, I'm here for that one thing. I'm here to get punched in the face by a plot twist. I want it to be big, I want it to be dumb as gently caress and also dumb as poo poo, I want it to be right under my nose the whole time and I want to have to break in order to laugh for a continuous minute after it hits. I don't understand how this guy keeps doing this. I don't understand how he keeps getting away with this. Kotaru Uchikoshi and huge dumb existential timeline twists are like Final Fantasy VII Remake and new arrangements of Those Who Fight; every time, you think there cannot possibly be any new ways left to pull the exact same stunt again, and every time it just rolls up and smacks you with a new one. My acceptance of this game hinged on exactly one matter and by god it delivered, and therefore I love it even though I also kinda lowkey maybe don't really like it, I think a lot of its writing standbys got old a bit too fast, I feel like it tripped over itself a little too much, the somnia were a little... well we'll get to that, the inexplicable collectable/completion cruft is literally five times more obnoxious than the first game, and I feel like I was sick of the impromptu dance numbers from about four seconds into the first one and it was just kinda jarring and between the weird sloppily-measured lyrics and the lackluster performance and the janky animation and the fact that there were like six of them in the game and only one song and it just critically missed with me, but I don't care, because none of that is the one thing I forked over my money to get. A similar judgement goes to ZTD from me, although with a lot of different reasons - the important thing is that those reasons don't matter because again I came for one thing and I got it. So yes the twist is really loving stupid and I'm fine with that, but, we have to be honest, it is loving stupid. As I think a lot of people have noted already, it is pretty definitively targeted exclusively at the player, and even by what we might call the usual standards is completely nonapplicable to the characters in the story. Even ZTD has AI2 beat here. ZTD has the infamous Delta twist, but they have an excuse for that - two, actually. One; it is arguably a holdover from a version of the plot that was teased in VLR which more explicitly involved our friend Blick Winkel who I think Delta was supposed to be hiding from/at war with or something. And two; there are other enormous twists in ZTD, like, yes, a whole True Flowchart which is as much of a mindfuck to the in-game characters as it is to the player. So it has that going for it. Meanwhile, in AI2, nobody knows or cares that someone out there has been completely bamboozled by all this. It's funny, I guess, that the nature of the twist was very directly foreshadowed by the Extremely Bad Tearer Balloon Hint Combination Puzzle, but, well, Tearer wouldn't have known about that side of the plot, so again it's a bit of a non-sequitur. There's some evidence to suggest that Ryuki is experiencing - or possibly remembering - events out of order, but other than that nobody in-game is actually particularly perplexed by any of the central mysteries of the plot except specifically the body of Jin Furue, as all the other corpses are basically notable only for being sliced in half. Now don't get me wrong. Despite how poorly the twist is situated within the plot, it's still fascinating and rewarding to go back and unpack the story we saw in retrospect of the twist and to see all the parlour tricks the game was using to misdirect us. One way in which I think maybe it actually is maybe situated pretty well in the plot is that it puts us in a little bit of synchronicity with Ryuki, because if you start to pick up on the inconsistencies it causes it can feel a little bit like you're losing your mind and struggling to remember what was true and what was just vibes. I imagine everyone has two or three out of the ten or twenty possible hints that they picked up on that just kind of stick in your mind and gnaw at it; for me it was Lein claiming to have been to the Horadori basement before and then seeming to do it for the first time with Mizuki (actually Bibi, with a loving chapter transition during it, the absolute mad lads), there sometimes not being an elevator in the Cathedral (which isn't even a continuity thing, which is why I like it, also, this is why the game has Tama make such a big deal out of explaining which way the windows in Toriko's office are facing), and Shoma having deja vu about being given chocolate by Mizuki (this one is extremely weird, because in a non-canon past 12 year old Mizuki gave chocolate to 12 year old Shoma, but in a canon past which we don't know is in the past Bibi gives chocolate to Shoma, who we don't know is 12 and not 18, and then in a non-canon future, Mizuki gives chocolate to 18 year old Shoma and he remembers being given chocolate by Bibi. So this whole plot point is a trainwreck of misdirections). So that stuff's all good. It's just, well, there's no way around the fact that they couldn't think of a good way to work this twist into the actual plot other than to have Mama, who is already being relegated to a kind of deus ex machina status as the person who exists solely to provide completely unaccountable but uncannily accurate leads, randomly explain it out loud in her empty bar and then doesn't even remember doing it. It's a delivery several orders of magnitude lower than a weapons-grade Uchikoshi Special like this deserves, and also there's maybe a few too many contrivances around Bibi needed to make it work for my liking, but, god drat, it's what I came for. I think I overall like the somnia a lot, although I think perhaps there's a balance still to be refined between the conflicting ideas of dream worlds that run on bizarre, personal and thematic dream logic and puzzles for the player to solve that aren't horseshit. A lot of AI1's somnia were horseshit, not because in the end they were inconsistent with themselves but because there wasn't really a good way to approach any of them that wasn't basically just trial and error. AI2 is on to a good thing with its idea that you explicitly figure out and notate the rules for each somnium and then apply them, but the process for doing that isn't really organic, even if the application of those rules is. The acquisition and use of timies still feels completely artificial and arbitrary, as does the time constraints in general, especially since so many somnia culminate in time-consuming decisions to which you cannot apply timies, so the overall goal of trying to finish with time remaining for unlock purposes is basically never interesting. This is a shame because on the whole, the somnia are fascinating. The highlights for me were definitely Amame's, both the climactic final one in which you can present evidence like an interrogation, which was a neat combination-twist of ideas, and the initial quiz show one, because once you figure out the keys the entire final round becomes exposition, like, it becomes less like you're trying to break into Amame's psyche and more like she's becoming increasingly desperate to be able to tell somebody about what she's done and how she came to do it. Real games as art poo poo. Plus of course there's Iris' excellent sendup of Pokémon Go, which works infinitely better as a playable setpiece than the Minecraft knockoff in AI1. Gen's wasn't really that interesting overall but was hilarious and poignant. There were some less great ones too, such as Masked Woman's (a great concept ruined by some complete garbage stealth action) and, I note with some dejection, Tearer's, where the gimmick seemed to be that you were basically required to retry and cheese the passwords in order to have enough time, and also the final puzzle hint just uses some extremely icky puzzle logic where the same cue hints at two different transformations you have to apply in order to different parts of the process. I got it on my own in the end but I can see it being a stumper. And speaking of stumpers, this game has possibly the worst puzzle hints I think I've ever seen in a game that periodically halts until you solve a puzzle. Nine times out of ten, the game will immediately mock you for getting an answer wrong (there's also no "I don't know, give me a hint" button), and then when it does deign to acknowledge that you don't seem to know what to do the sum total of advice will often be "hey remember you were given a hint you moron". I'm particularly astounded at how most of the time when a puzzle hinges on some particular visual clue from an investigation you're never allowed to bring it up for reference while inputting the answer, even though you can bring up the dialogue log (which if you're lucky might still have a text representation of the clue from back during the investigation). Particular demerit goes to the aforementionedly absolutely dogshit balloon hint puzzle which is just oblique as poo poo and has clues that are both completely direct and broadly useless in guiding you to do anything in particular, and to top it all off, the solution it leads you to is gibberish and gives you no sense of heading in the right direction if you ever do happen to read the clues right (I gather this issue was exacerbated greatly by the English localisation and its use of letter pairs and particularly its use of an abbreviated answer, with the Japanese original being a sane set of six individual kana which add up to a solution that actually means something when read). Compare this to VLR and even ZTD, in which basically every prompt that wasn't explicitly a plot branch/lock had a whole sequence of escalating hints that eventually led to simply being told the answer (unless you specifically disable that feature) I found the action sequences weak, frequently even weaker than in the first game (in which they were largely held up by the absurdity of Date's porno-driven superpowers (it's telling that probably my favourite action setpiece is the one that reveals Date's return in the future arc by way of having "Gen" power up with porno and waiting for you to connect the dots (unless you undercut that reveal by doing the other half of that route first). I thought the stadium fight was basically garbage almost beginning to end, with my opinion letting up solely for Kizuna's minigun and also I guess for Ota just driving up and down the pitch with an armoured truck and just bowling through bad guys. I like that the plot is sufficiently bonkers, even once you account for how normal things are when you're not confused about the time, although I think Tearer's plan is a little odd, like, I cannot for the life of me understand why if he has the big brain virus and the literal missile to put it on he doesn't just... launch it? Why does he need to launch an ARG to direct a horde of brainwashed mooks to the stadium, thus having to put its location on the internet, instead of just... doing it? Ah well. Finally, I want to know exactly what changes based on whether or not you convince the game that you've played AI1. Like, the game seems to be going out of its way not to engage with anything that would spoil the first game, and yet it still does this nonsense quiz gimmick. What's it for?
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Jul 13, 2022 13:45
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:57 |
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Is it me or is it mathematically impossible to meet the par time in Gen's somnium? I am walking immediately to the cookbook, winning the cookoff (240s remaining) and then walking immediately between the three dishes (20s each), ending with the one closest to the judges (the shortest possible route). I examine one of the dishes along the way burning 10s for a 1/2 timie. The final input eats 30s + 160s with that timie. You will note that this is more time than is available. What is missing here? There are other 1/2 timies but every one in the level takes 10s to get and saves you 10s when used so I don't see how they help, save for saving another net 5s from Amame which isn't nearly enough. e: forgot this is even worse than i originally made it sound, by an entire 30s Fedule fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Jul 14, 2022 |
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Jul 14, 2022 20:41
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Terper posted:As I recall, Amame has a timie that is replaced once you find the answer. So you'll have to talk to her before you examine all the dishes. I think. That's extremely silly! So yeah that gives a 1/5, eating 30s but saving 96s relative to what I had before. I'm gonna say it; even leaving completely aside the whole "dream logic" idea in somnia, I extremely do not like and have never liked the time limit aspect and especially timies as a mechanic, they're just a layer of mechanical cruft that complicates a gameplay system that categorically does not require complication and adds nothing to the game except a few tedious replays.
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Jul 14, 2022 21:15
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Oh here's a fun fact; telling the game that you have played the first game (and proving it) locks you out of a couple of trivia files and appendices. I think it's not so many that it locks you out of the trophies for them but it's enough to make it a big pain to get them without just going back and replaying the first chapter of the game again. Why do designers just choose violence sometimes? (that said, I cannot recommend highly enough replaying that first chapter after finishing the story and observing Mizuki's conversation options with Aiba in the Stadium after briefly investigating the body) what if Jin has a twin brother? what if the body was frozen? what if the left and right halves belong to different people? what if he was still alive with just the left half?
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Jul 14, 2022 21:52
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Oh my god that thread goes on after that screenshot and Uchikoshi starts literally quoting existentialism at the guy, it's incredible
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Aug 3, 2022 22:28
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