"*groan*... I feel miserable... I-it... hurts..."
- Al Astra, during [spoiler] Volcano death scene [/spoiler], and also me, playing this game
Let me tell you a little tale. A little tale about little old me, a few years ago, having a blast playing Hyperdimension Neptunia. I thought "wow, Idea Factory makes such fun games! You know what? I'll 100% all of their games, not only the Neptunia ones!". Sweet summer child, what a disastrous decision.
Having added Death end re;Quest to my radar a few years ago when I was deprived of Rem's presence in Re:Zero, solely for the reason that Shina reminded me of her, at the time I didn't even know this was an IF game. So now, years later, since I didn't want to start another Neptunia game and a good friend of mine was using the NPCs from this game as NPCs in our RPG sessions, I decided to give it a try.
Boy, oh boy. Here we go.
[i]This review keeps spoilers to a minimum[/i]
[h2] Story: 3/10 [/h2]
The plot sucks. It just sucks. It's funny that a 2018 game feels so much like a [spoiler]parody of all the Deep State and AI Takeover topics of current age.[/spoiler]
It's kind of infuriating how the story, at multiple points, seems like it's going to get better, only for it to come crashing harder than Apple's stock value if they announced that you can now use XCode on any OS.
There were multiple questions unanswered, and others that didn't need to get answers, but got answers anyway and that made everything decisively worse. "Big and impactful" revelations that were central to the plot coming out of absolutely nowhere, with not a smidge of foreshadowing.
The story kind of follows a sawtooth wave. It starts generic, jumbled and kind of boring. Then it picks up the pace, introduces some interesting elements... and then the characters do their thing (more on that on the next topic) and it goes back down. Rinse and repeat.
Unfortunately, the story does not end on top of the wave, oh no no no. The True(st) Ending truly buries it down in the abyss, with mind numbing decisions in favor of a "peaceful happy ending". Stuff just... happens offscreen, and the epilogue feels like it just summoned miracles out of thin air. It truly felt like the team were fed up and threw random stuff up just to end it.
They had a somewhat interesting concept, even if it is something that have been told to death by now, I can clearly see the building blocks for a new take on the main plot. But instead of building it, they stepped on the blocks, yelled insults while holding their feet in pain and left the room.
[h2] Characters: 1/10 [/h2]
This is the greatest offender. The characters are so badly written that, around the middle of the game, I realized that I've been mistakenly raging about the plot to my friend, when in reality the plot wasn't really that bad (by that point, at least, cause we were still climbing the sawtooth), but the characters were SO STUPID that it was seeping through.
The protagonist is supposed to be smart. An intelligent programmer, that has some pretty nice skills and a good grasp on things. But then you see this bumbling idiot doing just about the worst decisions at every moment, and you just wonder if he's been coding with an AI assistant this whole time. And I'm not talking about life-threatening moments or horrors that would make any rational human being lose motor function, I'm talking about some really straight forward decision making under pressure. He consistently takes the worst paths, and it works, because everyone around him is equally as dumb.
We have characters that are vital to the plot, and then just vanish into thin air, with no satisfying conclusion to their journey. We have Deus Ex Machina, that also just kind of vanishes. We have vagueposting queen. It's a mess.
The one character I can say feels like an actual character is Sumika. Props to her.
[h2] Writing: 2/10 [/h2]
[quote=You, clueless of what's to come] Wait, didn't you already talk about the story and characters? [/quote]
No, dear reader. I made a specific topic for one specific point, that absolutely [b]needs[/b] to be hammered down. This game feels like "what if the company that primarily makes cutesy, light hearted Neptunia games decided they wanted to make a darker game, with death and gore?". Because that's exactly what it is.
I'm sorry, but there is not a SINGLE moment in this game where the gore doesn't feel like someone who has no idea how to write a mature, heavy scene deciding that the correct way to do it is painstakingly describing someone's death, in the weirdest way possible.
If you know anything about the book Reaper's Creek, written by that one dude that hates the wetlands, then... well, first of all, I'm sorry that you had to go through that miserable experience. But second of all, you will know immediately what I mean with my last comment. The death scenes are, at the same time, nauseatingly described in deep detail while somehow being completely empty of meaning and purpose. It's just gore for the sake of being gore.
[h2] Voice Acting: 9/10 [/h2]
This is the game's strongest suit. The VA's did a fantastic job, Idea Factory's standard for voice acting has always been pretty high. I always play Neptunia with the English voices, but I played Death end re;Quest both in English and in Japanese to compare, and they are really good.
There were a few scenes where I felt like the voice acting didn't match the vibe, and some lines could have been delivered better, but overall, they sold the scene and made the experience much more enjoyable.
[h2] Sound: 4/10 [/h2]
The music's fine, but forgetable. The sound effects are bad. Audio is overall super unbalaced.
[h2] Visuals: 5/10 [/h2]
There are multiple scenes (important to the plot, mind you) that just happen on a black screen with white text on it. Come ooooon, IF, seriously?
The amount of gallery art in this game is minuscule. And the ones that do exist are mostly reserved for the bad endings, which I kind of get, since they really wanted to focus on the "oh wow, look, death scene, gore, you can die at any moment, look, isn't that cool? such edge, much fun", but it just makes the endings feel even more empty.
The dungeons are kind of ugly. Neptunia's dungeons were never breathtaking, but the ones here are either small strips of rock, tight hallways or generic open areas.
The characters are pretty, both their arts and models, but not really noteworthy either. The enemies, however, are kinda cheap and forgetable. I can barely remember the design of one or two bosses.
[h2] Game Mechanics: 5/10 [/h2]
It was kind of a let down, honestly. The Knockback mechanic is super fun. When you learn it, you start machinating how to properly set your characters so you can get the most out of the combos. However, it eventually becomes useless, as the damage the knockback does barely moves the enemy's health bar, and combat just gets down to spamming skills.
The whole Hacking thing is interesting as well. Spawning the Entomas to use them as decoy while using their bonus effects is pretty sweet. The Gamemode Chips are completely useless, I used them once to see what they do and never again. The Codes that Arata can use are mostly useless as well, with some exceptions, and even those exceptions depend on which difficulty you are playing the game.
And speaking of difficulty... man, I've never felt more frustrated with a game's difficulty levels before. I like hard games, so I played on Hard for my first run, but this game does not implement it in a fun way. Playing on Hard nerfs money and EXP, and basically makes using Corruption impossible because Bugs just kill you, instead of making the fights actually more challenging.
For Achievement Hunters, 100% is pretty easy. No "lv 999" and "Stella Dungeon" bullcrap.
[h1] Verdict: 4/10 [/h1]
I wanted to write more, but character cap made me end it here. Dear God, please, let the second game be better.
