Episicava - Vol. 1

5/10. Mediocre art. Poor writing and characters that were actively offputting. A few interesting threads in the story which hint at future improvement, but which can't really elevate the present experience. I should be giving this a "not recommended" but I feel bad doing so for something that skirts the edge and has so few reviews. Technical details / Presentation: no technical concerns. The art is mostly meh, except for a couple things: 1 character's sprite cuts off at her knees, so there's a visible gap between her and the bottom of the screen. Second, every single CG (or simply non-sprite image) of a given character looks completely different (the MC's sprite looks completely different from the the three other images of him, which all look completely different from each other). It's a little jarring. Music is pretty listenable, though nothing really sticks out about it. Gameplay: It's a VN. There are a few choices here and there, but they tend to lead swiftly to an untimely death, so you're almost always on the right path. It's mostly kinetic. Story: This VN is hard to pin down. The store page mentions Fate/Stay Night; this is basically shonen turned up to eleven. The main character is an edgelord orbited by women who love him even though he's mostly an a-hole to them. Up until about 2/3rds in it seems like every single interaction the MC has ends with words and people fighting. The MC has super powers, which is fine I guess, but almost every battle involves him pulling a new ability out of his butt that hasn't shown up before--and even better, he and several others say their attacks out loud when they perform them. He frequently fights off dozens of people at a time, and the climax takes this to the point of absurdity. The writing is very clumsy. There's a fair number of typos, but the syntax itself is painful sometimes--sometimes just poorly written, sometimes painfully video game, sometimes embarrassingly edgy. At one point I encountered the line, "The men nod and I find myself amused." Another: "I can't even grasp the mindsword to use it, even though it's equipped" (and no, the "mindsword" was never introduced). Yet another: "These two swords represent the Night and Day in you. Your Alpha and Omega. Your Yin and Yang." At the same time, it does do a couple interesting things. At the very beginning of the game the MC has an encounter with another character. This moment kicks something off that shows up periodically through the game, but is never explained. It's always interesting when it shows up. And the structure of the story works well. To get to the "true" end you have to finish a couple of routes for specific characters, then go back and pick different choices. One of those choices was kind of interesting, in the direction it seemed to be pushing the MC. All in all, if you can stomach (or [i]like[/i]) some majorly chuuni BS, this game is worth your time. Otherwise, probably best to avoid.

It's so hard to bear with the bad writing of this linear "Visual Novel". It's more like a kinetic novel but they forced themselves to add arbitrary choices where one choice leads to an immediate bad ending, just to be able to label Episcava a Visual Novel and not a Kinetic one. There are forced battles and action scenes at every point in the story. The main character constantly gets into unnecessary fights an immature child would get into for the sake of defending their pathetic ego. And if he decides to behave like a normal human being for once, some random event happens where he has to fight. Some criminals want to shoot him and his friends in a drive-by all of a sudden or he has to save his classmate by the thugs that want her "to go to their apartment for some quick fun." The fight scenes are badly written and it's hard to care about the outcome because the annoying protagonist is going to win and keep boasting about it anyway. I had to skip most of the text just for the few scenes that had some decent dialogue. The music is just terrible. Getting tortured by the terrible writing was enough, so I played with the music muted. The UI in Episcava doesn't make sense to me. What's the point of that elemental clock to the left of the text box? It's not like there's going to be a game mechanic where we have to use the right combination of elemental attacks where it would be useful to have it. There's also the menu buttons on the right side of the text box that don't need to be there since another little menu with the same buttons pops up when you right click. They could have just made the screen less cluttered. I like the character sprites. They're the only good thing about this game. The background CGs are nice too. But unfortunately, the characters' faces look bad in event CGs. It's a downgrade from their character sprite CGs.

This VN is so bad that it made me angry. Cut content. Terrible writing. A mary sue player character who is so morally bankrupt and unlikeable, right from the start, that he makes me want to puke. Update: Oh, now I know why the main character is such a piece of ♥♥♥♥. Turns out he's a socialist.

I am very sorry to say I couldn't make it through more than a few minutes of this game. Vague spoilers for those couple of minutes below. I really like the art, and was intrigued by the mention of Fate/Stay Night as the game's inspiration. Looking at the screenshots alone, I could tell a world had been crafted here. But almost immediately upon starting the game, it heavily dumps lore exposition on you in ways that made me feel as if I was back in school. Suddenly there were so many names and terms simply being rolled out like a history book, rather than being introduced organically into the story. Now, I can certainly look past such things if the immersion is there, but only a few seconds later the game introduces a rather sudden, dark scene illustrating the main character's past. It's incredibly dramatic, and is written in a way that perhaps some 40 hours into an RPG would be written, in that it assumes you will have sympathized and connected with the characters at this point. But unfortunately, only a minute or so in was not quite enough for me to really have any emotional investment in this rather over the top scene. I felt a bit awkward reading the shounen-like action sequences and the detailed, morbid depictions of death and torture after having only known these characters for seconds. But even with all that, I figured this was simply setting up a backstory, albeit awkwardly. It wasn't until the next part started that I had to give up. At this point, the main character is annoyed that all the girls in his school are head over heels for him, and how he's the subject of all the boys' envy. This, together with the previous scenes, screams: "Look how tragic I am... Every girl falls in love with me but I'm too cool to care on account of my dark past, and even when I treat them like crap they all want me..." which is just not my type of thing. In fact, the first line from a girl in this game (who has a portrait anyway) is simply "Fall in love with me, Arin!" and I could tell I wasn't going to be into it. I've played some visual novels where, clearly, the point is to self-insert and feel loved by cute characters, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But the way it's portrayed in this game seems kind of clumsy and juvenile, and reads like the roleplays I would write as a teenager. I'm sure there's more to the story and characters than the surface I scratched, and best of luck to the creator(s) on all their future projects, but this type of writing is just not for me at all, and I would only recommend it if you're really into the more edgier types of shounen anime stories!