The VII Enigma

It has all the makings of a decent mystery story, at the very least

A promising but underwhelming first visual novel for this developer. I'd recommend you check out their newer and better game, SYNESTHESIA, first, and come back to this if you like that one. 6/10

This VN was so much better than I originally anticipated. I admit I went in with pretty low expectations, because for me personally I don’t really like how the graphics look (character art mainly). But I was so impressed with this. I was very quickly immersed into this world, and if you’re hesitant because of the graphics like I was, the good news is that it doesn’t take long to get used to it. Each chapter of the game kept my interest, and I enjoyed all of the characters and their storylines. If you find the premise interesting at all, I recommend giving this a try!

Edit: this review was negative at first, mentioning suspicions of devs upvoting game with few positive reviews and breaking down how description of features was a bit praiseful for sake of promotion. After dev changed description for more honest points and presented some evidence of not being linked to upvote via discord, I've changed this review to positive. Still, this is more of "neutral" one because my points of negativity of game itself still stand. Being first big work of author, some moments in beginning are changing pace of story too sudden and last chapters were reminding me of silly action movies of 90's. Way too positive reviews state final is emotional, but while I was engaged in story during middle part, most characters went off radars for sake of main ones near finale and villians were acting not far from classic popcorn movies ones, describing their actions and making silly mistakes. I understand going for more dark and debatable takes on some themes present in story, but true ending felt unworthy happy one for most characters, pushing deus-ex-machina trope quite a bit. Speaking of characters, most of these were quite humane and believable enough for such type of mystery adventure, but few ones appearing later in story were way too troperiffic and stereotyped to point of me predicting most of their actions. That really clashed with earlier heroes and narrative, amplifying my dislike of later chapters and taking away my trust of statements of story being "unique" from some commentators. In artistic sense, for little indie studio without budget from kickstarter campaign graphics are nice and music is fine. Still, characters art could scare even most style-tolerant readers as myself due to some "dirtiness" in linings and facial features being uncanny in few instances. Not using sprites for characters and going for side-images during speech is somewhat logical, but weird decision, which made reading a bit harder to follow in some scenes. Few music tracks felt overused comparing to promised 30+ songs, lowering impact of these. So, art is very debatable part and one of things which could make you wish to skip game. Last negative point I wanted to state is weirdness of Enigma Files. While made fine technically, articles in it have way too little text and art is not helping in achieving feel of encyclopedia. Aside from bad endings descriptions to remind you how and why it happened and few lore-related articles, reading it won't make any good for player and won't give depth. For positive side, first two thirds of story are interesting and sometimes even cool, using action movies tropes more smart-ish and abusing stated sci-fi and social structures of in-game world for great effect. Mystery part of story is not outright predictable and can fairly challenge your suggestions for roles of characters in events of game until finale chapter. I also kinda liked action scenes, reminding me of Fate/Stay Night and if you will tolerate kinda weird CGs with fighter stances of heroes (they go somewhere between unnecesarily scary and laughable), you could enjoy these too. Other side of story, dialogues between stress scenes, are, for most part, nice and not cringe-inducing, having some jokes inserted without making all characters hypocrites akin Zero Escape (but at least these were in death game). If going for comparison, VII Enigma is very obviously inspired by Steins;Gate and Steins;Gate 0. Some people state different films which were remembered by them during reading - for me it was Minority Report. From one point, comparing VN to movie shows how good devs were using their tools to create such feeling, on other hand, easily finding many items to compare story to takes away epithets of "unique" and "origina" from it. Overall, VN is mediocre IMHO, but could be nice evening reading for fans of mystery VNs and Sci;Adv fans especially. I'm not recommending to anyone else, especially for full price. Go for it only if you want to have interesting story with mystery drops in it without romance and anime tropes... for most part. I really don't want to see implied sequel (if it's not in spirit only) to preserve images of characters from middle of story, but I'll be glad to read more stories from dev, hoping for improvements.

The game's alright. I think the art is ugly, but YMMV. The guy who wrote the Tempus System (the time travel stuff in this VN) tried to explain it with some high science, though there were some mistakes. This VN treats entanglement like magic, and thinks that there are four quantum fields (There are much more than that. Fermion flavors alone contain more than 4 fields). Were it up to me, I would explain the Tempus System like this: The Tempus force only acts on Tempus leptons, mediated by the Tempus bosons (massless, spin of -1, 0, or 1). A Tempus lepton of sufficient energy can emit a Tempus boson, potentially changing its spin. Tempus leptons are created through the Weak force from standard electrons. However, the Tempus lepton has access to many generations of matter. The flavors these leptons decay into are deterministic, so it is possible to set the specific bosons that will be emitted when the Tempus lepton is first created through the Weak force. Tempus decay emits Tempus bosons until it reaches its lightest flavor, at which point the Weak force will convert it back to an electron and emit some neutrinos. Furthermore, Tempus bosons can be directed since humans have an unprecedented level of control over Tempus particle wave functions - it is possible to set a wave in a box equation to the target, ensuring that only specific particles interact. The Tempus bosons are also capable on moving backwards through time when they're transmitted, allowing the time travel in the story. Anyway, the story feels very Hero Saves the Day in the second half. I didn't buy the romance either. The science part (the stuff the authors didn't screw up on) was great, and some of the alternate timeline stuff (Line-0 was a lot more exciting than the other timelines) was good. The VN is easy to platinum, though most endings outside of the True End are just game overs. Their presence doesn't make a whole lot of sense either - for example, there's one ending where the team accidentally gets stuck in an infinite loop, which would make any kind of escape impossible. That would make it impossible for this ending to be a canon loop, but finishing it is necessary to enter a special post-game scene? The game takes about 8 hours to finish. You can easily get it done is 2 days.

I have played a game called Stein; Gate. I am glad that game has simplified Chinese so I can enjoy it. It seems to me that this game is also related to time travel, saving lives, changing destiny, etc. But I don't know how much time I will spend. It costs me 2.8 hours now and I am still at chapter one... Hope later there will be Chinese language for me.