Z.A.T.O. // I Love the World and Everything In It

I Love the World and Everything In It . 复杂又不完美的世界也阻挡不了对它的爱。

牛逼

!!Spoilers Included!! Things I liked: - Art - Music (mostly) Things I didn’t like: - Story - Characters [u]Explanation:[/u] I bought this game because I liked the art style, and that held throughout the story. The music was pleasant, and I was surprised to find out it was royalty-free. Minor nitpicks with the music are that the loops don’t transition well, and the level matching between songs is inconsistent. A good volume for one OST is blaring for the next. My biggest issue with the story is that it's disconnected and there’s a ton of fluff that leads nowhere. It’s almost as if the author had two ideas for games and just spliced them in after chapter 2. The twist had no precedent and was seemingly random. Going from a game about becoming more outgoing/dealing with a girl’s mental health to [b]seeing into the code of the universe that needs to be stabilized.[/b] WHAT??? It feels retconned and disorienting. I’m not even positive what the central message of the story is, or what I can take away from it. The idea of “love yourself” only came in at the last part of the last chapter, and wasn’t built up over the story, so it can’t be that. There might be some minor comments said by characters, but usually those are shooed away by our ever-smart protagonist, so I’m not sure about those either. Moving on to characters, they felt awfully shallow. I could go on about how I hate the main character, but to keep it short: She’s profoundly narcissistic, delusional, and insufferable the whole time. Part of the story padding I mentioned earlier comes from her spewing pseudo-intellectual nonsense. I guess she’s the protag with an incredible power or something (again, wtf), but we don’t get any inkling of that till like the last 30 minutes of the game, so, ??? She hardly has any character growth besides being bolder towards the end, but otherwise the same. She’s like the perfect image of a Redditor. I just cannot see her in the positive manner that I’m sure the game wants me to. Ira was the biggest tragedy of the story. I swear like 80% of the game was building her up, then she literally just vanishes because of a newly introduced plot device. All of that story was meaningless. Was there a break during development or something? I don’t know why Ira even entertained Asya, or blushed at her comments; there was barely any character building between them, and it otherwise made no sense. Was it all just to set up her poofing out of existence? Cause even the game just moved on as if nothing happened. Vadim was the most stereotypically cartoonish bully character you can imagine. Marina was mostly fine because she had motives and even connections with other characters. Tosya… doesn’t need to exist. I guess she’s just there to show off Asya’s power. She’s mentioned by name in passing a few times in the story, but all she does is pop in to support the retconning of Asya being some powerful being… then dies… in the last 10 minutes of the game. COOL. This game reminded me of the anime ‘School Days’ with the huge wtf at the end and 1-dimensional characters, though it has been a really long time since I watched that. There were so many whys that were left unanswered that it makes me angry. I could go on about a bunch of little things, but I think you get my point. I wish the author had asked ‘why’ more times during the writing of the story, or replaced all the flab with meaningful information. Apologies for rambling. 3/10