This review contains spoilers
I remember someone recently asked, while I was playing this exact game, what my opinion on Uchikoshi was, as a content creator. I think I somewhat summarized it to calling him a good director, but not a good writer. Having played around half of Ever17, Remember11 (which I struggle to call one of his works, but the impact he had isn't something to discard), the Zero Escape trilogy, and now AI, I would say I have a strong grip on the man as the years passed and my tastes evolved, and I would comfortably say that AI is possibly the least Uchikoshi Uchikoshi work, and this is a double-edged blade.
The constant theming between Uchikoshi works is its constrained, smaller casts and isolated settings. Ever17 has about 7 characters of importance, and the Zero Escape series has constantly utilized casts of 9 for their death games, with additional characters depending on a couple of variables. Another one of Uchikoshi's trademarks are his constant twist recycling, his love for dirty jokes and just general writing that's considered perverse, and just the general mystery angle that's always been present. He has, after all, said to write his endings first and then the rest; the key core of his works, more than anything, is mystery. So how does AI work with these concepts and evolve with what is his largest scale work as of now? Well, he kind of does and doesn't change much.
The bigger difference is AI's cast: it's pretty big compared to his previous works. Date, Aiba, Mizuki, Boss, Pewter, Hitomi, Renju, Shoko, Ota, Iris, Mama, Sejima, Moma, Renju, alongside other minor but present variables are all important parts of the chessboard here, having their motivations and actions which all affect the way the mystery works. Given that and the setting being a prefecture than a fixed location, such as the ship in 999, AI's atmosphere evolves less of a feeling that a guillotine grows closer towards your neck, and more of providing various kinds of escape of these guillotines for the ensemble cast that's been presented, and makes it a much more character-centric experience.
So does AI succeed at making you care about the characters? Well, kind of. I will say I found Date's personality to be more charismatic than I thought it'd be, but his actual struggles and characterization I wasn't exactly sold on, more on that later. I would say Mizuki and Boss are both characters I found the most interesting; Mizuki's coping with her parent's death was well handled in her route and I found the found family angle of it nice, while Boss lends to my favorite route in the game, while making her emotions for Date transparent, and thus, found her to be a strong personality that bounced off Date, but also felt as a strong cushion. As for Iris, well, she's my least favorite of the cast. Her route just felt very weird which makes sense when taken into account she has a brain tumor, and Date basically connected to that, but even then I wasn't too big on the family angle between her and Date. I did find him and Hitomi to be nice, but it doesn't exactly salvage it. Ota sucks. Aiba has cool chemistry with Date but not much else.
So while the characters are somewhat hit or miss, and thus makes the actual atmosphere much less consistent than it should, the routes I would say are pretty consistent in quality. I mentioned Ota sucks, but I found his relationship with his mother was nice in his route, while Iris route lends more for the plot in interesting ways. Mizuki route is my second favorite; again, I liked the way she was handled and I'd say that enhanced Date's character much more. Annihilation route was my favorite route, however; seeing the plot unravel and Date be tortured emotionally was a strong rollercoaster, and it led to some fun moments and strong moments of tension.
True route I do consider my third favorite route, so it's a little half and half; it's where I see most of Uchikoshi's flaws crop up and harm the experience. To start somewhere, I really do not like the way that the whole "timeline knowledge" thing works; it's a very present concept from Uchikoshi, where information in Zero Escape is shared by the Morphogenic Field, and Ever17's Blick Winkel, alongside Remember11's SELF. AI opts for a... "fractal" concept, where Date remembers information from other routes via pieces of memory in his body, which frankly, does not make sense. I kind of get it in a way to sidestep constant infodumps, but it's a concept that's just written in and ignored, which is also a constant thing I noticed. Outside of that, I found Saito to be a lackluster culprit. He doesn't have much of a presence, and his motivations were lackluster at best. He does have one of my favorite quotes in the game, but regardless, not too strong. The twist with Date's body and identity works, but it's... a bit of a Phi Sigma situation where it recontextualizes a couple of things to be unfortunate, mostly Date and Iris pre-True having some less than tasteful moments. I also just find the twist to be too complicated for its own good, as well as having a couple of leaps of logic I didn't find too well executed. It really needs a lot of suspension of disbelief to work, and it... kind of, kind of doesn't work.
Side note, Uchikoshi's plot twist reuse isn't as present here as it is usually. At least, nothing really screamed at me that there was something from E17 used, barring maybe the body switching? IDK, not too important, didn't bother me. Nirvana Initiative seems worse with it lol.
The Somniums are interesting, but I never found them to work well as puzzles, and more as interesting interpretations of the characters. I usually just had a guide for most of them because I didn't want to struggle with how the timer works, and a lot of the answers felt either too easy, or too warped with the internal logic utilized. Regardless, cool concept, not too strong execution.
Which, that kind of summarizes my thoughts with AI? I felt affirmed that I can't consider Uchikoshi a good writer when his strongest concepts aren't done so well, when the issue doesn't lie with the direction, but with the raw text itself. It's hard to consider the final twist good when too much of the work is made to justify it, than it fitting naturally. And so, when everything seems strong and detailed by itself, the attempt to jam it in together makes it less than the sum of its part.
At the end of the day, it's not a fractal; it's an uneven jigsaw puzzle. But at least those singular pieces are good occasionally?
small edit because i forgot to put this in but the dance number ending is the best part of the game completely unironically
The constant theming between Uchikoshi works is its constrained, smaller casts and isolated settings. Ever17 has about 7 characters of importance, and the Zero Escape series has constantly utilized casts of 9 for their death games, with additional characters depending on a couple of variables. Another one of Uchikoshi's trademarks are his constant twist recycling, his love for dirty jokes and just general writing that's considered perverse, and just the general mystery angle that's always been present. He has, after all, said to write his endings first and then the rest; the key core of his works, more than anything, is mystery. So how does AI work with these concepts and evolve with what is his largest scale work as of now? Well, he kind of does and doesn't change much.
The bigger difference is AI's cast: it's pretty big compared to his previous works. Date, Aiba, Mizuki, Boss, Pewter, Hitomi, Renju, Shoko, Ota, Iris, Mama, Sejima, Moma, Renju, alongside other minor but present variables are all important parts of the chessboard here, having their motivations and actions which all affect the way the mystery works. Given that and the setting being a prefecture than a fixed location, such as the ship in 999, AI's atmosphere evolves less of a feeling that a guillotine grows closer towards your neck, and more of providing various kinds of escape of these guillotines for the ensemble cast that's been presented, and makes it a much more character-centric experience.
So does AI succeed at making you care about the characters? Well, kind of. I will say I found Date's personality to be more charismatic than I thought it'd be, but his actual struggles and characterization I wasn't exactly sold on, more on that later. I would say Mizuki and Boss are both characters I found the most interesting; Mizuki's coping with her parent's death was well handled in her route and I found the found family angle of it nice, while Boss lends to my favorite route in the game, while making her emotions for Date transparent, and thus, found her to be a strong personality that bounced off Date, but also felt as a strong cushion. As for Iris, well, she's my least favorite of the cast. Her route just felt very weird which makes sense when taken into account she has a brain tumor, and Date basically connected to that, but even then I wasn't too big on the family angle between her and Date. I did find him and Hitomi to be nice, but it doesn't exactly salvage it. Ota sucks. Aiba has cool chemistry with Date but not much else.
So while the characters are somewhat hit or miss, and thus makes the actual atmosphere much less consistent than it should, the routes I would say are pretty consistent in quality. I mentioned Ota sucks, but I found his relationship with his mother was nice in his route, while Iris route lends more for the plot in interesting ways. Mizuki route is my second favorite; again, I liked the way she was handled and I'd say that enhanced Date's character much more. Annihilation route was my favorite route, however; seeing the plot unravel and Date be tortured emotionally was a strong rollercoaster, and it led to some fun moments and strong moments of tension.
True route I do consider my third favorite route, so it's a little half and half; it's where I see most of Uchikoshi's flaws crop up and harm the experience. To start somewhere, I really do not like the way that the whole "timeline knowledge" thing works; it's a very present concept from Uchikoshi, where information in Zero Escape is shared by the Morphogenic Field, and Ever17's Blick Winkel, alongside Remember11's SELF. AI opts for a... "fractal" concept, where Date remembers information from other routes via pieces of memory in his body, which frankly, does not make sense. I kind of get it in a way to sidestep constant infodumps, but it's a concept that's just written in and ignored, which is also a constant thing I noticed. Outside of that, I found Saito to be a lackluster culprit. He doesn't have much of a presence, and his motivations were lackluster at best. He does have one of my favorite quotes in the game, but regardless, not too strong. The twist with Date's body and identity works, but it's... a bit of a Phi Sigma situation where it recontextualizes a couple of things to be unfortunate, mostly Date and Iris pre-True having some less than tasteful moments. I also just find the twist to be too complicated for its own good, as well as having a couple of leaps of logic I didn't find too well executed. It really needs a lot of suspension of disbelief to work, and it... kind of, kind of doesn't work.
Side note, Uchikoshi's plot twist reuse isn't as present here as it is usually. At least, nothing really screamed at me that there was something from E17 used, barring maybe the body switching? IDK, not too important, didn't bother me. Nirvana Initiative seems worse with it lol.
The Somniums are interesting, but I never found them to work well as puzzles, and more as interesting interpretations of the characters. I usually just had a guide for most of them because I didn't want to struggle with how the timer works, and a lot of the answers felt either too easy, or too warped with the internal logic utilized. Regardless, cool concept, not too strong execution.
Which, that kind of summarizes my thoughts with AI? I felt affirmed that I can't consider Uchikoshi a good writer when his strongest concepts aren't done so well, when the issue doesn't lie with the direction, but with the raw text itself. It's hard to consider the final twist good when too much of the work is made to justify it, than it fitting naturally. And so, when everything seems strong and detailed by itself, the attempt to jam it in together makes it less than the sum of its part.
At the end of the day, it's not a fractal; it's an uneven jigsaw puzzle. But at least those singular pieces are good occasionally?
small edit because i forgot to put this in but the dance number ending is the best part of the game completely unironically