After playing VLR and thinking "Hmmm, that was good, but too much of this is just rehashing Ever17... Maybe Uchikoshi IS a hack..." this game constantly had me going "WE'RE SO BACK."
This game really feels like Uchikoshi going completely unfiltered. Picking up where VLR left off, this game continues to take ideas from the Inifinity Trilogy's next entry, Remember11, but this time it doesn't feel as rehashed. It probably helps a lot that Remember11 is an unfinished game that doesn't really get the chance to delve into a lot of it's more interesting ideas, giving this game a lot more to actually say than it's predecessor.
The presentation of this game DOES suffer a lot from the games overly ambitious presentation that it clearly doesn't have the budget to execute, but the poor animations do have a certain campy charm to them anyways. The game would still definitely benefit from a complete makeover, but it's unlikely to happen given the game's general perception (and no, the ps4 version that gives the game shitty "realistic" lighting doesn't count. It even somehow manages to make the game look worse).
//SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT
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The only real complaint I have (besides the animations) is that I wish Uchikoshi was still the type of writer to LITERALLY make the player the "villain" of the game, but I guess that was probably more of Nakazawa's thing. The Zero Escape games still incorporate a lot of themes with very obvious meta readings, but Uchikoshi tends to avoid making the player an ACTUAL part of the story like is done in the Infinity trilogy, whereas Nakazawa's later works continue to implement the idea that the player is an active part of the story, even when it's extremely minor to the point of barely being brought up. Delta being a stand-in for the player works to a certain degree, but I do think it would've been better to do away with him entirely and make it "The player themselves is the one driving the story forward."
This game really feels like Uchikoshi going completely unfiltered. Picking up where VLR left off, this game continues to take ideas from the Inifinity Trilogy's next entry, Remember11, but this time it doesn't feel as rehashed. It probably helps a lot that Remember11 is an unfinished game that doesn't really get the chance to delve into a lot of it's more interesting ideas, giving this game a lot more to actually say than it's predecessor.
The presentation of this game DOES suffer a lot from the games overly ambitious presentation that it clearly doesn't have the budget to execute, but the poor animations do have a certain campy charm to them anyways. The game would still definitely benefit from a complete makeover, but it's unlikely to happen given the game's general perception (and no, the ps4 version that gives the game shitty "realistic" lighting doesn't count. It even somehow manages to make the game look worse).
//SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT
*
*
*
The only real complaint I have (besides the animations) is that I wish Uchikoshi was still the type of writer to LITERALLY make the player the "villain" of the game, but I guess that was probably more of Nakazawa's thing. The Zero Escape games still incorporate a lot of themes with very obvious meta readings, but Uchikoshi tends to avoid making the player an ACTUAL part of the story like is done in the Infinity trilogy, whereas Nakazawa's later works continue to implement the idea that the player is an active part of the story, even when it's extremely minor to the point of barely being brought up. Delta being a stand-in for the player works to a certain degree, but I do think it would've been better to do away with him entirely and make it "The player themselves is the one driving the story forward."