A lot more enjoyable than ZDT, thats for sure. Worth the playthrough for the story and characters alone, even with its flaws. Here are some general notes I kept thinking abt while playing.

The Good:
- This game is insanely gay??? Like I was NOT expecting it at all but there were multiple queer characters + a ton of positive talk about the queer community. I predicted Pewter being a villain tho the second I found the BL in his cabinets, gays as villains trope be like 🥴. But he didn't turn out to be a bad person, just someone who was manipulated. So I can forgive it. Same with Renju I suppose, to some extent. (Also the second I saw Pewter's bulge I was like no ma'am that man is NOT straight) Oh yeah and Mama is mother, I just love her sm <3

- Uchikoshi is really good at writing complex characters with deep character relationships. Date is an incredibly fun protagonist, even if his dialogue becomes a bit tedious and annoying at times. I genuinely love this horny middle aged man, 10/10 yes I would date Date. I similarly fell in love with Date and Mizuki's found-family relationship, Date and Aiba's begrudging partnership (love how they don't even realize how much they need each other and care for each other... oof), and weirdly enough Uta and his mother's relationship as well. It was the central plot of one path I suppose, but it still felt so inconsequential yet so impactful. I think this game really does a good job at showing the importance of familial love, whether through found family or biological family. As Mizuki says, a family is someone you are entirely ordinary with. The people you rely on without even realizing. If there's one takeaway from this game I would keep with me, it would be that.

- Uchikoshi is also incredibly skilled at writing these sorts of stories that are complex, intertwined slowburns that come together by the end. I think the twist for this game worked really well bc it kept the suspicion on literally every single character until the final reveal. And thankfully it didn't feel too contrived, which is always my biggest concern when it comes to this writing style. In general I think that his story was really compelling, and I appreciated that the villain had simple motives... to start, at least.


The Bad:
- The terribly awkward animations made this game feel so stilted to play, it reminded me quite a bit of how bad ZTD's animations were. It felt like watching dolls in a dollhouse. I suppose you could say it adds to the vibe, but I think it takes away from the tense atmosphere. Again tho, didn't take as much away as it did in ZTD so there is some improvement I suppose.

- The graphics, while not bad per se, felt like upscaled 3DS visuals. Which honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this game was originally being built for that system. But I genuinely hated the effects given to objects in somniums. It looked bad, and not purposefully bad. I think I get what they were going for, it just doesn't work imo and kinda breaks the atmosphere again. I think by FAR the most effective somniums were Date's tutorial somnium, Date's final somnium where you play as Mizuki, and Hitomi's mountain somnium. The greyscale/ color gimmick in those first two worked beautifully and was visually interesting, and the void of dark and empty spaces that made Hitomi's was insanely effective as well. Meanwhile Iris' shovelforge somniums... both of them... I never want to see them again. The bright colored blocks mixed with the weird wavy texture given to everything in somnium made for a visually appalling experience. Esp with the audio clutter in that second shovelforge somnium. I just don't understand that choice. Even in saito's/boss' somnium, I don't understand why they chose to go for garishly bright colors and textures that took me out of any sort of tense atmosphere, and was just wholly visually unappealing.

- The action sequences were terrible. I dreaded every time one would pop up. They were so insanely slow bc of the weird loading screens where aiba would think of a plan or w/e, and then executing said plan was similarly painfully slow. The qte's felt pointless. They just felt so forced. I genuinely think this game would have been better without these sequences at all. Thankfully there were only a handful, but still...

- Listen. I know that Uchikoshi has always written anime vn's. 999 is one of my favorite games of all time, and I genuinely love VLR with my whole heart, even with its flaws. But over the years he just keep cranking that dial more and more, and elements of this game almost feel like a parody of anime tropes at this point. Like it can't be real. A lot of the characters and dialogue are just incessantly annoying. Almost every character suffers from this, but mainly Iris, Mizuki, and Uta (albeit he is a NEET so like I get why) as well as Date himself to a lesser extent. It just becomes grating honestly. I feel like this story could be told so much better, these characters so much more compelling, if they had just toned back on the anime tropes. I'm not even talking abt the crazy zany elements, the comedy, or the meta-humor. I love those elements. Just stop the incessant dialogue and voice acting please.

- Speaking of. If I have to watch that dance or listen to that song that goes with it one more time in my life I will implode. The way they used it like 5 or 6 times I stg 😭 I was dying

- This game is incessantly horny, as I've previously said. That's not entirely a bad thing, but it is painfully het at times. And also flat out inappropriate at times as well. Yeah yeah Date's a perv I KNOW, I GET IT. Still...


Some cool things that happened to me during this playthrough:

1) My very first path was the one where we see the video of Boss killing So, so the entire fucking game I was insanely suspicious of her and that really threw me off the tracks of finding the actual murderer in any other path lol. At first I thought this represented a weakness of branching CYOA-esque stories, but looking back its actually kinda rad that I had this really unique experience. I kept thinking abt how things would tie back to her, and even tho she wasn't the villain, that was such a fun angle to be looking at the story from.

2) Idk if this is how you're supposed to figure this out, but at the end of Iris' route where she dies to the tumor after psyncing, she had her eye stabbed due to the machine. I immediately figured out that it was bc of the psync machine, and that made me realize that the murderer (whoever it was) wasn't actually fascinated with the eyeballs but rather was just placing all his victims in this machine. Didn't know abt the body swapping yet, but was an insanely chilling moment to finally figure out such a large part of the mystery in a moment where I wasn't even sure if we were supposed to be thinking abt that. This, imo, is why Uchikoshi's writing is so effective. It makes the reader feel like they are actually putting together the pieces of the story themselves, and that they can figure things out early.