I'm in two minds about this game. On the one hand, there's the story, which can basically be summed up in two words: Kotaro Uchikoshi. It's got all his classic strengths: creative use of time travel and metafiction, mysteries and bangs that keep the plot driving forward, and distinct characters - and unlike many of his games, it has an actual proper ending. Unfortunately, it also has manyI'm in two minds about this game. On the one hand, there's the story, which can basically be summed up in two words: Kotaro Uchikoshi. It's got all his classic strengths: creative use of time travel and metafiction, mysteries and bangs that keep the plot driving forward, and distinct characters - and unlike many of his games, it has an actual proper ending. Unfortunately, it also has many of his classic weaknesses: too many conveniently outlandish characters in too small a physical and narrative space and a massively confused scale, characters not acting their age, some moments with very awkward pacing, and some tremendous contrivances (such as a major military battle in which apparently no-one was badly hurt). It's the kind of story that's great to go through once, but it's probably not going to be that memorable.
And let's be clear - this is all about the story. This is a visual novel, not a puzzle game. Yes, there's sections where you try to manipulate objects in order to play "tricks" to get events you want to happen, but the number of choices of object is quite small and inconsistent and the consequences are too unpredictable to really be tactical. Yes, it can be hilarious to see how your actions domino through to affect the characters, but that's a double edged sword - in order to be hilarious, it has to be unpredictable, which means you're just guessing at what to do in most of the scenarios. It's also weirdly stop/start - when you click on an item to manipulate, you have to wait while the screen fades to black and white, the object moves, it pauses, the screen fades back in, you see the reaction, and then the screen whites out completely with a "cleanup in progress" sign because they couldn't be bothered to animate the character recovering from being tricked. It's irritating and breaks any immersion the game was going for.
In fact, about three-quarters of the way through the game it drops the "trick" part entirely and becomes a traditional VN with binary choices, most of which lead have one option to continue and one that is instant death. What's worse, they often don't make sense. For example, the very first choice you get is when a character asks you to do something that makes perfect sense at the time, but if you say you'll do it, you get an instant ending saying that you ultimately failed to achieve a key goal as a result of being too dependent on them. Which is ridiculous because a) you've been depending on them the whole game up to that point, and b) when you make the correct choice, you find that all they were going to do is tell you they aren't going to give you orders and leave!
And then there is the elephant in the room. Panties. The weird thing is that they aren't needed in the game, or plot, at all. There's never like a critical moment when they matter, and the only influence they have on the game is that if they come into view during the trick segments the controls go wobbly and you have to pan away from them before a timer runs out (or just press a single button to change the camera position to a different one, which makes it trivial, and also makes you notice that there are camera positions which exist only to upskirt the female characters). You might be looking at panties (on a cartoon 3D model) like 3-4 seconds, if you play badly - so if you actually want to do that, it won't be satisfying, and if you just find the whole thing a bit creepy like I did, it's just unnecessarily so. Yet the game mentions them all the time, the loading screen shows a girl with her skirt riding up, there's a "gallery" of viewed panty shots, one of the chapters is called "panty party" (which does not contain any panties nor even mention them) etc.. It just comes across as unnecessarily creepy, and has the feeling of having been glued onto the game because of the popularity of salacious VNs in some markets and/or because of the tie-in with an existing anime (although the anime just treated it as an occasionally-mentioned joke).
There's also some QoL problems. The game doesn't tell you a whole bunch of useful things, such as that you can skip videos by holding down X (which you will want to do, because the game plays an identical anime opening and closing sequence for every one of the 20 chapters) or that you can save at any time (which you will also want to do, because the instant deaths in part 2 otherwise require you to play the entire chapter from the beginning, and one of them is right at the end of a chapter!)
So if you can get this as a sale price and you don't mind the visual novel gameplay and narrative style, and can tolerate the unnecessary creepage, it's probably worth a punt, especially if you're an Uchikoshi fan and are frustrated by his endings (since this has one of the most satisfactory endings of any Uchikoshi game). But it's generally too weak to be a global recommendation, and certainly not worth full price.… Expand
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