Gu-nosia?

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

Time to Beat

Faster than I thought. I guess it took quite a few sessions even though some were pretty short. It took me 122 loops to complete.

Usually I don’t like playing in such short sessions but it wasn’t the kind of game I could happily sit down for hours playing. The repetitive nature meant I would get bored after a couple of loops. But it was actually pretty suitable for the time period when I started playing. January is always a crazy month with my families so having a game I could play for 15 minutes and feel like I was making some progress was good.

Writing

Definitely a well written story. It closed out all the questions it brought up during the course of the game. The humour was laugh-out-loud funny at points (Shigemichi….) and all the characters had distinct and interesting personalities/backstories. The world-building was amazing. Kudos to the translators for ensuring each character had such unique ways of speaking. I was particularly impressed with how wordy and incomprehensible Jonas was haha. Some character highlights for me:

• The reveal about Chipie’s cat 😱
• How the seemingly token bath scene with Comet was actually important for multiple plot points
• Gina being super harsh in the true route ending
• In general how certain characters were non-binary and the use of pronouns

The epilogue blurbs for each character were also super fun. I was surprised by Raqio and Remnan teaming up. And Comet and her black cat was perfect.

Speaking of Remnan, the true ending made me feel SO bad for the Remnan in the crazy Kukrushka scenario. OMG the poor guy 😭

Also very cool was the way each character’s personality was incorporated into the way they acted in the debates. It was fun figuring out how to deal with them, like knowing Remnan would never lie about being human and never to attack Yuriko directly 😅

Gameplay

This was my main issue with the game… In theory the system was smart:

• Incentivise players to keep looping by tantalising with plot reveals and doling out experience points to enable the player to gain skills to be able to debate better
• As the player obtains more skills, introduce new ‘conditions’ outside of ‘win the loop’ in order to get more information/shake up the gameplay a bit

How it actually felt to play it:

• Early game was painful because RNG meant I got lots of abilities that required 30 skill points so it wasn’t rewarding to keep losing loops because I was unable to unlock anything to help me get better results
• Early game is also tedious because you aren’t familiar with the characters yet so end up reading every extremely generic line in the debates.
• Related to above, once you get used to the generic text you can just button-mash through it all but then end up missing new text/chances to make choices because your button-mash game is too on point 🙄
• Mid-game is good in terms of being quite obvious about the different goals you need to achieve (i.e. characters outright asking you to protect them/telling you so-and-so must survive so you can interrogate them) BUT it’s actually really annoying to try and achieve because now you need to keep more people than yourself alive and sometimes rng just says no. And then having to go through all the scenario text again is extremely tedious because you know what you need to do and it really comes down to luck because your skills can only help so much.
• Late game it gets way too obtuse to know what you need to do to get some of the final information. And some of the required scenarios aren’t linked to character profiles so you have no idea that you’re missing any ‘information’.

Also rng related, after I got one of the main end game cutscenes and just needed one more event for Setsu, I played five more loops and got nothing. Which made me wonder if I was missing something. And very nearly made me drop the game despite being so close to finishing. A week later I tried one more time and got it straight away 😠

So overall, I was pretty much annoyed at the game the whole way through LOL. If I didn’t have faith that the story would be good, I would have dropped it at multiple stages.

Also, a visual novel where you don’t bother reading most of the text cos it’s generic? 🤨

Graphics

At first I thought the character designs were overly intricate but as I played the game and learnt more about the in-universe world, the designs made more sense and felt appropriate. Regardless, the art is very nice 😊

Music

I don’t remember anything about the music 🙃

Overall

I think as time goes on I will eventually be less mad about the gameplay. Or will I? I do feel quite strongly about games not wasting my time and given I went into this game knowing I would probably have to grit my teeth and endure, the memory might stay LOL.

The story and characters were very good though. But I dunno if I could recommend this game to other people. I don’t want to waste anybody’s time and saying ‘it gets better!’ would kinda be a lie. I suppose if the story is not enough of a hook then it isn’t a worthwhile game for that person. I am a little glad I played it though, I did have the option of bailing and just watching the upcoming anine, but I had a feeling (vindicated) that it might not translate so well into that media.

Categories: Games

hikaru