GAME: ワールドエンド・シンドローム
PLATFORM: Nintendo Switch
PRICE: 5,907 円
GENRE: Visual novel / ミステリー×恋愛アドベンチャー
LEVEL: Upper intermediate / advanced
REVIEW:
Engaging story with lots of choices. The story takes place in a quaint little town over about a month, with each day broken up into morning, afternoon, and evening. For each time period, you can choose to go to one of 7 places. In addition, there are many events that present even more decision points. So, exploring all options exhaustively needs tons of reloads. Saving and loading are kind of slow, so that was a bit annoying. But maybe I was overdoing it.
The game has several parallel storylines, with new ones opening up as you progress through it. I think they were cleverly thought out. The dialogues were both funny and deep enough to keep it interesting.
The voice acting was stellar. I just wish there was more of it. That would be my biggest complaint, actually. With such great voice talent and plenty of well written dialogues, it feels such a waste that only “events” are voiced, and not even all of the events. It was also weird that even in the voiced events, the main character’s (your) lines aren’t voiced, so the conversation sounds one-sided. (Except in very few scenes where it is, so it’s not like they didn’t have an actor at all.)
The drawings are good overall. The backgrounds are great, and while clearly they kept their number to a minimum, they didn’t feel to be missing more like the voice acting did. The characters are OK. Some events contain separate character drawings, some of which are nicer but some don’t really match their regular drawings, so just OK.
Finally, about difficulty. The text has a wide range of styles from slang to super formal. The topics also include some discussions about folklore research. Kanji use is fairly normal, meaning there isn’t a lot of alternative or unusual writings. But there is no furigana even for names. The grammar is definitely at least N2 level. There is a good amount of idiomatic expressions and a little bit of specialized vocab.
Overall, I really liked it! It took me about 190 hours to finish (all endings), and had a lot of fun with it. It also definitely improved my reading ability. Apparently there will be a sequel, which I’m excited about too.