Skelly tan is ready for her rehearsal!
It all starts with a group of highschool friends preforming a charm ritual which is common slice of life anime bullshit. They somehow botch the ritual and the lot of them gets spirited away to the legendary haunted elementary school which used to stand on the very spot of their own highschool. (Because I haven't had enough of walking around in haunted Japanese schools yet.) Heavenly Host Elementary just happens to be a nexus of overlapping dimensions which the students got scattered throughout. They're essentially in the same place but can't really interact with each other unless they're in the same space. So the goal is to somehow figure out why you're there, regroup with your friends and escape back to reality.There are five chapters which you unlock as you go and it jumps around to different groups of students. I am really bad with names and faces in life and about twice as bad with names in a foreign language. Even now having played through the whole game about 1.5 times I can't recall with certainty a single character's name.
In the first half of the game you're stuck in pretty much the same area of the school which gets really monotonous. They really needed to dole out the new areas a little more evenly because they're pretty much all crammed into the second half of the game. They didn't even utilize the East wing to it's full potential. Like what the hell was up with the piano and the migrating marble bust?
So you explore looking for people and keys, solving simple puzzles and collecting... student IDs off of dead students you come across? The bodies are from several different schools from junior high and up. At first I thought this aspect was kind of weird like something only a serial killer would do but then I thought about it and realized that these are all missing persons with families. It's not like a serial killer's trophy, it's like grabbing someone's dog tags. Assuming you make it out alive, you have a list of all these missing people who you can confirm as dead. Then I thought about it some more and realized that that would be pointless because if you die in the school, all memory of you is erased from reality. So, no, I was right. It's like a serial killer trophy. What's even weirder is that on the game's title screen there's a catalog of all the IDs you've found with a picture of the body and a cause of death. Reminds me of Tyler Durden's "human sacrifice" wall except less... yeah...
You meet spirits, some of which want to kill you and you have to do something to appease them or just run from them to escape. Occasionally you'll have to make a decision that may affect the ending you get. It's pretty immediate and upfront about letting you know that you made the wrong choice by having someone die. Then it gives you the "wrong ending" game over screen. I don't know about other people but I TRY to get these because there are several different ones and they're interesting. But I think it's stupid that if you make a choice that gets someone killed, it results in a game over when the canon plot itself involves people in your party dying. So only specific people are aloud to die and at the prescribed time. What the hell is the difference? Why is it that when one person dies we have to start over but when another dies we just move on and try to forget? I should be able to finish the game with one person missing an eye and half their arm. That would be awesome. I think the only game I've ever played where you could get playable characters killed and then just keep playing on without them was Fire Emblem.
On the game's status screen you see character avatars in your current party appearing exactly like your typical JRPG and it shows "HP 30/30." This really confused me when I first saw it because it implies that your characters can sustain damage. It makes it look like you can fight enemies in the game. Well, you can't. As it turns out, during the entire game there are only two instances I've found where you can get injured versus get killed instantly, (which is the norm.) One is where there is hazardous stuff on the floor that hurts you if you walk on it. The other is your first encounter with a hostile ghost. So there you go, characters have hit points because... not really any reason. Way too often it seems that the game cheats you out of rendered images that you should be seeing when something is happening in the game. The screen turns black except for the dialogue box and it's suddenly reduced to a text game or a choose your own adventure book where you're literally just reading a description of what is going on. There is a time and place for books. If you're watching a subtitled kung-fu movie it is not okay for the screen to just go black during a fight scene and leave you reading a description with nothing else to see. It is a disservice to the medium. It's called a "visual novel" because it's fucking VISUAL. Every time this happens all I can think about afterwards is wow, that scene would have been a lot better with some actual illustrations or even just the sprites or even just ANYTHING but a blank screen!
As you progress, you notice that dialogue and exposition seem to be slowly nudging gameplay out of the door. Then you get to chapter five and find that it's a car door and gameplay has been officially shoved into the road and backed over a couple of times to make certain it's dead. You can't take two steps anymore without a fifty line conversation. Shut up. Shut up. Oh my God, SHUT UP! This is the problem with making it a hybrid puzzle/visual novel game. You see the puzzle part and naturally that's what you want to do because it's more engaging but they keep slapping your hands away and hiding it behind their back. No, no! Finish your incredibly thick and tedious dialogue first and maybe we'll let you lick the gameplay spatula later. Nearly the first hour of chapter five is talking with no significant break in between whatsoever.
Playing with no walkthrough, I got the Groundhog Day ending which is obviously bad so I needed to change something to get the true ending of the game because I require validation for my efforts. But for the first time I didn't know what I did wrong because it wasn't made immediately evident like the other times. Well in short... everything. I needed to start over from the beginning of the chapter because my three separate saves didn't stretch back far enough to salvage it. Fantastic. On top of that, I need to experience about another hour of exposition. Find all the notes, talk to crazy dead bitch 1, get the statue to open the infirmary, listen to crazy dead bitch 2, meet crazy dead bitch 3, chant this many times, give her this and this but not these, go backwards through the maze, escape the building before time runs out. Holy shit. It's easier to swim to the moon than it is to get out of Heavenly Host. This place just has to be filled with the most pedantic and anal retentive ghosts ever. And ultimately when you think about it the whole reason anyone comes here is because they do the ritual wrong which in this case constituted repeating the chant the wrong number of times. That's it. That was enough to piss off the ghosts. Escaping is like going into the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle. If you blink funny, then you're fucking dead.
During the last dialogue of the game in where we remember our dead peers who all died horribly and who's existence was completely erased from reality except in the memories of the survivors, one of those generic tie-in J-pop singles begins to play. You know, the ones they tend to play in romantic slice of life anime where the MC and the love interest have a moment and the writers scramble to finish the relationship development that they forgot to do over the next three minutes before stopping just short of any sort of resolution? One of those. Except they also seem to play them any time they can get away with too, including this time. Sappy upbeat J-pop! Good for graduations, weddings, fight scenes, and funerals!
If I had made this game the end credits would have a blooper reel like in the first Silent Hill game and it would be set to Oingo Boingo's Dead Man's Party because it's just so obvious.
♫ I'm all dressed up with nowhere to go~
Do do do do do do do do do do do dooooo ♫
