Castlevania (1986/1993)
Playing a NES game as a British guy is a strange experience. Hearing tell of all these pivotal, formative and defining games is undeniably exciting. Then I try playing them, and it just doesn't hit me at all. The graphics are not interesting, the sound chip is not as distinctive as it's competitors, and the games themselves are clunky and fusty in a way that just doesn't resonate with me. This is, of course, pure subjectivity. But to me, NES games are just not fun or interesting.
This is probably because I never owned a NES as a kid, and nor did anyone I knew. But there is something potentially offensive, or at the very least reductive to dismiss the love for anything as merely nostalgia. So I absolutely will not do that. Indeed, the NES has such a clear and focused aesthetic appeal, hardcoded by its very particular limitations, that almost any game made for it is of course instantly identifiable. However, the muted browns and greens and maroons it spits out just are not appealing to me. This is despite buying an actual physical NES and scouting several games, including Castlevania, which is thankfully worth a crazy amount of money now, so that's good.
So how to appreciate Castlevania with no skin in the game? The answer is, with difficulty. I opted to play the 1993 Famicom version which has an 'easy' mode that is vastly more fun. Purists will balk, but removing the stun locked stagger every time you get hit makes platforming sections less of on ordeal. Bosses too go down a lot more easily, with more wiggle room for not perfectly memorising patterns. Yet at one stage (about stage 4,to be precise) even easy mode becomes a chore.
Bleating like this is pathetic and I need to get good and try harder and memorise every nook and crany. This is not a process I'm ignorant to, having spent literally hundreds of hours on games like Mushihimesama and Umihara Kawase until they literally invaded my every waking (and latterly, subconscious) moment. The issue is, Castlevania isn't interesting aesthetically. Again, it's drab and featureless, and not in a glorious way like Megami Tensei. If it were a single game bereft of a series, then perhaps I would grin and bear it, but Castlevania has been done SO much better, in all sorts of permutations. Playing this made me want to put more time in to Rondo Of Blood/Dracula X, the glorious PC Engine iteration that's possibly the best a 16-bit game has ever looked.
Superbeat: Xonic (2015/2017)
Superbeat: Xonic is a rhythm action game, and a fairly conventional one. It has everything you might expect, including chirpy music, and swarms of abstracted shapes lining up with lines that indicate that the player must push a button. Games like Superbeat: Xonic (and better games like Dance Dance Revolution and DJ Max and Pop N Music) present a significantly deconstructed version of videogames, where everything has been reduced to raw, naked button pushes. This is extremely compelling to a certain kind of player of videogames, myself included. However, it also presents an absolute need for the producer to ascribe a very coherent aesthetic to these games. They will, of course, be summarily ignored by top level players, and may even be disabled in the options as being too distracting. yet the onslaught of colour and noise and shapes mean that rhythm action games can be the most visual striking of any genre, despite being so mechanically simple.
Superbeat: Xonic is ultimately a failure on a couple of fundamental levels. Firstly, the notes spiraling out from a central point are just not as easy to read as in Beatmania or DJ Max Respect. Of course, part of this comes from familiarity with the game, but much like shooting games with isometric viewpoints, the occlusion of note readability is just frustrating.
Even more frustrating is the lack of music videos. Rhythm action games are so completely reliant on unobtrusively telegraphing information to the player that any distraction is probably anathema to the highest level player, but I can complete 16* songs on DJ Max and I absolutely love the music videos. They provide much needed variety and character to an otherwise potentially dour experience. Perhaps this is die to limitations in the hardware, but Superbeat: Xonic lacking MVs makes this game less fun to play long term. And a rhythm action game that cannot be played again and again and again and again unfortunately has no reason to exist.
Root Double-Before Crime After Days (2013/2020)
Playing Root Double elicited a rollercoaster of emotions, that quickly flatlined in to an almost comforting level of boredom. After being bludgeoned by 40 hours of repetitive and largely generic narratives, it left me questioning why I bothered playing it through the whole way in the first place.
Initial impressions are largely good. How wonderful to be playing a visual novel again! Everything about Root Double screams out that you'll get a dependable VN experience, from the serious VN setting (featureless underground facility, very Ever 17, love it) to the extremely VN soundtrack, and the no-nonsense character design. Root Double's story of hot headed firepeople and an amnesiac protagonist trapped in an underground research lab which is undergoing nuclear meltdown is about as clichéd as they come, and initially all the better for it. There's something utterly ridiculous and yet delightful about the discrepancy between the diegetic urgency of the situation compared to the tenancy of visual novels to rattle out a frightening amount of exposition. And initially, Root Double is frankly far more intense than the majority of visual novels. Even 999 and Ever 17 had significant periods of downtime. Root Double is initially ridiculously dramatic, with constant fires, explosions and impending radiation death that can make it a little hard to focus on how the characters are developing.
Things shift quite significantly with the realisation of how long this game actually is. Many visual novels must in all practicality be played with a walkthrough. It is very possible, of course to play the PC98 version of YU-NO using only the hints and tools the game gives you, but it would take exceptional patience. Even a more straightforward visual novel, such as Steins;Gate uses an exceptionally esoteric system to blockade its conclusory routes, which again get be alleviated by playing with a walkthrough.
Root Double is frankly obscenely long and unwieldy. Even glancing at a walkthrough left me feeling disheartened at the realisation that the game would take months to finish alongside other things like raising a child, going to work and eating. But it's also comforting trash. The featureless corridors, the unending exposition, the constant descriptions of searching rooms... Visual novels are often wildly reluctant to get to the point, and Root Double is very much a typical visual novel in this respect. Yet the drip feed of, at times genuinely compelling plot twists and Sci fi elements almost make playing it worth it.
After completing the After route, which confusingly is the first route one should read, it is suggested the player should start the Before Route, which cycles back in time and focuses on characters who are more in the periphery of the After Route. And the Before route is guilty of much of the visual novel clichés that After managed to avoid. It's pretty much a slice of life narrative. Not as cloying as something like Robotics;Notes but a world away from the frantic antics of the burning nuclear power plant. It's all high-school romance, sexless and mildly suggestive, with some tagged on sci-fi elements.
Route Double has some VERY good ideas, which become more and more apparent as the game plods along interminably. These ideas are similar to the ideas presented in 999 and Ever 17. Just not quite as good, and hidden in huge canyons of not very exciting exposition. None of the characters are likable enough or well designed enough or well voiced enough to justify such length. It's all very silly.
Much like Steins;Gate and Zero Escape and its derivatives, Root Double is probably at its best when it engages in lengthy science lessons and rambling pseudoscientific musings. Perhaps it's a bit of an acquired taste, but this is one of the main advantages of the extreme longform structure of the visual novel. While there's nothing quite as compelling as Steins;Gate's banana/microwave/time machine experiments (which really set a milestone in slow, comfy speculative fiction), Root Double does have some reasonably meaty science lessons tucked away, albeit VERY deeply in a cloyingly vast narrative.
So, Root Double is like a particularly long and boring roller-coaster. It goes pretty high and sometimes pretty fast, but it takes so long to get there it's never particularly exciting. Around the 15 hour mark there's a lot of traipsing around with a ragtag gang of psychic teenagers around a very, very clean city, and I realised that this was incredibly relaxing. It's a silly crime thriller/slice of life hybrid that would bore me silly in any other medium, but as a visual novel, it works. The characters are all weakly derivative archetypes, but they're good enough, and certainly not gross and pervy like in certain games (for example Our World Is Ended, urgh). There are endless flashbacks, which take place within... an extended flashback. Judicious speed reading is often required. It's the antithesis of what most people would imagine a game to be. To all intents and purposes, it's just reading, though the sound and visual elements do tickle a certain pickle. Even though I'm moaning, even though I'm essentially bored, I realise I'm enjoying this more than 90%, of other games I force myself to play.
In terms of the actual ludic machinations of the game, as in, the game itself, the methods of interaction are somewhat oblique, with frankly little meaningful input from the player. A graph of sorts, dubbed the 'Senses Sympathy System' can be pulled up in certain highlighted, crucial situations, and the player can change various values of various characters. The game all but telegraphs that many times this won't even do anything meaningful. This system is used to earn affection points for characters, a common system in visual novels and dating simulators, as well as traverse narrative branches, though once more the systems themselves are firmly occluded. It feels clunky and antiquated, way more so than even Ever 17, and certainly more so than more contemporaneous experiences like Virtues Last Reward, which not only sets the narrative paths out for the player to see and therefore manipulate, but also does an excellent job at diegetically situating this hodological narrative framework within the narrative. The Senses Sympathy System here is clunky, half baked, and would have been better replaced with a more formulaic menu based selection system. If the player has any sense, they'll be using a walkthrough, so it hardly makes any difference.
There's a big twist and it's good. Not amazing but good. It's not as brain meltingly clever as the big, big twist in Ever 17, and it's not as complicated and satisfying as the many, interlocked twists of Virtue's Last Reward but it's fun. Maybe if there was less build up to it it would hit harder. Perhaps I should have played the 'B' route first, which the game actually let's you do. Who knows?
After completing the first two routes, then the game starts to get a bit crazy. Then after finishing the third route, the game really beds in. At this stage, the plot twists became tired and hackneyed and for hour after hour after hour I just wanted the game to end. But I kept playing because it was just interesting enough to keep going. It wasn't that I cared about the presumably predictable endings, it was more that initial feeling of comfort I kept coming back to. Visual novels are comfy experiences, and Root Double's insistence on explicating everything is both heavy handed and strangely therapeutic.
Many of the themes and concepts introduced on the home stretch of the vast and seemingly unending narrative are fascinating, and involve the ramifications of telepathy, psychic projection and mind control. It is not unlike texts such as Possessor or Dollhouse, which also consider the implications of vestigial data when using a RAM/ROM based model of the human psyche. These notions are doubtless scientifically dubious at best, but are thrilling and compelling. Yet Route Double fudges it. It's ultimately boring and, with the extreme level of explication, there is no doubt in the mind of the reader as to what has occurred. Again, while it may be cruel, Route Double's proximity to Ever 17 all but invites direct comparison to the labyrinthine narrative quantum hellscapes of early to mid period Kotaro Uchikoshi narratives. Route Double also has the temerity to be not as compelling (understandable, forgivable) but also flat-out boring.
The final hurdle in a gauntlet of hurdles is to see the slight narrative repeated through the conceit of memory diving over and over and OVER again to a point of almost transcendental frustration. Suddenly the more laborious passages of Umineko or the repetitious contrivances of old-school ADVs seem quaint in comparison. Why is a perfectly serviceable, 3/5 narrative rendered if not unplayable then certainly unenjoyable through such avant-garde, abusive levels of padding? Making this even more frustrating is that there are many fascinating, if somewhat derivative aspects to the narrative. Memory rewrites and secret experiments deep in laboratory basements and parasitic memories declaring autonomy and shadowy extra-governmental organisations and and earnest attempt to explicate ESP... It's all good stuff. And it's all stuffed deep in a mollasses thick mess of expository information.
Upon it's eventual conclusion, al questions regarding how good or effective or challenging or interesting or whatever Root Double is suddenly dissipate. It is over, and that is all that matters.