I have a feeling we might be getting a moonlight syndrome translation patch before long so I watched lps of the first two twilight syndrome games, which is really one game in two parts. it was a slog to get through for me because lps, like podcasts, seem to trigger the same thing as sitting in a classroom with a teacher talking. suddenly I’d rather be doodling draculas, thinking of all the books I want to look up on annas archive, pausing to look up cutaways of 19th century ships, seeing what the upcoming list of uhd releases is, etc. and just watching a game, that’s robbing critical essences from it you’d get from playing it yourself and being right there in it. even so the game still seemed great to me, I would of rather been playing it myself if it were in english though.
it’s like a visual novel but with side scrolling sprites on ps1 3d to navigate, kind of inexplicably (except it’s by human entertainment so the track for that work is already laid) since it doesn’t make a lot of use of that, but which makes it 100x more interesting than if it’d just been first person views of static background. its almost like a zone of enders type deal where the first one seems almost more like a demo of the idea made with whatever pocket change fell into the couch for a budget and the 2nd thing is the actual game. you play three highschool girls and they investigate urban legends they hear about at their school. it’s episodic, you select different rumors on the menu like you would a case in a phoenix wright game.
I don’t understand how this is some obscure thing and not a hugely successful game series that’s still going to this day, a hundred games made by a dozen different developers of varying quality by now.
I like how different each rumor is. sometimes you’re walking around a lot, sometimes it’s basically a visual novel on autopilot occasionally selecting a choice when they come up. one case you’re just in a girls bedroom and you’re just answering the phone when it rings over and over. the 2nd to last case in the first game, you’re investigating your schools 7 mysteries, all seven of them, and then it turns out they’re all bullshit and nothing even happens! everyone in the comments of the video is complaining how boring this chapter is because they’re dumbasses who wouldn’t know art if it fell out of the sky and landed in their ass. and it’s completely necessary because it’s the perfect setup for the last chapter, which also ends on a great cliffhanger.
seeing the girls different personalities clash and the occasional sometimes jarring glimpses of their home lives, it’s all pretty great. I wish it would get translated for real someday but I guess there’s occasional unsubtitled voice lines that would be difficult to deal with. You know I don’t understand how there isn’t some google lens overlay type deal you can just have running on your pc for stuff like this, why is that just some annoying to use phone app thing, somebody too afraid of making something useful for humanity without figuring out how to tie a lifetime subscription to it?
I watched this because I was interested in moonlight syndrome but then the last bonus case at the very end was the one written by suda and it was completely inscrutable to me so maybe this was the high point. I think I might watch a lp of the other twilight syndrome which I think is new characters and Yuuyami Doori Tankentai, which I’m realizing now all together would knock out a good chunk of the ps1 japanese games that are not likely to be translated but still interesting enough to me I bothered downloading them in my collection. kind of sad to imagine the possibility of a day when everything worth knowing to me on the ps1 might actually become known to me
