So I was plugging away at this an hour or so a day, hit a point recently where it felt like things were turning a corner (a certain someone got their pep back would be the vaguest way I could describe it) and… I hit a credits roll. Seemed odd as I hadn’t even gotten the trophy for seeing 50% of the art yet so I checked online and while this isn’t the “true” ending, I managed to blindly hit the ending needed to activate said true ending on my first go around.
(It is good that wasn’t the actual ending as it tied almost nothing up at all).
Anyways I looked at a rough sketch of how the story branches are handled and am pondering how to best proceed. There seems to be three endings on each side of the initial branching off point, I am leaning towards staying on the same half I’ve already started down and using my quicksaves to skip to the exact choices and just clearing out this whole side before jumping into the mostly new content on the other side of that one amazingly untelegraphed hugely important early game decision.
Jumping back to earlier points I am going to miss “Hououin Kyouma” as annoying as he can be at times his energy sorta drives the rest of the cast in a way that is notable when he’s drowning in PTSD
Ifor how annoying I found Hyouin in the first, that the moment he returns is a triumph is a neat magic trick and how I knew the game was in all ways better.
Got ending #2the Maho one and while that was a path mostly made up of fluff Moeka and Maho are sloppy and it takes a long digression to get their room cleaned, they also have a slumber party there were some nice bits as it wrapped up and a few story beats that definitely caught my attention and I hope the game touches on elsewhere.
Also to keep it vague the difference between someone (in particular)'s name and their name in brackets feels like a thing the actual text barely portrays to the degree that I wonder if something was lost in translation The translation has a lot of quirks as you get the original voicework with it and some of the choices made in the translation into english jump out so much as to almost be distracting at times even to someone who doesn’t speak a lick of Japanese. It’s nothing that actually ruins the experience, but for example when a character repeatedly refers to someone as “Mommy” in text when I hear the spoken voice saying “Momma” it makes me wonder if the two were produced independently with zero oversight.
Knocked out ending #3Kagari’s one (Recursive Mother Goose and I almost want to tip my hat to how much of an insane shaggy dog story it was, with you basically trying to figure out the origin of a song which requires you to follow an increasingly absurd chain of acquaintances that ultimately goes… well not nowhere but it definitely feels like one just ran in circles for ninety or so minutes. TBF there were a couple of nice character moments (albeit ones mostly lifted from the prior game) but I’d definitely list this as the low point of the experience so far, what was good here could have easily popped up elsewhere and the rest could be excised/off in some side game.
Anyways that out of the way I can now go all the way back and explore the other side of the initial big branching off point, or what I assume is the other main half of the game. Looking forward to how that is handled, there is one early character and bit of foreshadowing that basically hasn’t come up in ages that was rather intriguing and I assume got shunted off over there.
I was gonna save any real thoughts for about the midway point and I’m about there, but the only real thought I have at this point is that the original game was probably a better story told worse, while 0 is at least at this point a less interesting tale executed a good bit better than what came before. This makes the first half of 0 superior to the first half of the first game, but I kinda wish said first game was this lucky.
(Also I have spent way too much time pondering how time travel and world line shifts are handled in this game, they likely follow the universe’s internal logic well enough but with my current knowledge the cause & effect puzzles me greatly and there is one (very long) example of the former that I am not convinced tracks at all.)
(Much like the first game I’m resisting the urge to greet people with “tutturu~” >_>)
This will only make sense to maybe Rudie, but as an update on my backloggery page I put “hey there is a Christmas party now, knowing this game it will end in violence as all parties here do”. I am now just past said party and to the start of the next chapter and like… I was joking game, you ain’t gotta go over the top on me like that.
Okay I got my fourth ending which I am pretty sure is the bad one, which just leaves one path left which apparently had both the last regular and the one true ending on it. I must admit to having no idea just exactly how they intend to pull all these various strings together, and how these various world lines fit together worries me as the answer may just be “they don’t”, but it feels like we are starting the final run soon. I am amazed as there are several things that feel like they have to happen that they’ve successfully not actually done yet, so they’ve successfully built anticipation but I swear if they just somehow never do them I will complain here.
I am I feel a good ways along what I assume is the final path (the chart says this is the final path, I’m assuming the good ways part) and the story has definitely picked up momentum. A number of set-up dominos have fallen (it seems one may never do so though which stuns me) and to give both games credit they do know how to ramp things up for their end runs, felt legit awful for Mayuri there.
I know they are spread among various world lines but there being so many different women under the motorcycle helmet feels like something that just doesn’t make any sense
Okay turns out I was much closer to the end than I realized, also for a 40 hour game the true ending route being maybe 15 minutes tops was a heck of a surprise. I’m still sort of gathering my thoughts but I’ll say that aside from a few bits the pacing held up much better and I rarely went “please for the love of god get on with it” but that story itself… I am not sure it really makes any sense or that the split routes didn’t sort of rob itself of a big ending climax. definitely more enjoyable than the first game though.
BTW @Rudie I know I’ve seen you complain several times about the big twist in Zero Time Dilemma, I feel the Kagari one here is gonna be the dumb one I end up yelling about for years to come. I couldn’t even tell whose face it was when it was revealed on top of it making no sense even after I googled that.