Recent reviews by Chiaro-Scuro

I'm going to preface this by saying I don't outright hate this game. The reason I get so angry below is because it had so many good things going for it, so many clever little moments that I loved, and then just ended up being, in my opinion, a lot of wasted potential.

Okay ... so the description of the game straight up tells you that this game was heavily inspired by persona, of which I am a huge fan, and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for games with talking animals. This game should have been a match made in heaven for me, and for a little while, it was. This game starts off just fine. Conceptually, I loved it. The switching between two worlds, entire universe hanging in the balance, characters are likable enough and I wanted to know more about their backstory (something that I truly regretted thinking for reasons I'll explain later). All of these elements were VERY Persona esque and it's enough to sucker a fan of the series in.

DON'T YOU ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DO IT!!!

See, one of the great things about the persona series is that it's pacing is near flawless. Never once does it make you feel like you're wasting time, and never once does it feel like you're being rushed through the story. It knows how to handle time very well, as you spend a full year with new friends, family, and ocassionally working to save the world. This game takes pacing, strangles it, spits on its face, and then glues a fursuit on it for good measure. While it has multiple chapters, it is essentially split into two halves. Act 1 being set-up, and interesting set-up at that, but then you enter Act 2. When you enter act 2 of the story, you think that this is a game that could have like...6 or 7 acts with how much it sets up at the beginning, the game taking place over like ... a month, I mean, hell, it took them until chapter two for the game to even ask you what you want your gender to be, that's like if professor oak caught up with you after your first gym bage just to ask you if you're a boy or a girl ... this is not the case though.

Instead of pacing the story out and learning about characters and events in a way that feels natural to you, Act 2 is an endless wall of exposition, being passed from character to character, explanation to explanation. I ♥♥♥♥ you not, there is a section in this game where you talk to 5 different characters right in a row, all of them going on monologues, pages and pages worth of monologues, laying out their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, crappily written, oh woe as me tragic backstory and by the time I got to the third guy I was just skipping through ALL of it. I didn't care. I WANTED to care. I WANTED to hear all about them, but I didn't earn it. All of them barely knew my character, I never formed a bond with any of them, so they come off as like....you know how you feed a stray cat once and it'll never once leave you alone after that? Yeah, it feels like that. You give these characters even the slightest bit of attention, and suddenly the feel like they can divulge every deep dark secret to you...which on it's own is bad, but when you're literally walking from one agonizingly long tragic backstory to the next agonizingly long tragic backstory. It is painful. Headache inducing. I just screamed at this game to get back to the plot already before I end up hating these characters. But that's when I realized, this game was about to end soon.

Yeah, the plot happens across two days ... a grand epic story about the destruction of the universe takes place over TWO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DAYS. And since the plotline has just been a series of questions that have been raised so far (Who is the mysterious man? What kind of power do you hold? Who's good who's evil?) guess what happens next... MORE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MONOLOGUING.

I say this not just to Klace, who I'm sure worked very hard on this and put a lot of time and effort into it and I'm sorry that this is my opinion of this game because I REALLY wanted to like it, but to any author. Filler is not a bad thing to have. FIller is NOT wasted time. In fact, it's necessary in any medium that that isn't television and movies. Especially long winded visual novels like this. Exposition is rarely enjoyable to read ... ever. The only time that it IS enjoyable is when you, the main character, have earned the answer to your questions. You as the main character have to make strides towards your goal. Actively try to find the answers to your questions. And that is the biggest problem in this game. You don't earn anything. How do you earn something? Time and effort. In persona, you are a detective, a thief, an explorer, a warrior. You kill monsters, you spend days upon days with your friends, build relationships from the ground up, plan attacks, coordinate thefts, you do SO MUCH to earn every scrap of information you get, and that keeps you invested.

In this game, you barely do ♥♥♥♥, stuff happens AROUND you but only like...once do you make a decision that actually matters to the overall plot of the game. And even then, if I were to replay the game and make the other choice, I think that all it would do is switch the chronological order in which events occur. The main character has their hand held throughout the entire experience, you aren't earning information, you are being treated as a child, being sat down as all the others lecture you on what's happening. Saying Act 2 is not fun is an understatement, Act2 is like...going to school. 8 hours of people force feeding you information until your brain short circuits and you go home to watch tv.

As I said, on a conceptual level, this game is pretty damn good. But this game needed a lot more content...a LOT a lot. Persona takes over 100 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hours to tell it's story and This game isn't even half of that. All the plot relevant stuff stays in, but there's no break, there's no fun moments, everything is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ serious from the get go and the so called "Fleshed out characters" end up being one note character traits with barely any complexity to them, having the ILLUSION of depth by giving them a sob story to tell the main character. I should want to save the world. I should want to save my "friends", this should be something that is exilherating and exciting, but no...the main character is a pawn...YOU are a pawn.

I haven't finished this game and I don't really want to, I am just so done with trying to care anymore, it's nearing the end, and even if there is some big twist at the end that changes everything, if I feel like skipping every bit of text until I get to that point just because I'm so unbelievably bored with the dialogue, is that really a good sign?

4/10, it was a great first attempt into the fray, but if this writing and production team continues on more projects, please please please learn to pace your story better.