izigame.me

This might be one of the worst games I have ever played as far as story is concerned. Like yea, I don’t doubt there are overall worse games…but the writing in both dialogue and overall narrative is so monumentally bad in this game I was at times speechless as I went through this travesty of a narrative. It feels like the writing team literally never read a novel in their lives or if they did they only read Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves.” I want to be clear “The Waves” is a masterpiece, this game is like that without the writing skill of Virginia Woolf .
Maybe I wouldn’t care so much, but as far as visual novels go the production values here are mindblowing. The soundtrack is outstanding, although it is only like a 10 hour game, but still the soundtrack through those 10 hours borders on perfect. It attempts to convey the themes and the emotions these characters are feeling, which the writing doesn’t even come close to even hinting at. It’s also a fully voice acted game and the actors are exceedingly skilled, but when you work with trash there is only so much the voice actors can do, despite the dialogue bordering on nonsensical characters like Nora are still able to convey the tragedy of their life, while Poly’s conveys how constantly regretful she is. The game is also gorgeous. From environment backgrounds to character designs. Everything pops and conveys the beauty of this world, kind of reminds me of the art direction in Hades. The character designs especially for the Gods perfectly exemplifies each God’s specific emotion. For a visual novel it is also striking because characters and backgrounds also have movement to them in these scenes which few visual novels have.
The actual gameplay is handled rather poorly, but with a better narrative and writing would probably have been ok. The problem is this is a visual novel, the only gameplay is picking choices. This game attempted to do a bit more and your character gets to see the entire board of choices and where decisions can lead. However, in practice this is a disaster. Choices become meaningless because in game you don’t have enough narrative idea of why you should select a lot of these choices because not enough information is given to understand them. Meanwhile, looking at the decision tree board isn’t helpful either because it is exceedingly easy to accidently lock yourself out of decisions without even meaning to, because you will be making choices that have an affect later on in the board…but the board won’t tell you want choices are necessary to get to that point on the board. This game design simply does not work. This game should have taken a hint from all those Zero Escape games where you are able to jump around to any point on the board at anytime to go down a different path if you want to. This game foolishly doesn’t allow you to do that without replaying an entire chapter which you are not realistically going to do.
The main issue though is the horrifically bad writing. I got to say I’m literally baffled at what the story these people were trying to tell is. So I guess these developers hate Capitalism…like a lot…weird you charge $25 for your game when you hate Capitalism so much, by this games logic it 100% should be free. Your corporation has oppressed me by charging me money for this game! Which is actual dialogue the characters in this game would say if they lived in our world. It’s looney tunes level of crazy. The entire plot of this game revolves around a corporation called MK and the main character and her friends/family that wish to abolish it. There are a million ways you could tell a narrative about the oppressive nature of capitalistic systems…and sure this is I guess one of them…but it’s like the worst and most incompetent way. For instance why not make a straw man argument where your communist characters are all great people that go out of their way to help people and the corporation is literally oppressing these people and making things worse in this island nation. It’s a fictional story you could do that…the writing of this game leads me to think that’s what you thought you were doing. I would instead say you made like a Tin man argument. Instead of building up a faulty premise for you to knock over, you created a faulty premise which is literally stronger than your arguments against that system.
There is almost nothing about this MK company that comes across as problematic. The game starts and you tell the player that prior to MK’s rise this island nation was pretty much a garbage place where the water was literally polluted and people had to rely on Ursula’s commune for food and shelter because there were like no public services. Then when MK comes to power they go about closing the beaches to clean up the polluted water (which they didn’t cause) and your characters scream that they are oppressing them? You then talk about how MK went around buying up slums…but paying people for those slums so they could fix up the architectural integrity of the old city…and creating parks and other public work projects. When it’s revealed they are trying to dig up the ancient civilizations artifacts to commune with the gods…the characters flip out because MK won’t allow people access to archeological dig sites? What a shock that an archeological dig wouldn’t want random people who are untrained going into these dig sites…and sure they are doing this to find these artefacts but you then say their plans are to put a lot of this stuff in a museum for the public? Seriously whatttttttttt are you doing. Eventually, you say they kidnapped people and were using them…but honestly I don’t trust the characters telling me these things because those same characters are describing all the above acts as horrific oppression. All these main characters seem detached from reality.
Nothing is shown in this game. You could have had like characters find MK holding people against their will. You could have had interactions between your character and some high ups at MK that shows their motives are evil or their cruelty. You could have shown them shooting people or taking some horrific action…but you didn’t. Instead for the majority of the game you have delusional characters talking about how MK giving people jobs and employing 50% of this island nation as “oppression.” Then instead of having your characters have clear conversations with each other you are constantly forcing the player to go to the “choice board” and picking lines of dialogue and choices there instead of just having a constant conversation with characters with dialogue choices. The end result is I honestly barely know any of these characters as instead of talking to them I’m picking choices that I have no idea how they relate to what is going on in the story. The entire first half of the game you are searching for your mother and I didn’t even realize this for quite a while because you spend more time talking to Gods about their problems then what is even happening in the world.
This needed to be like a 30hr game with a ludicrous amount of more dialogue and character interaction and an actual villain instead of the villain being the overall oppression of capitalistic systems on society. Why didn’t you just make a God called “Capitalism” and have them embody that entire societal system which your character could actually talk to and interact with?!? You literally made a game where Gods represent different aspects of Humanity and you couldn’t just have done that? This game isn’t even half baked, it’s completely uncooked. Go play something like Disco Elysium or Teenage Excolonist instead, both games which make pretty clear what the problems of capitalistic systems are but in compelling narratives where characters actually can talk to each other instead of just shouting “CAPITALISM IS OPPRESSING US.” This game comes across as a parody of an anticapitalism game.