Review #479: Corpse Party - Blood Drive

 This game is a corpse, but there's no party to be had playing it.

Damned, tempting extras at a low price!

 So there I was, browsing Play-Asia for a new purchase and I came across Corpse Party Blood Drive's Everafter Edition at 20 bucks. 20 bucks. It came with a fancy box, an artbook and a soundtrack CD, of course I had to buy it. I had to. Plus, it was a franchise I was looking to get into, even the 3DS re-release of the first game was on my sights. Was. After playing through Blood Drive I've no intention of ever dabbling in it again. Ever.

 I came at Blood Drive knowing NOTHING about the previous games... which is a big mistake. Blood Drives assumes you've played previous games, even the ones that never made it outside Japan, and if you want to get the full experience, it's better if you've dabbled in side material too. Still, while I got half the plot, what little I got I despised. Where should I start? There're overly long drawn-out descriptions of things that happen all the time, which are so boring to read. And this comes from someone who adores visual-novel styled games like Phoenix Wright, Danganronpa and Lux Pain, to name a few. The dialogue and script are very poorly written, it's hard to take anything that's happening seriously when everything sounds so... like it's trying so hard to be 'cool' using profanity and expletives, which has the offset of coming out as very cringey since the game uses a super-deformed style for the 3-D graphics, and the 2-D art is so childish and looks like your average, generic anime. And it tries so hard when it comes to describing gory stuff, it tries SO hard, but it's so hard to take seriously. And the characters? Every single character is a walking anime trope. You've even got Magari who represents everything wrong about anime, walking in a glorified string bikini while inside a zombie infested, decrepit and rundown school. It makes no sense and looks so stupid that makes it impossible to take anything that's going on seriously. As for the plot itself, EVEN if I knew the series' background I would have found it boring and cliched, ending with the characters having to save the entire world. I'm not kidding.

Ayumi is an idiot, coming back to Heavenly Host was a big mistake, and so was joining her in her quest.

 And when the game isn't boring you to tears, you'll be walking around the Heavenly Host high, a rundown highschool filled with zombies, ghosts, fleshy red things on the walls and broken floors. The entire gameplay portions of the game takes place in here, and all you'll be doing is running around, collecting items, solving puzzles(all of them are of the 'put the correct item in here' variety) while avoiding pursuers and traps on the ground. But nothing works well, nothing.

 Let's start with exploration: You've no map and everything looks the same. Seriously, there's no way to know where you are because there're no unique landmarks or what have you to guide you. And you have to go round and round and round searching for objects that need to be used in different places in order to proceed. The game is divided in 10 chapters, and every single time you'll have to retread old ground since for whatever reason objects appear out of thin air from chapter to chapter. It doesn't make sense. It's particularly egregious in a few chapters that after triggering something, new stuff appears in rooms you've already been to, with no hint whatsoever, so you are expected to go round and round and round and round again, examining every single room, again. It's so boring.

It looks scary, but it isn't. Trust me, I was deceived too.

 You are given a flashlight, which runs on batteries, but.... by pressing Select you can make batteries unlimited. Just like that. Your character also seems to run out of stamina pretty fast, which is supposed to make it so that you simply can't run away from pursuers, but... it makes exploration a drag, since you walk oh, so slowly. Plus, every now and then you'll be given choices 'enter the hole or 'do nothing', 'trust her' or 'ignore her', and if you choose the wrong answer... you lose. Just because. It's not fun, these 'bad endings' are interesting either since you don't even get a CG, just a boring, over-drawn description of what murdered you. Hopefully you saved earlier, because it's always fun to lose because of a random event that has a 50-50 chance of survival.

 As mentioned before, there're pursuers in the game, usually black ghosts. Once one tracks you, it will pursue you until you die or you run an absurdly long amount of time. You can hide in closets, but every single time I tried it I got caught, or... you can run towards a save spot, save and reload. Bang, the pursuer is gone. That's what I did, once I figured it out, since pursuers are relentless and once one spawns there's basically nothing else you can do, unless you have a Talisman which will instantly kill it. It's particularly bad because you also lose health from various traps laid on the floor, such as broken glass or splinters, which are hard to avoid when you're running away... which is probably why save spots heal you completely.

As dangerous as a super-deformed mannequin can be.

 Alright, so the exploration is boring, the chases are a drag and the visual novel parts put you to sleep, what else could the game screw up? Well, it runs like hot garbage. There're load screens everywhere: Open the menu? Loading screen. Use an item? Loading screen. Enter a room? Loading screen. And these are pretty long, 4-5 seconds affairs(Sometimes more) and they pile up because they are so frequent. The framerate is particularly pathetic, but once you turn on the flashlight, oh boy, does it get bad, hopefully you like playing as if your characters were underwater. Pro-tip, turn Flight Mode On, it makes it run a tiny bit better. I heard that the game was also prone to freezing, but I didn't come across any, albeit I did use Flight Mode most of the time I played the game.

 There's a bunch of extras to collect, like extra chapters, which are entirely in visual-novel form, and 'Name Tags', from dead alumni, and each tag comes with a colorful description of how the person died. And that's about it.

The game is probably more enjoyable if you can't understand the drivel they are spewing.

 Corpse Party - Blood Drive is a bad game. It is. Even, even if you liked the story, maybe you've never watched anime before so everything seems new to you, or maybe you're a hardcore anime nut and don't care that anime recycles tropes and cliches, even then... the game runs so poorly, it's an absolute dredge to play through. There's not a single redeeming quality in Corpse Party, and I usually like to find redeeming qualities. But there's none here. This game should've stayed in Japan, alongside the other games in the franchise that never made it through.
 0.5 out of 10