A rollercoaster of emotions.
We are back to fighting surviving, like we were in Raw Danger!(DR2), and immediately the game makes a strong impression, as I'm offered a ton of ultimately meaningless but colorful choices. I can decide the way in which I give, or not, my seat on the bus to an older lady. I can decided whether my character lived near by or if he is outta town, etc. There are are a lot of choices like this, which matter very little, but add more personality to the game. That said, the two previous game had choices that mattered sprinkled between the other responses, in this one... everything is just added flavor. It's a bit disappointing to be sure.
Something that threw me off is how ridiculously dumb it can get yet also shockingly dark. Think Yakuza, how the main storyline is played completely straight, but the side missions are ridiculously dumb.... except that here the entire game keeps swinging from both extremes. There's this instance that perfectly encapsulates this: You found a hurt old lady and you must carry her to her home... only to find the wife of her son being a total jerk that pretty much forces you to take her to the hospital since she doesn't want the old lady with the BROKEN LEG on her home. So, that's fine, you take her from place to place until you end up at a shelter, and in this shelter tensions are high, because 'outsiders' are treated as second-hand citizens, not being allowed to sleep under a roof or get provisions, so it gets serious again.... until you start getting water from a leak on the roof, and you share it with people who start deeming it 'MIRACLE WATER" 'cause it heals people, culminating in the mayor asking you to share the water with his son... and as a reward you can ask him to change the name of the game to 'Disaster Report 5' or 'Disaster Report 4 - Miracle Water', changes that will CHANGE THE GAME'S START BUTTON SCREEN! And this is what I mean, one moment you are dealing with people kidnapping women for prostitution to having to meddle in a weird and out-of-place Romeo and Juliet type story that involves a scorned man that threatens to murder a girl because he lost his job so he killed his family. The game's mood is all over the place, to its detriment. Previous games could also get silly, but it was usually up to the player, and the silliness was usually reserved for the conspiracies and plot twists, not as over the top and out of place as in this one.
Add to this, you'll sometimes be forced to participate in this hijinks that may run completely against the way you are playing your character. There's this one time that you absolutely need to buy a bathroom key, and the only way you'll realistically have enough money to buy it will be by convincing a person you are the son of the owner and pocket the money. Another time you have to HELP A CULT recruit people, which once again, can probably clash against the way you are playing your character.
The gameplay reminded me of the original games, as it's charmingly wonky. Movement is extremely slow and cumbersome, like the classic games. There's this weird mechanic in which you must crouch whenever an aftershock occurs unless you want to take damage straight out of the second game, which is fine by itself, but I always found it frustrating, unfair and downright immersion-breaking that YOU need to crouch, but other NPCs do not. They just stand in place while the aftershock knocks you on your face. Collecting compasses and being able to change clothes return, which was also a nice throwback to the original games.
On the other hand, the game has a lot of useless mechanics. For example, you might get scared the first time you pick a selfish choice and earn 'Immoral points', but 'Immoral' and 'Moral' points mean absolutely nothing and affect squat, they are just there as some sort of meaningless scoring system. There's also a Hunger, Thirst and Bathroom need gauges... that seem to affect nothing. Your character might have a different neutral standing pose, you'll get a tiny icon below your health bar, but as far as I could tell, there were no negative effects to these.... that said, I still tried to keep in tip-top shape 'cause I enjoyed the self-imposed roleplay! Speaking of unnecessary the health bar too, if you die you just respawn nearby, with all your health restored, heck, transitioning from area to area fully restores your health, making it completely superfluous.... just like in the original games!
All of the above clunkiness and puzzling game mechanics I could deal with, but what really hurt the experience for me, unlike the previous games in the series, was how hard it was to figure out how to proceed. I was doing rounds all over the very first section of the game because somehow I skipped one character interaction and only triggered it by chance after spending like half an hour walking to and fro. The part about the bathroom key was also annoying, as there was no need for me to visit the store's bathroom... but you NEED to check the door to get the option to buy the key, and you NEED that bathroom to exit the building... which is dumb, because there's another building with a bathroom nearby, so I never thought about using that one. There's another frustrating part in which you need people to push some debris. They ask you to save their father, so you need to find the father, slowly crawl towards him, find out you need something to push the wooden debris on top of him with, so now you must exit the shed, go back to the previous section, and talk with every single NPC, which you probably talked with before, hoping you find the one that will give you the carjack, so that you can return, crawl again and.... It's a bit surprising just how poorly thought out some of these sections are.
This Switch port includes the free DLC epilogue. It lasts about 1-2 hours, and has you visiting the town a few months after the disaster stroke. It was kinda cute seeing the town being rebuilt, but it feels rather... cheap. Even though you load your character from your Clear save file... the game doesn't check which options or sidequests you did, in fact, I never managed to meet the cat, yet my character wondered about the fate of the cat. Even worse, when interacting with NPCs your dialogue choices decide what you did for them, meaning, you can tell them "Hey! I'm the guy who bought your restaurant" and that way you get the response to the sidequest, because it seems reading data from you save file was just too hard. As is to be expected, the game reuses environments from the main game, albeit edited to show that the city is undergoing repairs, however, they couldn't be bothered to move NPCs around, so some environments have characters pointing at buildings as if something had happened. Another NPC, who used to stand bent over a car, is now on the same pose albeit resting his hands on thin air, and if you talk to him he'll say that he is pretending that there's a car in front of him. Yeah.... Oh, and not every NPC returns. Yayoi and Kanae, two major NPCs, particularly on the Airport route, and two girls you could potentially romance, only appear on the final chapter... and only one of them does, as you get to pick ONE, and ONLY one from a few different NPCs for your character to wonder about them and get a scene about them.
I liked the epilogue, but damn if it didn't feel like they cut every corner.
Adding to all of these... the frame rate is absolutely dreadful on the Switch. I mean, I got used to Raw Danger on PS2, which also ran pretty poorly, but at least those games were better designed.
For as many technical shortcomings, for as many baffling design choices... there's a certain charm to the game, the same as the previous two had. It's also definitely not a game for everyone, and I think that the tonal whiplash can be a bit too jarring, to the point that I feel like this is the weakest entry in the series so far. Honestly, I'd suggest playing Raw Danger! first, which is probably the best, and if you enjoy that one, decide if you want to try the other two games that were localized.
5.0
No comments:
Post a Comment