Recent reviews by ryan driverson drivesalot goslin

Good game. It's a shame it never got to live up to its potential, but I'll take being left wanting rather than see it done poorly.

PSA: This might look like a cute moe VN but the game has some adult moments that teeter between PG-13 and R. Just be ready for that, it's a bit of a shock.

I'm assuming you read the summary. Symphonic Rain is a moody, sometimes dark, character driven VN. The star of the show is it's character writing, which is pretty good for the most part and even if I didn't always like how things turned out, it was intriguing. It's what kept me hooked through most of the experience.

The music minigame is also delightful. I recommend turning it on Hard if you are up for it, I found it to be a rewarding and not too difficult challenge. You might need to be able to touch type to really do well though.

Where Symphonic Rain doesn't shine to brightly is in the integration of it's setting. Setting is mostly used to create an aesthetic, a backdrop for the action. But it makes very little difference in how the characters live their live.

Piova's endless rain certainly is interesting as a setting, a moody atmosphere complementing the moody plot but (as far as I know) that's the entire extent of it. Characters have to use towels when they get home but as far we hear, they don't even have to mop the water off the floor. Why does this happen in Piova? Is it normal in this world? I'm not here for a sci-fi story but a weird setting needs a weird reason to exist.

The place the story takes place, a fictional city in Italy, also ends up being just an aesthetic. The characters still act and practice Japanese culture and customs, except they like pasta.

The Fortelle, Chris's instrument, is neither pictured nor properly explained. It seems to be a sort of keyboard instrument but it's not clear what it even sounds like, except if it sounds like the entire ensemble of instruments in the songs, which are of unspecified diegetic quality.

Neither of these choices are bad, they both provide a good aesthetic, but it become hard to believe the world they live in is real and that sometimes makes it hard to feel like the characters are real too. This isn't a lack of backstory or exposition, it's a lack of integration between the story elements. You could take this story, set it in a Japanese town with a good music school, and all you'd have to do is add umbrellas and swap pasta for rice. To me, part of the "visual" in visual novel is the ability to really flesh out a setting or world, and I really wanted to love the setting as much as I did it's characters but there just isn't much to grab on to.

Fantastic side-scroller, even better with multiplayer. Must have for any fans of the genre and definitely worth checking out even if you're more lukewarm like me.

As interesting of a hook as having a Colonel Sanders dating sim is, the writing is simply too poor to carry the game much further. Funny in conception, poor in execution.

Best FPS controller ever made. Also good for other mouse games. I use mine all the time and I love it.

I know Valve is all in on VR but I would really like to see a second version. I have some friends for who the controller was too big for their hands so I'd like to see if the shape could be worked to be more one-size-fits-all. Built-in rechargeable batteries could be nice as well.

Really well designed and very fair puzzle game with a lot of character and a lot of fun. It's hard to explain how it feels but Valve has this approach to design that feels "caring". You can never soft-lock yourself in a puzzle, they streamline annoyances with some slight of hand magic, they set up rules just to let you have the satisfaction of breaking them. It's an amazing feat of game design and you should absolutely play it.

Just a heads up, some people not as used to the FPS genre might get some motion sickness. My dad can't play the game for extended periods of time. If this is you, play in small bursts and drink a lot of water.

Well it's a classic and there are many good introductions already out there so I'll just stick to stuff about my experience. I'm not really the biggest fan of shooters (especially realistic ones) or a big fan of horror/thriller so that colors my view a bit.

This game is fun for the most part. Shooting is pretty good and there's a number of different weapons. The game really shines with alternate methods of taking down enemies, like with the gravity gun or allies. For the most part, the game feels very fair and allows you to pace yourself the way you want, which I especially appreciate given how I'm not a shooter/horror/thriller kind of person.

I'm not usually one to get lost in 3D spaces like some of my less gamer-y friends I know but I was turned around or got lost many times in the game. A lot of times I struggled to figure out a puzzle or where I was supposed to go, only to find out it was some stupid thing I wasn't seeing. This tended to make puzzle solving less rewarding since I was often more confused about what the puzzle and it's parts was more than how to solve it.

The beginning section of the game, the sewers and subsequent airboat ride, felt to me like the worst part of the game. It drags on and on and I remember being very confused in many sections and had to ask some friends for help. But once you get past that, it improves a tad with Ravenholm and then a lot more after that.

Try it, it's a classic and isn't as offputting as other action shooters can be. Grab a friend if you need help like I did, I think it's worth it to experience such an important milestone in game design and technology.

PSA: This is a sequel to the original Steins;Gate. If you haven't read it, read it first. I would also recommend you read the original if you've only seen the original anime but that one is more up to you.

Steins;Gate 0 is a decent sequel, . There are a lot of great things about it and there are some glaring flaws. If you enjoyed the original VN, this one is a nice treat.

I'll be avoiding spoilers for as long as I can until I really start discussing the story.

Art:
The art is a bit all over the place. One good thing for this VN is that there is a lot of it. If a scene feels like it needs a CG or a character needs a certain sprite for one or two occasions, it's there. There were a lot of times where it really pulled me in and it felt like the team cared a lot about the details of each of these events.
The quality of the art is kinda hit-or-miss. The sprites all look great, no problems there. On occasion, sprites from the original game are used which is jarring since they are a different style than the new ones. The biggest problem is the CG quality control problems. Some look great. Some look like they could use some help with proportions. I think they were done by a team of artists (there were definitely large problems with stylistic consistency) and I guess some were just more skilled than others. I do wonder if the increase in art has meant we saw a decrease in quality of it.

Music (Disclaimer: I'm a music nerd):
Takeshi ♥♥♥ (for some inexplicable reason, Steam censors this composer's name. Shame on you Steam. His name is Takeshi A b o), the composer for Steins;Gate, has really grown in the five years since the original. The original game's soundtrack suffers from overuse of the same few motifs and it's far too short for a 40+ hour game at around one hour of music. This is fixed in the new game although I think a little was lost in the process.
Takeshi uses a larger variety of musical elements (most of B-Messenger is in 7/4 so that's cool), the instrumentation is more diverse, and it uses more musical material over a slightly longer soundtrack. The game still introduces new pieces even after the halfway point and some are for specific story points. SG0's soundtrack always feels pretty fresh and doesn't ever get boring like the original's did. However, given SG0 is about half as long as the original, it also doesn't have the same amount of time to get stale.

That said, while it is distinctively Takeshi's writing, a couple characterizing elements from the original soundtrack are thrown out, which makes this feel a bit alien of an approach, rather than an extension of the sound created in the first game. The synths and metallic percussion, a large part of the original game's sound, are mostly gone. I do like the more orchestral instrumentation but I would have liked it more as an addition rather than a replacement. The most jarring is probably the lack of use of the original game's motifs. Even though they were arguably overused in the beginning, they are the most defining elements of Steins;Gate's musical identity and the fact that they only appear twice in the entire soundtrack (one of them being pretty subtle) creates a great feeling of disconnect.

Story:

Spoilers for the original Steins;Gate true ending

Where as the original Steins;Gate has a mostly locked in, focused, and thought-out world and plot, Steins;Gate 0 suffers from poor pacing, focus, and a lot of fluff watering it down. Coming off the tail of Okabe's catastrophic failure in the true ending is a great idea and you can see a lot of interesting ideas begin to evolve from it but it just isn't able to fully hold it together on it's way to the finish line.


SG0 Spoilers start here

SG0 pretty much nails the first act, coasts on the mid, and is kinda meh at the end. The first act really delves into Okabe's depression and struggle to cope with what happened. Amadeus is a fantastic plot device, Okabe's interactions with it serves well to deepen his romantic tragedy. Maho and Leskinnen are nice additions to the cast.

There are three new characters introduced as Mayuri's friends, Yuki, Kaede, and Fubuki. Yuki is essential to the plot but Fubuki plays almost no role and Kaede just seems to be there to visually round out the group, she does nothing of consequence the entire story. The first game does mention these characters and I'm certain that's why they were added but they simply contribute to the game's problem with filler (more on that later). Fubuki and Kaede should have either had reduced presence in the story, given more to do, or just cut. No other character in Steins;Gate is as inconsequential to the story as them so they stand out in a bad way.

I think I read this from someone else's review but the Amadeus/Salieri allegory feels rather heavy handed. What starts as a subtle nod that would maybe deepen the understanding of those who know their history becomes completely explained and then bashed over your head with, destroying any amount of subtlety there could have been. Explaining your own literary device in the same piece as the device is like watching a live dissection, we all understand it now but in the end, the device is now dead and unpleasant to look at.

Probably one of the most irritating parts of the writing is the dropped plot threads. One of the routes has a news story about gorillas mysteriously having their brains cut out. It is never mentioned again. Was it committed by Stradford? Who knows? Okabe, Maho, and Leskinnen are saved from a radical gunman by a mysterious gunman who then runs away. A mystery is set up as to who their savior is which is and then never mentioned again. They had to confirm in a later interview that this was Kagari. Why tease a mystery to then never come back to it? Who in their right minds would create a piece of media that requires the audience go find random interview questions to fill in the rest of the story?

Speaking of dropped plot threads, this story begins to also lose it's focus about halfway through. While the first half focuses a lot on Okabe's personal issues, this gets shelved as the gang ramps up their efforts to look for Kagari. Simply put, Kagari is probably the least interesting of the ideas brought out by SG0, and it disappoints me by not using that time towards something better.

This novel has a lot of filler as well (scenes that do little or nothing for character or plot development). For example, the scene where Nae is a cleaning sergeant feels wrong given she is a fairly timid character. And it drags on for way too long as if it was enjoyable to read.

Finally, the true ending is a real let down. I was really looking forward to watching the team come up with the plan and watch them banter and argue until they work it out, and then start some death defying mission but most of that is just skipped and Okabe is sent on a mission that I didn't feel was explained well and needlessly complicated to the plot. And apparently requires you listen to a drama CD to hear the rest of the end (Again, the drama CDs are not even an "official" sequel, how would the audience know to even seek them out?). It's severely underwhelming and is the worst part of the novel. And if the ending to your novel is the worst part, you have got a very serious problem.

The steady decrease in writing quality, dropped plot threads, and filler leads me to believe the writing process was not at all smooth for this game. The game starts off with some good ideas inherited from the original but with how winding and ultimately unsatisfying the plot is, I think they didn't plan out the story first and weren't particularly inspired later.

Spoilers end here

Overall, 7 out of 10. Lots of great stuff here, definite read for any Steins;Gate fan, but numerous problems create a story that is definitely not all it could have been.

PSA: Look up the Steam Improvement patch for this game, makes the overall experience better.

Played the rest of this on a family shared account so I'm missing about 40 hours in my counter

Steins;Gate's strength is in combining character's personal conflicts with thriller/high stakes conflicts, they become the same conflict in the plot. It makes for a story that is epic in scale but also intimate with its characters and setting. It's the perfect mix of slice-of-life and thriller action and if you like either or both, you should give this a shot.

It may feel like it starts slow and if you haven't played a VN before, you might be thrown off for a little bit. Give it some time. The slower paced scenes are actually pretty important and without giving too much away, you won't hate them by the end. VNs are still a bit new to many but if you like to read (and maybe even if you don't), you'll get used to and learn to appreciate them for their strengths.

Here are a couple tips that are important to a readthrough but may not be quite obvious.

Make a decent amount of save files. IIRC Chapter 4 or 5 starts giving you choices that affect the ending so you'll want to make a new save file for at least the beginning of every chapter. For other choices, there are branching conversations that may lead to one achievement or another.

Sometimes the game hints that you need to pull up your phone but it isn't always obvious about it. If you think it's hinting at you picking up your phone, it's probably trying to see if you will pick it up or put it down.

If I had to give a criticism, the soundtrack is too short. It's a great soundtrack and it really matches well to the rest of the VN, but in my opinion, it needs more tracks and longer ones, it gets stale after about halfway through.

I'll add that Steins;Gate handles its setting particularly well, especially for a JP VN. You get to know the area around the lab pretty well, and a few other little locations around Akihabara. It makes the setting feel a lot more realistic than some of its contemporaries.

While I originally recommended this, I eventually decided that was a mistake. This makes a lot of common mistakes that other OELVNs make, essentially using the medium as a crutch for bad writing.

The Bad:
If you have ever read 4LS's The Answer, this writer hasn't and he makes a lot of the common mistakes. http://www.katawa-shoujo.com/the_answer/

While the art and music are fine, the writing is poor. The characters are all common anime cliches, which would be fine if it was at least executed well. The story in some areas devolves in a checklist of plot points, which is hugely problematic since this is the kinda VN that rides on it's character writing. Megumi's date is a memorable example of this where instead of watching the MC and her interact and banter, you read through what literally feels like the outline for the plot points that scene should have. As the reader, I feel no more invested in her character than I did before.

This game has numerous editorial errors as well. Once or twice it skips half a conversation if you aren't in a certain route so anyone playing a route for the first time will be wildly confused (and before you get on me, it's not framed as an intentional absence of information, it is an error).

The Good:
- The art and music are nice 8/10
- The story has some dramatic elements

The Bad:
- The character writing is bad, which is a death sentence for a character-focused VN

The Bugs:
- At the original time of writing, there were several bugs, at least half pertaining to the date. While the demo did start in April, the full game starts in May. Then goes to June. Then jumps back to May, goes through to August, and jumps between July and August for the rest of the game. This all happens while the chronology of the story progresses linearly.