The game officially has 26 different possible endings, labeled A through Z. Some of the endings are most decidedly not you beating the game, but rather the game beating you - if your character dies in the opening sequence, as happened to me during my first run-through, that's Ending W. If another character gets curious what a random button does at an industrial facility, he dies and that's Ending G. I understand that there are other endings, some based on certain achievements and others that are basically just jokes, but there are five main endings (A through E) and on this rainy night in Georgia, I completed the last two of them.
Five different endings doesn't mean you have to play through the whole game five times over. The first ending comes after you play through the main story line as the female character 2B (they're all androids and have appropriately robotic names). The second ending comes after you play the main story line but this time from the perspective of the male character, 9S. They're not always together, so the stories are somewhat different, plus not only do you not have to repeat the side quests, there are enough of them in the game that you can play a whole bunch of new side quests on the second playthrough.
I've probably already revealed too many spoilers above, but I'll add one more and say that the last three endings (C through E) are achieved after completing a second story line that takes place after the events of the first. So, no, the game is not repetitive.
It took me a while to get used to the feel of the game. It's Japanese and not necessarily anime-based but certainly influenced by anime, and some aspects of the game felt a little too childish and immature for me. The central couple, 2B and 9S, behave like children, at least when they're not mercilessly slaughtering lower forms of robots, and while they obviously fall in love, there is no sensual or sexual aspects to their relationship. This despite the fact that both characters' designs, especially the female 2B, are sexy as hell. It was also somewhat disturbing that because of her ultra-short dress, you had near constant up-skirt views of 2B I'm way more familiar with her white underpants than I should be. Not to sound like a prude, but the fact that she walked and talked like a prepubescent teenager while looking like some sort of robotic sex toy was more than a little bit conflicting.
But those concerns aside, it was all very, very clever. The action takes place in an imaginative variety of settings - a forest, a cavern, a desert, an amusement park, a treehouse village, an abandoned city, and more. The play style changes frequently, at times being a 3-D, open-world, sandbox game at others a 2-D shooter game, and still others a text-based program. After the first two playthroughs, you frequently change the character that you're playing. In something of a directorial triumph, one of the climactic battles towards the very end of the game involves a major boss fight by two of the characters, and the game rapidly switches the player from one character to the next, which involves not only fast-changing POVs, but different fighting styles.
And the score was excellent - probably the best original music I've heard yet in a video game. There was a specific track for each location, which lent as much to the presence of each area as the visuals, and there was specific music for battle scenes and foes. Even if you couldn't see the monitor, you'd have a pretty good idea of what was going on from the soundtrack alone.
So, if you recall, I bought this game back in 2018 but couldn't play it on my somewhat underpowered laptop. But rather than return the game, I kept it in my library until I got a better gaming computer. I finally started playing it after I got a new PC last month and, frankly, I'm glad I kept the game and didn't return it. It's been a fun ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment