Fuck Root Letter / √Letter(ルートレター）とかいうクソゲーについて

最初のルートしかクリアしていないが、これはいくらなんでも酷すぎる。

まず、システムがかなり微妙。間違えて手紙を飛ばす見返す方法がなく前のセーブからやり直さざるを得ない。昔のADVのようなコマンド式のシステムなの で、やった箇所をただ飛ばすことはできず、コマンドを選択しなおさなければいけない。1週目ではさほど問題ではないが、周回プレイとなるとこれが苦行でし かなくなる。更に、昔のアドベンチャーゲームによくあった、進むのに調べないといけない箇所が小さすぎてドット単位で探すしかなくなることも多い。

BGMも極端に少なく、プレイ時間の9割くらいに同じ曲がずっと流れている。

そしてシステムだけでも充分酷いのにシナリオが更に酷い。ミステリーだから「種明かしで面白くなる」という僅かな可能性に期待して最後までプレイしたが大した謎もなく結末は最初から予想していた通りのもの。微塵も面白くない。てかなんなんだこのクソシナリオ。

主人公はただの図々しい阿呆。ヒロインは普通に良い娘かと思ったら仲の良い友人を「ビッチ」「デブ」「チビ」呼ばわりする。元同級生は毎回いきなり豹変し て基地外じみた言い訳で15年前のことを隠そうとするが、謎が明かされるとそれはどう考えてもそんな必死に隠すようなことじゃない。まるで意味が分から ん。これを書いた人の頭は一体どうなってるの？

てか追求パート、半分くらいただ相手を侮辱してるだけだろ。マックスモードも意味不明。一体何を考えてこんなゲームを作ったのだろうか。

更新：2週目から章をまるごとスキップできる機能があると知って一応トゥルールート（縁結びルート）をクリアした。申し訳程度の補足説明はあるものの、シナリオは根本から破綻しているので評価は変わらない。というかこのライター、頭がおかしいとしか思えない。

Root Letter is absolute fucking garbage. Only cleared one route so far but:

It sounds like it has potential: Protagonist had a pen pal 15 years ago when he was in high school. When clearing out his old room he finds an unopened letter from her that says "I killed someone. Goodbye" and he heads to her hometown to investigate, using her old letters to find her old classmates, who all insist there's no such person. Cast is all veterans like Hidaka Noriko and Inoue Kikuko, and the game's system is an old-fashioned command-type adventure.

System-wise it's TOO old fashioned and is straight up just an ADV from 20 years ago complete with pixel hunting and retarded leaps of logic.

 And then there's the writing. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh boy the fucking writing.

The main character's an absolute idiot who takes far too long to figure out that his pen pal was using a fake name even after they hand you all the fucking evidence you need to figure this out. He's also a crazy fucking asshole without the slightest bit of common sense.  The "mystery" is something you can figure out almost immediately and despite everyone trying to hide it super hard it turns out to be ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING. And actually, are they even trying to fucking hide it, because the excuses they give you are "it was a ghost" "it was aliens" "IT WAS YOUKAI" and the retarded protagonist takes all of these seriously and spends the next fucking chapter/day investigating whatever the previous day's retarded nonsense was (by visiting real-life museums and shit to promote tourist attractions in Shimane prefecture which worked with them on making this game). It's a glorified fucking tourism ad.

Oh and the pen pal has some pretty fucking great nicknames for her "best friends".

Hidaka Noriko: "I have seven best friends and we're the bestest of friends ever! They all have nicknames, like FATASS, MIDGET, APE and SLUT!"

And the protagonist uses these nicknames too so he goes up to a newscaster and screams at her "HEY YOU'RE THE SLUT, I KNOW YOU'RE THE SLUT, ADMIT IT YOU SLUT" (in Japanese it's actually ビッチ/bitch but the nuance is more like English "slut" than "bitch).

The classmates are all fucking psychopaths too. Bald glasses guy is a crazy cat man and a stalker and embezzles money, ape has violent tendencies, best friend is nuts, fatass somehow has PTSD from Shiori's fake suicide even though HE WAS THE ONE WHO SPOTTED THAT THE BLOOD WAS FAKE, midget tried to rape Shiori but thinks there's nothing wrong because he only TRIED and didn't actually do it and is a knife-wielding maniac, and when glasses wants to kill himself because he can't cover the funds he embezzled together they all decide to cover it for him, except they force the main character to cover a third of all of it.

So uh yeah.

Root Letter is fucking garbage written by a literal lunatic

Also I know I might be making this sound like it's so bad it's actually good but it's REALLY not because 90% of the playtime is going to an area, having the protagonist say something ridiculously fake about how great the tourist attractions in Shimane prefecture are, and going "well there's nothing here, maybe I should go to X next!"and then he does this same fucking thing several times before finally running into a character who'll actually advance the plot, slightly. It's mind-numbing.

Googling it in English has people claiming it's a "murder mystery". AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA nope.

Fuck I'll just spoil it:

Aya died 25 years ago and her mother went nuts
The pen pal's real name is Shiori and Aya's father got her to pretend to be Aya and talk to Aya's mother as therapy or whatever. 

The mother found "Aya" a pen pal, that's the main character. 

The mother died in a fire in an accident and Shiori quit being Aya 15 years ago. Shiori noticed there was a problem with the wiring in Aya's parents' house which led to the fire but didn't warn anyone about it and blames herself for Aya's mother's death (that's the person she "killed").

After Aya's mother dies she just decides to put an end to pretending to be Aya by pretending to commit suicide because she can't just stop, she has to traumatize her friends by pretending to slit her wrists complete with fake blood, because I don't even fucking know why.
Shiori's classmates all hide her existence from the main character because... I don't know, they're crazy or fucking retarded or something?

After spending ten days sightseeing in Shimane the classmates go "eh alright we know someone who knows where she is" and they go see him and he tells you Shiori moved to Africa. THE END.

Now, that's just the first route, and clearing it unlocks more routes, but after this fucking travesty I don't think I'm going to continue playing this. Also, one of the routes I unlocked was titled "government conspiracy"which is making me think this goes full fucking retard, Shin Hayarigami style, and fuck that.

Fuck this game.

Edit: Oh man I keep recalling more retarded shit in this game.

At one point you need to coax the crazy cat man to give you info by giving him a rare cat keychain. You find one on a cat's collar and try to steal it from the cat. The cat's owner shows up and thanks you for playing with her cat. The main character then says "sure NOW GIVE ME SOMETHING TO MAKE UP FOR IT". What the actual fuck is wrong with this guy? Hell, what the actual fuck is wrong with the writer who came up with this?  I can't even begin to understand the sort of thought process that churns out this rancid shit

Edit: Turns out that from the second playthrough and on there's an option to skip entire chapters which makes checking out the rest of the game not that annoying (though it's not without its problems: It skips one of the letters for some reason, and you can't skip chapter 8).

Cleared the enmusubi route which is the "true" ending which adds a few more details, namely that Shiori's classmates are all horrible horrible people and the real reason Aya's mother died was because she ran back into the burning house because she's crazy and thought Aya was still alive. Shiori's fake suicide thing was because her classmates were all horrible assholes so that covers her motive but it still makes no fucking sense and it's all still fucking retarded. They add some stupid shit about how the reason the classmates were hiding Shiori from the main character was because they didn't want to get scandals or whatever from how they drove her to suicide except IT WASN'T SUICIDE DAMN IT THIS MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE. In this ending Shiori is a nurse and the main character just marries her and they live happily ever after.

Souseikitan Aerial

Just realised I had these lying around in a folder so I figured I'd leave them here.
Fucking literature.

Seriously though this game is absolute shit.

エロスケにレビューを投下しました。

Final Fantasy XIII

I've been trying to play FFXIII for the past few days, but I've pretty much given up on it.

I'm, what, 15 hours in? And not having any fun. At all.

I kept going because I'd heard that it gets better later. To the contrary, the further in I get the worse it becomes.

Needlessly long dungeons, annoying-as-fuck enemies with just way too much HP, weak-as-fuck enemies, STILL with way too much HP, bosses that kill you in five seconds even if you're at full health just because you're underlevelled.

Fuck you. Seriously, just fuck you.

Seriously, the gameplay is just terrible. It's like every single aspect was created with the design philosophy "annoy the living fuck out of the user" in mind.

Stuff that annoyed me most:

-The camera. God, the fucking camera. Combined with the encounter system. You need to sneak up on enemies? Too bad, halfway through your running at them the fucking camera swings around 270 degrees and suddenly you're running sideways and WHOOPS THE ENEMY SPOTTED AND ATTACKED YOU.

-The massive dungeons. They don't even have any fucking good gimmicks (and most don't even have any), and are all linear. Linear isn't a bad thing, but SPEND HOURS RUNNING FORWARDS is.

-The enemies' excessive amounts of HP. Even some of the regular ones. This combined with the dungeons make it seem like they realized that the game had no fucking content at all, so they decided to buy time by making dungeons and battles ten times longer. Fuck you.

-Some enemies' LOL KILL U 1 HIT attacks. No wonder they let you restart from right before any battle, but that just seems like a last-minute addition in an attempt to fix a fatal flaw. And it's still fucking fatal because having to refight the same battle over and over again isn't exactly my definition of fun. Especially if it's all up to luck.

-The stupid time limit battles with the summons. Level's too low? You'll never win, ever. Go grind. I hate grinding.

-The Optima System. Or rather how you can't mess with it in battles. Each character having different roles with different movesets, that's a good idea, and makes AI-controlled characters actually somewhat reliable. Making it so that some bosses need certain combinations (otherwise you just die), and combining that with how you can't mess with the combinations in battles? That's not. You don't know what the boss does until you fight it. You see what it does and go "oh, that? I'll just switch my optima to buster cure WAIT I DON'T HAVE BUSTER CURE, FUCK" and then the boss kills you, game over, retry? Fuck you. Even better is when they mess with the party members JUST AS THE BATTLE STARTS which means you're more likely than not to be missing all the combinations you want. FUCKING STUPID.

-No idea what's going on? We're not going to bother explaining in the game, go read five million pages of text. "OH NO WE'VE BEEN TURNED INTO THE LUCI OF THE FARUSHI OF THE PULSE" (no further explanation given, go read the fucking Autoclip). OH NO RAGNAROK (no further explanation given, go read the fucking Autoclip). Woman shows up for half a second in a flashback, then shows up later with Saz's son. Who the fuck is she? No further explanation given, go read the are you seeing a pattern here?

-Snow.

I'll go on a bit more, but if it doesn't get better soon I'm finding something else to play.

Cleared Alan Wake

So yeah, cleared Alan Wake.

Ending... what the fuck was that? Seriously?

Also, the final boss was crap.

The game's not very good, honestly. The whole light gimmick is somewhat original but nothing to call home about, and is kind of ruined by how the stages all feel unnaturally stretched out as if just to buy more time so that people won't complain about how short it is.

There aren't even any real gimmicks aside from a few exceptions (and even then, those are way too few and far between) to really define the stages, you run around, start up a generator once in a while, enemies ambush you and you kill them, repeat a million times. There isn't even much variation in the enemies, either. You either get the people who try to cut you up (some have more life, some move faster, but they're basically the same), the birds, and poltergeist activity (random shit flying at you and the occasional possessed vehicle). None pose much of a challenge or require you to do anything besides shine the light at them and then shoot them if they're human, or whip out a flashbang or flare if there're too many. There's only one real boss enemy (the final boss) in the game and it's pathetic.

As for the whole horror aspect... Anyone who says that the game had any scary moments at all is lying. Or suffering from mental degradation which results in them pissing their pants at Disney movies. The only vaguely creepy bit at all in the game is the house with Zane's name scrawled all over the walls, and that just turns out to be his crazy old stalker's doing, and she's on the good side. It even gets a bit funny at the end, where the bad guy tries to drop a fucking ship on your head (I chuckled at that).

Looking at Metacritic made me throw up a bit in my mouth. To keep it short, anyone who gave it more than 70 is either lying through his teeth (possibly due to being paid off), an absolute idiot, or both.

The story isn't bad but is in all honesty nothing exceptional; The average Stephen King novel or X Files episode is tons more interesting (by the way, I'm pretty sure I saw/read this whole writer-writing-story-that-comes-true thing somewhere else before). Also, the way the narrative is executed is not very good because you might miss parts of the story because you didn't know that you had to go up to someone and stand next to them for five minutes to listen to them yap on about something, or because you opened a door too soon which caused someone to be cut off.

I hated how they rub references in your face too hard. "Dude he's hitting the door with an axe! LIKE IN THE SHINING!", "The birds are attacking! LIKE HITCHCOCK'S BIRDS!".

The gameplay is just the same things over and over and over again for hours. It's terrible, in all honesty. The graphics are nice but, again, nothing special.

It's not bad by any means. Just nothing out of the ordinary. I certainly wouldn't use words like "brilliant" or "intense" or "gripping" or "astounding" or "intelligent" to describe it, and to say that it's "so unnerving you'll sleep with the lights on for a month" is so plain fucking ridiculous that I'm at a loss for words here.

Also, it's short, Very short. Took me about ten hours, and I'd estimate that at least half of that was just trekking along the countryside in the dark following the icon that tells you where to go next. You don't get lost because of that thing, and there aren't any puzzles (I can think of about one exception, but that wasn't much of an exception anyway. "Hey, that viking boat looks like it could be used as a ram!" says Alan. Ten seconds later you hit a green button and use it as a ram.) to solve or whatever. You just walk, and walk, and walk, and walk, and walk for fucking hours on end, stopping only once in a while to shoot an enemy or two or start a generator.

Replay value? Er, right. Go collect all the items! Some are only available on higher difficulties!

Bah.

It's really sad, because I see a lot of wasted potential here. This game could've been something special. It isn't. But people are claiming that it is which just makes it even sadder.

I may sound pretty negative about all this but I still enjoyed the game somewhat (though the ending kind of ruined everything for me). There were a bunch of pretty cool moments, namely the battle on the stage, and the bits where Sarah and Barry accompany you. Driving through enemies was kind of fun, too, and I also sort of enjoyed the Twilight Zone parody show you can find on the TVs.

Ah well, I'll probably check out the DLC (have the bonus code for the first one) when it's out, but until then, there's nothing left for me to do in here.

Anyway, the aftertaste left by Alan Wake was so bad that I went and washed it out of my mouth by getting the rest of the achievements I was missing in Idolmaster L4U. Yay.

Cleared Indigo Prophecy

Ugh.

The last third of the game just kind of ruined the whole experience.

The annoying action sequences (LOL RANDOM BASKETBALL and such) at the beginning were pretty bad but the suspense and setting and all were interesting enough to keep me playing.

And then Lucas became a zombie and fought a Mayan oracle with kung-fu and psychokinetic powers while floating in mid-air sideways, jumped a shark helicopter, ran along a wall and hadoukened a glowing orange energy man thing that was the physical avatar of an artificial intelligence that gained sentience from the internet in the 80's.It's even more fucking stupid than it sounds.