Review of AI: Somnium Files
| Subject | AI: Somnium Files AI: The Somnium Files - NA Download Edition |
| By | Helpfulness: 0 Vote: 9hexashadow13 on 2021-01-23 |
| Review | tl;dr: A narrative focused game with an incredibly well told story with a great cast, though one that's quite a bit different from expected, and gameplay that is generally unobtrusive in conveying that story but that can be annoying at times. AI Somnius is the latest game from Uchikoshi Koutarou, a writer best known for the Zero Escape trilogy. In a lot of ways, it's similar to the Zero Escape trilogy, in that it's a heavily narrative based game with branching paths and game play segments somewhat disjointed from the main game, and ultimately it very much does feel like a Uchikoshi Koutarou. However, beyond that the game is incredibly different. The game is heavily narrative based, so a heavy portion of the game involves simply following along with the story in either VN format or cutscenes. The gameplay intermixed with that generally manifests in four ways. The first and most common is investigation. This is pretty standard point and click in a 3D environment, where you can select people in order to talk to them with options being given on what lines to select, or select objects in order to investigate them. These portions are pretty straight forward and risk free in that the game simply waits for the player to go through everything important before moving on, and thus it works as a solid enough system through which a lot of the story is told. It is especially important to note though, that not only things of importance can be selected. Rather, essentially everything can. What makes that interesting though, is that while a lot of objects just get simple descriptions, quite a lot, way more than I expected, have voiced lines connected to them, generally humorous ones but also ones that develop characters. This makes going through and selecting everything, including things that clearly aren't related to the story, pretty rewarding and thus makes these segments enjoyable beyond simply their main story contribution. However, as mentioned, not everything has lines connected to it, so it did get a bit annoying at times having to manually search for everything that does. It would have been very preferable that everything possible to select being highlighted, and even more preferable that everything that isn't just a simple description being highlighted differently. There are also game play segments that involve QTEs during cutscenes and parts where the player has to present evidence. However, both of these are incredibly forgiving to the point there's no real tension. Thus, these help a bit in getting the player a bit more immersed in the story, but otherwise don't contribute all that much. However, they also don't detract from the story at all, so I suppose they serve a decent enough purpose. The last game play segment is Psyncing. This is probably the core game play aspect, and what could essentially be considered as the replacement for the Escape Rooms from Zero Escape. It is also here that the choices made affect which branch the story proceeds down. During these portions, the player controls an avatar as they wander through a dream being investigated. This investigation is limited to six minutes. However, time only moves upon performing actions, so the player can simply stop moving in order to stop time. Moving causes the clock to count down in real time, but that's only a small part of where time is spent. Rather, the goal in these segments is to interact with objects, and often series of objects, in order to complete certain objectives called Mental Locks. Each interaction has a specified time that it takes to do. However, performing certain actions unlocks multipliers, increasing or decreasing, which effect future actions, so there's some level of time management. The biggest issue with these segments is that they're completely random. There's very little rhyme or reason to what the player has to do to progress and thus it's entirely based on trial and error in searching for the right actions to perform among a string of possible actions. This would be fine, because even the actions that aren't necessary have scenes attached to them that are generally pretty amusing. However, the fact that there's a time limit prevents the player from simply being able to explore as they will because there's a limit standing over there heads. Each time a mental lock is opened a checkpoint is essentially created that the player can return to, so even if they're running out of time this can be used to avoid having to do the whole level again. However, there's essentially a life system attached to this, with only three returns being possible, which limits the effectiveness of this. Thus, while at the same time being a game play portion that's essentially about exploring as there's no clear way to figure out how to proceed, it's also a game portion that greatly limits the players ability to explore freely, thus largely feeling kind of contradictory. With that said, these portions are generally pretty easy, wherein the time management really isn't all that necessary outside of the basics due to an abundance of time. However, just because these game play segments aren't a major impediment, doesn't make them fun, and all they seem to do is knock the wind out of the story pacing. And furthermore, there is an exception to that in that the most difficult Psync segment is quite difficult and requires good time management to the point that it feels like it's pretty much impossible to do fully without already having established what to do. During Psync portions, there's bonus artwork that is unlocked for finding a collectible hidden in the stage and also for finishing the stage with time remaining. To be frank, I found it far too frustrating to accomplish this goal in the hardest sync myself, and thus resorted to using a guide. All in all, these portions weren't enjoyable much, and just felt like something that had to be trudged through for the sake of the story. As for the story itself, it is in a word, great. It's a solid mystery with a good amount of complexity with things slowly revealed across four routes that come together well in the final route. With that said, it is very different from the Zero Escape games in that the story is at a lower scale for lack of a better term. There are clues given in other routes that build up to everything in the final route, but these clues and foreshadowing are enough that they telegraph the entire story pretty strongly before it gets explicitly revealed. It didn't feel like there were any twists that were genuinely incredibly surprising or world changing. A benefit from this is that it also doesn't suffer from any major plot holes as such twists often produce. But on the other hand, it also feels like it's dashing expectations for fans coming in from Zero Escape. But that in a way also felt intentional, that the big twist was that there is no big twist. The game draws a lot from other Spike Chunsoft games in the form of cameos and Easter eggs, but with Zero Escape it draws on the subject matter at points to heavily push the players expectations in a certain direction that suggests a major twist is coming, only for that twist to never come. To a degree, this does kind of result in a pretty major plot hole, but at the same time, this 'hole' isn't something that was created from the creator forgetting something or making a mistake, but rather something intentional in that the narrative went out of its way to create, so can it really be considered a plot hole? Taking into account the pre-release marketing, it feels even more like targeting fans and screwing with their expectations was an intended goal, and one that ultimately I'd have to say was accomplished well, though whether that's a positive or a negative I think is still debatable, though I'm leaning towards positive. Another benefit of having a smaller scale story, is that it's fully complete in this game, with no cliffhangers or anything like that as with Uchikoshi's previous works. There's just a solid happy ending that is incredibly satisfying, which may seem too simple, but I appreciated greatly. The story also does a really good job with it's characters. Unlike Zero Escape, where all the characters are trapped within a closed environment, here they're all living their lives while facing their own problems and interacting with characters outside of the main cast who are also just living their lives. A lot of this contributes heavily to the overarching narrative, but there's also a lot that doesn't, being centered around character relations not that related to the core plot, but that are well written nevertheless. Good examples of this are Ota's route that very well develops his relationship with his mother, or Mizuki's route that does a really good job at developing her relationship with Date while staying pretty far from the main mystery. Now that's not to say the main characters that are more in focus of the overarching narrative aren't developed as well, because Iris, her mother Hitomi, and their relationships with others are also developed incredibly well. The various side characters that aren't heavily focused on are also pretty solidly fleshed out which makes their relationships with the main cast feel more substantial. The protagonist is especially well written, with quite a lot of depth to him and with a connection web worthy of a protagonist of such a work. His relationship with Aiba was especially great and the story involving that was really well told. All in all, this results in a cast that is overall very well fleshed out and easy to get really invested in. The only hole I could really find are that the narrative didn't develop the Boss or Hitomi and their relationship with Date as well as everything else, but even there it did a decent job. The localization was pretty solid. In general the Englsih script flowed pretty well and very naturally. I was especially impressed with the work done on the endless stream of jokes, especially those involving puns that had to be essentially redone. That said, there were some clear issues. The first is that chapter titles weren't translated. Each of these titles in Japanese has wordplay, essentially, in that they contain 'AI", such as in "sigAI", which would definitely be too hard to maintain while translating so it makes sense to leave the Japanese titles. However, I feel that the English translation should also have been included alongside that. Another, is that the appendix seems to have been translated separately from the main script. This is clear from the fact that there are jokes that were completely changed in the transition to English, but the appendix still has definitions of the terms from the Japanese script which don't show up in the English script. There are also English words that are used in the Japanese script that have definitions in the appendix that would make sense to include for those that don't know English well, but that should be obvious for English speakers, at least more obvious than other words used without comment. Lastly, there's a localization bug where it has English voices during the ending sequence, even if you've been playing the entire game with Japanese voices, which was incredibly jarring and took a decent amount of oomph out of what was otherwise an incredibly spectacular ending, but I did end up watching it with Japanese voices immediately after so that was mostly mitigated. I would also like to say that I found the Japanese voice acting incredibly solid, for whatever that's worth. The art and art style were great and fit well. There was a lot of fluctuating in tone and atmosphere, but it managed to handle that pretty well. The character designs were mostly all down to Earth, but a lot of them were stylish and memorable never the less. The graphical quality and animation weren't spectacular, but did a solid enough job without ever being a distraction so I think they're solid enough. The exception to that is the animation of dancing, which was downright excellent. The music was really good, especially with quite a few memorable tracks, especially the vocal track. In terms of technical issues, the only issue I could find was that there were loading times for flashbacks. This wouldn't be an issue if they were used sparingly or for introducing new information, but they're mostly used for information the player already knows, and they're used far too much to the point they got annoying, especially as they seemed to show certain scenes I really did not want to see again multiple times. The QoL features were solid, with collected information being easy to access in the menu, the flowchart being easy to navigate, though there only being five routes really helps with that, and the summaries provided for each chapter making jumping around between routes a lot more smooth, despite the existence of route locks. |
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