Review of Dies irae ~Acta est Fabula~
| Subject | Dies irae ~Acta est Fabula~ Dies irae ~Amantes amentes~ |
| By | Helpfulness: 2 Vote: 6AngeVNs on 2021-08-29 |
| Review | Things I liked Music - Definitely the most consistently good thing. Lots of variety from guitar heavy songs, to organ heavy songs, synth, emotional songs, etc. Shirou + Ellie as a whole. Being a cool constant secondary couple is a big rarity in VNs (anime too) so seeing them be important AND cool/funny is a nice treat. Shirou is admittedly too much of a dick at times but his fights are usually entertaining enough to make up. Kei Sakurai as a character. The one major character who was important in all routes (minus Rea's RIP). It was obvious from the beginning she had by far the most animosity with her villain group so it made her motivations interesting. Lots of interesting backstory even without the side stories. While her romance wasn't amazing it was still loads better executed to me than the others (and I'm usually a fan of childhood friend romance and/or nice girls). There's not many stories in any media that go into such detail of backstories of all the major villains. It was actually interesting to see them expanded in Side Stories and a little in certain routes to make you care about them more. Mixed feelings Our protagonist Ren. He did have some kinda interesting thoughts about how he wants to preserve his daily life and his view on reviving the dead. Other than that I thought he was pretty vanilla/predictable protag with a lot of UUUUUOOOORRRRRRRRRRGGHGHHHHH. Kasumi. I actually really liked her in the common route, humor was like a better version of Sumika from Muv-Luv. Her whole thing of being left out of all the big happenings and wanting to be helpful was part of the reason she killed all those people. The removing her memories to keep her sane was neat. However, it seems like the writers hated her after that because her inclusion in her route felt super rushed and while her being a Sonnenkind replacement made sense later it felt like she herself didn't get enough time to develop what she got/lost from the common route. She didn't feel as funny after her memory was wiped too. Fight scenes - I actually liked the simpler fight scenes since it was interesting to see the strategies going on, that's way I liked Shirou's fight scenes without his chain powerz a bunch. However, a big problem with the fights is they're a bit way too descriptive. Dialogue between them was fine but having to describe every single thought and action happening was really tiring to read as well as the cheesy as fuck villainous laughs/speeches. It got worse when fights became super shounen-y (not bad in of itself) when the descriptions get ridiculously long for no reason even though everyone just has powerful magic shit with no real strategy. Doesn't help I'm not super big on fight scenes in VNs when the best representation of some attacks is showing a curved colored beam. The power up CGs for everyone were pretty cool though. Things I didn't really like Padding through extreme narration. I know this isn't the only VN to do this but I felt half the narration of what the characters were doing or what was happening was completely unnecessary and just made the VN longer than it really needed to be. The major villains Reinhard and Mercurius. I get part of the point of them was that they're powerful and were limited on screentime on purpose. But... I really did't get them. They took waxing poetic to the extreme any time they talked, especially Mercurius. I'm going to guess the way they talked was part of their charm to people but to me they just added annoyance to the already padding heavy narration. Also any fights were them were so boring to read because of how powerful they were. The Romance. Kei's was kinda interesting but the other 3 were completely rushed. With Kasumi and Rea it seemed like "well they've known each other so it'll work out" but gave almost no development to the relationship. Marie's was the worst where she was forcibly given personality by Reinhard to where they just wrote her as a love interest. It's disappointing how bad the romance was given how long the game is. The general lack of emotional payoff at the end of the VN considers the potential true routes. Kei's route was bittersweet so that was alright. Kasumi's was a big downer ending but at least it was unique. Marie's route between the worst romance, the ridiculous long and boring final fight, and the Marie dying but then reviving people in the side story? Rea ending 1 was kinda alright since the using Mercurius and Reinhard to kill each other thing was interesting but Rea ending 2 just gave Ren a shounen-like power up with no real build up. And in either case Rea's romance was meh. |
| 2 points |