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Review of Out of Touch!

SubjectOut of Touch!
Out of Touch! - Chapter 46 (v3.7)
ByHelpfulness: 1
Vote: 5
htc89234 on 2022-04-21
ReviewOut of Touch starts off at breakneck speed. The first fifteen minutes alone consist of two counts of sexual assault (one attempt and one successful), one count of meeting the protagonist deity father before he calls the MC a little bitch and piercing his heart with a giant fucking lazer, and one count of a 5-year timeskip.

Honestly, there's just too much to unpack in the first few chapters, but it works. It surprisingly works. It's got the right amount of absurd, extremely annoying melodrama sprinkled with just enough absurd humor to make it work. The storytelling isn't particularly stellar - mainly because of the speed, with some characters going through what seems like a mental breakdown for 9 lines before being completely ok and everyone is friends again 60 lines later. Nonetheless, it works; the constant changes of viewpoints and who's narrating makes the first few chapters interesting, and above all, this VN has style. A lot of style. Visually and most importantly, sound wise; the songs are all citypop or future funk vibes. Perhaps the one complaint that can be made about the first couple of chapters is how the MC himself reacts to what happened to him.

Unfortunately, everything that is mentioned in the prologue is resolved in the first 8 chapters. And that's when things start going downhill. For the next 8 chapters, we get presented to the other absurd side of Out of Touch - weird youkai/ghost/deities time-travelling space-travelling dimension-warping absurdities that have always never existed and know but do not know you and are definitely related and mysterious while als - bla bla bla it's everything that's annoying in fiction, at once. But honestly, because of the pacing, the first time this happens, it's tolerable. Because of the tonal shift, it's even kind of amusing. Chapters 8 through 14 are nice; the right amount of crazy, and the right amount of nonsense, even if no longer quite as nice as the first few chapters.

Anything beyond that is no longer going downhill. We've gone off the rails. It's trudging along the side of the mountain slowly without anything to lead it by on a crash collision course that we're forced to watch through in slow motion as it culminates in what might be the most infuriating sequence of events I have ever read. There's a battle system introduction which oh lord why? It's never used again. It's used twice. The first fight is unwinnable. The second is won through healing, not dealing damage, so it's just several turns of annoyance at that point. The outcome of the fight is meaningful only for a few chapters anyway, because chapters later we find out that the person who lost didn't even really lose. Even when we get into a place where another "boss fight" would be nice, the battle system doesn't even show up. Why?

The storytelling slows down. Chapters get longer, and things move along far more slowly. There's not as many viewpoint changes anymore to at least try to keep you engaged. The melodrama gets tuned up to 11. The comedy gets tuned down to zero. Most characters of the group don't show up as you're forced to sit and read through the introduction of several new characters. Some get plopped and retconned into existence. Some just disappear after a couple of hundred lines, never to be seen again. The ones that are meant to die or go through death experiences, don't. What does remain of the main cast would, by all means, be bitch-slapped by the MC had this VN any sense of keeping the comedy at the same level it was when it started.

Now you're in this room, without many choices, with most characters nowhere to be seen, with characters that just burst into existence in the last few moments with some spiritual mumbo-jumbo attempt at explanation that honestly would've been best left unattempted (much like the prologue), and there's no comedy relief, there's no meaningful interaction. There's just city pop, purple, and melodrama. Maybe not even the developer remembers what or where we started off at. We've crashed.
1 point