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Review of Ore-tachi no Sekai wa Owatteiru.

SubjectOre-tachi no Sekai wa Owatteiru.
Our World Is Ended. - NA Download Edition
ByHelpfulness: 2
Vote: 7
hexashadow13 on 2022-10-25
Reviewtl;dr: A VN with a bizarre and crazy but hilarious cast, though everything beyond that is pretty lacking.

Our World is Ended is a VN originally released on the Vita in Japan 2017. It then received an enhanced version in February, 2019 on PS4/Switch that features additional content. However, despite that, in that was localized for PS4/Switch/PC in April, 2019 is based on the original Vita version and does not contain any of the additional content, which is kind of a major bummer to be honest. But it’s pretty unlikely the additional content will ever get localized so we’ll just have to make due with what we got.

The VN is about an Asakusa based seven person game company, Judgement 7, trying to develop an AR game. However, they end up getting pulled into an alternate Asakusa and all sorts of other crazy stuff ends up happening to them. Ultimately, I would say this VN is a blend of four types of content, the sci-fi related overarching plot, the design story behind them trying to make a game, character arcs, and a bunch of random comedy.

The overarching plot I simply don’t think was all that good. It tries to deal with a bunch of sci-fi related concepts, such as virtual reality, immortality through being digitized, the impact the digital world can have on the real, etc. but I don’t think it really handles them all that well and ultimately says nothing about them. There’s very little consistency to things and most everything seems to occur simply because of plot convenience so it’s not particularly good in terms of mystery or intrigue either. It also uses cheap tricks like fake out deaths way too much so it starts feeling really repetitive and like its just dragging on and on at times. And in the end, it still feels like there are loads of plot holes and things that felt like they would be important that simple are never explained. Overall, this aspect just felt like a complete waste, not just that it was underdeveloped or that it fails to lick up to it’s potential. Rather, it felt like something that it would have been better off minimizing or getting rid of entirely.

There’s also somewhat of a design story wherein the cast are trying to make a game. The thing though is that it pops up randomly and they never really make any progress since whenever it pops up they end up getting distracted by sci-fi stuff or character drama. Thus, it’s really not much of a design story, there are just brief hints of game development stuff here and there for the most part. And these brief hints feel kind of strange because of how awkwardly they fit into everything else. This aspect I think definitely had some potential if it was fleshed out better, but as it is I don’t think anyone will be all that satisfied with it.

Then there are the character arcs. I initially found the entire cast immensely annoying. As the VN went on though, I came to find them all pretty likable. This wasn’t because of their character arcs though, rather I just got used to them. The protagonist is the generic dense light novel protagonist with all that entails for better or for worse. I like LNs so as things developed I very much came to like him and the dynamic between him and rest of the cast, especially the light romance and related fluff. The rest of the cast are all crazy in really weird ways, but once I got used to them I found that their quirks made them pretty likable because they are hilarious.

The character arcs themselves are very much a mixed bag. There’s only one that actually stood out as a good character arc, Natsumi’s, which slowly developed over the course of the entire VN and got a solid climax and good epilogue. The majority of the rest are in the range of okay to mediocre due to being some combination of undeveloped, rushed, or inconsistent with what are supposed to be key moments simply not carrying enough weight. Yuno’s I will especially note had some good high points and a great epilogue and thus could have been solid overall, but it was condensed too much to only mattering during a single segment near the end and thus didn’t really have as much time to sink in. There’s also one that I would say is bad, Owari’s, in that he doesn’t really have a character arc at all, but the writing seems to treat it like he did, which is bizarre. Thus, in terms of characters I think the VN was okay, though as it is nowhere near strong enough to carry the VN, though if it was handled better it did have the potential to.

And lastly there’s random comedy. This is my favorite part of the VN by far. The comedy is mostly centered around perverted humor, but it has a good amount of range within that, and enough variation beyond that to keep things interested. It also shows up in all sorts of ways. At times it’s tied into the sci-fi elements, with the cast progressing the plot in completely ridiculous ways or just ignoring the plot to goof off. At times it’s tied to the design story with them all being terrible at game development apparently. And at times it’s tied to the character arcs wherein the plot is centered around a single character. The last of these was the best portion because the comedy is carried by how insane the cast is, and when it’s focused solely on the characters with the plot only providing some structure, often in completely ridiculous ways, then the comedy shines through incredibly well for some of the best comedy I have ever seen in VNs period. Still, while the comedy does make up a major portion of the VN, the rest is still dragging things down considerably, so in the end it’s only enough to make the VN barely good with a lot of conditionals.

The translation is also only passable at best. It isn’t strict about making sure to translate everything so it leaves things like honorifics and various terms that don’t have good English equivalents. But it also randomly attempts to translate things that it shouldn’t and does a really bad job at it, like chuunibyou into manchild. The translator also seemed to have a hard time figuring out how to convey keigo properly, which results in some bizarre situations like having lines in English that have Japanese honorifics that the original Japanese does not. It also doesn’t seem to even attempt to explain most puns and such. And it’s also riddled with loads of spelling and grammar mistakes that would easily be caught by a proofreader. The UI text I think was straight up machine translated, which isn’t an issue most of the time since it’s easy enough to figure out and things behave as usual, but the description of “skip unread” toggle in regards to scene skipping is worded so strangely that it sounds like turning it on does the opposite of what it does. It overall feels very amateurish. Despite that, there were some small things that I found surprisingly well done, such as how they handled the translation of the title.

In terms of QoL, I played on PS4 and it ran perfectly fine as you would expect. It has mappable controls so those shouldn’t be an issue and the other settings one would expect were also all there. Some of the choices, called SoS choices, were annoying because instead of just giving you all the choices, they scroll across the screen. They get especially annoying because there are a lot of choices and in order to get all the endings, which are mostly all just character focused short epilogues basically, you have to go through the entire story again and again. There is of course a skip function, but it still takes longer than I would have liked.

The art style is good and the art certainly can look really good at times in CGs. However, I don’t think it works all that well for sprites on backgrounds, and thus I don’t think it’s a good fit for VNs. The music is decent enough and works well with the story, though the only track I found especially memorable was Final Flight of the Black Winged Angel. The OP and true ending ED were both pretty solid and fit reasonably well.
2 points
#1 by r1k1
2022-10-28 at 03:56
< report >Spot-on review IMO. Excellent game if you're looking for sex comedy about insane weirdos, but you will probably be disappointed if you expect anything more than that. I loved this game because I went into it with no expectations aside from the comedy (I actually laughed a lot at how silly the main plot was, at times, but idk if that was intentional lol) but it's a VN that requires a lot of asterisks to actually recommend...