Review of Sorcery Jokers
| Subject | Sorcery Jokers |
| By | Helpfulness: 6 Vote: 5animecac on 2020-09-24 last updated on 2020-10-16 |
| Review | [Spoiler Free, although structural points are spoken of]. Sorcery Jokers is a magic / battle / action VN; with a hint of mystery, conspiracy and harem style slice of life sections in between. This VN has a unique jump choice flowchart, following our two main characters - Senri and Haruto (seperate stories that are told by constantly jumping between the two, before their stories eventually dovetail). I'll start with what it does well. Firstly, the art style and special effects are pretty good. It is a battle heavy VN and utilizes a decent amount of effects to bring it to life. The routes involving Senri are good also, and it has a fairly good ending to this VN. Now for the bad, and there is quite a lot. Everything with Haruto is terrible. Like really terrible. He is a hollow character that is annoying to follow. Basically he is everything wrong with the naive young hero trope. What makes it even worse is that because Senri's scenes are quite good, it ends up making the pacing of this VN feel very wrong and frutrating to play through - going from something fairly good to something terrible and constantly needing to switch (the VN is set-up to switch between these two story lines constantly, so you kinda have to endure that). The music is bad. Far too few tracks, and often I found the music playing in the background not to match the tone of what was happening at all. It is not that the tracks included are terrible, but that the whole VN had only about 4 pieces of music. Way too repetitive and negatively effected the atmosphere it was trying to create. I felt that the characters and feel of the VN to be fairly hollow. It was plot and intrigue heavy - and certainly presented differing characters motivations and backstories - but they just felt unreal, hollow and fairly trope heavy. I felt they spent the wrong amount of time on various aspects of the story and characters, and in general the writing was often pretty bad. The ending was by far the best part of this VN. To me that was somewhat of a saving grace, otherwise I would have scored it even lower. To be clear - the ending isn't amazing or mind blowing, but it does have hype and a certain amount of feeling to it which was lacking for most of the rest of the story. What is the worst about this VN is it truly could have been a great one. If they had simply had the one main character in Senri without the constant story switching, rededicated the time wasted on Haruto into some interesting world building and character development and spent a bit more budget on some better music it would have been incredible. The basic plot points were intriguing enough to build something great. This was simply a missed opportunity. I wouldn't recommend this VN to be honest, not unless you really want something battle / magic orientated and you are willing to overlook some significant flaws and one of the worst co-MC's in existence. |
| 6 points |