Review of BALDR SKY Dive1 "Lost Memory"
| Subject | BALDR SKY Dive1 "Lost Memory" |
| By | Helpfulness: 5 Vote: 9primate541 on 2020-10-26 |
| Review | Baldr Sky is one of the best recent VNs and JRPGs to have been localised to the West, delivering an entertaining story, memorable characters, and robust action RPG combat. It's set in a cyberpunk vision of urban Japan in the aftermath of a tragedy called Gray Christmas, which left an entire city in ruins. Local and federal governments, a private corporation, a research team and a religious cult are implicated in the event, with each party blaming the others. The survivors who comprise the bulk of the main cast include alumni of an esteemed school, who believe they had been witness to suspicious events prior to the disaster during their school days. The game takes place from the perspective of Kou Kadokura, who as one of these survivors has worked as a freelance mercenary, pursuing the truth about Gray Christmas. Conflicts are often resolved in cyberspace, so mercenaries in this world are versed in combat online using their avatars. Over the course of the game he encounters his old school friends, many of whom have aligned themselves with the very factions he suspects, as they attempt to find their own truth. Its story and setting draws from a wealth of inspiration, from the classic cyberpunk series Neuromancer, from popular manga and anime such as Ghost in the Shell, Serial Experiments Lain and Neon Genesis Evangelion, and from other visual novels including Muv Luv, Higurashi and the Zero Escape games. It's abundant with references to politics, religion and technology, but its central themes are largely focused on the personal, exploring the relationship between technology, identity and reality. The storytelling is excellent, with the gradual unravelling of its core mystery working in tandem with the development of its characters. It's hard to put down after starting it, until reading it to its conclusion. It frequently switches between different timelines and settings, interspersing its narrative conflicts with gameplay. Early on, gameplay portions are scarce and you'll spend most of your time reading, but it gets increasingly dense with gameplay the further you advance. The constant switching of perspectives, settings and between story and gameplay never feels unearned or arbitrary, and keeps it well paced and engaging. The game has multiple routes with an enforced playing order, with each route culminating in two to three possible endings. The choices you make during the story and how you perform in combat determines the ending you'll reach. One of its best features is how substantial all the endings are, with even bad endings where you've failed all the game's challenges and missed every flag feeling worth having reached. They often still reveal something about the world or story, providing clues or foreshadowing. Gameplay is based around fights in cyberspace using Gundam style mechs. The fast flow of its action is akin to a fighting game, with hit confirmation and animation cancelling mechanics. There's a satisfying impact to every hit you deal as the game briefly pauses on each direct hit, giving you the feedback to make a decision on whether to continue a combo, change it up or to make a tactical retreat. Timing inputs as opposed to button mashing is often important if you want to succeed with the game's combat. The combo system is a joy to play with, letting you map up to 18 out of a sizeable pool of moves and weapons, leaving it up to the player to create combos out of them. A practice mode is built right into the game's menus, so that you can freely experiment making any combo you can imagine. I spent many hours just messing around with this, trying to make the perfect combo, generally settling for ones that launched enemies in the air before juggling them with a series of uninterrupted attacks. There's a heat mechanic that acts as a stamina meter, but adds a risk/reward system in which additional damage is taken at higher heat levels. This turns the game's harder encounters into fights where you bait moves out of your opponent, subsequently punishing them before they can cool down. The progression system is tied both to an experience system and unlocks during the story, feeling in many ways like Nier Automata's, giving the player a progressively larger pool of purchasable 'plugins'. The game's difficulty ramps up appropriately through the campaign, with the occasional need to change your build. Having access to knockdowns, stuns, and high level ranged attacks help immensely in the mid to late game. Overall it offers a great challenge, especially in its many boss fights. There's always the option of changing the difficulty too at any point if you really get stuck. The game's production value is high, with a lot of detailed backgrounds and character sprites in the game's visual novel portions. The gameplay visuals also look great, with what appears to be prerendered 3D assets for its sprites. The game's soundtrack is a treat, with tons of great tracks. In particular, there's an unprecedented amount of excellent tracks just for its battles, well over an hour's worth in total. Some things detract from the game, though not significantly. The game maps many functions to just four keys, making those four keys functions arbitrarily context dependent. The camera also occasionally feels too close, especially on fights where bosses have attacks that extend past the length of the screen. And while I love the story, some of its themes and morally ambiguous issues are neither dealt with by the narrative with the complexity and nuance they deserve, or resolved by the story's end. Contributing to this is the game's one dimensional antagonists, who rarely present a compelling case for themselves. This reduced the overall impact of the game, which despite having an ending that wrapped up much of the game's narrative, left less to think about thematically than if it had been better written. There's also the sexualisation of its characters, which manifests in a way that sometimes feels crude, excessively exploitative and tonally dissonant with the narrative. The game has some bugs, crashing to desktop occasionally. Another bug I encountered caused the bitmaps for the game's maps to not display or load fully until a game restart. Baldr Sky gets high marks from me for both its story and gameplay. Even if it tends to oversimplify some complex issues, the story is always engrossing, and each of the characters' arcs are compelling. And the action is by far the best 2D action combat in a JRPG I've played. If you enjoy VNs or JRPGs, this is absolutely a game you should play. |
| 5 points |