I beat two visual novels over the last few weeks. These ended up pairing fairly well together since they had similar ideas presented in very different ways.
Cross†Channel (2003)
Cross†Channel: Tower of Friends (200?) - Oh boy here we fucking go. Back when I was first really getting into visual novels around a decade ago, this was one I remember trying and having a hard time getting into before ultimately dropping it out of boredom. I don't like to leave things things unfinished though, so I decided to try it again.
The basic premise here involves a group of students for a school of people maladapted to society to various degrees. After coming back into town after a camping trip that failed to mend friendships within the group, they find that seemingly the entire population of the Earth has disappeared.
Before I can really talk about the game though, I have to talk about its availability in English.
This Game Has Three God Damned Translations and None of Them Are Good: Yeah apparently no translation of this game into English does it justice. From what I can tell, there are three core versions of the game in English:
1. One done by some high school kid a decade and a half ago. Apparently they went on to do more translations of these kinds of games over time, but this was one of their first works before they had much in the way of experience in translation.
2. An infamous second translation done by a man that every independent source I've seen has claimed to have some form of insanity. From what I can tell from the translator's manifesto (There's always a manifesto) he's some kind of alt-right nutjob so I will not be giving him free publicity here. It seems like its actually a huge pain in the ass to get his version of the translation installed on top of all of that, so while I am morbidly curious to see what exactly he did here one day, I am not putting in the time for this madness.
3. An official translation on the butchered Steam release that apparently isn't any good either. Even if the translation were good, the presentation on the Steam release seems to crop CG's, lacks the 18+ content of the story (Most of which is admittedly tasteless but some of which matters), and just generally was not well received.
It seems the high schooler's work is the best of a bad lot, and that at least has the excuse of being done by a kid. That puts talking about the game itself in a bit of an awkward place to criticize as apparently people like the general prose of the original Japanese release and it isn't preserved here. I was bored though and wanted to try this game again, but I felt it was important to say upfront that no version of this game in English seems to be ideal.
The Actual Game: So with that massive caveat established, I have to say I was fairly disappointed in this game. I generally like stories about some mysterious setting or circumstance and how people react to that, so I thought Cross Channel's
The Leftovers-esque premise would really appeal to me more. I think the biggest problems for me are as follows:
1) The game honestly does a poor job of setting up basic character relationships, to the point I'm not sure I ever quite got what their general group dynamic was or how it broke apart to such a degree. This matters because it actually takes a fairly decent amount of the time before the group goes on their ill-fated camping trip, but its never really established in satisfying way for me. This is pretty huge problem because the game never gets quite off the ground running, and the whole prologue and most of the first batch of the character routes spending so much time instead on slice of life shenanigans (That don't really tell you much) is honestly a huge huge
HUGE slog as a result. Still, I went forward with grim determination.
2) The protagonist Taichi has a really obnoxious "jackass pervert" schtick that really overstays its welcome in the first half or so of the game with how repeated and one-note his gags are. Eventually his character does move beyond that, but ooof, it takes a good long while for him to move beyond bland gag character into something more substantial.
3) The side characters don't feel especially developed to me. You eventually get some explanation of what their deal is but most of them really kind of one note at the end of the day. This is especially noticeable once the game shifts into focusing on Taichi's deal, and everyone else really kind of fades into the background.
Premise Feels Kind of Wasted At First: This is kind of tied into the point I just made about side characters, but I really feel like the cast here does not react even remotely realistically to seeming to be the last remaining people on Earth. Even keeping in mind the stuff about them being nutjobs to some degree, that they spend most of the game just doing the same kind of shenanigans they did in the prologue but in an empty school (Until you get like, a random suicide or someone bringing out a fucking crossbow and shooting people), it all seems awfully blase.
They do at least make a half-hearted effort to repair a radio tower to send out an SOS, but well it doesn't see a lot of attention. In general there's really not much emphasis put on like survival or solving the mystery of everyone vanishing or whatever, which is fine to a degree and I don't have a problem with this being a setting for character drama more than anything, but it made me wonder for the longest time why this game even had the Leftovers premise if you were going to doing just general school drama shenanigans.
Eventually the game does take a bit of turn and some of the characters actually like, try doing stuff, but it takes a long fuckin' time for Taichi to even realize
he's trapped in a time loop that resets everyone's memory after a week unless you wait it out in a specific spot.
The second half in the game moving into a story about Taichi seeking some kind of redemption for
having legitimately killed a lot of people, having some kind of Jekyll/Hyde kind of psychosis that makes him rape and murder too, and driving at least one student to suicide was certainly a narrative decision. I'm not sure if the game really endorses the conclusion the character comes to (Namely,
leaving himself isolated in the "parallel world" after figuring out how to send everyone else home. Certainly isolating the mentally disturbed from the rest of society is not the answer, especially when they themselves are the victims of child rape?), but that might be the point somewhat. Either way I think you can argue the politics here are a bit dated.
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Then there's the story "DLC", Tower of Friends. I think its DLC anyways, but I'm not actually sure where this segment originated from and information online seems a bit scarce. I couldn't actually tell if it was originally released as actual downloadable content (Its unusual for visual novel type games to receive DLC to begin with, especially one from 2003), and it could be content from some later release of the game merely released in unusual way for the English translation. If its legitimate DLC though, this is one of the earliest examples of genuine story DLC that I'm aware of outside of MMO expansions.
Anyways, Tower of Friends.
WTF is Going On During "Tower of Friends": For something that is only 15-20 minutes long, this whole thing was a mindfuck in the worst way that threw the ENTIRE GAME up in the air for me. I cannot make sense of whatever this scenario is meant to communicate. Basically this "DLC" is a scenario where Taichi just loses his goddamned mind
and murders all of his friends. That's edgelordy enough, but in a bizarrely dark parody of the main game, he decides
to take their corpses to construct the "Tower of Friends" as opposed to the maingame's Radio Tower. For bonus points, one of the bodies is mentioned as being contorted into the shape of a swastika* and well lmao at that lovely detail.
What actually is going on here isn't clear to me. This is another case where explanations I've seen for this online range all over the place. From what I can tell the possibilities are:
1.
This is just a normal Bad End during the main game where Taichi loses it. Okay I guess, makes enough sense.
2.
Taichi killed main timeline version of his friends, they were dead the whole time and he entered alternate world without them. Entire game was him coming to terms with being mass murderer via delusional friends.
3.
The alternate world had their own parallel timeline Taichi who was separate from the main game's Taichi. He killed his friends and teacher and then uh, just kind of vanished I guess? I've seen multiple sites offer some version of this theory and this explains SOME details about the game like the blood pool that gets cleaned in the school where Miki "died" previously, and the adult's dead body that Kiri claims to find in one of the routes, but "lol parallel world" alone doesn't explain fact that ENTIRE WORLD'S POPULATION IS MISSING.
4.
Taichi himself died after murdering his friends, but the "parallel" world is some form of afterlife where he sends them back to redeem himself. This would make sense of the fact that his dead mother is also a character in the parallel world (Sometimes), but considering he succeeds in saving everyone and far as we are shown, nobody is surprsied by resurrections of multiple dead students...well, I don't buy it.
5.
This is post-True End Taichi simply being driven mad by isolation. Okay I guess
6.
Entire game was a dream.
7. There is no real explanation for WTF is going here and its just meant to ambiguous for whatever reason. The original game was ambiguous enough with its plot (And really I respect that it didn't try and spell absolutely every implication out), and I'm not sure it needed even more stacked on top of it at the last minute.
I don't really find any of those explanations satisfactory and other than 1 and 5 (Which are just kind of whatever nothing additions if correct) none of them really make sense. No matter which is correct though, none of them really clarify for me why the hell you 180 degree from the bittersweet optimism of the original game's True Ending to this ultra dark and cynical note. Its such a tonal shift, and since it doesn't clarify plot or character, I don't understand what its supposed to add to the game.
Like if you wanted to argue that Tower of Friends exists to raise ambiguity in the main game whether, say, the Crutches Boy
really just committed suicide or if Taichi simply pushed him off the school roof to his death, I don't think you
need something like this DLC to argue that. There's enough in the base game to put forth that interpretation.
Anyways, while there is interesting stuff in Cross Channel it is kind of a mess overall.
*EDIT (2/16/2024): I’ve been reconsidering the thing in Tower of Friends about
the corpse in the shape of the swastika. I now wonder if this itself is another example of inaccurate translation.
Recently I read something online about a fan translation of Kinoko Nasu’s Garden of Sinners light novels and how a similar bit was handled in the film adaptation of them. According to this poster, the light novels mention a corpse being left in the shape of a manji, a sort of religious symbol referring to religious concepts like samsara and reincarnation. However for the official English subtitles of the film adaptation, they say this corpse is left in the shape of a swastika, presumably because the shape is similar enough to a manji and the manji is relatively unknown to western audiences. You see a similar thing with the infamous Legend of Zelda 1 dungeon in the shape of a swastika- it’s supposed to be a manji, not the Nazi hate symbol.
^The Zelda 1 "swastika" dungeon that has baffled people like the Angry Video Game Nerd for years now: "With the first Zelda, I think everyone agrees it's a masterpiece. Sure, maybe there's some weird stuff in it. I don't know why one of the labyrinths is shaped like a swastika or why the enemy names are so random." (From his Zelda 2 review)
^A screenshot I found online of the American Zelda 1 manual, identifying the dungeon as "Manji".
This has me wondering if there’s similar translation issue or mis-identification going on with Cross Channel. The idea of Taichi becoming literal Nazi out of nowhere in Tower of Friends just seems nonsensical, but if the corpse he makes is just supposed to be a manji that would create VERY different context to not only what he’s doing but Tower of Friends and perhaps even Cross Channel as a whole, if at the end they’re trying to signify some kind of spirituality explanation for the events of the game and the “parallel world”.
I don’t know for a fact if this even is translation error and I don’t know Japanese myself, but one day I’d like to know the answer on this. I’m willing to bet on it being a translation error.
Chaos;Head (2008) - Yeah this game was sure something. The basic premise here is that an otaku shut-in goes paranoid as he thinks a conspiracy begins to envelop him and that a serial killer straight out of Se7en has decided to fuck with him, but that doesn't really sell how unusual this game is.
The protagonist Takumi is one of the last in the line of post-Evangelion anti-heroes in that he's genuinely a failure at answering the Campbellian call to heroism for the vast vast vast majority of this game. He's pretty much devoid of any heroic qualities at all for the longest time too- like the reason I dropped this game the first time was because the first several hours of this game largely consist of him complaining about "3D women" as he sits in his shitty container (He lives in a storage container on a rooftop), and chats on a thinly veiled equivalent to 2chan (Japanese equivalent to 4chan). On top of all that he's a stuttering coward who is prone to goofy hallucinations. This opening section of the game is honestly a bit much- I can handle "unlikeable characters" just fine but hours of misogynstic ranting do get very tiring to read very quickly. I 100% do not believe game is endorsing anything he says here- its purely for characterization and to show just how down in the gutter this guy is at the start, but it is rough with how repetitive it can be (It's not as bad as similar stuff I complained about with Cross Channel taking a lot time to get going but its similar issue).
Once serial killings start hitting the city he lives in and Takumi is forcibly entangled with the incidents (Both suspecting various other he meets of being "NewGen" (Short for "New Generation Madness killer") while he also gets accused by others and even suspects himself), the game really picks up a lot. The general paranoid atmosphere of the game and wondering just what is real and what is just another one of Takumi's delusions is really quite engaging, though after a certain point the game kind of just become urban fantasy story. They do try and play it off as "sci-fi" with the various explanations (And later entries of this same series like Steins;Gate are more rooted in blatant sci-fi premises), but here it doesn't quite have the same genre feel.
^Like this is the kind of story at first where the Se7en-esque serial killer sends "presents" to people (In fact you can probably figure out what's hidden underneath the aluminum foil here based on shape and size), though the story becomes something different by the end.
Similar to Cross Channel, I do think this game suffers from the side characters feeling a bit underdeveloped. Its not quite to same degree and I generally liked the side characters here in Chaos;Head more, but its notable. Apparently the rereleased version of this game- "Chaos;Head Noah" majorly expands on the side characters and explains some more plot information about them too, and while that version of the game isn't available yet in English (It is coming thankfully, but bizarrely it is going to be a Nintendo Switch exclusive) I do plan on checking it out eventually.
Probably the most interesting mechanic here is the delusion system. This game doesn't have much in the way of traditional VN choices, but occasionally you will get a moment where you can force Takumi to hallucinate something either positive or negative. The positive ones usually imagine him receiving adoration from people or imagining some kind of erotic scenario, while negative ones usually imagine him being attacked or threatened or committing suicide in some fashion. Both kinds of delusions occasionally foreshadow later plot developments as well.
Its a neat idea but I feel like it really doesn't affect all that much, sometimes feeling more akin to the type of choices you see in a Telltale game at best that are more about tailoring the story than anything. There is one ending that choosing specific delusions can lead you to, the B ending. I don't understand the thinking behind the B Ending since its locked to a second playthrough having seen either the A or AA endings first.
On top of that how the specific delusions are supposed to lead to B Ending doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I'm guessing the idea was supposed to be that being exposed to a constant barrage of "Whose eyes are those eyes?" delusions just sets Takumi up to shatter his self-confidence more than in a normal playthrough, but I don't get how it leads to Suwa successfully tricking Sena into killing her dad (Shouldn't what Takumi is going through not having direct affect on this?) or allow him to defeat Takumi.
The sequence where Suwa forces Takumi to experience the NewGen killings consecutively from the POV of a separate victim in each incident is an astounding little sequence, but I don't really get why its so hidden, especially since it actually explains a fair amount of plot mysteries.
Also on a basic level, its never clear to me what the choice of delusion is supposed to represent. Like in a normal game, your character's choices are exactly that- choices your character makes. I'm not sure if the idea behind the delusions is Takumi choosing to imagine horrifying scenario or something forced upon him by his fucked up brain
or by SHOGUN or Noah's sci-fi nonsense. This is well before getting into the "No Takumi, YOU are the delusions" revelation in the endgame too and frankly that raises so many questions for me.
I did end up liking this game way more than I expected based on obnoxiousness of the opening hours, and the protagonist does strike me as fairly unique, but the whole thing does feel a bit unfinished. Hopefully the expanded Switch version puts some needed meat on the bones of the game.
Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) - I picked up that Sonic Origins collection and played through this. A solid game for sure, though I don't like the emphasis on vertical levels here. That can work in a Mario game, but with Sonic I don't like how it just slows you down (Especially with waiting for spears in the walls to retract and such). The last Robotnik fight is pretty whatever too.
Still, even with those issues this isn't bad game or anything. It's just that Sonic 2 is so much better.
Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors (1994) - I also picked up the Capcom Fighting Collection. Its similar to the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, but with a wider variety of titles (Mainly 5 different Darkstalkers games).
Darkstalkers 1 here plays mostly similar to early SF2 games from what I can tell, though the emphasis here is on a horror aesthetic. One thing I really like about these versions of these games in the Capcom Fighting Collection is that they add in the ability for Smash Bros.-like inputs for the special attacks. That's good for people like that are just awful at even basic inputs that classic fighting games require.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
