Things have been a bit rough for me on the creative front since my bout with cancer last year, and dealing with covid this year hasn't helped with. I used to do most of my writing outside of the house, but now I'm in the house all the time (day job lets me work from home) and I've having difficulty adjusting.
So I'm going to try to get back in the writing groove again with NaNoWriMo this year. I'd been working on a novel series for the past few installments, and that's pretty much drafted (but not revised), so I'm going to clear my brain and start something new this year.
If you'd like someone to write with, you can follow my profile on the site. I generally write somewhere around 2000-2300 words a day while I'm participating, not because I'm trying to overachieve, but I find that a good length for me when it comes to story beats. When I deviate from that in my daily writing, the resulting chapters need a lot of work to make them flow the way I want.
I'm not ready to share the title of the project, being that it's so early, but I quickly found my theme song for it in the new single by debuting solo artist, rei. Here's a video of her performing "Shirayukihime" on the First Take, a video series where artists are recorded performing a song in a single take.
And because not everyone understands Japanese, the song title translates to "Princess Snow White" and a translated set of lyrics can be found here for the original version as performed by the group, Flower.
Monday, October 26, 2020
Monday, October 19, 2020
Bad Apple Wars vs Angel Beats
Note: I wrote this last year after I finished Bad Apple Wars and never got around to posting it. Since my brain power is rather tapped this weekend, I figured now would be a good time.
I'm now in the position where I've both watched Angel Beats and played Bad Apple Wars, and while there are no doubt other stories involving an afterlife trapped in a high school, nearly every blogger I checked out for Bad Apple Wars called it Angel Beats if it was an otome, and going in I wondered how fair was that actually.
So let's get the commonalities out of the way. Obviously there are going to be spoilers for both!
1) High School Purgatory
Both stories involve high school students who die in the prime of their life and awaken in a high school afterlife they cannot leave.
2) Rebelling Students
Both stories feature a group of students rebelling against the way the school is supposed to work. The SSS in Angel Beats knows that people who follow the rules eventually disappear, and conclude that disappearing is bad, so they fight against that. In Bad Apple Wars, the Bad Apples know that people who follow the rules lose their memories and individuality, eventually "graduating" to an unknown rebirth, so they break the rules to stay themselves.
3) There's That Good Student Enforcer
Angel is the initial antagonist in Angel Beats. Whenever the SSS get up to shenanigans she shows up to stop them. In Bad Apple Wars this role is handled by the Prefects as a whole, and they are led by White Mask, who is a particularly difficult individual to run into.
4) They Have a Band
Angel Beats has a full sized band called Girls Dead Monster that performs multiple times in the series, and lead singer Masami disappears (which we later know is a good thing) after her best performance ever. Bad Apple Wars does not have a full band, but the singer and guitarist of one, who had the misfortune of dying in the same bus accident together. Sanzu, the singer, gives the best performance of her afterlife, breaking not one but two of the school's unbreakable rules, after which she disappears (but it was not a good thing).
But there are differences...
Despite their similarities, I think Bad Apple Wars is enough of its own animal that comparing it to Angel Beats is only useful as a convenient shorthand for those already familiar with Angel Beats.
The stories handle their scenarios very differently. The SSS eventually learn that they aren't supposed to fight the system. Disappearing is moving on to a better place, and their high school purgatory is a stopping point for them to come to terms with their regrets before they move on. The problem with the SSS is that they were shooting themselves in the foot by hanging on to regrets of the past instead of learning to let go.
In Bad Apple Wars, the Bad Apples are supposed to fight the system, though they never learn the truth of the matter. The school is set up as a halfway point for students who died in despair. Those who play by the system gradually lose their memories so they can be reborn on graduation. But if students wish to return to the lives prematurely taken from them, they must challenge the rules of the school and earn their resurrection.
This means that in Bad Apple Wars if someone died regretting that they never did something, they could earn a second chance to fix that regret. And one of the characters ends up taking that chance even though he knows he's going to die again soon since the cause of his death (disease) won't go away with his ressurection.
Though nobody can die in either story, being already dead, Angel Beats plays the inability to die for laughs (and as a legitimate combat tactic). Characters will sacrifice themselves in a dramatic fashion knowing that they'll eventually revive, no worse for wear. Revival is not quick though, so it's usually something like they'll die in one episode and be back the next.
In Bad Apple Wars the characters know that "dying" is an impossibility, and they heal up from lethal wounds immediately. This prevents death from being much of an inconvenience and combat between the Bad Apples and the Prefects involves the Bad Apples' Soul Totems (which are unique to each person) and the Prefects' correction tools. Neither side expects to do any lasting physical harm to each other, which is why the Prefects' weapons alter the minds of those hit and the Bad Apples largely to expect to delay or inconvenience the Prefects while they execute their real objectives.
Also different is that the school staff has a role in Bad Apple Wars. While they're just props in Angel Beats, in Bad Apple Wars they are essentially the administrators of this afterlife. Though they are the ones who set up the prefects with their roles, they don't actively work against the Bad Apples and most of them are happy about their charges eventually leaving to go back to their previous lives (except probably Mr. Gas Mask).
I suspect, having watched and played both, that the only reason Angel Beats gets brought up is that it's simply the easiest reference point, given that they both take place in a high school afterlife and both came out of Japan. If you like one, you might not necessarily like the other. One is a romance, the other is a dramedy, and they have diametrically opposed messages about letting go of the past and moving on to reincarnation.
So I wouldn't call Bad Apple Wars an otome version of Angel Beats, because tonally it's not. If anything, I would like to call it another entry in the high school afterlife subgenre. And if that subgenre doesn't already exist, it really should, because there's more that could be done with it.
I'm now in the position where I've both watched Angel Beats and played Bad Apple Wars, and while there are no doubt other stories involving an afterlife trapped in a high school, nearly every blogger I checked out for Bad Apple Wars called it Angel Beats if it was an otome, and going in I wondered how fair was that actually.
So let's get the commonalities out of the way. Obviously there are going to be spoilers for both!
1) High School Purgatory
Both stories involve high school students who die in the prime of their life and awaken in a high school afterlife they cannot leave.
2) Rebelling Students
Both stories feature a group of students rebelling against the way the school is supposed to work. The SSS in Angel Beats knows that people who follow the rules eventually disappear, and conclude that disappearing is bad, so they fight against that. In Bad Apple Wars, the Bad Apples know that people who follow the rules lose their memories and individuality, eventually "graduating" to an unknown rebirth, so they break the rules to stay themselves.
3) There's That Good Student Enforcer
Angel is the initial antagonist in Angel Beats. Whenever the SSS get up to shenanigans she shows up to stop them. In Bad Apple Wars this role is handled by the Prefects as a whole, and they are led by White Mask, who is a particularly difficult individual to run into.
4) They Have a Band
Angel Beats has a full sized band called Girls Dead Monster that performs multiple times in the series, and lead singer Masami disappears (which we later know is a good thing) after her best performance ever. Bad Apple Wars does not have a full band, but the singer and guitarist of one, who had the misfortune of dying in the same bus accident together. Sanzu, the singer, gives the best performance of her afterlife, breaking not one but two of the school's unbreakable rules, after which she disappears (but it was not a good thing).
But there are differences...
Despite their similarities, I think Bad Apple Wars is enough of its own animal that comparing it to Angel Beats is only useful as a convenient shorthand for those already familiar with Angel Beats.
The stories handle their scenarios very differently. The SSS eventually learn that they aren't supposed to fight the system. Disappearing is moving on to a better place, and their high school purgatory is a stopping point for them to come to terms with their regrets before they move on. The problem with the SSS is that they were shooting themselves in the foot by hanging on to regrets of the past instead of learning to let go.
In Bad Apple Wars, the Bad Apples are supposed to fight the system, though they never learn the truth of the matter. The school is set up as a halfway point for students who died in despair. Those who play by the system gradually lose their memories so they can be reborn on graduation. But if students wish to return to the lives prematurely taken from them, they must challenge the rules of the school and earn their resurrection.
This means that in Bad Apple Wars if someone died regretting that they never did something, they could earn a second chance to fix that regret. And one of the characters ends up taking that chance even though he knows he's going to die again soon since the cause of his death (disease) won't go away with his ressurection.
Though nobody can die in either story, being already dead, Angel Beats plays the inability to die for laughs (and as a legitimate combat tactic). Characters will sacrifice themselves in a dramatic fashion knowing that they'll eventually revive, no worse for wear. Revival is not quick though, so it's usually something like they'll die in one episode and be back the next.
In Bad Apple Wars the characters know that "dying" is an impossibility, and they heal up from lethal wounds immediately. This prevents death from being much of an inconvenience and combat between the Bad Apples and the Prefects involves the Bad Apples' Soul Totems (which are unique to each person) and the Prefects' correction tools. Neither side expects to do any lasting physical harm to each other, which is why the Prefects' weapons alter the minds of those hit and the Bad Apples largely to expect to delay or inconvenience the Prefects while they execute their real objectives.
Also different is that the school staff has a role in Bad Apple Wars. While they're just props in Angel Beats, in Bad Apple Wars they are essentially the administrators of this afterlife. Though they are the ones who set up the prefects with their roles, they don't actively work against the Bad Apples and most of them are happy about their charges eventually leaving to go back to their previous lives (except probably Mr. Gas Mask).
I suspect, having watched and played both, that the only reason Angel Beats gets brought up is that it's simply the easiest reference point, given that they both take place in a high school afterlife and both came out of Japan. If you like one, you might not necessarily like the other. One is a romance, the other is a dramedy, and they have diametrically opposed messages about letting go of the past and moving on to reincarnation.
So I wouldn't call Bad Apple Wars an otome version of Angel Beats, because tonally it's not. If anything, I would like to call it another entry in the high school afterlife subgenre. And if that subgenre doesn't already exist, it really should, because there's more that could be done with it.
Monday, October 12, 2020
Spice and Wolf Light Novels Series Review (Vols 1-17)
Light novels are growing in popularity in the US, but are still a bit niche. I don't know too many people who read them, even though many of those who are anime fans have watched numerous anime based on them. Most reviews only cover the series on a volume by volume basis, which makes it hard to see whether a series is worth getting into given that these can get pretty massive.
They're essentially YA serials, aimed at a similar age in Japan as YA is in the US. Generally each book has its own story (though sometimes there are multi-parters) and the characters keep moving forward as long as the series lasts. It's not uncommon for popular series to go on for a dozen plus volumes, but this means sticking with a series can be a serious time investment.
Spice and Wolf by Isuna Hasekura is the first light novel series that I can say I've "finished." It was one of the first translated for American audiences, and the earliest editions even had removeable Americanized covers in an attempt to reach a crossover audience. It's also been around long enough that all seventeen volumes of the original series have been completely translated. I put "finished" in quotations because the series picked up again and there are more installments in the form of Volume 18 and beyond, but Volume 17 is clearly the end of the original story and the Spring Log sequel books seem to be forming their own ongoing subseries.
This review will have some general spoilers, since I want to be honest about the direction the series goes, but it will be light on specifics since I'd like more people to read this series. Though I may complain about parts, I enjoyed it enough that I've spent seventeen books with these characters!
Probably like most English speakers, I became interested in Spice and Wolf through the anime, and though I like Holo, the character I actually fell in love with was Lawrence, who is so different from the usual male protagonist. Lawrence is weak, he's no good in a fight, and while his best asset is his head for economics, he's not perfect about using it and gets himself in trouble when he can't see the forest for the trees. He understands that he's a traveling merchant with meager assets, and his dream is to one day make enough money to settle down somewhere and open a shop. He's simple, but realistic for the time and place he exists.
Of course, what isn't simple is meeting Holo, the erstwhile harvest goddess of one of the towns he routinely visits in his travels. Tired of being taken for granted by the locals, Holo decides to stow away in his wagon and convinces him to take her back to her homeland in the north. Though she was worshipped, in actuality she is more of a very large and ancient wolf from older times when beasts like her were common. She's been gone from her home so long she doesn't remember how to return, nor does she know what happened to her former packmates, but she promises Lawrence that traveling with her will be good business and she will earn her keep.
From there, the series is largely a tale of Lawrence and Holo's misadventures in the various cities and towns they visit along the way. They are rarely in any physical danger (because what danger could possibly stand up to Holo) and there are a lot of details about medieval economics that other authors gloss over. Hasekura makes that his focus, and quite a few of the books are "solved" by Lawrence coming up with an economic scheme that will pan out for all parties involved.
Holo and Lawrence also have good chemistry with each other. Lawrence is tight with his money out of necessity. He doesn't have much of it. But Holo is fond of the finer things in life, particularly good food and drink. While she often helps Lawrence get a good deal, she also eats her way through much of the fortune she brings him, leaving it unclear just how much money he has at any given time in the series.
Despite their differences, as they travel together they realize they're growing fond of each other, but their journey by its nature is designed to be a temporary one. Once they reach her home, Lawrence has other things to do, and there's no reason for her to venture away. Aside from that, Holo is painfully aware that Lawrence is only human and will pass away long before she ever does.
The anime skips the Vol 4 story and uses Vol 5 as its finale, which makes for a good ending for Season 2 since it ends with Lawrence confessing to Holo that he loves her and he's made a choice that puts her well being over his chance to make a profit. It also was a good time for the anime to end in general, because there clearly came a point when Hasekura realized that this series was going to end sooner than the fanbase would like, given that there was a world map and we know the general vicinity of Holo's homeland. Vol 5 puts the end of her journey close enough that it could end in weeks.
Volume 6 begins what I call "the detour." Lawrence and Holo decide to chase after the perpetrator of a business deal gone wrong as an excuse to avoid going to her home right away so they can extend their time together. Eventually they do a lot more than that. Between the three short story collection volumes and the detour itself, the main story is on hold until about Vol 14.
To be fair, I think you could skip from the end of Vol 5 to the start of Vol 14 and the only thing you'd be confused about is the occasional mention of a non-human character from the middle volumes and the fact that Lawrence and Holo obtained a third traveling companion in the form of the boy Col.
And Col never really worked for me. I felt like he upset the Lawrence and Holo dynamic since he was obliviously third wheeling everywhere they went and Holo would use him to try making Lawrence jealous (which wasn't really that effective since Col is clearly underage and ignorant of his part of any of it). If Hasekura added Col expressly to stop Lawrence and Holo from getting any closer, he did a fair job of it, as I feel their relationship didn't go anywhere during those middle volumes.
Volume 14 puts them back in Lenos, the town of Vol 5, which is why it's an excellent place to pick up the series again, and Lawrence is once again confronted by whether he'd rather follow Holo or his livelihood. Unlike most series where characters fall in love and expect everything to work out, over the last few books, Lawrence comes to realize what being in a commitment really means, and sometimes that means giving things up. It's not that he has to stop being a merchant, but he can't pursue every opportunity willy-nilly like he used to, and sometimes it might mean taking a loss.
Volumes 15 and 16 comprise the Coin of the Sun duology and series finale, and while Lawrence and Holo's devotion to each other is clearer than ever and they understand that they will not part at the end of their journey, it's rather dampened by the fact their journey actually isn't over. It also hurts that the second half of this duology focuses more on the needs of other characters than our two leads.
Fortunately, there is Volume 17 to provide the epilogue and the proper ending to the series, because I would have been rather upset if it seriously ended at Vol 16. Hasekura calls Vol 16 the final book in his afterward for it, but really, it's incomplete without Vol 17, which provides the closure the previous volume is missing. Unfortunately there is still one glaring omission in Vol 17, which will no doubt annoy a fair number of people (even my friend who has only watched the anime series was in disbelief about it), and Hasekura brings it up in the narration so it's in no way an accidental omission, but at least it's clear that the pair are settling into their happily ever after.
I still enjoyed the series. There aren't many I'd read seventeen volumes of, but it's more for the journey and the characters involved.
Spice and Wolf continues in both the spin-off series Wolf and Parchment, following a now-adult Col and Myuri, the daughter of Lawrence and Holo, and the main series under the Spring Log arc name. I haven't read either yet.
Part of this is because Spring Log assumes some familiarity with Wolf and Parchment and I'm not sure if I want to read Wolf and Parchment. Col was mostly inoffensive, but also terribly bland as a hapless kid along for the ride. He had an dream about restoring the lost lore of the northlands while also being in service of the church, which could be interesting as an adult, but it would depend a lot on what his adult persona ended up being like.
They're essentially YA serials, aimed at a similar age in Japan as YA is in the US. Generally each book has its own story (though sometimes there are multi-parters) and the characters keep moving forward as long as the series lasts. It's not uncommon for popular series to go on for a dozen plus volumes, but this means sticking with a series can be a serious time investment.
Spice and Wolf by Isuna Hasekura is the first light novel series that I can say I've "finished." It was one of the first translated for American audiences, and the earliest editions even had removeable Americanized covers in an attempt to reach a crossover audience. It's also been around long enough that all seventeen volumes of the original series have been completely translated. I put "finished" in quotations because the series picked up again and there are more installments in the form of Volume 18 and beyond, but Volume 17 is clearly the end of the original story and the Spring Log sequel books seem to be forming their own ongoing subseries.
This review will have some general spoilers, since I want to be honest about the direction the series goes, but it will be light on specifics since I'd like more people to read this series. Though I may complain about parts, I enjoyed it enough that I've spent seventeen books with these characters!
Probably like most English speakers, I became interested in Spice and Wolf through the anime, and though I like Holo, the character I actually fell in love with was Lawrence, who is so different from the usual male protagonist. Lawrence is weak, he's no good in a fight, and while his best asset is his head for economics, he's not perfect about using it and gets himself in trouble when he can't see the forest for the trees. He understands that he's a traveling merchant with meager assets, and his dream is to one day make enough money to settle down somewhere and open a shop. He's simple, but realistic for the time and place he exists.
Of course, what isn't simple is meeting Holo, the erstwhile harvest goddess of one of the towns he routinely visits in his travels. Tired of being taken for granted by the locals, Holo decides to stow away in his wagon and convinces him to take her back to her homeland in the north. Though she was worshipped, in actuality she is more of a very large and ancient wolf from older times when beasts like her were common. She's been gone from her home so long she doesn't remember how to return, nor does she know what happened to her former packmates, but she promises Lawrence that traveling with her will be good business and she will earn her keep.
From there, the series is largely a tale of Lawrence and Holo's misadventures in the various cities and towns they visit along the way. They are rarely in any physical danger (because what danger could possibly stand up to Holo) and there are a lot of details about medieval economics that other authors gloss over. Hasekura makes that his focus, and quite a few of the books are "solved" by Lawrence coming up with an economic scheme that will pan out for all parties involved.
Holo and Lawrence also have good chemistry with each other. Lawrence is tight with his money out of necessity. He doesn't have much of it. But Holo is fond of the finer things in life, particularly good food and drink. While she often helps Lawrence get a good deal, she also eats her way through much of the fortune she brings him, leaving it unclear just how much money he has at any given time in the series.
Despite their differences, as they travel together they realize they're growing fond of each other, but their journey by its nature is designed to be a temporary one. Once they reach her home, Lawrence has other things to do, and there's no reason for her to venture away. Aside from that, Holo is painfully aware that Lawrence is only human and will pass away long before she ever does.
The anime skips the Vol 4 story and uses Vol 5 as its finale, which makes for a good ending for Season 2 since it ends with Lawrence confessing to Holo that he loves her and he's made a choice that puts her well being over his chance to make a profit. It also was a good time for the anime to end in general, because there clearly came a point when Hasekura realized that this series was going to end sooner than the fanbase would like, given that there was a world map and we know the general vicinity of Holo's homeland. Vol 5 puts the end of her journey close enough that it could end in weeks.
Volume 6 begins what I call "the detour." Lawrence and Holo decide to chase after the perpetrator of a business deal gone wrong as an excuse to avoid going to her home right away so they can extend their time together. Eventually they do a lot more than that. Between the three short story collection volumes and the detour itself, the main story is on hold until about Vol 14.
To be fair, I think you could skip from the end of Vol 5 to the start of Vol 14 and the only thing you'd be confused about is the occasional mention of a non-human character from the middle volumes and the fact that Lawrence and Holo obtained a third traveling companion in the form of the boy Col.
And Col never really worked for me. I felt like he upset the Lawrence and Holo dynamic since he was obliviously third wheeling everywhere they went and Holo would use him to try making Lawrence jealous (which wasn't really that effective since Col is clearly underage and ignorant of his part of any of it). If Hasekura added Col expressly to stop Lawrence and Holo from getting any closer, he did a fair job of it, as I feel their relationship didn't go anywhere during those middle volumes.
Volume 14 puts them back in Lenos, the town of Vol 5, which is why it's an excellent place to pick up the series again, and Lawrence is once again confronted by whether he'd rather follow Holo or his livelihood. Unlike most series where characters fall in love and expect everything to work out, over the last few books, Lawrence comes to realize what being in a commitment really means, and sometimes that means giving things up. It's not that he has to stop being a merchant, but he can't pursue every opportunity willy-nilly like he used to, and sometimes it might mean taking a loss.
Volumes 15 and 16 comprise the Coin of the Sun duology and series finale, and while Lawrence and Holo's devotion to each other is clearer than ever and they understand that they will not part at the end of their journey, it's rather dampened by the fact their journey actually isn't over. It also hurts that the second half of this duology focuses more on the needs of other characters than our two leads.
Fortunately, there is Volume 17 to provide the epilogue and the proper ending to the series, because I would have been rather upset if it seriously ended at Vol 16. Hasekura calls Vol 16 the final book in his afterward for it, but really, it's incomplete without Vol 17, which provides the closure the previous volume is missing. Unfortunately there is still one glaring omission in Vol 17, which will no doubt annoy a fair number of people (even my friend who has only watched the anime series was in disbelief about it), and Hasekura brings it up in the narration so it's in no way an accidental omission, but at least it's clear that the pair are settling into their happily ever after.
I still enjoyed the series. There aren't many I'd read seventeen volumes of, but it's more for the journey and the characters involved.
Spice and Wolf continues in both the spin-off series Wolf and Parchment, following a now-adult Col and Myuri, the daughter of Lawrence and Holo, and the main series under the Spring Log arc name. I haven't read either yet.
Part of this is because Spring Log assumes some familiarity with Wolf and Parchment and I'm not sure if I want to read Wolf and Parchment. Col was mostly inoffensive, but also terribly bland as a hapless kid along for the ride. He had an dream about restoring the lost lore of the northlands while also being in service of the church, which could be interesting as an adult, but it would depend a lot on what his adult persona ended up being like.
Monday, October 5, 2020
VN Talk: Murder By Numbers
Platform: Windows (also on Switch)
Release: 2020
A friend of mine gave me the heads up about this indie game by comparing it to the Ace Attorney series, and after I watched the adorable opening movie, I realized I had to buy it. It was a slice of Saturday morning cartoon nostalgia crossed with solving mysteries. I was sold.
And here's your obligatory spoiler warning for a game that is less than a year old, since I'll also be covering some general details about the final villain and the end of the game.
Murder By Numbers clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Ace Attorney, being on the lighter end of mystery games and using humorous sound effects to express someone's shock or dismay. Much of this narrative sunshine is also due to SCOUT, a well-meaning robot who doesn't quite understand human slang and behavior. Usually if the mood is getting low, you can count on SCOUT to either break it with an unintentionally funny line, or by offering a genuinely kind word of encouragement.
I dove into the game appreciating its quirky sense of humor and entertaining cast of characters, but that said, after I played for a while, I realized I wasn't loving the game as much as I wanted to.
While we have the usual colorful cast of characters we'd expect from an Ace Attorney-style game (especially one set in Hollywood) and the associated stretching of what is permissible behavior because of them, I found I didn't quite like some of the characters.
There's a lot about Honor that's appealing. Aside from being a woman of color, she's a divorcee with a strained relationship with her ex-husband, one that she would like to end permanently except that her mother keeps hoping they'll get back together and finds ways to include him. It's complicated and unhealthy, given that her ex used to gaslight her to keep control of the relationship, and that's something we rarely get to see a female protagonist deal with. Honor left that guy, is finding her place as a newly single woman, and gets to have her ex arrested for some shady stuff over the course of her amateur detective work.
And I'm a little conflicted about how her ex was handled. I'm fine with him being a vile human being, but until his arrest I wasn't exactly sure what level of danger he was to her or anyone else. Is he just a controlling ex, or he is a man capable of calling in a murder? There was a build-up during the second case where it was starting to look like he was involved in something deep, and eventually it looks like "all" he was up to was making Honor's career as an actress crash and burn as revenge for leaving him.
While normally that would be fine, I started suspecting him of being involved with the end of the storyline baddie (instead of just hiring one of their goons), but in the middle of the third case he's just arrested and off he disappears. It felt like solving the largest subplot with a third of the story to go! I was expecting him to hang around until the fourth case before being shuffled off camera.
I also want to talk about the pacing of the game. While this may not be an issue for some players, it's important to realize that this is a combination mystery/puzzle game, with most on the weight being on the puzzle. There are no courtroom trials in Murder By Numbers, so most of the gameplay comes in the form of puzzles called nonograms (also commonly referred to by gamers as Picross). You will do these puzzles every time Honor looks for something or if someone shows her something.
This caused me numerous late night moments of praying that I could just get to the next break point in the story and save without hitting a puzzle that will take me another 20 minutes to solve so I don't lose track of the conversation. It really sucks starting a conversation, getting a puzzle, realizing I have to stop and save, and then coming back the next day to finish the puzzle only to forget why I was doing the puzzle in the first place. Oftentimes the ending half of the conversation wouldn't give me the necessary context to remember what happened beforehand, so I'd be trying to put things together with vague memories of the case in general.
While the game has one of the better nonogram tutorials, I'm more of a casual dabbler than a hardcore nonogram puzzler, so it wasn't uncommon for me to spend most of an hour long play session on just two or three puzzles. The puzzles were fun at the start, but the further I got in, the more I found them to be hindrance, and while there is a hint option, doing that reduces your score, barring you from unlocking extra cut scenes, so if you're more of a story person than a puzzle person, you still have to do all the puzzles the hard way to get your story.
The narrative conceit is that SCOUT is looking for clues, and doing the puzzle is him sifting through data to find things, but that doesn't explain why I need to do a puzzle to reveal a driver's license someone else is showing me.
The one thing that saves this game is SCOUT. Aside from being the biggest source of humor in the game, the meta story that runs through all the cases revolves around his origin, and because he's such a good kid we care about what happens to him.
Like the Ace Attorney series, there is a smaller story for each case, and an overarching story that runs through the entire game. However, Ace Attorney usually does a pretty good job making overarching story details relevant to the current plot when revealed in early cases, leading to "wow" moments when you realize that what looked like a minor detail early on is actually really important to a later case.
Murder By Numbers doesn't do this, since the overarching story elements tend to be tangentially or completely unrelated to individual case stories. SCOUT's existence doesn't have much to do with any of the cases, not even the one that kicks off the final case, but the narrative expectation is that somehow everything is being masterminded by the secret organization that created him (or at least that's what I was hoping after watching the opening movie) when that isn't the case at all.
I mean, the death at the end of the first case and the final villain are tied together, but it feels almost incidental since what the villain wants is so far removed from what his lackey was contracted to do by Honor's ex. It might feel a little unfair expecting the story to ape the same plot beats as Ace Attorney did, but it's clearly a setup the developer was going for when they hired the same soundtrack composer and they included the same audio cues that match the intonation of how a character is speaking. I ended up feeling like the individual cases didn't matter as much as they should have.
Part of this was due to being burnt out on puzzles, so I ended up taking a two month break, but I've done that with other games and not had nearly the same amount of difficulty picking up the story again as I have with this one.
But if there was one plot thread that could pull me through, it was caring about SCOUT. I knew he'd been altered since his creation because someone wanted to turn him into a weapon, and then he was discarded when one of his team members was accidentally killed by him. So it was easy to root for a robot that just wants to be loved and not hurt the people he cares about.
Since the final villain is in direction opposition to all that, and was responsible for altering SCOUT in the first place, we care about defeating him not because of anything recent he's done, but because of what he did to SCOUT before the story even started, which is good because as a primary villain he leaves something to be desired.
Sure, Jack is menacing and he's got a gun, but his attitude and the dubious morality of his security firm are completely at odds with his high-minded claims that he's doing all of this to save lives by making weaponized robots to fight in place of people. It's not that he can't have that be his end goal, we have well-meaning extremist characters all the time, but I have trouble believing that a guy so quick to get his hands dirty is really interested in saving lives. I would've had an easier time believing he was trying to land a lucrative military contract for his end game.
I don't mind that it was included. The main story was complete and having a sequel hook for a potential second game in a series isn't a bad idea. But on the other hand, I don't know if I want to do a second go-around.
Because the gameplay/game design interfered with my enjoyment so much, I would need a couple things to play a sequel. 1) The ability to save whenever I want during the visual novel segments (so I can stop at a good breaking point in the story, and not the moment of a reveal, which is when the puzzle shows up). 2) Either fewer puzzles or no punishment for using hints when I want to speed up so I can finish my play session while I understand what's happening in the story. I'm here for the plot, and if taking hints means I'm barred from seeing all the story, then I won't use hints, and though I think Murder By Numbers has a lot of potential, I didn't love it enough to keep playing when I burned out on puzzling.
If you love nonograms for their own sake and you're fast at solving them, then you'll probably enjoy playing through a lot more than I did. But if you're just an Ace Attorney fan and not a nonogram one, you may want to try a few nonograms independently of the game first and decide whether you can stand doing multiple 15x15 nonograms in a row by the time you get to the later cases.
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