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hopeymchope · 4 years ago

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Parascientific Escape: The sci-fi “escape room” visual novel-style series nobody talks about

I can’t help thinking that Parascientific Escape would probably have an active fandom somewhere on the Internet if it wasn’t TRAPPED ON THE 3DS ESHOP.

I mean, it’s an escape room-centric visual novel-style sci-fi Japanese game that is clearly inspired by Zero Escape and very anime in its style. There are endearing characters, including optimal waifus/husbandos, plus a gradual buildup of an interesting fictional world full of political intrigue, its own countries, its own companies, and of course... psychic powers. Because you can’t have a trilogy of Japanese visual novel-style games featuring escape room puzzles without mental powers, now can you?

But as I said... they’re trapped as download-only titles for the 3DS. That’s fucking brutal.

Even so, there’s a pretty big 3DS/2DS user base still in existence. It’s not like they’ve never been translated or something, so at least we have the capability to play them. So if you look into them, what are you getting?

A basic overview: Parascientific Escape is a trilogy of anime-style games about solving escape room mysteries and tracking down evildoers via the use of psychic powers (obvious Zero Escape influences). There’s an overarching plot about a mysterious mastermind who believes it’s time for the recently emerged psychics of the world to take their place as the next evolution of humanity and get their own nation (obvious X-Men influences).

They don’t work very well as standalone stories; each story relies on information from the last one, culminating in a game that stars the protagonists of both parts 1 and 2 together as they finally unravel the motivations behind the events of the whole series and face off with the people behind everything. In addition, the escape room puzzles start out pretty easy in the first game build to be pretty frustratingly obtuse by the tail end of the third. And on top of all that, each game taken on its own only contains about 3-4 escape rooms. So when you bundle all three together, that’s when it all works as a single satisfying package.

Don’t worry about burning a lot of cash to play the whole series, however. The three games are $5.00 US each on the 3DS eShop and are usually on sale for $2.50 each these days. I got the entire trilogy for $7.50 US!

So let’s break down the gameplay and setup in a little more detail. Don’t worry; I won’t give any spoilers that go beyond the first five minutes of any game in the series. The twists and turns are part of the fun here.

The first game is Parascientific Escape: Cruise in the Distant Seas. You play as Hitomi Akeneno, a high school girl (because of course she’s a high-schooler) with the dual abilities of mild telekinesis and a type of clairvoyance that lets her peer past barriers or into the insides of objects. She finds herself trapped on a sinking cruise ship where some mastermind keeps systematically locking her into isolated sections while she’s trying desperately to escape.

I really liked how you could look inside of an object with clairvoyance and then use her telekinesis to manipulate the various switches and levers within, gradually pulling some object you need out from within a maze. I also thought it was clever how the solution to a new escape roomight require you to backtrack to a previous escape room to investigate some object or area that wasn’t relevant to that previous room’s original puzzle.

(One of the things I found most fascinating about this one is the ethical debate raised by Hitomi’s friend Chisono regarding how Hitomi got herself involved in all this. Chisono offers a perspective that is extremely unusual to see in most fiction. You can even say it’s pretty cold, but it’s not without having some merit to it. I don’t want to say too much about what I’m talking about, though; it’s better left as a surprise.)

The second title, Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective, almost seems standalone at first. You play as Kyosuke Ayana, a private detective and actual adult (!) who is 22 years old. A young woman shows up at his office and asks to hire him for protection. See, there’s a serial killer on the loose, and she believes she’s the next target.

We are swiftly told that Kyosuke was once in an accident that necessitated the replacement of his left arm and right eye. He volunteered to be a guinea pig for some very special prosthetics that granted him artificial psychic powers. As such, he now has “chronokinesis” — to the power to look back in time. However, he can only look back for five days, and he only has limited ability to move or manipulate the things he sees in the past.

Naturally, Kyosuke’s investigation winds up trapping him within some escape rooms that require use of his unique abilities to solve. Some of the hints at the proper timestamps or exactly where you should be looking when you peer into the past are a little vague, though, which can cause momentary frustration. Because I like to always be making forward progress, I actually preferred Hitomi’s telekinesis/clairvoyance powers from the first game. Still, Hitomi had some pretty basic puzzles in her rooms. I can’t deny that these puzzles took more thought.

Outside of the escape rooms, everything is undeniably a huge improvement. The first game presented strictly linear segments of storytelling between the rooms, but this one is more of an adventure game. You can choose where you go, select from a limited menu of things to do when you get there, and do all of it in any order you like. There’s usually a correct sequence order to progressing the story, but it’s typically pretty clear what the next step is, so it’s not like you’re just flailing about and trying a bunch of locations blindly. Besides, there’s no way to get stuck, so don’t stress it. There are even a lot of actions you can take that have no impact on story progression at all — they’re just there to generate additional dialogue that further develops the characters.

The tradeoff is that you actually get fewer escape rooms overall. The first game had four, but the second only contains three. This is also the first game in the series to introduce multiple endings; you get a number of dialogue choices throughout, and unfortunately, it’s far too easy to trigger the “bad” ending. There are guides online to help you trigger the Gold Star “true” ending, however. Just hit up GameFAQs. You might want to use the guide on your first playthrough, because I can say from experience that it’s annoying to have to replay all the dialogue sections just to make the correct choices. (Luckily, you can skip over any irrelevant sections of each chapter — including the escape room puzzles.)

In spite of my above whining, the second one is probably my single favorite story in the Parascientific trilogy. It’s a lot of fun.

The final game in the trilogy is Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon. Mysterious characters who were plotting offscreen for the previous two games are finally given faces, locations that were talked about extensively in both are finally visited, and the two protagonists of the first couple games finally meet and team up. It’s absolutely a culmination of what they set up in the first two.

The narrative jumps around from the perspectives of many different characters, but the most time is undoubtedly spent with Hitomi and Kyosuke. Sadly, there is no gameplay usage of Hitomi’s powers this time; the escape rooms are all done with Kyosuke, and they are more devious now than ever before. Personally, I found the next-to-last one to be incredibly obtuse and frustrating. I ultimately had to consult a video playthrough on YouTube for that. (The YouTuber in question didn’t seem to have the same issues figuring things out that I did. So I guess your mileage may vary.)

The “adventure game” segments make a return here as well, although they’ve also become a bit tougher to figure out. There are a couple of times when you might find yourself wandering the various location options, clicking on every possible action to try and progress. Luckily, there aren’t so many default options that you’re left flailing for very long. Even the longest period of clueless wandering lasted me a maximum of 15 minutes.

Once again, you have to make the correct dialogue choices if you want a positive ending. And once again, GameFAQs is your friend and co-pilot.

Ultimately, even the gated endings and occasional puzzle frustrations did little to curb my enthusiasm. I really had fun with these characters and their stories, I greatly enjoyed the majority of the escape rooms, and I was pretty satisfied with how it all wrapped up. The character designs/artwork get better and better as the series goes on. The selection of music tracks may be the same throughout the whole series, but I really dug on them, so I can’t complain. Do I have any other misgivings? Well, just one; the English localization is pretty sloppy. There are a pretty large number of typos, and the dialogue can sound stilted and awkward at times due to being a direct translation. It’s actually at its worst at the start of the first game. Luckily, after about 30 minutes of playtime, it settles in and finds its voice.

Seriously, they should really figure out a way to re-package these games for another system that doesn’t use the the dual-screen setup. Put all three of them together, and it’d easily be satisfying as a full retail release!

But for now, if you have a 3DS/2DS, they’re only $7.50 in total most of the time (and $15.00 at the worst). Do you like adventure game-style mysteries and visual novel-esque progression and, of course, escape rooms? You should give these a shot! And I hope these devs get to make games with bigger budgets and better localizations in the future.

#parascientific escape #parascientific escape: gear detective #parascientific escape: cruise in the distant seas #parascientific escape: crossing at the farthest horizon #3ds #2ds #3ds games #2ds games #video games #visual novels #Kyosuke Ayana #hitomi akeneno #escape room games

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shylaxgameblogs · 7 years ago

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Shylax’s Top 10 Games (Played in the Year) of 2017

Yep, it’s the return! You’re going to be here a while, so...

10. Mario Golf World Tour (2014)

Yep, that’s right, a golf game. It wouldn’t be right without one, and here it is.

I really wanted to play this game because @pawelcyril kept gushing about it, but I don’t really play it anymore. It’s not a bad game, it wouldn’t be on this list if it wasn’t, but it could have been a lot better than it was. There are a lot of 9 hole only courses, which is disappointing. The single player story mode is fun, but short. Online’s loading times are disappointing. Being able to create and customize a Mii golfer is fun, but the Mii’s driving distance sucks compared to Star Mario. The tournament system is fun, and solves World Invitational’s cheating problem by just letting you go as many times as you like, but...Hot Shots Golf World Invitational was so much better. That game had so much more staying power, even with its own flaws.

9. Fire Pro Wrestling World (2017)

I remember playing Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium on a SNES emulator. That was my first experience with Fire Pro, and it was so much different than any other wrestling game I had played before. Probably the closest that comes to the Fire Pro experience are the aki wrestling games, most notably WWF No Mercy.

If you’re a fan of American-style wrestling, this game will probably disappoint you, because even though you can create your American favorites and have them battle each other, this game doesn’t feature the wild and crazy antics that make American wrestling tick. There are no storylines here, and no cutscenes. This is pure puroresu. Japanese wrestling is treated more like a legitimate sport, and so does this game. It’s all about the competition.

This game has no license, but it has a robust Create-a-Wrestler system, allowing you to create your favorite wrestlers, characters outside of wrestling, or original characters. You can even create bear wrestlers if you’d like, which is a major plus in its favor in my book.

However, the meat of the game is its robust wrestling engine. It’s 2D at its very best, relatively unchanged since the SFPWXP days, although it does look much better. The action is displayed in a 3/4 isometric view, and the grappling system is unique, and unlike American wrestling games, punishes button mashing, instead of rewarding it. There are three styles of grapples - weak, medium, and strong. You have to build up with successful weak moves before moving up - if you try to go for medium and strong moves too early, you’ll get countered.

The only reason I don’t play it more is it’s still in Early Access, and more features are being added and refined. Online play is there, but the netcode is pretty laggy. There’s not a story or career mode, so unless you have friends who are ubercompetitive at this game, its only other real use is as a supreme @tangobunny Watch Mode game.

8, Parascientific Escape Gear Detective (2015)

The sequel to 2014′s Parascientific Escape Cruise in the Distant Seas, which was a refreshing take on the Zero Escape formula, adding in powers you could use during “escape” sequences, and being able to backtrack to rooms you already completed, was a huge improvement over the original. The first game felt like a teaser for a much larger story, and felt pretty generic and cheap (the localization didn’t help).

Gear Detective (the Parascientific Escape games are eShop only games for 3DS) wasn’t anything groundbreaking either, but it was a much better use of your $5 than the original. While it seems to abandon the story the original set up, it is a more fully fleshed out story, feels more complete, and has multiple endings, which the original did not feature.

It still doesn’t compare to more full-budget and full price titles like the Zero Escape series, but the escape room genre is pretty limited, and this game is well worth your $5. I’m hoping to play the third game in the series soon so it can be eligible for next year’s list.

7. Pokemon Moon (2016)

This game was a mixed bag for me. I really enjoyed it, but there were some annoying decisions that prevented me from playing it more.

First, the good. I really liked the character designs in Sun/Moon. I enjoyed Alola more than Kalos, I enjoyed the new Pokemon in Alola more, and I appreciated that they tried to do something different with the Trials instead of the Gyms. I liked that they tried to breathe new life into old Pokemon with Alolan forms.

The downsides: Breeding is still a hassle, even with quality of life improvements, so competitive is still a hassle. Online was a huge step back, no more Super Training, no more being able to access online features while playing, you have to go to a separate screen. For its flaws, the PSS >>>>>>>>>> the Festival Plaza. Let us be able to chat via text and speech online, you cowards! There was a golfer character, but no golf minigame.

6. Pocket Card Jockey (2016)

Pocket Card Jockey was an unheralded 3DS eShop game that combined horse racing and solitaire. But while I played it, it was oh so addictive. I loved raising my horses, racing them, and naming them after obscure video game systems. If you don’t have it, you should definitely buy it. It’s a great way to pass the time.

The art style is incredibly cute as well, you’ll love your horses.

5. Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator (2017)

I almost forgot this game. @hopeies would have killed me if I had, so I put it on the list. I’m not super keen on romance-based visual novels, although I did put Katawa Shoujo on there last year. Being a heterosexual male, I did not think I would enjoy this game, but I was pleasantly surprised. I got to enjoy meeting and getting to know the various dads (Damien and Hugo were my favorites), but the game got some things right with the whole visual novel experience (and some things wrong).

My favorite thing about Dream Daddy, is that you can romance who you want. You can just go, “I want to romance that guy”, and YOU CAN FUCKING DO IT. No decrypting mysterious route conditions, no looking up a guide. And if you don’t know who you want to romance? You can get to know the various dads before committing to one. It also makes it very clear when you’ve pleased or displeased a dad, and pleasing or displeasing a dad is obvious if you’ve paid attention to what they like and don’t like. It takes a ton of the crypticness out of visual novels, and other VNs should take heed.

On the other hand, it doesn’t feature basic visual novel features like being able to backtrack or see a chat log, which is disappointing. DDADDS manages to mix up things by including minigames, made possible by the Unity engine. It also allows you to create your Dadsona, averting the typical blank slate protagonist of most visual novel games.

4. Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics (2016)

I bought the original One Way Heroics for 78 cents on Steam and loved it. It was a delightful hybrid of 16-bit JRPG and roguelike, and I was so excited when I heard Spike Chunsoft was doing an enhanced remake of this game. I haven’t played it as much as I want to, but it’s the original game but better, and that’s all I wanted.

To keep you from dawdling, you have to keep moving forward, or else the left edge of the screen will consume you. You also have to keep track of HP and hunger levels. Once you die, that’s it - but you can transfer items between playthroughs and gain perks that will help you do better in future playthroughs.

It’s such a delightful throwback to the old days, and a fun roguelike.

3. Love Live! School Idol Festival (2014)

This is the first ever mobile game to make the list. I knew I wanted to download this once I joined the mobile world - Cute girls, trading cards, and music? What’s not to like? The rhythm game aspect is very good. It’s very responsive, and fun. The visual novel aspect is kind of hit or miss, but I love the girls, so it’s all good. It’s basically just the characters being themselves, and no real story of importance. I wish the game was a bit less stingy with love gems, but otherwise, I love it.

2. Nier (2010)

Nier is kind of punching above its weight here. While the game itself isn’t anything special, it’s wrapped up in this awesome music, beautiful graphics, and innovative storytelling that makes it something special. Besides, Yoko Taro is just a great guy. I can’t wait to get a chance to play Automata, so I can surely put it on a future list.

1. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)

This is the video that convinced me to give SOTN another try:

youtube

It truly is a masterpiece, but some of my own thoughts: It’s a shame Sony discouraged 2D games on the PS1, because the 2D games on the PS1 are timeless. 2D is timeless. 3D ends up looking like shit later, and the PS1 3D games surely do look like shit.

#shylax original #text #video games #shylax top 10 of 2017

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