It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m back, and hopefully I’ll last longer this time!
A few weeks ago, I finished... “Raging Loop” is what the English version will be called, so I guess we'll go with that. (If you look at the Japanese title in the picture above, you can see that the Japanese version calls itself "REI-JIN-G-LU-P".) Anyway, I finished Raging Loop a few weeks ago. I thought it was a pretty neat game that would never see the light of day in America, since it was extremely, extremely Japanese, plus it had already been out for several years, so the time for a translation had passed.
Naturally, the English localization was announced the next week.
So here we are! Since the game is coming out in English, and it’s a pretty niche game that people probably don’t know much about, I figured I may as well get reviews going again and help people find out about this game. (Of course, I’m not the first person to review this, but I may certainly be the least-known person to do so! Also, since I'm basing this just on my experiences with the Japanese version, I may end up using different terms than the official localization ends up using.)
Raging Loop is a game about a young man named, umm, Fusaishi Haruaki who crashes his motorcycle near the tiny rural village of Yasumizu. He intends to just fix his motorcycle and move on, but the damage is too heavy to repair in one day. As the sun sets, a strange fog envelops the village. The villagers start to freak out and warn Haruaki to hide until dawn, but when Haruaki goes to investigate a scream he hears, he gets mauled to death by a giant werewolf.
The next thing Haruaki knows, he’s riding his motorcycle again, shortly before his crash. Things play out the same as before, but this time, when Haruaki hears the scream, he remembers that going out to investigate got him killed last time. (Wait, "last time"?) He remains hidden and survives until the next day, where he discovers that he’s been wrapped up in a frightening ritual known as the Underworld Feast.
Due to the Feast, some of the villagers have been replaced by undead wolf spirits, who will kill one villager a night. The remaining villagers must kill the wolves, and may hang one person a day. The Feast will continue—and nobody can leave the village—until all wolves or all villagers have been eliminated.
In other words, they play a game of werewolf.
This “ritual” is the focus of most of the game. What’s really cool about Raging Loop is that the Underworld Feast is fully integrated into the customs, rituals and folklore of Yasumizu. The villagers have a legend about a Wolf Spirit that was killed by the villagers and the other animal spirits of the mountain, and swore revenge against the villagers. So the werewolves are people who have received the “blessing” of the Wolf Spirit to carry out its revenge. The humans receive the blessing of the remaining four animal spirits to aid them in their struggle against the Wolf once more: one human receives the blessing of the Snake Spirit and can learn whether one person is human or a wolf each night, one human receives the blessing of the Spider Spirit and can protect one person from the wolves each night, two humans receive the blessing of the Monkey Spirit and know who each other are, and one human receives the blessing of the Crow Spirit and can learn whether the village lynched a human or wolf each day. The rules of the game are passed down by song, and said to have been dictated by their great mountain spirit, Shinnai-sama.
As you might have gleamed from the title and my plot summary, Raging Loop is a time loop game. Haruaki mostly retains his memories from loop to loop, which gives him a slight, almost imperceptible advantage in the Underworld Feast. While there are multiple routes and choices, they unlock in what is basically a set order, making the game linear overall. If you're into this type of game, though, it's still a lot of fun! Raging Loop is much more about watching how Haruaki navigates the Underworld Feast and mysteries of Yasumizu than having you, the player, challenge them. Raging Loop uses a “key” system for progression, where certain paths require you to obtain specified “keys” to unlock them, and “keys” are obtained by reaching specified endings. Additionally, choices have no effect beyond their immediate branch, so there’s no need to worry about triggering the right flags or locking yourself out of something later. On the flip side, this means that every choice in the game (except the choices that split the main routes) either continues the route or leads to a near-immediate bad end. Add in the fact that the main routes must be completed in order and each main route must be fully completed to unlock the next, and you can probably see how this ends up a linear experience. The only part that will vary from player to player is the order they play the bad ends, none of which are particularly substantive.
I’m not saying this linearity is bad, however! After all, kinetic novels like the When They Cry series are a thing. I just want to make it clear that Raging Loop isn’t like Virtue’s Last Reward or some other visual novel with lots of freedom in the order you clear it, or some sort of mystery game where you yourself actually get to “play” the game of mafia. The linearity is not good or bad in itself; it’s just a fact of the game. But here it works, since Raging Loop is written so well.
If you like social deduction games, don’t mind reading, and can get into the psychological genre, Raging Loop is gripping. It’s exciting to see the strategies that get used, and the twists and turns the Feast takes. Usually, mafia is just a lighthearted party game played for fun in multiple rounds where the goal is simply for your team to win. But the Underworld Feast is only played once (as far as anyone who isn’t Haruaki can tell), and while each person wants their team to win, surviving is also a priority. Plus the players are the residents of Yasumizu, who have a convoluted web of relationships among them. This all drastically changes the dynamic of the Underworld Feast compared to the typical party game.
Of course, if you do like games like mafia and werewolf, you probably know that just “watching” these games isn’t nearly as fun as “playing” them. And as I’ve already discussed, in Raging Loop, you don’t really get to actually “play” the Underworld Feast. But Raging Loop is still exciting! After all, the game was designed and written to be “watched,” so it’s much more interesting than your typical, random, unscripted party game round. Plus the mysteries of Yasumizu, the Underworld Feast, and the time loop are all there to pique your interest as well.
However, the thing that I think makes Raging Loop work as well as it does is Haruaki. He’s smart. While a lot of adventure game protagonists are outright idiots and/or are forced to make idiotic decisions for the sake of the plot, Haruaki is consistently clever. If there’s a relatively obvious solution to a problem, Haruaki will usually take it.* If there’s a seemingly trivial answer to an issue, there will usually be a bad end showing why it doesn’t work. The fact that Haruaki consistently acts intelligently makes the game’s plot feel tight.
(*: There is one major point where Haruaki ignores an obvious solution: in one route, Haruaki receives the blessing of the Snake, which allows him to check whether someone is a human or wolf each night. With his time loop powers, the obvious solution is to repeatedly check a different person each night, and then he’ll know who everyone is from the start... but Haruaki never even addresses this possibility. That being said, I’m willing to forgive this for a few reasons. First, doing this would completely break the route and make it boring. Second, while Haruaki generally retains his memories, it’s not perfect; sometimes he doesn’t remember certain things until later, and sometimes nothing carries over. So it’s conceivable that even if he did this, he wouldn’t remember the results until it was too late. And third, he’s just one guy. Even if he had perfect information, he’d still need to convince everyone else and avoid dying, so even if Haruaki knew everyone's roles, that wouldn't necessarily translate into an easy victory.)
In the end, Haruaki approaches his predicament the same way a player approaches a video game. After all, if he fails or if something goes wrong, he can just reload from his earlier save point. This works perfectly, because Haruaki is in fact the player stand-in in a video game! Haruaki’s actions generally follow what the player would want Haruaki to be doing, preventing the frustration that idiotic protagonists bring. Taking a step back, I think Amphibian (the scenario writer) had a fantastic sense of what the player would be thinking and feeling in each segment of the game, allowing him to craft the game flow to fit that. There is more about Haruaki that I like, but that gets into spoiler territory, but suffice to say as a character he ends up quite far from your typical protagonist.
Structurally, I would divide Raging Loop into five parts. The first three parts comprise the three main routes, each one focusing on a different instance of the Underworld Feast with a different distribution of roles. The fourth part of the game involves jumping around the timeline to collect information and exposition regarding the overarching plot. The fifth part is the final “true end” route.
The best part of the game is the first three routes. The Underworld Feast werewolf games are engaging, mysterious, and oozing with atmosphere. They’re filled with twists and turns, and sink deeper and deeper into Yasumizu. The fourth section is the weakest, not just because it’s mostly exposition, but also because that is when the game stops being about the werewolf game, and starts being about something else. Once you know what this “something else” is, the game can never be about the werewolf game anymore (even if you revisit the main routes), and unfortunately the werewolf game is much more interesting than this "something else".
While this is a mystery adventure game, don’t expect the finale to tie up every single plot point. The conclusion does resolve enough to feel satisfying, and it’s clear that the events that aren’t explained are omitted intentionally. One of the neatest things about Raging Loop’s plot is that the driving force behind the solution isn’t technology and pseudoscience, but anthropology and folklore. The game is much more akin to Higurashi no Naku Koro ni than Virtue’s Last Reward in this respect. Raging Loop goes deep into real-world politics, mythology, and anthropology to both develop and explain its mysteries. This is a unique approach to the subject matter, and fits the folklore-based werewolf game setting perfectly.
The graphics are serviceable, but definitely one of the weaker points of the game. The character sprites have a bit more shading and detail than typical anime sprites, which give them a bit of an uncanny look, but I got used to them pretty quickly. Each character only has one pose with multiple expressions (unlike games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, which give each character a variety of expressive poses), so the narration and voice acting is necessary to breathe life into the characters. The backgrounds are varied and detailed, and there are a fair number of CGs and other graphics.
The weakest element of the game graphically is the Underworld Feasts. These are the segments where the villagers all gather to discuss the events that have happened in Yasumizu, and decide who they will lynch. They are the high points of the game, and akin to the trials in Ace Attorney and Danganronpa. And they are expressed in a single, static CG. Stylistically, Danganronpa is the coolest, with the camera spinning around the courtroom and constantly changing angles. While Ace Attorney is not quite as bombastic, it still keeps up a sense of movement by sliding between the defense, witness, and prosecutor’s stands. A single, static CG is... literally the least that can be done, besides a black screen. The content of the Underworld Feasts is interesting enough on its own to be engaging (if you like these types of stories), but the lack of graphics in these segments is still a weak point of the game. Raging Loop was initially a mobile game, so the restrained graphics are understandable, but that doesn’t make it any more exciting.
The music, sounds, and voice acting are fine as well. The music isn’t too intrusive, which I think is for the best since sometimes tracks play for a looong time, and some of the songs you will be hearing a lot. I ended up quite liking the folk-song that gives the rules of the Underworld Feast, which ends up as a leitmotif for the entire soundtrack. The game is fully voice-acted, which I thought really helped breathe life into the characters and scenes, especially considering the limited graphics.
There is one last really cool feature. Once you beat the game, you unlock “revelation mode,” which functions as a sort of new game plus. Essentially, revelation mode lets you see the story from the other characters’ point of view. If revelation mode is toggled on, you’ll see the thoughts of characters besides Haruaki, and even entire new scenes that Haruaki wasn’t present for. Since werewolf is all about what each individual person is thinking, getting to see everyone’s thoughts fleshes out the characters and game, and also explains a few plot points that weren’t handled the first time around.
One last thing that I’ll note is that while the game advertises itself as “J-horror,” it really isn’t scary. There are absolutely no jump-scares, and rather than pure “horror,” the game is much more focused on the atmospheric dread of being in a real-life werewolf game. There are a fair number of mangled and mutilated bodies over the course of the story, but the graphics showing these are heavily stylized. (Here’s an example.) There is also an option to censor the descriptions of the gore in the dialogue/narration. So even if you’re squeamish not good with horror, that shouldn’t be an issue when playing the game!
Raging Loop is an awesome folklore-based psychological mystery/thriller. It’s not a traditional whodunnit or fair play mystery, but you should definitely give it a look if you enjoy games like Zero Escape and Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. It’s available for phones, Steam, PS4, Switch, and Vita in Japanese, and will be available on Steam, PS4, and Switch in English.
をちなかれ！
Good review
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