Unfortunately, sometimes, life is simply unfair.
You play as Date Kaname, a police investigator who is part of "ABIS": the Advanced Brain Investigation Squad. Basically, they have a special machine that let's Date "psync" with someone and enter their dream. So when ABIS encounters an uncooperative witness, they just hook them up to their psync machine. Conveniently, the witness always seems to dream about something relevant to the investigation (and, for that matter, always seems to dream). Not quite as conveniently, the information relevant to the investigation is often hidden within the dream, meaning Date (or technically, his avatar within the dream) must search it out. These sequences are known as "Somniums," and we'll get into more detail about them later.
The game opens at the crime scene, where a woman's corpse has been tied to a merry-go-round in an abandoned amusement park, and her left eye has been gouged out. It's a dreary, melancholic opening... to a game that is still by Uchikoshi Kotaro, so the atmosphere doesn't last long. There's not much physical evidence at the crime scene, but you quickly identify some witnesses and get interrogating. The game concerns the murder investigation, but I don't want to go much further, partially due to spoilers and partially because the story branches.
The story is the beating heart of a game like this, but... it was kind of a let-down to me. If nothing else, I do have to admit that it was put together well. Despite how ridiculous and disjointed things might seem at first, by the end of the game it's revealed how all the events were interconnected and led into each other. While there is one gigantic coincidence in the plot, it's in the backstory and I think a story of this complexity is allowed one. The game even goes out of its way to explain every single action the culprit takes over the course of the plot and show how everything played out.
Or at least, the game's plot is mostly well-constructed. While it's nicely woven in the broad strokes, there are plenty of seams to pick at. There's also one character (possibly two) who I thought should have had enough information to solve the crime immediately. To its credit, AI does try to provide an excuse for why this character didn't just immediately realize the truth, but I didn't find the excuse very convincing. The final sequences of the game also involve using information learned in other routes. While this is the central gimmick of the Zero Escape franchise, there's no justification for it here. AI even goes out of its way to disavow any sort of rational explanation. As a result, it ends up feeling like a cheap shortcut for Uchikoshi to get the plot where he wanted it to go.
Anyway, while the resolution does explain everything logically, the issue is that the conclusion isn't very surprising. AI frequently falls into two main pitfalls. The first is that a fair number of twists take the form of first making you think X is true, almost immediately disproving X and showing that Y is the case, and then at the end of the game reveal it was X all along. While this can be surprising, it'd be a lot more shocking if the truth was Z, something we had never considered. The other issue is that AI periodically brings up plot points that are very very obviously going to become important later. It doesn't feel like much of a "twist" when you've known for hours that it was coming. 999 introduces various pseudoscientific ideas and concepts over the course of the game, and then the climax involves a natural, logical extension of those ideas; AI will bring something up, and then that thing itself is directly involved in the resolution. The big twists were also ideas I had seen before, albeit in niche titles.
The game also goes out of its way to justify itself and sometimes gets incredibly stupid, even on its own terms. There's one moment where you need to search a dark corner in a room, so instead of just getting a flashlight, we're treated to a sequence where Aiba, Date's hyper-advanced AI companion who resides in his prosthetic eye, uses her night vision function. In another scene, Date needs to shoot a bad guy who has taken a hostage. The risk of hitting the hostage is too high if Date shoots the person head-on... so instead he does a ridiculously convoluted trick shot. Or how about the scene where Aiba runs out of power. The issue is that Aiba gets charged in Date's car, and the scene takes place after a long drive; you'd think that with all of Aiba's unrealistically advanced features she'd have a low battery indicator.
As a murder mystery, I also feel AI is lacking. Especially at the beginning, we never get to really investigate. I didn't feel like I was diving into the crime, but merely treading water until the game decided to initiate its next plot sequence. And if I know my effort is going to not matter because the game unilaterally sets the pace, why should I bother trying? I'll discuss this in further detail later, but AI seems to require an abnormally high amount of buttons prompts for a mere visual novel; this creates a tension between the interactivity of the controls and the linearity of the plot. While I was usually interested in what the game had next, actually progressing through the scenes often felt like a slog.
The fact that I hated playing as Date didn't help either. Maybe it was because of my own preconceived notions, but Date was not what I expected him to be. He's an amnesiac detective who's the guardian of a preteen kid that dresses like a foppish emo edgelord, and yet he acts like a generic juvenile perverted idiot anime character. It feels like literally 90% of his character is making horrible puns or acting perverted. His antics (to me) were tiring, nonsensical, and out-of-place. While there is that last 10% of his character hidden down there, it's just "okay" rather than "grating."
The rest of the characters don't fare much better. Aiba is the deuteragonist, and serves two roles in the plot: one, to banter with Date, and two, to obtain whatever information is necessary for the plot to proceed through magical hyper-advanced hacking. I just... didn't care about her. The game makes it clear that Aiba has a synthetic personality. She isn't the culmination of her experiences, but whatever she has been programmed to be, and she can (presumably) be changed at any time. I didn't have any particular interest in learning about her arbitrarily set personality.
One last character I think is worth mentioning is Iris Sagan, a net idol who goes by the online handle A-Set. She's probably the closest the game has to a tritagonist. It's very obvious that Uchikoshi loves A-Set and that the game wants me to care about her, but, unfortunately, merely making her a girl and putting her physically close to my in-game avatar is not enough to win me over. A fair amount of the game's emotional tension depends on you caring about Iris, and while I didn't want bad things to happen to her, I wasn't particularly vested in her plight either. I'll admit Date does have good reasons for caring so much about this random girl he happens to meet, but I'm not Date.
AI's humor did not quite do it for me. A lot of the jokes are horrible, strained puns. Most of them also take place as conversations between Date and Aiba. As I've already said, I found Date grating, and I didn't care about Aiba's "sense of humor" or dynamic with Date because her personality is artificial. Also, even when the banter was with other characters, it was still the same types of jokes—which I thought diluted the character voices, since it felt contrived for every person to apparently have the exact same unique sense of humor. This doesn't mean that every joke fell flat, but I was rolling my eyes a lot more than I was laughing or even chuckling.
The action scenes in the game are particularly atrocious. I'm bringing this up immediately after discussing the humor because I can only hope the action scenes were intended to be funny. If there were action scenes in The Room (no, not that one), they'd probably look like the sequences in AI. They're cartoony and over-the-top, and often feature hordes of mooks with the exact same model, as if we've wandered into the matrix. There's also a recurring gag involving porno magazines, which the game appears to treat as the most universally desired and coveted item in the entire world. Maybe this all sounds hilarious to you, but I found it insufferable.
The issue, I think, is that the action scenes completely upturn the game's balance between comedy and drama. Games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa are both about murders and chock full of jokes. I think the key to their balance of comedy and drama is twofold: first, a lot of the jokes are contained in optional conversations, and second, the jokes are concentrated in the lighter scenes. If a joke is in an optional conversation (from examining an object, for example), I don't think it disrupts the game's balance as much, since you can say: "the game didn't force the characters to have this silly conversation while investigating a murder, I made the characters have this silly conversation while investigating a murder." And by keeping jokes out of the tensest scenes (for the most part), they avoid tonal whiplash. AI's action scenes violate both of these principals. They're mandatory and, despite being the most outrageous scenes in the game, often take place in extraordinarily tense moments.
The gameplay is also kind of a drag. You'd think that this wouldn't be an issue for a game that's not much more than a visual novel, but I felt like AI wanted me to jump through too many hoops for what it is. All scenes are viewed from a static position, but you can freely look around. You can talk to any character that's present, and Date can examine various items in each location. When you hover your cursor over a person or object, their name will pop up and glow green if there is an unread interaction with them, and be grayed out if you've depleted their interactions. As a result, while you do need to pixel hunt to find every object, you can immediately tell on hover what hotspot you're on and whether you've examined it already. Additionally, most scenes are gated by talking to characters, rather than examining objects. There were no points where I got stuck on a pixel hunt.
There are two issues here, one with examining objects and one with talking to people. The issue with examining objects is that whether you've examined an object or not is reset every scene. A "scene" is usually one visit to an area, although sometimes one visit will consist of two "scenes." The writers came up about two to four different examine conversations for every object in the game... but there are some locations that you visit many, many more times than that. So by the midpoint of the game, all you get from examining an object is "that's a chair" or "that's a table," but every single object appears still "unexamined" every single scene. While examining the objects is admittedly optional, it seems kind of a shame that you need to choose between either trudging through dozens of recycled lines to find the few new jokes or forego the comedy entirely.
As for talking to people, the problem is that the game is kind of weird in how it has divided its conversation topics. One conversation will often be broken into multiple topics, forcing you to select each one individually. Selecting a character brings up the "talk" menu for that character, and selecting a talk conversation causes the "talk" menu to disappear—except the "talk" menu doesn't always reappear when the selected topic is done. So when the topic ends you have to realize that it's ended (and not just a scripted pause in the game), and then re-select the character to resume your conversation, and finally select the new topic to talk about. Which will often be the exact same topic, again. There were points in the game where a character only had a single talk topic, and every topic after the first would just be called "Continue." Why do I need to re-select the talk topic every few lines, when this is literally the only thing I can do now? Why not just make it one smooth conversation, rather that constantly interrupting it with pointless player input?
Like I said, it felt like AI wanted me to press so many buttons for what is essentially a visual novel. Every scene I need to look around and select every object (even though, by mid-game, none of the objects will have special examine conversations anymore), and then select each conversation topic of each character, with several topics likely kicking me out of the talk menu.
There's a couple more gameplay mechanics, so let's discuss them now. First, there are quick-time events. These happen during action scenes. There isn't much to say to them; they add a slight padding to the game, but they aren't done often enough to be obnoxious. Next is a couple of segments where you'll be presented with the evidence you've gathered during your investigation and answer questions based on them, almost like an Ace Attorney game.
And finally, the game's flagship mechanic: Somniums. This is the how Date enters and explores people's dreams. When Date "psyncs" with someone, the information he's searching for will materialize within the subject's dreams, but is often (or, in the game, always) hidden behind "mental locks" that Date needs to clear.
The Somniums work like this: the subject's dream will take the form of some physical location, and Aiba will appear within the dream as Date's avatar (with the form of a skimpy girl, because anime). Aiba can explore the dream and clear the mental locks by interacting with the various objects present in the dream. Pretty much everything in the dream—the setting, the method of unlocking the mental locks, and the behavior of all objects—depends and varies on the specific person and their psyche.
However, there's a time limit of 360 seconds. (Standing still causes time to slow to a near-halt, so you do have some time to think.) Interacting with an object consumes a set amount of time, so you can't just goof off. Additionally, by interacting with objects you'll earn "timies," which are power-ups that allow you to reduce the time it takes to interact with an object, by a fraction or to a specified amount. So Somniums are all about finding the proper interactions with objects while strategically using timies to minimize the time taken.
When I first started the game, I was prepared to hate Somniums based on the tutorial and first Somnium. The issue, I felt, is that when you have a puzzle that is literally dependent on dream logic, it's impossible to logically deduce. Instead you're forced to randomly guess and employ trial-and-error, which is frustrating rather than fun. However, after the first Somnium or so, the Somniums seemed to each operate on a much clearer set of rules, greatly diminishing the frustration.
That's not to say the Somniums are perfect. There are a couple of flaws, although none are major. First, although each one operates on its own internal logic, they're so short it can be kind of tough to figure out that logic before it's over. A lot of random extras have been hidden in the various object interactions, but the time limits encourages you to make a bee-line for the correct answer without exploring the side paths. And some Somniums have the timies and object timings designed in a way that basically requires you to have foreknowledge (in effect, to play twice) in order to properly clear.
My most frustrating Somnium moment involved action selection. When you select an object, Aiba's possible actions will pop up, with actions you've already taken grayed out. In my experience, in this sort of situation, a game will gray out selections based not on whether you've already selected the choice, but if you've already seen the resulting dialogue. Not so with Somniums. There was one Somnium where you were supposed to do action A and then action B. However, I did action B first, which had no effect. I then did action A... but action B remained grayed out, so I didn't think to do it again. I tried every action but nothing worked, and I was stuck with every action on every object grayed out. I had to look up the answer and discovered the answer was to select action B, even though the game had grayed it. I think the biggest reason this frustrates me is because, as I've already described, AI will constantly re-light up objects that you've investigated twenty times during investigations, but the one place in the game where you might actually have to re-investigate an object, it keeps the object grayed out.
That particular moment aside, I don't have particularly strong feelings about Somniums. They feel like standard point-and-click adventure puzzle segments, just presented in a slightly different context. Perhaps my lukewarm reaction to the game's flagship mechanic is the greatest possible indictment, though.
So that's AI. The story gives itself away when it isn't too busy being idiotic and/or perverted, the humor is juvenile, Date is grating, the other characters aren't particularly endearing, the action scenes are ridiculous, the Somniums are mediocre at best, and the standard visual novel gameplay is a trudge. It does end up being better as a whole than the individual parts suggest; the story was clearly put together very carefully, the game keeps the suspense and drama high from moment-to-moment, and it's hard to be totally glum when the characters are constantly acting silly and having fun. But there's still rampant problems and mediocrity, leaving the end result a resounding "meh" to me. I feel like the value I got out of the game was not the experience itself, but not having to worry about missing out on a fantastic Uchikoshi game by not playing it.
Of course, that's just me. Most other people seem to love it, so maybe you will too. (For future readers, in case the link changes—at the original time of posting, AI is the #3 Switch game of all time by user score.)
The part where all the item indicators reset when I returned to an area bothered me too, in the end I gave up clicking everything in both AI: The Somnium Files and its sequel. But despite that and the cringiness of the protagonist's gimmick, I really liked this game - probably says something about my tolerance for Spike-Chunsoft-iness
ReplyDeleteWell I now own Nirvana Initiative, which I heard is pretty divisive, so... we'll see how that goes!
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