Chaos;Head Noah / カオスヘッドノア

Takumi Nishijou is just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill reclusive socially anxious MMORPG-addicted anime-obsessed self-absorbed rude cowardly acerbic loner Japanese teenager that lives alone in a storage container on top of an apartment building. Y'know, the usual. One day weird things start to happen, and Takumi wants them to stop, and... that's pretty much the entire plot of Chaos;Head. (I'm not calling it "ChäoS;HEAd," sorry not sorry.)

As you may have guessed from the weird semi-colon in the name, Chaos;Head is connected to Steins;Gate, the beloved anime and visual novel that I had slightly different feelings on. And yet, while I absolutely hate Steins;Gate, I at least have feelings on it, whereas Chaos;Head is just... there.

I think the issue for me is that Chaos;Head lacks drive. As I said a moment ago, the entirety of the plot is "Takumi wants all this weird stuff to stop." Takumi doesn't want to do anything. There isn't anything he's trying to accomplish. Things just happen to him as he waits for things to stop happening to him. There's no progress or development or anything, the game just teases you with near-climaxes until you get to the real climax and it ends.

I'm not ragging on Chaos;Head just because I didn't like Steins;Gate or anything. In fact, I really liked Chaos;Head at the beginning! While Okabe was a delusional, grandstanding idiot who took forever to figure out even the smallest plot developments and seemed to come up with the most idiotic course of action at literally every turn, Takumi grasped situations much more quickly and had reasonable reactions to the events that happened around him. Sure, there were a few places where it probably would have been better to just have a direct conversation with whomever, but Takumi's social anxiety is an established character trait and, while this flaw is arbitrary in the sense that the writer could have just not given it to him, Takumi's social ineptitude reverberates through his entire character. Chaos;Head's plot surrounds a series of mysterious deaths, which is always a good way to get me on your side, and sprinkles bizarre, unnerving events within everyday life, like a modern, urban version of Higurashi When They Cry.

But it just keeps going on, and on, and on, and we do get weird events and character moments and clarifying exposition, but it never feels like there's solid development. It never feels like the plot catalyzes into anything concrete, because... it doesn't. We never get any sort of goal for Takumi to accomplish himself, so we're left just waiting for the game to run its course and end. Also, while I was able to excuse Takumi's inability to have a direct conversation at the beginning of the game, his absolute refusal to basically ask anybody about anything did get on my nerves by the end.

The tension and weirdness just didn't do it for me. I do think that Chaos;Head and Higurashi When They Cry are aiming for similar atmospheres, but the strength of Higurashi is the way it blurs reality and paranoia. However, in Chaos;Head, the distinction between real, "real," and fake was always incredibly obvious to me. And when I knew a scene was fake it was hard for me to care about any weirdness going on in it.

I also never got a solid grasp of any of the characters. Although I didn't appreciate it when I initially played Steins;Gate, I think its character-per-chapter structure provides a sturdier foundation for its character development than Chaos;Head's. While that structure did feel a bit ham-fisted in Steins;Gate, it meant the character arcs and their climaxes were clearly delineated; at the end of each chapter we got the payoff for that chapter's character and understood what they were about. But there is no such structure in Chaos;Head, and instead all the character development is twisted together over the course of the whole game. It was hard for me to tell what the characters were building towards, since they all happened simultaneously but (mostly) independently. While some characters had a scene near the end that was clearly met to be the climax of their arc, like most other events in the game, it felt like it was something that just... happened. It didn't give me insight on the characters and rarely provided closure on their story.

The murder mystery is just... not. The game makes it clear relatively early that there are supernatural elements to the story, but there's absolutely nothing interesting behind the murders whatsoever, either on the whole or for each individual murder. The corpses are discovered in bizarre situations, but the explanation behind all of them is either the direct, obvious explanation or what is essentially magic. The reason for the bizarre series of deaths pretty much boils down to doing it for the sake of having a bizarre series of deaths. And the reason they wanted a bizarre series of deaths was lackluster and disappointing.

Chaos;Head also has an unusual choice system, called the "Delusion Trigger" system. Periodically, a "Delusion Trigger" will occur, and you get to choose whether Takumi sees a 'good' or a 'bad' (or no) delusion. Of course, delusions don't lead to any immediate branches, so they can seem a bit pointless in the short-term. The game is also incredibly unclear on how the system actually works; I didn't figure it out until midway through my second playthrough! (Your choices don't matter for the first playthrough so it doesn't really matter, but still.)

The ending system isn't much better. There are nine endings in Chaos;Head Noah: the first ending, an alternate ending, six character ends, and the the true end. The first end is the end you're railroaded into on your first playthrough, so there's not much to say there. The alternate end is where the problems start. Once you understand the logic behind how to achieve it, it's not that difficult to unlock, but there are no hints towards what the requirements are.

Then the six character endings for each of the heroines. These were actually added for Chaos;Head Noah, and are the main difference between Noah and the base Chaos;Head. I didn't expect much from these. I mean, Chaos;Head was already a complete game, and if each heroine is getting her own ending, then those endings are probably going to be lazy fanservice cash-grabs, right? Wrong. The new endings flesh out the world, lore, and characters (and not just the heroines!) of Chaos;Head far beyond the base game. In fact, these endings include some revelations that seem so integral to the plot I almost find it a bit hard to believe that they weren't included in the original release.

Unlocking them is also relatively straightforward: for each ending, there is a series of yes/no questions that you encounter by making a certain choice at a certain Delusion Trigger. (Each Delusion Trigger only has three options, so fully exploring the game and finding each question series can be fully done in three playthroughs.) If you answer the yes/no questions properly, later on in that playthrough you'll transition into the related character ending rather than the usual path. Now, if we look at just the game itself, this system is actually pretty annoying, because after answering the questions you'd need to then go through the entire rest of the game to see if you properly unlocked the ending. Even with the skip function, that can take a while. However... answering the questions correctly immediately unlocks a trophy. So the auxiliary trophy system makes unlocking these endings a lot easier, since you get immediate feedback on whether you answered the questions correctly. Which can sometimes be easy to do, but other times makes no sense.

And then all that's left in the true end. In Chaos;Head Noah you can automatically view the true end after unlocking all other ends. But... it's not even worth it. Usually you'd expect the "true end" to reveal the final plot points and neatly resolve everything, but here it's just a rehash of the first end with (in my opinion) no meaningful variations. It felt a bit weird to me going into the true end, because I wasn't sure what else there was to do. It felt like the first end had already revealed most of the plot, the alternate end had filled in the remaining gaps, and then the character endings had provided a bunch of extras. So what was left for the true end? Nothing. The answer was nothing. Spending the time and effort of unlocking all the additional endings after the first end just to discover that the first end was pretty much all you were working towards the entire time anyway feels like hitting the ground in a trust fall.

One thing I did like was the sense of setting. Just like Steins;Gate is centered around Akihabara, Chaos;Head is solidly set in Shibuya. I don't think we get as deep into the weeds of Shibuya as in, for instance, The World Ends With You, but there are plenty of references to Shibuya's most famous landmarks.

The graphics are also pretty nice, with crisp, anime-style sprites and a fair number of CGs. The sprites have lip flaps, which I think add that extra air of life and quality. (Although, if you stop and think about it, lip flaps are actually a pretty minor feature... but I still think they add a lot of vitality.)

So, yeah. Chaos;Head Noah is a video game. Stuff happens in it. If you play it, it'll occupy your time. It's a bit spooky and unnerving sometimes. There isn't anything particularly clever in it. Will you get anything meaningful out of it? If you're like me, probably not.