NI begins 6 years after TSF. Mizuki, the adopted daughter of Date (the first game’s protagonist) is now a member of ABIS, the top-secret police department that investigates crimes with the assistance of a “psync machine” that lets its agents view and enter other people’s dreams. Mizuki now has Aiba, a hyper-advanced AI inside a prosthetic eyeball (used to psync) that belonged to Date in the first game.
Mizuki is called to a stadium, where she discovers the left half of a corpse that has been split in two. The issue is that this is the second half of the corpse, as the first half was already found… six years earlier. Testing shows that both halves had the same DNA, and the second half was alive until only a few hours before discovery.
When the first half was discovered six years ago, it was monikered the “Half Body” case, and investigated by a fresh ABIS recruit Ryuki and his AI companion Tama. Mizuki goes to interrogate Ryuki (who has been a mess since the case) about his investigation. The first half of the game then consists of experiencing Ryuki’s investigation, while in the second half we play as Mizuki.
Gameplay-wise, NI generally plays the same as TSF, with a couple of improvements. Most gameplay scenes take place from a static location where you can rotate the camera, examine objects, and talk to people. NI has the same problem as TSF where “examine” flags reset every time you re-visit the same location (and occasionally over the course of a scene in a single location), but on the other hand there are many fewer instances of needing to constantly re-select the single dialogue option from a person.
Somniums are also generally the same, where you control Aiba or Tama in another character’s dream, and you need to investigate and solve puzzles to clear “mental locks.” It felt like there were many fewer branching somniums compared to the first game, and I had liked seeing how the same somnium could end up resolving differently, but oh well. I also thought that the quality of somniums tended to fall to the extremes, where each one was either a forgettable slog or a crazy genre-shifting experience.
The main new gameplay mechanic is virtual reality crime scene recreations, where you play as Ryuki or Mizuki in a digital recreation of the crime scene created by Tama or Aiba. After examining everything, you then need to recreate what happened, selecting the appropriate object or location at each step of the recreation. This essentially replaces evidence-presenting from TSF, which I thought was an improvement since crime scene recreation is much more robust and happens much more frequently.
But now we’re going to get into it. I’m just going to drop this random comment I found on Reddit, since I think it sums things up in a succinct and level-headed manner:
“Compared to Zero Time Dilemma, it's flawless. Both AI:NI and ZTD make weird (or just bad/ baffling) narrative choices in order to facilitate its main twist. Then it's up to you to basically forgive the game for all the nonsense based on how much you liked the twist. Is it a good idea to actively gimp aspects of the narrative just to justify an insane twist? I mean, that depends on how you execute it. Is AI:NI perfect, no. Do I like it despite its flaws, yes.”
The issue is that, while NI’s twist is fun and cool, it requires an absurd amount of contrivance, throws out a bunch of stuff that seemed interesting and important, and blows literal holes in our understanding of the game’s events. And for what? There is definitely a comparison to be made to the twist in Zero Time Dilemma, although I think it’s not quite as bad. The twist requires the game to appear janky and low-budget, and, while I’m sure Spike Chunsoft appreciated the cost-cutting measures, in hindsight it still seems more like an excuse to be cheap and janky rather than intentional clever development. I actually do like the idea of the twist, but think that a video game was absolutely the wrong medium to present it in.
The plot poses some interesting problems at the beginning of the game, but ultimately bends over itself to the point of breaking in service to the twist. (There are some mysteries where the answer is basically “they just did.” On the other hand, I think there are some plot reveals that are objectively ridiculous but that the game successfully puts in the groundwork to pull off.) The relationship between this game and the previous also reminds me a lot of the progression from 999 to Virtue’s Last Reward, where the first game is a self-contained, personal story, and then the sequel massively expands the scope and the stakes, and not to the sequel’s benefit. TSF already had silly action sequences, and NI goes a step further by incorporating silly shonen-isms into the actual plot.
While there are a fair number of new characters, there are a lot of returning characters from TSF. Too many, in fact. A lot of them are there to show up, repeat their shtick from the first game, and then fade into irrelevance. Some characters do have actual plot relevant and get additional development, but many feel like they’re there simply to pad the game without the need for any additional assets.
To make matters worse, many characters seem transplanted from the beginning of TSF, meaning any growth or development gets undone. Obviously it’s not uncommon for episodic plot-based mystery series to be allergic to spoiling the previous games, but they could have just not brought all these characters back. On top of that, NI has a “spoiler mode” where it includes spoilers from the first game if you’ve played it. However, these are limited to a few small snippets of dialogue, and the game will bend over backwards to avoid references to any major developments from the first game regardless of whether you’re in spoiler mode or not. Which makes the mechanic feel like a waste, because why include it if you’re not going to actually adapt to spoilers?
In addition to the returning characters, NI also reuses a lot of jokes from TSF, which I suppose is not that surprising when many characters are there just to do their gag and leave. But they aren’t references or subversions—they are usually a direct, beat-for-beat repeat, which feels lazy and uninspired. On top of that, NI feels the need to dive in and explain a lot of the gags from the first game, which is completely unneeded. They couldn’t just leave it as a silly-one off gag, but instead need some contrived and long-winded explanation for how it came about and instead of Explaining the Joke from a game ago why don’t you just come up with some new material?
The new characters are fine, although a large portion of the game’s character development is spent on guys in their twenties (or older) wooing teenage girls, so that felt awkward and bizarre. It would’ve been nice if we got to lean into them a bit more without the fetters of the existing cast. In particular, I really liked the dynamic between Ryuki and Tama. I expected to be put off Tama based on her design, but the game managed to strike the perfect balance of comic relief/straight man between them. Mizuki isn’t Date, so she was fine (and got some strange retcons).
Nirvana Initiative is a silly game literally bent around its twist to the point of breaking, all the while unnecessarily weighed down by baggage from the first game that it refuses to drop for no discernible reason other than self-satisfaction. While some parts of the plot work out nicely, most get broken into pieces for shock value and the story itself devolving into shonen action slop by the end. Gameplay is slightly refined, but mostly the same. Spoiler mode is essentially a slap in the face, and screentime for the new characters is limited by the game’s commitment to recycling and explaining gags from the first game. But Date isn’t the protagonist so despite every other individual component being inferior, on the whole I still had a way better time than in Somnium Files.
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