Official announcement that the full game is coming out Fall 2019 in Japan!
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Depends on the price you are asking about I guess?
The 2980yen physical package has the demo on disc, an artbox, a soundtrack disc in a case with different art, a game case with different art too, and a small artbook. The soundtrack has 10 tracks.
The digital demo on PSN is only 980yen though.
As far as the demo content goes, you get to play as all 13 characters, but only their prologues. Each character gets about a 15 minute segment, might be more or less depending on how long it takes you to read and how much optional dialogue you try to trigger I guess? As you complete each prologue you unlock more character prologues to pick from. So the first one is always preset, then you get more in each batch as you finish more characters. The prologues are not self-contained in any way, and they each end with a cliffhanger and TO BE CONTINUED.
Honestly more excited about this being an adventure game because it means it might not run into the issue even my favorite VW games have: the action gameplay becoming repetitive after hour whatever. I'm pretty patient so it never bothered me that much, but the idea of a scifi adventure game in VW trappings is tremendously exciting to me.
Art and OST alone took my soul out of body. I will be sad if this game didn't get niche minor success. Plus as erotica artist, Kamitani always draw something that make your dick hard or wetting down there, and all 3 hours of this game prologue make it true.
It's throw all of scifi things at my face, time travel, aliens, robot, multi dimension, clones, uploading consciousness, mecha, nano machine son, etc. with school setting and a lot of mystery. If later story goes and focus in romantic and tragedy come from love I will die by happiness.
One character is a nerd and I like nerdy girl. I like 80s delinquents too.
I'm sorry if I'm late on this but, is the game adventure/visual novel like or something else?
First character done. I knew it was short (15~20 min) but it still felt like it was over in a blink. Good thing though since it means it got me hooked. I love the setting and it's really beautiful, as expected. The gameplay could be a little more developed (like allowing to use every word/item on every NPC), but that's only the beginning so there's not much to talk about for now. At least the menu shows an option (locked in the demo)* to jump from character to character so we'll probably have a system similar to Machi or 428, or so I hope since those are my 2 favorite VN.
Only weird thing is how the PC can walk through desks and stuff.
Edit:
*Not locked but looks like it's only to go back to the selection menu and lose all progress done in the chapter, so it probably doesn't work like in 428, too bad.
Only weird thing is how the PC can walk through desks and stuff.
Edit:
*Not locked but looks like it's only to go back to the selection menu and lose all progress done in the chapter, so it probably doesn't work like in 428, too bad.
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If it were me 4 months ago I would have scoffed at it being a VN/Adventure game but now that I've gone through the Danganronpa trilogy and found that I really love the genre if done right - I'm into it. Even if it doesn't have any gameplay parts aside from walking and talking, I'm completely cool with it.
Bring on a special edition with a steelbook in the west!
Bring on a special edition with a steelbook in the west!
Nope, from what I played.
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5/13 chapters done. It's good.
Giant robots, aliens, spaceship, time travel, reincarnations... There's more than what I expected on the SF front!
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After watching the stream I will probably jump on my JP account and give this a download. The first 15 minutes in sound and music alone hooked me and then that art, my God. Kamitani is a fucking master at this stuff.
People should set up their expectations very quickly because this game is unlikely to have any kind of traditional battle gameplay, going by how the demo is unfolding and what it's teasing.
I still find it hard to believe a simple walk and talk game took this long to make. Even with Kamitani's detailed artwork. I wonder if there was development issues going on. Maybe they did plan to have more in the game than just walking and talking but couldn't get it to work.
I asked because in one of the trailers there was something that looked like gameplay but probably is not included in the demo or is not really gameplay in the traditional sense.
I don't understand why people have a problem thinking about this. What makes an adventure game "simple" to begin with?
How long did Double Fine take to create Broken Age? The game was Kickstarted in 2012 and the final act was only released in 2015. 3 years of development for a team larger than Vanillaware, with way less graphical detail, and a relatively short game. It's about 5-6 hours long tops.
What about something like Return of the Obra Dinn? One person developing it, took 4 years. It's also a 5-6 hour game, a little longer if you get stuck figuring stuff out.
Oxenfree took about 2 years to make, considerably fast. But it's also a 4 hour game.
13 Sentinels is probably a significantly longer adventure game going by Japanese adventure game standards compared to the west. The prologue here alone is 3 hours long at the very least. The full game is likely a good 20-30 hours if not longer.
They never tried to make a game with a branching patch to begin with.
Honestly, even doing a text adventure takes a fuckton of work, doing 13 characters feels like insanity if each campaign has at least 1 hour, depending on how much it branches that's literally suicide and if the game is indeed that long people should freaking applaud it xO
It doesnt exist in the demo. All 13 characters prologues is just adventure.
Based on what I saw from the Twitch streams I watched there may be some light puzzles as well as POTENTIALLY having a strategic puzzle map kind of gameplay due to
time travel influences being present
If you don't want to click that just know that if you are looking for a Vanillaware game that is action oriented or a TBS/RTS this is not it.
Psyched to hear that initial impressions of the story, art, and music are all fantastic. Fall 2019 means Spring 2020 for the west if I had to guess.
That's probably pretty late game stuff. The footage in the previous trailer showed several of the characters already in mechs during that segment.
Okay I was only curious of this gameplay segment but even it has it, I would play this game. I like puzzles elements and VN games, so it'll be Day1 for me!
I know adventure games still take long to make but this got announced back in 2015 and was likely already in development before then. Nearly 5 years of development. On top of that all the silence on the game for so long got me wondering.
So yeah I'm not saying it shouldn't take a few years to make because it's an adventure game. The average game takes 3 years to make at least. Could be that Atlus showed it off why too early but they usually don't do that for non MegaTen titles.
I mean we are still speculating at this point. I would imagine 95% of the game to be walking and pressing "X" to talk.
I just want to point out that it's a Japanese adventure game, and that "adventure games" in Japan are not the same as in the west.
Just leaving this here.
Just leaving this here.
10 characters done. It's actually pretty meaty when you put everything together so I almost get why it's not given for free (almost).
I may be completely wrong but I think the reason why the save will not be transferable is because the beginning may play out differently, by that I mean it's possible the demo has been edited to be kind of a long, playable trailer, with a bit more of what the game has to offer story-wise and more cliffhangers than what the actual game will show at the beginning.
To be honest, there's so much going on that it becomes a little confusing, especially with the time travel and non-chronological depiction of events. There's also the fact that Kamitani and/or whoever was in charge of the story read and watched a lot of SF material and decided to put as much of it as possible in the game, from The War of the Worlds to E.T. to Godzilla to Macross to Evangelion to M.I.B to Steins;gate to you name it. And it actually works as far as I'm concerned, in a Xenogears way, but if the whole game is like that from beginning to end I think I'll need to take notes while playing, lol.
That said, I like it a lot and think the full game has the potential to be something special if they don't botch the execution.
I may be completely wrong but I think the reason why the save will not be transferable is because the beginning may play out differently, by that I mean it's possible the demo has been edited to be kind of a long, playable trailer, with a bit more of what the game has to offer story-wise and more cliffhangers than what the actual game will show at the beginning.
To be honest, there's so much going on that it becomes a little confusing, especially with the time travel and non-chronological depiction of events. There's also the fact that Kamitani and/or whoever was in charge of the story read and watched a lot of SF material and decided to put as much of it as possible in the game, from The War of the Worlds to E.T. to Godzilla to Macross to Evangelion to M.I.B to Steins;gate to you name it. And it actually works as far as I'm concerned, in a Xenogears way, but if the whole game is like that from beginning to end I think I'll need to take notes while playing, lol.
That said, I like it a lot and think the full game has the potential to be something special if they don't botch the execution.
Sounds good , thanks for the impressions.
Someone is translating the demo into english.
Good to see some folks are translating it. I hope more folks get it on this. I downloaded it last night and only played the first part but I really enjoyed what I saw so far.
Got mine today, played about an hour so far and finished the first 4 prologues. The prologues are REALLY short, and not really representative of a "game" so much as very effective teasers showing what the game promises in scope, scale, and narrative. It's REALLY well presented and I'm dying for the full game haha.
It seems about a normal length of time considering that Vanillaware isn't that big and what they also had on their plate in the last 5 years.
Muramasa: Rebirth was released in 2013 and the last of the 4 dlc campaigns came out in Nov. 2014.
Dragons Crown was also released in 2013, had updates and came out on PS3, Vita and later, PS4.
In 2016 Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir was also released for PS3, PS4 & Vita with a bunch of changes.
I finished it earlier today. Took me about 4 hours because I did stop and repeat/review some dialogues to catch more details. It's a really dense story demo, and honestly, rather than a game demo, this feels more like an extended interactive trailer. What's most interesting about the way the narrative is laid out, is how layered it is. There's a really good reason why character prologues unlock as you clear batches rather than having all 13 available to pick at once. None of the character prespectives, their backgrounds, and the individual stakes they have in their POV stories, are stand alone so to speak. Everything builds on something else, and the prologues of the later characters who unlock won't make sense without the context from seeing the characters appear previously in earlier prologues.
The relationships between characters, who they really are, where they come from, and what they want, forms a big part of the overaching mystery presented in the prologue package. Originally I expected a game set in the 80s where aliens invade and a bunch of students have to fight back in mechs, and each character story just being a different perspective of this theme to show different types of people facing the situation. What I actually got from this prologue is something else entirely - a multi-generational story spanning several centuries from WW2 Japan all the way to the far future, with characters hopping through time and dimensions, facing time loops, nanomachines allowing memory transfers, criminals using time travel for sabotage, secret Imperial Japanese army experiments, consciousness moving between different bodies, a talking cat from another world, idols talking through telepathy through TVs, etc.
Nothing is what it seems from the surface, no one is exactly who we think they are (or sometimes who they think they are), and every revelation to a mystery adds another layer of complexity to what seems to be "going on". I think releasing the prologue to give people a first hand taste of what the game really is was a fantastic idea. Selling it as a product is probably not a great idea but Atlus gonna Atlus. The experience I got from this prologue isn't something that is easily communicated through a trailer or preview on a site/magazine. They can try to show how "epic" the scope of the story is, but actually seeing the layers peel one by one, character by character, in a 3-4 hour prologue is a whole other experience. Each character prologue adds a new feeling of "wow, they're doing -that- too?!" and each and every of the 13 characters featured are unique, distinctive, and memorable in their own ways. I liked some way more than others, but there was something totally different about each one of them and the prologue does a perfect job of making me want to see more of each story and how they all tie together.
The relationships between characters, who they really are, where they come from, and what they want, forms a big part of the overaching mystery presented in the prologue package. Originally I expected a game set in the 80s where aliens invade and a bunch of students have to fight back in mechs, and each character story just being a different perspective of this theme to show different types of people facing the situation. What I actually got from this prologue is something else entirely - a multi-generational story spanning several centuries from WW2 Japan all the way to the far future, with characters hopping through time and dimensions, facing time loops, nanomachines allowing memory transfers, criminals using time travel for sabotage, secret Imperial Japanese army experiments, consciousness moving between different bodies, a talking cat from another world, idols talking through telepathy through TVs, etc.
Nothing is what it seems from the surface, no one is exactly who we think they are (or sometimes who they think they are), and every revelation to a mystery adds another layer of complexity to what seems to be "going on". I think releasing the prologue to give people a first hand taste of what the game really is was a fantastic idea. Selling it as a product is probably not a great idea but Atlus gonna Atlus. The experience I got from this prologue isn't something that is easily communicated through a trailer or preview on a site/magazine. They can try to show how "epic" the scope of the story is, but actually seeing the layers peel one by one, character by character, in a 3-4 hour prologue is a whole other experience. Each character prologue adds a new feeling of "wow, they're doing -that- too?!" and each and every of the 13 characters featured are unique, distinctive, and memorable in their own ways. I liked some way more than others, but there was something totally different about each one of them and the prologue does a perfect job of making me want to see more of each story and how they all tie together.
Atlus selling this is one of the reasons why I think this game had some development issues in the background. They're trying to recoup some costs to finish it. Otherwise it's just a dumb idea to sell a demo. Something which is supposd to sell you on a product.
Finished it today too. A little over 3 hours but I'm tempted to replay some chapters to have a better understanding of the big picture.
When you think you've seen all the plot devices the game uses, it still achieves to surprise until the end.
The demo perfectly accomplished its goal as I feel attached to every character and can't wait to see the whole story. I buy only a couple of new releases per year but this one is going to be a day 1 for me I think. It's a shame Atlus is keeping it from reaching the most people possible. They'll probably lose some potential sales with this move.
When you think you've seen all the plot devices the game uses, it still achieves to surprise until the end.
The demo perfectly accomplished its goal as I feel attached to every character and can't wait to see the whole story. I buy only a couple of new releases per year but this one is going to be a day 1 for me I think. It's a shame Atlus is keeping it from reaching the most people possible. They'll probably lose some potential sales with this move.
Yeah I'm pretty happy with my soundtrack CD. 30+ minutes of music for a 3-4 hour demo is actually a lot of music lmao.
Thanks for the impressions, duckroll! That's quite a lot happening in a few hours, sounds really dense.
The way you've described character perspectives building on each other, and needing to unlock in a certain order, does actually sound kind of like Odin Sphere, just increased in size and complexity. Do you think so? (if you're familiar with Odin Sphere)
Yeah I also read positive impression from other places. Hype intensifies.
I remember the paid demo of Dissidia 012. Atlus is just living in the past.